12 ms·
Some popular self help books
- asimovfan 6y agoI recommend the Satipatthana Sutta by the Buddha. It will change your life if you do what it says. Sad I hadn't heard of it 20 years before.
- komali2 6y agoHow did it change your life? What did it say you should do? How would your last 20 years been different if you had read it earlier?
- qntty 6y agoIt's the oldest text on mindfulness meditation in the buddhist tradition. In all likelihood, they didn't just read it and follow the instructions, as interpreting it's meaning from scratch is the life's work of a buddhist scholar. It doesn't include any of the buddhist moral teaching ("have goodwill towards others") so most likely OP meant that meditation had a positive effect on their life.
- voxl 6y agoI imagine any religious text will change your life if you do what it says, the implication that what it says is good is dubious.
- balfirevic 6y agoYeah, every book will change your life if you do what it says, and you haven't been doing it before :) That doesn't say much by itself.
- fortran77 6y agoI like "The Rust Programming Language" by Steve Kablink. It really changed my life. And it's free. (We should put this book in hotel rooms.) https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ Also > Continual upskilling is critical for accelerating your career progression. However, the time constraint that corporate employment entail tends to spare limited time for you to improve your skillset. Who writes like this? "Upskilling?" C'mon
- gmargaritis 6y agoIn what way did it change your life ?
- fortran77 6y agoRealizing that the programming language and compiler can take care of many of the bugs and problems that plague programmers.
- braythwayt 6y agoComing from FORTRAN77, that is indeed quite a leap!
- komali2 6y agoI don't really feel like this falls under the "self help" category of books, which imo are more generalist.
- nxpnsv 6y agoIt sure beats fortran77.
- bryogenic 6y agoA Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy by William Braxton Irvine
- komali2 6y agoWhy?
- marcrosoft 6y agoThis book is on my night stand I try to read it a couple times a year. I feel like you can’t just read it once. You have to be reminded of its principals constantly.
- miguendes 6y agoThe millionaire fastlane by MJ de Marco dispite its cliché title is by far one of the best books I've ever read. It shows what it takes to make money by solving other people's problems in a no BS manner.
- mlthoughts2018 6y agoThat book is total bs, probably the worst offender on the list. It’s nothing but just-so anecdotes written by someone who (a) got outrageously lucky and (b) benefits hugely from white privilege. “Self-made millionaire” is not a thing. If you start from a premise that believes this is a possible concept, you’re just self-deluded selling snake oil. The Millionaire Fastlane is the same old scam as the rest of them. Its self-aggrandizing author can believe he knows some psychological focus principles that unlock chances of wealth, but it’s just ego/narcissism. He just got lucky, in a cosmic sense (being born white in modern America) and in specific business opportunities. For every one MJ Demarco there are a million people with same mindset, same grit, same determination, same talent, same attitude etc who got nothing. It’s all just plinko.
- UK-Al05 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
- hlava 6y agoso how successful are you if you read all theese books? 3 commas successful?
- braythwayt 6y agoI’m happy, healthy, loved, and have a full belly. Would you like a list of the self-help books that got me to my three commas?
- komali2 6y agoIf y'all gonna hop in this thread with your favorite book it may be more convincing to write something more than just "it changed my life." Apparently Buddhism, stoicism, and the Rust programming language are all equally capable of changing a hackernews poster's life?
- camjohnson26 6y agoEvery book I ever read technically changed my life
- komali2 6y agoLol I guess. Perhaps we should just all link our Goodreads profiles at eachother? There's limited time in life. A thread like this would be fun if people said a bit about why a certain book is absolutely worth reading...
- silveira 6y agoThere were books that changed my life so little that I read them a second time because I forgot I read them the first time.
- RHSeeger 6y agoIf you take out the "equally" and read it more like "all 3 are capable of being being catalysts for dramatic change (presumably good) in someone's life", then I don't see how that's unreasonable. Philosophy books for what I would guess most people would say are obvious reasons; a programming book possibly for teaching a person to think differently about a thing they spend a large percentage of their life doing.
- komali2 6y agoYou're not wrong but why would I read a rust book instead of a php one, if I was an English teacher browsing this thread for "self help" book recommendations? That's kinda my point. I don't want to assume why someone liked a book, I'll probably get it wrong.
- bronlund 6y agoI would recommend Superbetter. Self help from a game developers point of view. Tons of interesting information.
- throwawaybab323 6y agoThe cancer of the internet the "self help" guides and gurus
- throwayws 6y agoThe first step: become somebody else. That's the only step though. If you can't do that then don't get your hopes up to adapt the mindset. wayback: https://web.archive.org/web/20200712144005/https://dailyjag.com/literature/read-these-self-help-books-and-make-most-of-our-this-downtime/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200712144005/https://dailyjag....
- orasis 6y agoI’m glad to see Millionaire Fastlane at the top of the list. I make money effortlessly in large part due to the mindset of value creation that this book talks about.
- brightball 6y agoI’m curious if it’s relatable to Rich Dad, Poor Dad. That changed the way I thought about money very early on by focusing on defining assets purely as things that generate money for you and not “things you own.” Ex. Your house is not an asset, a house that you rent to a tenant is, etc. The goal of the book was to reiterate the idea that creating income generating assets will allow you to exit the workforce. No other type of asset defined by other terms would do so. It had a big focus on real estate or investing in small stable, we’ll establish business models like gas stations, etc but in our field it could easily apply to stable side projects too. Very cash flow oriented.
- orasis 6y agoIt’s really nothing like that. It’s a short enough book so just read it.
- komali2 6y agoOn "When": > This book explores scientific facts that imply that the impact of the decision taken is dependent on their timing. I'm skeptical whenever a self help book talks about "scientific facts" as it relates to psychological research. Especially lately as a lot of psychology experiments are undergoing a crisis of reproducibility. I recall some oft-repeated idea that we have a limited willpower gas tank that is depleted by every decision we make in a day, which was based on a cookie experiment that I read was recently reproduced to show an opposite result. In any case the use of the word "fact" seems strong but perhaps the book addresses this.
- sradman 6y agoCloudflare is reporting a 502 Bad Gateway (for me). The article is available at The Internet Archive [1]. [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20200712144005/https://dailyjag.com/literature/read-these-self-help-books-and-make-most-of-our-this-downtime/ http://web.archive.org/web/20200712144005/https://dailyjag.c...
- pivic 6y agoThese are not self-help books; they're mainly books on trying to get rich.
- taneq 6y agoDoesn't getting rich help you?
- spiderfarmer 6y agoNot everyone, not all of the time. And getting rich always costs something you might not be willing to give up.
- orasis 6y agoAre you rich? If not then your opinion isn’t worth much. Money comes easily to me and my life is way more awesome for it.
- taneq 6y agoYou're holding money to a far higher standard (everyone? all the time?) than any of these self-help techniques are held to. I suspect that's because you know it works better. If someone is reading 'books on how to get rich' then they're not looking to get mega-yacht wealthy. They're looking for financial security.
- starpilot 6y agoI would watch https://youtu.be/dmLTLkCBSN8 https://youtu.be/dmLTLkCBSN8 for a contrary view. These books are brain crack and rarely lead to any significant life changes.
- outoftheabyss 6y agoThis is a well put together video but I wouldn't take as drastic a view. I believe we have something to learn from everyone, it's just knowing what will work for you and what won't while being careful of not entering that cultish mindset. Everything in moderation.
- caymanjim 6y agoSite is hugged to death, but as usual I won't let that stop me from commenting. I don't think many lives are changed by self-help books. People who are actively trying to change their lives often read self-help books, and then misattribute any positive result to the book. Then they recommend the book to others, and it's either mindless blather, or common-sense tropes wrapped in a bow, or something that reinforces a decision they've already made. Someone decides they need to focus on something, and then reads a book about it while they're focused on it. They already changed their life before they read the book, by making the decision to change. No one is changed by a religious text if they are already a religious person who largely agrees with the philosophy. No one changes their diet if they haven't already made a decision to eat healthier. No one GETS.RICH.QUICK if they weren't already entrepreneurial. Yeah, maybe these books impacted people in some way. But they were already 99% of the way there. Recommending them to someone who isn't also 99% of the way there isn't going to change a thing. The older I get the more obvious it is that there are no new ideas, there's just new branding.
- caymanjim 6y agoNow that I can see the site, these are all books by people who through a combination of luck, timing, skill, and work managed to get rich. Now they think they figured out something others didn't. No, they were well-positioned--largely through the circumstances of their birth--got lucky, and then had the skill to take advantage of the combination. Now they think they discovered something. They didn't, and they actually have no awareness of how they ended up where they are.
- spiderfarmer 6y agoAnd the things they did learn can all be boiled down to a blog article. Instead they fleshing out simple ideas to 100 pages of examples and repetition.
- hackerbeat 6y agoLol. Spot on. With both comments.
- morgengold 6y ago
- SirensOfTitan 6y agoI've only read three self-help books that have dramatically changed my thinking: * How To Develop Your Thinking Ability by Ken Keyes Jr. It's out of print now, but easy to find a copy. It condenses down a lot of Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics into an easy to digest format. * The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey. Also quite an old book, mentions a lot of similar ideas to Psychocybernetics (essentially the queen or king of all self-help books: most other ones just re-iterate the ideas in this one). It discusses how the thinking mind gets in the way of true excellence. I started reading it largely to consider how I was keeping myself from entering into meditative jhana. * Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson. While certainly filled with some questionable ideas, this absolutely broke my neat model of objective reality into tiny little pieces in high school. It set off a journey of self-exploration. While some of the books in this list are good, everyone in silicon valley talks about a lot of those books nonstop. You'll understand the language SV folks use to talk about ideas, but you won't offer much else in the way of a unique perspective. A journey of reading needs to be self-lead.
- kranner 6y ago> I started reading it largely to consider how I was keeping myself from entering into meditative jhana. Can you elaborate on this please? I've read The Inner Game of Tennis and I'm familiar with the (samatha) jhanas (and somewhat experienced as well). Do you mean something like convincing Self 1 to relax enough and trusting Self 2 to take you into the first jhana, etc?
- SirensOfTitan 6y ago> Do you mean something like convincing Self 1 to relax enough and trusting Self 2 to take you into the first jhana? Yeah, pretty much. It primed me to pay a lot more attention to the judging mind particularly during sits (and really made me aware how much doubt as a hindrance disrupts my practice). While retrospectively it’s sort of obvious, I mainly have learned meditation through reading, so if an instruction isn’t phrased the right way I’ve noticed I miss it.
- 6y ago
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y agoDan Pink is fairly good. I enjoyed A Whole New Mind. In it, he set out a fairly useful exercise for me, called "The mini-saga" (I don't think he originated the idea). The goal is to write a story in exactly fifty words (not characters). It was an enjoyable exercise. I always like the story that was attributed to Hemingway, that the shortest story ever told was "For sale, baby shoes, never worn."
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- cjfd 6y agoI like 'getting things done'.
- orasis 6y agoI liked it when I first read it 20 years ago, but it also invisibility promotes a fear based perfectionism. The path of getting things done leads to nowhere.
- cjfd 6y agoThis may be the case for you but these kind of things are very much dependent on the person. One thing is to accept that not all items on various lists will be finished. The book explicitly says this is the case and recommends to remove items if they have not been done after a few weeks. If one can do this without much or any negative emotion I do not see this downside.
- del_operator 6y agoI don’t know how much self help it might be considered, but reading about reinforcement learning was quite a valuable perspective. Now I reflect a bit more on my own value functions and how I can possibly communicate them effectively.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Balgair 6y agoRange is not a self-help book. Sure, it's thesis is practicable and generalizable, but it's more of a pop-psych book. That said, I'd recommend Range as a great book to read on a flight or at the beach (whenever those return). The thesis is pretty easy to grok. The chapters that give examples towards the thesis are entertaining and memorable. The section on the orphan musical geniuses is very good. It's a great book, just not self-help.
- imshashank 6y agoSo everyone, that is my personal list. I have read every single one of these books and have only shared them since I find them really helpful. P.S. I chose a really bad day to move plugins, update site etc and that's why some of you were seeing the 502 errors. Sorry about that.