I Read 235 Self-Help Books — Here’s What I Learned
Did they actually help me help myself?
I am reading a new self-help book this week, The Diary of a CEO.
And it got me thinking, I must have read hundreds of these. Are they actually helping?
I got into the rabbit hole of figuring out how many I have read exactly and what impact they had.
Thanks to Goodreads, I learned I have read a total of 704 books in my lifetime, and 235 of them are in the self-help category.
Exactly one-third of my reading has been on learning how to help myself.
So did they work? Did they actually help me help myself?
Short answer, mostly yes.
Long answer, this story.
But first, what is a self-help book?
You will see below I mention books that don’t sound like motivational books we think of when we hear the term self-help because actually, self-help includes a diverse category of books.
A dictionary description of self-help is ‘the acts of helping or bettering oneself without the aid of others’. In the context of books, self-help is a form of coping with one’s personal problems without professional help. Therefore, all books that can serve this practical aim are considered self-help books. — Journal of Happiness Studies
Self-help includes different categories. Common self-help categories include improving finances, maintaining good health, growing a business or career, and strengthening relationships.
Here’s how self-help books impacted some categories in my life. Let’s start with the fails.
Helping My Relationships
Relationships are the area where I have seen the least amount of impact from self-help books because I believe we humans are way more complicated than what science has been able to discover so far.
Especially, one part of us remains a mystery, our soul. And it is the part that in my view defines all our relationships.
There’s little logic on why we like some people and dislike others. We call it a vibe, energy, feeling, spark. All these abstract things are hard to explain, predict or control.
I have had cases when I have met a person on a trip and felt like best friends in a week. And I have family members I have known my whole life about whom I think, “If we weren’t blood-related, I would never speak to you again”.
They are equally good people, and I cannot logically explain why I feel that way in both scenarios.
In all the self-help books I have read on relationships, there’s very little focus on this. Rightly so because it’s very hard to understand and show evidence on what and how it works. Most of the advice is based on brain psychology and strategies that work in other areas of life, which are more rational.
But relationships are everything but rational. They are messy, irrational, and complicated in a million different ways.
They usually don’t make sense logically and don’t care much about our brain, because it’s our heart who leads.
I might know exactly what to do to fix a broken friendship but I don’t feel like doing it because I’m angry, so I don’t.
And the relationship books I have read focus so much on the practical aspects of what to do, and not on the feelings that trigger our actions or inaction. This is why I believe, in this area of my life, the self-help books haven’t made much difference.
The maximum they have done for me is to gain the understanding and the language to speak about emotions and behaviors. The three books that helped with that are:
The 5 Love Languages by Gary Chapman
Helping My Health
On the other hand, health is a very exact science with predictable results based on defined variables.
I know that eating the right food, exercising, sleeping well, going to the doctor, or taking the medicine will help my body feel better almost without fail.
Learning how my body works and what I can do to support it, has made a difference to my wellbeing. And understanding what is going on when I don’t feel well was a game changer.
Especially as a woman, understanding how my hormones work, and the way they control how I feel emotionally, mentally and physically has made me more self-compassionate.
However, all the reading I have done on health has not convinced me to adopt any particular diet or exercise routine.
I try to eat healthy, but with no restrictions. And I exercise and sleep based on how my body feels, not pushing it for the sake of reaching a specific goal.
I guess I still have the blessings of a young age, but so far the biggest benefit from reading about health has been understanding and self-awareness. Which has had the biggest impact on my relationship with myself.
My favorite three books which helped me do this were:
Glucose Revolution by Jessie Inchauspe
Helping My Career & Finances
After ten years of working in the corporate world, in three different countries, growing a career has required a lot of advanced techniques.
And I have learned a lot of the techniques through self-help books, and most of the advice has worked very well.
Especially, making cross-country moves (Tirana — Stockholm — London) in five years, while still maintaining a career growth trajectory (Analyst — Senior Consultant — Manager), needed way more than just technical skill.
Networking and personal branding were key elements for this, which I only learned through reading books on career growth, because nobody mentioned these things in school.
I still struggle in certain aspects of my career, but it is understandable because the higher I climb, the harder it gets.
When it comes to finances, money is a science, too. An exact one. Emotions get involved with it frequently, but if we focus on money only, it is all about numbers. And numbers are easy to analyze, work with and predict. This is why in this area of my life, self-help books have made the biggest impact.
I would have fewer ideas on how to make more money, how to save it, invest it, and grow it, if it wasn’t for the books I read in this topic.
Do I have millions like many of the books promised? No, I don’t. But I have something that millions cannot buy, I have enough. Which I realized by reading this story from the book The Psychology of Money.
At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history. Heller responds, ‘Yes, but I have something he will never have … enough.’
If there’s one category of self-help I don’t regret spending my time on, it is this on. And the three books which made the biggest impact were:
The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek
The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel
Did They Change My Life?
Have any of these books literally changed my life? I will steal a quote from Atomic Habits to reply to this:
If you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done. Conversely, if you get 1 percent worse each day for one year, you’ll decline nearly down to zero. What starts as a small win or a minor setback accumulates into something much more.
None of the books changed my life immediately by just reading them. But I believe that the majority of them helped me get 1 percent better each day.
And the biggest benefit was understanding and getting to know myself better. And as Aristotle said:
Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.
