Self Help

Sundray

"Freedom of choice is what you've got. Freedom from choice is what you want."

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The Power of Yes: Positive and Practical Advice to Help You Live Life to the Full

The Power of No: Because One Little Word Can Bring Health, Abundance, and Happiness

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Atomic Habits: How to use habits to build your own identity for the life you want.

12 Rules for Life: Follow these specific habits to take on the author's identity for the life he thinks you must have.

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Information is not truth.

The point of a teacher is to challenge the student. We become wiser by putting knowledge to the test, not by merely ingesting information. There is as much misinformation as there is true information, if not more. That is why learning is only complete once the misinformation is separated from the true information. And the only way to do that is to experience the information in the context of the real world.

This is just as true for machine learning/AI BTW.

Interestingly, each and every title portrayed here is, individually a lie, and collectively probably more accurate. Because the truth is usually much more nuanced and complicated than can be distilled into a short book title. But you won't get that by reading a single book or author. And while reading multiple authors is closer to getting to the truth, the real truth is found when you put the books in context with your own experiences and reality.

That's not an excuse for climate denial though.

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I get the joke, and certainly not all self-help books are good, but also people are unique and at different places in their lives. With just a little introspection one can probably tell which book would be better for them. Maybe they say yes too much and would benefit from learning how and when to say no; or they say no to everything and would benefit from learning to embrace new experiences.

Or, you know, pick one up and thumb through a few pages.

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I mean you need to know what your problem is before you cna get help for it. Sometimes finding the problem is harder than finding the solution tho.

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"If you're looking for self-help, why would you read a book written by somebody else? That's not self-help, that's help. There's no such thing as self-help. If you did it yourself you didn't need help. Try to pay attention to the language we've all agreed on. "

-George Carlin

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"How to Cope with Having a Flat Butt"

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Just buy the two book "What They Teach You at Harvard Business School" & "What They Don't Teach You at Harvard Business School" and that should cover the entire fucking universe.

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On lemmy the answer to everything is "capitalism bad".

kadup

Quick reminder: anything can be turned into a book, anyone can write one. There's no regulating body, authority or even peer pressure overlooking the veracity of what's written.

Your weird uncle can write a self help book based on a random dream he had.

You might have heard teacher complaining about Wikipedia as a source... books aren't different, you need a lot of supplemental research to use a book as a source after you verify it's valid as one.

kadup

And that's non-ironically correct, yes.

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Yea I spent an hour reading about a 10$ diet study book before I bought it for this exact reason.

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"How to Make a Fortune: Selling Fortune-Making Guide Books to Rubes" - Griff T. Runner

Wytch

Came here for this, thank you

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I'm pretty sure the 2nd title is disproportionately large.

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I prefer the self-help books that insult my intelligence in the title.

"Self-actualization for complete dumbasses"

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Brilliant idea -- I'm gonna write a book the helps people figure out which self-help book they need!

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sometimes the research you are able do yourself is not enough because of hype. the hype alone can trigger "scientific studies" that get approved just because they are about a visible topic and the results get cherry-picked by "journalists" creating a false sense of consensus to everyone who didn't spend their life studying the topic in detail.

see books like 80/20 running (based on a "study" done by the author on members of a single running club with n<=5 participants per group) or baby led weaning (based on the ability of the author to bullshit parents with baby brain) that created whole movements behind them and claimed to be based on strict scientific research.

sometimes even researchers themselves can get swiped away by the collective delusion (hype) even in otherwise very rigorous fields (e.g. string theory in physics or all the "AI" research going on right now).

the only way to be sure that what you are learning is right is if it can show past results. someone (many someones) took the risk before you and went with it. and they came up with predictions that panned out and applications that were useful and are well known.

you can be adventurous and try new promising things, but be aware of what you are doing, why and what the cost and consequences are.

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Atomic Habits is pretty dope and makes a lot of sense