I like to read self-help. I think it can actually change your life.
The problem is finding actual good self-help. Most stuff is garbage or dives too deep into a specific topic.
One of my favorite authors is Orison Swett Marden (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orison_Swett_Marden) who writes well-rounded self-help and founded a magazine ironically called "Success". There's also Samuel Smiles who wrote the original title called "Self-Help".
If you go back in time far enough, you will come to the conclusion that most self-help stems back to certain influences at the time. You can go as far back as to the tao te ching, meditations, or even the bible. Not much of this stuff changes, but is repackaged with modern examples of successful people into bestsellers.
> You can go as far back as to the tao te ching, meditations, or even the bible.
The Tao Te Ching with the adjonction of its commentaries is a book on Confucian moral and ethic. The Meditations is a journal and also mostly a book about ethics. I think linking them to modern self-help books is somewhat disingenuous.
I deeply believe that if people actually stopped reading self-help books and read books about ethics instead the world would definitely be a far better place. “How to live a life worth living?” is after all a far more interesting question than “How to do the most of your life?”.
The problem is finding actual good self-help. Most stuff is garbage or dives too deep into a specific topic.
One of my favorite authors is Orison Swett Marden (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orison_Swett_Marden) who writes well-rounded self-help and founded a magazine ironically called "Success". There's also Samuel Smiles who wrote the original title called "Self-Help".
If you go back in time far enough, you will come to the conclusion that most self-help stems back to certain influences at the time. You can go as far back as to the tao te ching, meditations, or even the bible. Not much of this stuff changes, but is repackaged with modern examples of successful people into bestsellers.