Agreed, but many self-help books either waste their time by making dubious claims from half-sourced research, using useless anecdotes, or repeating the problem

Agreed, but many self-help books either waste their time by making dubious claims from half-sourced research, using useless anecdotes, or repeating the problem in different ways. The best ones actually tell stories of different ways of using its method to solve a variety of problems.