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Personally, I see the self-help industry dying because people are starting to realize that it’s just a network of individuals selling products, promoting each o

Personally, I see the self-help industry dying because people are starting to realize that it’s just a network of individuals selling products, promoting each other’s products, and creating new avenues to sell more products. I refer to it as the “self-help mafia.” Tim Ferriss kind of created it.

curuinor 4mo ago
Dale Carnegie created it, Tim Ferriss is a century too late to point as origin.
- ransom1538 4mo ago
  Dale Carnegie -> Jim Rohn -> Tony Robbins -> [all hacks now]
  - curuinor 4mo ago
    the man leveraged the fact that his name was the same as Andrew Carnegie (having no relation) to launch a publishing empire. it was hacks from the beginning
    - xKingfisher 4mo ago
      Even worse he changed his name from Carnagey, presumably to deliberately cause confusion.
    - MengerSponge 4mo ago
      Highly recommend "If Books Could Kill" https://bsky.app/profile/ifbookspod.bsky.social https://bsky.app/profile/ifbookspod.bsky.social It really is all the same book.
      - sharadov 4mo ago
        All the writers that I love to hate - hariri, gladwell! Will give it a listen
        sanswork 4mo ago
        I wanted to love it since despite being a self help reader I can definitely see a lot of the bad/dangerous advice given all over the place but I often found them really stretching to make stuff negative and being very smug about it which just made it the same issue as the source material. Especially annoying since in most cases there were really solidly valid negatives to go after in the books. It's very much a lets build a straw man then tear it down podcast.
        sharadov 4mo ago
        I listened to a couple episodes and concur, the overt-criticality and smugness was off putting.
      - ctoa 4mo ago
        The very first thing I did when coming to this thread was search for if someone had already mentioned "one book theory". My favorite episodes of IBCK are mostly the self-help trash.
      - jpfromlondon 4mo ago
        [dead]
  - HatchedLake721 4mo ago
    Why is Tony Robbins a hack?
    - anitil 4mo ago
      I think calling these people 'hacks' is not quite the right word. They're very good at what they do, it's just a lot of people don't like or don't value what they do. I actually have a fair bit of respect for their craft (the ability to draw attention and turn that attention in to customers) even if I feel like what they're selling is fake, or fake-adjacent
  - adamtaylor_13 4mo ago
    It is wild to me that people consider Dale Carnegie and Tony Robbins in the same boat. "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie completely changed how I communicate with people, for the better. For nerds (like me) who think data and statistics are the way to persuade people, you're doing yourself a disservice by ignoring the truth. Lots of people think sales are icky, but much of life is influenced by your ability to persuade and sell, even yourself, to others.
  - tiahura 4mo ago
    Robbins is much more an unintentional heir to Sartre (ducks) than Carnegie.
  - dzonga 4mo ago
    people in tech i.e engineers discount sales - but damn the book by Caldini - Influence & Jim Rohn In terms of sales training - help a lot.
- lanamo 4mo ago
  Or you could say in other words: Everything is a remix! Dale Carnegie and Steven Covey have both been heavily influenced by Alfred Adler, the Austrian psychotherapist and founder of individual psychology.
- senordevnyc 4mo ago
  Why can’t you go back to things like Meditations? Or Proverbs in the Old Testament? It’s almost like the designation of “self help” is so broad as to be totally useless.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
wang_li 4mo ago
Self help is just education from a book rather than from an in person instructor.
Quarrelsome 4mo ago
you've giving people way too much credit here. People never start to realise en-masse.
an0malous 4mo ago
> it’s just a network of individuals selling products, promoting each other’s products, and creating new avenues to sell more products I've got some bad news for you about the SaaS industry
- watwut 4mo ago
  The sooner people realize that, the better.
- gdhkgdhkvff 4mo ago
  Considering he named it “the Tim Ferris mafia” makes me think he’s fully aware of that.
darth_avocado 4mo ago
Also personally, my self help consumption (across all media) has been dropping lately. Part of it is that quality of content has been worsening over the years. But the part that’s put me off the most is the general burnout I’m facing in life: professional stagnation, uncertain future (will I be employed in a year?), more work, financial pressure, politics upending my life directly etc. Funnily enough I’ve started consuming more content around hobbies, crafts and other fun stuff, which the blog mentions was one of the only two categories that saw growth in sales. I wonder if that is a reason for the decline rather than AI.
- throwaway2037 4mo ago
  > my self help consumption (across all media) has been dropping lately I want to propose an alternative theory about why your viewership is dropping. Whatever made you originally watch self-help on a particular topic is no longer as interesting. Let's say you were struggling with (a) exercise/fitness/diet, (b) personal/romantic relationships, or (c) business/"success"/wealth. (These are easily the three biggest categories for self-help.) You watched a few hundred hours of self-help YouTube videos over a few years and you learned how to improve. Now, the content is less interesting. I share this idea because I see a similar pattern in myself. For the self-help YouTube videos that I do watch, I am/was most interested in (a) exercise/fitness/diet and (b) personal/romantic relationships. After 1000 hours or so of this sort of content, I learned how to improve and "ascended". Now, I don't need to watch as much because my thinking on these topics is more advanced. Deeper: How will these channels sustain themselves? It does not look obvious to me! If I were running a self-help channel, I might intentionally delete old videos after 6-12 months. Why? So that I can remake the same content again (and again)... to get a revenue boost from new(er) viewers. For anyone who is a full-time self-help content creator, probably 90% of the revenue is made in the first 30 days. (Wild guess, but there will be an extreme cliff of some sort.)
mmahemoff 4mo ago
Why now though? Based on the sharp decline since 2022 (according to Ferris’s numbers), s/books/chatbots seems like the Occam’s Razor explanation here.
digitaltrees 4mo ago
Hard disagree. I have read lots of books, participated in events and training seminars and had profound results in my life. My marriage is better because of what I learned, I am a better father and leader because of what I learned. And the fact that people sell things as part of that growth journey is how they support their ability to share the lessons and techniques.
- JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
  Can you share an easy-to-understand example for someone who is similarly highly sceptical of self-help products?
  - apatry 4mo ago
    Getting Things Done by David Allen gave me a framework to get out of the weeds when I am overwhelmed (usually once or twice a year when I stretch myself): build a to-do list that us complete enough to stop thinking about what you have to do, if a new task take less than 5 minutes just do it right away, and then prioritise the rest. Deep Work by Cal Newport gave me a way to think about my time management: information work is not the same as a factory line where doing the same thing at similar productivity from 9 to 5 makes sense, and it is important to dedicate long stretch of quality time to be productive (vs busy). There are no silver bullets, but learning what worked for a group of people, testing it for myself, adapting it, and using it as needed has been helpful to me.
    - coliveira 4mo ago
      Yes, I read "Getting Things Done": he teaches you to make todo lists! That's it, nothing profound or from another planet. Basically you could get that information in 1 paragraph: "if you're overwhelmed, make a todo list", but he wouldn't have made a lot of money that way...
      - kamaal 4mo ago
        There is more than that, though. Deadlines, Next Tasks, Weekly list purge/build, Yearly alignment etc etc. Also how you teach somebody a thing matters. Stories have a profound effect on humans since the earliest of our days.
vld_chk 4mo ago
I do not have data, but from first glance, if anything, the overall demand for self-help and self-improvement increases Y/Y. We can correlate it with a sharp drop in alcohol sales, or raising revenues of therapy industry or fitness industry. YT and podcasts still looming too. But the form of books … Yes, by some reason it collapses. I personally attribute it not to “people realise those guys are salesmen”, but with the fact that none of really good ideas were produced by such books for a while. Now anyone who really has a new angle or new idea to say — they go straight to YT/podcasts, bypassing writing a book altogether. Because of this, me personally, when I check bookshelves, do not see any really new or interesting idea published in the field.
- mcmoor 4mo ago
  I'm curious how correlated they are to decline of books in general
- throwaway2037 4mo ago
  Your comment gave me an idea. First, start with this assumption: Self-help is "someone trying to sell an idea that may improve your life (health, business/wealth, relationships)". Second, consider the mediums that we use to sell self-help. Traditionally, it was in-person/live events. Basically, 100 to 1000 people sit in a big room and listen to a person talk on stage. Usually, there is some Q&A, raise your hands for voting, etc. Now think about the revenue side: How do you scale that business? Publish a book with the same ideas. The in-person events create a personal brand, and books help you scale the business. Next, consider the mediums for selling self-help: (1) in-person events, (2) books, (3) YouTube. (1) scales the least, but has the highest branding building effect. (2) scales medium, because it costs money for the customer to buy the book. (3) scales infinitely, because it is nearly free. Further, the most financially successful YouTubers first build a personal brand, then begin sell product placement by sponsorships. Further, they also begin selling "merch" (channel merchandise). That is the real gold mine of YouTube. Even sponsonships for most channels with less than one million subscribers pales in comparison to selling "merch". About (1) (2) and (3) above, I would say that humans are usually more influenced by [the most] (1) seeing a person live, [next most] (3) seeing a person on video, and [the least] (2) reading their book. Thus, it seems logical that YouTube will replace books for self-help. Without reading the article, my first instinct (after writing the above) is that self-help books are not being replaced with AI/LLMs. Instead, they are being replaced by self-help YouTube channels.
raincole 4mo ago
Self-help industry is something that literally can't die. It's in the same category as astrology and technical analysis.
627467 4mo ago
A self-help movement worth their reputation is one that sells more than a book. In fact many give away the book and then charge you a sub for being part of a club
protocolture 4mo ago
Yeah I got a free medical "coach" and the coaching was sub par, and mostly used to try and press me into non free services. A lot of those non free services seemed to involve very poorly written and syndicated coaching apps.
tbmtbmtbmtbmtbm 4mo ago
Then you could frame the collapse of this writer's book as a 'hit'
dimitrios1 4mo ago
Not to be a contrarian, because I agree for a lot of the industry, but there are some genuine gems out there. Few examples: Extreme Ownership really helped me be a better leader and take more accountability for my own actions Atomic Habits really helped me think about goal setting and what the underlying driver was Coaching Habit improved my 1:1s drastically (I basically stopped talking or advice giving and just listened -- profound, I know, but the book helped smack me in the face with it) Many more examples, but there is definitely a ton of self-help hack slop out there as well.
- digitaltrees 4mo ago
  Totally agree. So many people talk when they should listen.
- nephihaha 4mo ago
  I'd agree with that. A lot of rubbish is out there, but there are some helpful things. Even the Law of Attraction can be helpful if viewed through the lens of positive thinking (i.e. you can handle bad situations better if you are in a good frame of mind which will make your life better.)
dartharva 4mo ago
Tim Ferris? Bro humanity has invented religion that served exactly this purpose long since before it even invented the wheel.
enos_feedler 4mo ago
Unless you have hard proof this is occurring then I would rather believe my own and others positive testimony on self help. Its powerful and relatively affordable if you are committed to making changes in your own life. Is good advice. Authentic stories (generally). I am just grateful that people take the time and effort to reflect and encode their experience into something digestible by others. It’s pretty cynical to have your view.
1-6 4mo ago
OP is describing Dave Ramsey
mannanj 4mo ago
this self help industry completely reversed my diabetes, brought my adventure and satisfaction, and let me to making the best friends of my life. maybe you are judging and dismissing something with prejudice?
kdheiwns 4mo ago
Every time someone has said some goofy thing will go away because people are getting smarter or realizing something, it's absolutely not the case. A large number of people will always want someone to tell them that they have everything figured out and others just don't see how great they are, that they'll wake up rich and famous one day, that they're powerful, that they're beautiful, etc. Many will pay to be told this. Many will pay for subscriptions to become even bigger and better. As an extreme example, pickup artists had a wave of success a few years back and people paid big money for those ridiculous courses. They got replaced with Andrew Tate style "a real man just smokes and fights and hates women" type content and people paid money with the hopes of becoming like them. Trends and life goals change, but people still gobble up self help.
- JimsonYang 4mo ago
  agree, there's always going to be a belief for a majority of people that by reading or doing this ONE trick, they can avoid the hard work and sacrifice needed to get to a place/do a task we've seen it with exercise/dieting we've seen it with women/dating this types of things always persist
- vidarh 4mo ago
  I went down a rabbit hole of reading some of the "pickup artist" material many years ago, and it was fascinating because there was a whole range from the really ridiculous "one trick" peddlers who in some cases probably were proto-Andre Tates - isogynists who looked for all kinds of underhanded tactics to trick women and saw it as justified because they saw things as stacked against men - to people who were just a hair shy of more mainstream selfhelp of making yourself better to be more attractive. On the extreme end you'd see NLP, hypnosis and in some cases coaches trying to legitimise things that'd easily cross into assault. On the "near mainstream" end you'd see people pushing meditation, exercise, and mainstream authors on getting better at social situations (e.g. Dale Carnegie). The former imploded in the aftermath of Neil Strauss' The Game, which made some of the popular techniques well known and/or mocked (e.g. you had Howard on Big Bang Theory who in the beginning "demonstrated" several of the more ridiculous methods) and a lot of the field pivoted towards closer to regular self-help because the weirder stuff would get them called out. I wonder to what extent that contributed to channeling the people who didn't want to put in the work towards people like Andrew Tate, with the mockery that followed and the less extreme coaches in that field moving away from it leaving a whole bunch of angry young men ripe for the picking, now with one more bone to pick.
aaron695 4mo ago
[dead]
rapidfl 4mo ago
This is a good point. If there was timeless material, they would continue to sell. Maybe War of Art or Meditations still continue to sell. Deep Work is a joke.
throwaway27448 4mo ago
Is this really a new revelation? Anyway, "self help" is still one of the largest sections at my local barnes and noble—certainly by far the largest non-fiction section.
throwaway2037 4mo ago
> starting to realize You think people didn't know the same in the 1970s, 80s, 90s, 00s, etc? Related: Every single diet fad in the last 50 years (except GLP-1) did not work. Yet, many people continue to buy into every new diet fad.
Razengan 4mo ago
> the self-help industry About 15 years ago my friend showed me this video of a "self-help" guy he was impressed with and inspired by. ..it was over 30 minutes of rambling that sounded like it makes senses but meant nothing and lead nowhere. Looking back it was like listening to how early LLMs were: Just long strings of random words and vague sentences without actually saying anything. Or how Saruman's power of the tongue was described as. It's depressing and obvious to see how many people could be misled by this kind of charlatanism. AI if done right could cut a lot of crap from human society.
teekert 4mo ago
Yeah, there is just too much Tony Robbins referring to cells living of light in some jar linked directly to your work productivity (and thousands of other debunked BS "facts"). The levels of coaches for coaches for coaches for coaches on LinkedIn is approaching levels that shouldn't even be possible. I feel like almost everything about this topic has been said, but the amount of things being said is increasing exponentially, and it's all coming out of thin air. Like an LLM expanding the current body of work. I for one used to enjoy such books but have turned more to mind-fuck scifi (i.e. I keep hunting for the Ted Chiang level books, although they are also very rare). I find meaning in those.
ElProlactin 4mo ago
If you're looking for self-help, why would you read a book written by somebody else? - George Carlin
- mettamage 4mo ago
  For real? Because certain people might know things about the way the world works that could help you?
arethuza 4mo ago
"It’s just a network of individuals selling products, promoting each other’s products, and creating new avenues to sell more products" That's hardly unique to the self-help world - doesn't a lot of tech also fall into that category?
thomassmith65 4mo ago
There was a self-help industry long before Tim Ferriss. "How to Win Friends and Influence People" is still popular today. Dale Carnegie wrote it in 1936. Back in the '80s and '90s Tony Robbins infuriated millions of North Americans by spamming late television with his obnoxious self-help infomercials: https://youtube.com/watch?v=gUczh_vsRUI https://youtube.com/watch?v=gUczh_vsRUI As long as there have been dissatisfied people, there probably has been someone promising to be a deus ex macchina with the secret to turn their lives around.
Cthulhu_ 4mo ago
I can't stop referring to the irony that the gist of "the 4-hour work week" is to write a book about working only 4 hours a week. But also pretty much all of the self-help books I've read can be summarized in a few paragraphs, that is, a blog post. The rest is repetition or examples. Which are important for learning and understanding, I suppose, but when an AI can both tell you the gist of it while applying it directly to your current situation, they can't compete.
- wyclif 4mo ago
  Tim Ferriss has been called out on these "ironies" for years now: https://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/01/08/5-time-management-tricks-i-learned-from-years-of-hating-tim-ferriss/comment-page-7/ https://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/01/08/5-time-management-...
- NeutralCrane 4mo ago
  The repetition and examples aren’t there for learning. They are there for monetization. This is my biggest issue with the self-help industry. There is a lot of self-help books out there with ideas that are genuinely valuable, or at least worth considering. But as you say, the entirety of the idea can be conveyed perfectly well in a blog post. But you can’t sell a blog post. So it has to be padded out with cruft into a book length publication that can be sold to people. That’s how AI undermines the industry. It has those general ideas and can convey them in the simplistic, cruftless versions that are most helpful, and can iterate back and forth with someone on applications to their own life.
PatronBernard 4mo ago
I'd say it's just moved from books to influencers on social media. Still plenty of money in misleading vulnerable people.
wouldbecouldbe 4mo ago
I just don't see it changing, people don't buy knowledge, they pay for trust and authority. It's already been for decades that you could find every workout & workout program for free online or youtube. Yet people decided to buy anyway, because they trust that that person is right, and perhaps they tried the free stuff before and it didnt work (not because it wasn't correct, but because they didn't stick to it)
HPsquared 4mo ago
This description fits a LOT of economic activity in general.
XCSme 4mo ago
Kind of, the 4-hour work workweek was one of the first book's I've read (I started late, was never interested), and it had many good insights that lead to me living a freer and more fulfilling life, that I might have not done otherwise. Sure, you don't need to read an entire book to get the idea to do something, but that's way in which ideas get into your head and consciously or not, guide your steps in certain directions. Of course, everything in self-help books should be taken with a grain of salt and also applied differently for each individual. It's just a way to get more ideas of what's possible, similar to travelling: it doesn't force you to do things in a certain way, it just shows you what's out there.
piltdownman 4mo ago
There's an influencer self-help industry, and then there's the likes of Alain De Botton whose output like 'How Proust Can Change Your Life' firmly sits in the self-help arena. Important to distinguish the two imo.
doctaj 4mo ago
Yeah I trust nothing. I listened to a hubermanlab podcast and found myself using AI to take a first pass at verifying claims he was making, but everything he suggested was complete bull crap.
tiahura 4mo ago
* Tim Ferriss kind of created it.* There’s literally 100 years of self-help books before, who?
kevin_thibedeau 4mo ago
This isn't a new phenomenon. Tony Robbins was doing this 40+ years ago.

curuinor 4mo ago

Dale Carnegie created it, Tim Ferriss is a century too late to point as origin.

ransom1538 4mo ago
Dale Carnegie -> Jim Rohn -> Tony Robbins -> [all hacks now]
- curuinor 4mo ago
  the man leveraged the fact that his name was the same as Andrew Carnegie (having no relation) to launch a publishing empire. it was hacks from the beginning
  - xKingfisher 4mo ago
    Even worse he changed his name from Carnagey, presumably to deliberately cause confusion.
  - MengerSponge 4mo ago
    Highly recommend "If Books Could Kill" https://bsky.app/profile/ifbookspod.bsky.social https://bsky.app/profile/ifbookspod.bsky.social It really is all the same book.
    - sharadov 4mo ago
      All the writers that I love to hate - hariri, gladwell! Will give it a listen
      - sanswork 4mo ago
        I wanted to love it since despite being a self help reader I can definitely see a lot of the bad/dangerous advice given all over the place but I often found them really stretching to make stuff negative and being very smug about it which just made it the same issue as the source material. Especially annoying since in most cases there were really solidly valid negatives to go after in the books. It's very much a lets build a straw man then tear it down podcast.
        sharadov 4mo ago
        I listened to a couple episodes and concur, the overt-criticality and smugness was off putting.
    - ctoa 4mo ago
      The very first thing I did when coming to this thread was search for if someone had already mentioned "one book theory". My favorite episodes of IBCK are mostly the self-help trash.
    - jpfromlondon 4mo ago
      [dead]
- HatchedLake721 4mo ago
  Why is Tony Robbins a hack?
  - anitil 4mo ago
    I think calling these people 'hacks' is not quite the right word. They're very good at what they do, it's just a lot of people don't like or don't value what they do. I actually have a fair bit of respect for their craft (the ability to draw attention and turn that attention in to customers) even if I feel like what they're selling is fake, or fake-adjacent
- adamtaylor_13 4mo ago
  It is wild to me that people consider Dale Carnegie and Tony Robbins in the same boat. "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie completely changed how I communicate with people, for the better. For nerds (like me) who think data and statistics are the way to persuade people, you're doing yourself a disservice by ignoring the truth. Lots of people think sales are icky, but much of life is influenced by your ability to persuade and sell, even yourself, to others.
- tiahura 4mo ago
  Robbins is much more an unintentional heir to Sartre (ducks) than Carnegie.
- dzonga 4mo ago
  people in tech i.e engineers discount sales - but damn the book by Caldini - Influence & Jim Rohn In terms of sales training - help a lot.
lanamo 4mo ago
Or you could say in other words: Everything is a remix! Dale Carnegie and Steven Covey have both been heavily influenced by Alfred Adler, the Austrian psychotherapist and founder of individual psychology.
senordevnyc 4mo ago
Why can’t you go back to things like Meditations? Or Proverbs in the Old Testament? It’s almost like the designation of “self help” is so broad as to be totally useless.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

wang_li 4mo ago

Self help is just education from a book rather than from an in person instructor.

Quarrelsome 4mo ago

you've giving people way too much credit here. People never start to realise en-masse.

an0malous 4mo ago

> it’s just a network of individuals selling products, promoting each other’s products, and creating new avenues to sell more products I've got some bad news for you about the SaaS industry

watwut 4mo ago
The sooner people realize that, the better.
gdhkgdhkvff 4mo ago
Considering he named it “the Tim Ferris mafia” makes me think he’s fully aware of that.

darth_avocado 4mo ago

Also personally, my self help consumption (across all media) has been dropping lately. Part of it is that quality of content has been worsening over the years. But the part that’s put me off the most is the general burnout I’m facing in life: professional stagnation, uncertain future (will I be employed in a year?), more work, financial pressure, politics upending my life directly etc. Funnily enough I’ve started consuming more content around hobbies, crafts and other fun stuff, which the blog mentions was one of the only two categories that saw growth in sales. I wonder if that is a reason for the decline rather than AI.

throwaway2037 4mo ago
> my self help consumption (across all media) has been dropping lately I want to propose an alternative theory about why your viewership is dropping. Whatever made you originally watch self-help on a particular topic is no longer as interesting. Let's say you were struggling with (a) exercise/fitness/diet, (b) personal/romantic relationships, or (c) business/"success"/wealth. (These are easily the three biggest categories for self-help.) You watched a few hundred hours of self-help YouTube videos over a few years and you learned how to improve. Now, the content is less interesting. I share this idea because I see a similar pattern in myself. For the self-help YouTube videos that I do watch, I am/was most interested in (a) exercise/fitness/diet and (b) personal/romantic relationships. After 1000 hours or so of this sort of content, I learned how to improve and "ascended". Now, I don't need to watch as much because my thinking on these topics is more advanced. Deeper: How will these channels sustain themselves? It does not look obvious to me! If I were running a self-help channel, I might intentionally delete old videos after 6-12 months. Why? So that I can remake the same content again (and again)... to get a revenue boost from new(er) viewers. For anyone who is a full-time self-help content creator, probably 90% of the revenue is made in the first 30 days. (Wild guess, but there will be an extreme cliff of some sort.)

mmahemoff 4mo ago

Why now though? Based on the sharp decline since 2022 (according to Ferris’s numbers), s/books/chatbots seems like the Occam’s Razor explanation here.

digitaltrees 4mo ago

Hard disagree. I have read lots of books, participated in events and training seminars and had profound results in my life. My marriage is better because of what I learned, I am a better father and leader because of what I learned. And the fact that people sell things as part of that growth journey is how they support their ability to share the lessons and techniques.

JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
Can you share an easy-to-understand example for someone who is similarly highly sceptical of self-help products?
- apatry 4mo ago
  Getting Things Done by David Allen gave me a framework to get out of the weeds when I am overwhelmed (usually once or twice a year when I stretch myself): build a to-do list that us complete enough to stop thinking about what you have to do, if a new task take less than 5 minutes just do it right away, and then prioritise the rest. Deep Work by Cal Newport gave me a way to think about my time management: information work is not the same as a factory line where doing the same thing at similar productivity from 9 to 5 makes sense, and it is important to dedicate long stretch of quality time to be productive (vs busy). There are no silver bullets, but learning what worked for a group of people, testing it for myself, adapting it, and using it as needed has been helpful to me.
  - coliveira 4mo ago
    Yes, I read "Getting Things Done": he teaches you to make todo lists! That's it, nothing profound or from another planet. Basically you could get that information in 1 paragraph: "if you're overwhelmed, make a todo list", but he wouldn't have made a lot of money that way...
    - kamaal 4mo ago
      There is more than that, though. Deadlines, Next Tasks, Weekly list purge/build, Yearly alignment etc etc. Also how you teach somebody a thing matters. Stories have a profound effect on humans since the earliest of our days.

vld_chk 4mo ago

I do not have data, but from first glance, if anything, the overall demand for self-help and self-improvement increases Y/Y. We can correlate it with a sharp drop in alcohol sales, or raising revenues of therapy industry or fitness industry. YT and podcasts still looming too. But the form of books … Yes, by some reason it collapses. I personally attribute it not to “people realise those guys are salesmen”, but with the fact that none of really good ideas were produced by such books for a while. Now anyone who really has a new angle or new idea to say — they go straight to YT/podcasts, bypassing writing a book altogether. Because of this, me personally, when I check bookshelves, do not see any really new or interesting idea published in the field.

mcmoor 4mo ago
I'm curious how correlated they are to decline of books in general
throwaway2037 4mo ago
Your comment gave me an idea. First, start with this assumption: Self-help is "someone trying to sell an idea that may improve your life (health, business/wealth, relationships)". Second, consider the mediums that we use to sell self-help. Traditionally, it was in-person/live events. Basically, 100 to 1000 people sit in a big room and listen to a person talk on stage. Usually, there is some Q&A, raise your hands for voting, etc. Now think about the revenue side: How do you scale that business? Publish a book with the same ideas. The in-person events create a personal brand, and books help you scale the business. Next, consider the mediums for selling self-help: (1) in-person events, (2) books, (3) YouTube. (1) scales the least, but has the highest branding building effect. (2) scales medium, because it costs money for the customer to buy the book. (3) scales infinitely, because it is nearly free. Further, the most financially successful YouTubers first build a personal brand, then begin sell product placement by sponsorships. Further, they also begin selling "merch" (channel merchandise). That is the real gold mine of YouTube. Even sponsonships for most channels with less than one million subscribers pales in comparison to selling "merch". About (1) (2) and (3) above, I would say that humans are usually more influenced by [the most] (1) seeing a person live, [next most] (3) seeing a person on video, and [the least] (2) reading their book. Thus, it seems logical that YouTube will replace books for self-help. Without reading the article, my first instinct (after writing the above) is that self-help books are not being replaced with AI/LLMs. Instead, they are being replaced by self-help YouTube channels.

raincole 4mo ago

Self-help industry is something that literally can't die. It's in the same category as astrology and technical analysis.

627467 4mo ago

A self-help movement worth their reputation is one that sells more than a book. In fact many give away the book and then charge you a sub for being part of a club

protocolture 4mo ago

Yeah I got a free medical "coach" and the coaching was sub par, and mostly used to try and press me into non free services. A lot of those non free services seemed to involve very poorly written and syndicated coaching apps.

tbmtbmtbmtbmtbm 4mo ago

Then you could frame the collapse of this writer's book as a 'hit'

dimitrios1 4mo ago

Not to be a contrarian, because I agree for a lot of the industry, but there are some genuine gems out there. Few examples: Extreme Ownership really helped me be a better leader and take more accountability for my own actions Atomic Habits really helped me think about goal setting and what the underlying driver was Coaching Habit improved my 1:1s drastically (I basically stopped talking or advice giving and just listened -- profound, I know, but the book helped smack me in the face with it) Many more examples, but there is definitely a ton of self-help hack slop out there as well.

digitaltrees 4mo ago
Totally agree. So many people talk when they should listen.
nephihaha 4mo ago
I'd agree with that. A lot of rubbish is out there, but there are some helpful things. Even the Law of Attraction can be helpful if viewed through the lens of positive thinking (i.e. you can handle bad situations better if you are in a good frame of mind which will make your life better.)

dartharva 4mo ago

Tim Ferris? Bro humanity has invented religion that served exactly this purpose long since before it even invented the wheel.

enos_feedler 4mo ago

Unless you have hard proof this is occurring then I would rather believe my own and others positive testimony on self help. Its powerful and relatively affordable if you are committed to making changes in your own life. Is good advice. Authentic stories (generally). I am just grateful that people take the time and effort to reflect and encode their experience into something digestible by others. It’s pretty cynical to have your view.

1-6 4mo ago

OP is describing Dave Ramsey

mannanj 4mo ago

this self help industry completely reversed my diabetes, brought my adventure and satisfaction, and let me to making the best friends of my life. maybe you are judging and dismissing something with prejudice?

kdheiwns 4mo ago

Every time someone has said some goofy thing will go away because people are getting smarter or realizing something, it's absolutely not the case. A large number of people will always want someone to tell them that they have everything figured out and others just don't see how great they are, that they'll wake up rich and famous one day, that they're powerful, that they're beautiful, etc. Many will pay to be told this. Many will pay for subscriptions to become even bigger and better. As an extreme example, pickup artists had a wave of success a few years back and people paid big money for those ridiculous courses. They got replaced with Andrew Tate style "a real man just smokes and fights and hates women" type content and people paid money with the hopes of becoming like them. Trends and life goals change, but people still gobble up self help.

JimsonYang 4mo ago
agree, there's always going to be a belief for a majority of people that by reading or doing this ONE trick, they can avoid the hard work and sacrifice needed to get to a place/do a task we've seen it with exercise/dieting we've seen it with women/dating this types of things always persist
vidarh 4mo ago
I went down a rabbit hole of reading some of the "pickup artist" material many years ago, and it was fascinating because there was a whole range from the really ridiculous "one trick" peddlers who in some cases probably were proto-Andre Tates - isogynists who looked for all kinds of underhanded tactics to trick women and saw it as justified because they saw things as stacked against men - to people who were just a hair shy of more mainstream selfhelp of making yourself better to be more attractive. On the extreme end you'd see NLP, hypnosis and in some cases coaches trying to legitimise things that'd easily cross into assault. On the "near mainstream" end you'd see people pushing meditation, exercise, and mainstream authors on getting better at social situations (e.g. Dale Carnegie). The former imploded in the aftermath of Neil Strauss' The Game, which made some of the popular techniques well known and/or mocked (e.g. you had Howard on Big Bang Theory who in the beginning "demonstrated" several of the more ridiculous methods) and a lot of the field pivoted towards closer to regular self-help because the weirder stuff would get them called out. I wonder to what extent that contributed to channeling the people who didn't want to put in the work towards people like Andrew Tate, with the mockery that followed and the less extreme coaches in that field moving away from it leaving a whole bunch of angry young men ripe for the picking, now with one more bone to pick.

aaron695 4mo ago

[dead]

rapidfl 4mo ago

This is a good point. If there was timeless material, they would continue to sell. Maybe War of Art or Meditations still continue to sell. Deep Work is a joke.

throwaway27448 4mo ago

Is this really a new revelation? Anyway, "self help" is still one of the largest sections at my local barnes and noble—certainly by far the largest non-fiction section.

throwaway2037 4mo ago

> starting to realize You think people didn't know the same in the 1970s, 80s, 90s, 00s, etc? Related: Every single diet fad in the last 50 years (except GLP-1) did not work. Yet, many people continue to buy into every new diet fad.

Razengan 4mo ago

> the self-help industry About 15 years ago my friend showed me this video of a "self-help" guy he was impressed with and inspired by. ..it was over 30 minutes of rambling that sounded like it makes senses but meant nothing and lead nowhere. Looking back it was like listening to how early LLMs were: Just long strings of random words and vague sentences without actually saying anything. Or how Saruman's power of the tongue was described as. It's depressing and obvious to see how many people could be misled by this kind of charlatanism. AI if done right could cut a lot of crap from human society.

teekert 4mo ago

Yeah, there is just too much Tony Robbins referring to cells living of light in some jar linked directly to your work productivity (and thousands of other debunked BS "facts"). The levels of coaches for coaches for coaches for coaches on LinkedIn is approaching levels that shouldn't even be possible. I feel like almost everything about this topic has been said, but the amount of things being said is increasing exponentially, and it's all coming out of thin air. Like an LLM expanding the current body of work. I for one used to enjoy such books but have turned more to mind-fuck scifi (i.e. I keep hunting for the Ted Chiang level books, although they are also very rare). I find meaning in those.

ElProlactin 4mo ago

If you're looking for self-help, why would you read a book written by somebody else? - George Carlin

mettamage 4mo ago
For real? Because certain people might know things about the way the world works that could help you?

arethuza 4mo ago

"It’s just a network of individuals selling products, promoting each other’s products, and creating new avenues to sell more products" That's hardly unique to the self-help world - doesn't a lot of tech also fall into that category?

thomassmith65 4mo ago

There was a self-help industry long before Tim Ferriss. "How to Win Friends and Influence People" is still popular today. Dale Carnegie wrote it in 1936. Back in the '80s and '90s Tony Robbins infuriated millions of North Americans by spamming late television with his obnoxious self-help infomercials: https://youtube.com/watch?v=gUczh_vsRUI https://youtube.com/watch?v=gUczh_vsRUI As long as there have been dissatisfied people, there probably has been someone promising to be a deus ex macchina with the secret to turn their lives around.

Cthulhu_ 4mo ago

I can't stop referring to the irony that the gist of "the 4-hour work week" is to write a book about working only 4 hours a week. But also pretty much all of the self-help books I've read can be summarized in a few paragraphs, that is, a blog post. The rest is repetition or examples. Which are important for learning and understanding, I suppose, but when an AI can both tell you the gist of it while applying it directly to your current situation, they can't compete.

wyclif 4mo ago
Tim Ferriss has been called out on these "ironies" for years now: https://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/01/08/5-time-management-tricks-i-learned-from-years-of-hating-tim-ferriss/comment-page-7/ https://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/01/08/5-time-management-...
NeutralCrane 4mo ago
The repetition and examples aren’t there for learning. They are there for monetization. This is my biggest issue with the self-help industry. There is a lot of self-help books out there with ideas that are genuinely valuable, or at least worth considering. But as you say, the entirety of the idea can be conveyed perfectly well in a blog post. But you can’t sell a blog post. So it has to be padded out with cruft into a book length publication that can be sold to people. That’s how AI undermines the industry. It has those general ideas and can convey them in the simplistic, cruftless versions that are most helpful, and can iterate back and forth with someone on applications to their own life.

PatronBernard 4mo ago

I'd say it's just moved from books to influencers on social media. Still plenty of money in misleading vulnerable people.

wouldbecouldbe 4mo ago

I just don't see it changing, people don't buy knowledge, they pay for trust and authority. It's already been for decades that you could find every workout & workout program for free online or youtube. Yet people decided to buy anyway, because they trust that that person is right, and perhaps they tried the free stuff before and it didnt work (not because it wasn't correct, but because they didn't stick to it)

HPsquared 4mo ago

This description fits a LOT of economic activity in general.

XCSme 4mo ago

Kind of, the 4-hour work workweek was one of the first book's I've read (I started late, was never interested), and it had many good insights that lead to me living a freer and more fulfilling life, that I might have not done otherwise. Sure, you don't need to read an entire book to get the idea to do something, but that's way in which ideas get into your head and consciously or not, guide your steps in certain directions. Of course, everything in self-help books should be taken with a grain of salt and also applied differently for each individual. It's just a way to get more ideas of what's possible, similar to travelling: it doesn't force you to do things in a certain way, it just shows you what's out there.

piltdownman 4mo ago

There's an influencer self-help industry, and then there's the likes of Alain De Botton whose output like 'How Proust Can Change Your Life' firmly sits in the self-help arena. Important to distinguish the two imo.

doctaj 4mo ago

Yeah I trust nothing. I listened to a hubermanlab podcast and found myself using AI to take a first pass at verifying claims he was making, but everything he suggested was complete bull crap.

tiahura 4mo ago

* Tim Ferriss kind of created it.* There’s literally 100 years of self-help books before, who?

kevin_thibedeau 4mo ago

This isn't a new phenomenon. Tony Robbins was doing this 40+ years ago.