4 ms·

"because of what I learned." Do these books/seminars actually teach you something new about being married or a father, that you didn't know before? Like what? I

"because of what I learned." Do these books/seminars actually teach you something new about being married or a father, that you didn't know before? Like what? I always figured they were more about coaching, persuasion, convincing. To the extent I've scanned them, I never saw any kind of new fact, definitely not about something like being married.

Fr0styMatt88 4mo ago
I mean I can see it. Books are just a way to transmit one’s thoughts and experiences to other people. So it’s no different to being exposed to someone with a different viewpoint. Common sense isn’t common or innate, it’s tribal knowledge. There’s that XKCD about someone learning something new that was just thought to be something everyone knew. Also you don’t know what you don’t know. Agree though — coaching and persuasion are a huge part which is why I think a lot of these books seem ‘fluffy’ if all you’re wanting is a collection of facts.
sanswork 4mo ago
I'm definitely a better father because of a bunch of the self help books I've read. Things like better ways to communicate with my son, more effective ways to transfer knowledge, encourage independence, etc. Other areas of my life have definitely improved too though I agree when people say most self help books could be a blog post and in cases where it's an expansion of a blog post I'll generally just go read that. With these types of books(and I read a lot of self help) I generally expect to get like 1-2 good pieces of advice/ideas per 200 pages so I generally just scan through them until I hit areas that seem high value then read those areas more deeply. I've read all of Tim Ferriss' books and haven't really gotten anything I can think of from his stuff to be honest they are a bit too general for me but I've gotten some good advice from his podcast though I only listen to maybe one episode in 10 when it is with someone or about something that sounds very interesting and even then I tend to scrub through it since there is a lot of filler in a 2 hour podcast.
- rfc3092 4mo ago
  Please share “better father” books.
  - AnimalMuppet 4mo ago
    Here's the problem: You can be a bad father by being too strict, or you can be a bad father by being too lenient. In Zion National Park there's a hike called Angel's Landing. You wind up on this ridge, with a 1000 foot cliff on one side and a 500 foot cliff on the other side. And the ridge is not very wide - only a couple of feet in some places. Parenting is like that. You think, oh, I see people causing problems by being too strict, so I want to back away from that cliff. But there's a cliff behind you, so don't back too far... And the problem with parenting books is that, if you're the kind of parent who needs the books warning you about being too strict, then the books that warn against being too lenient are probably the ones that resonate more with you. That is, you're drawn to the ones you don't need, not to the ones that you do need. All that said, yes, get books and read them. Be sure to get a variety of them. I can't give specifics off the cuff, as I'm well past that phase now.
    - digitaltrees 4mo ago
      Totally agree especially since each kid is different and responds to the same technique differently. But there are common things like attachment theory, boundaries creating safety, the tactics of repair after conflict.
    - frankosaurus 4mo ago
      Well stated. I read Nurture Shock before my kids were born. One of its main arguments is to praise effort rather than natural abilities ("you worked hard" rather than "you're smart"). Being one who naturally withholds praise, its message of not over-praising resonated with me. In retrospect, I should have praised kid #1 more. It took me 10+ years to realize that. The book was not wrong but also not the message I needed.
      - 4mo ago
DrewADesign 4mo ago
Only hard facts change your perspective? Lacking happiness or charisma or confidence or the ability to quit smoking or any other run-of-the-mill self-help topic isn’t caused by a lack of relevant data: it’s a matter of perspective. Often, the best way to push through the problem is getting the perspective of someone that’s thought about it more. Whether self help books are an effective medium for that is another topic, but if they’re not, lacking hard facts wouldn’t be the problem.
digitaltrees 4mo ago
Yes. I learned new techniques like: victim vs author perspective. wife and I did a training where she went first, learned the the technique (tell a story of a fight like you are the most sympathetic victim then tell it again like you were the author) and it immediately shifted both of our perspectives about a conflict we hadn’t been able to resolve for 6 months because she told both versions and immediately understood where I was coming from. I am personally grateful we both know that technique now.
jayers 4mo ago
Self help usually doesn't teach you anything that is new. Usually they just repackage the same common sense that you've heard a million times before in a new way. That doesn't mean it is useless though, I have had my own life changed by several self help/business books. Sometimes you just need someone to tell you common sense in the right way so that you actually listen to it.
- digitaltrees 4mo ago
  You don’t come out of the womb with common sense. And you don’t know all common sense possible.
- nephihaha 4mo ago
  What if you are raised in a toxic environment? Many are. The news media is also packaged in such a way as to cause fear, alarm and misery. Sometimes you have to break free of that. There is a lot of bad advice out there especially in the modern world.
thepryz 4mo ago
I view self help books in a similar light as management books. They're usually not going to teach me anything new. What they will do is present something I already know, in potentially new ways and new contexts that allow me to contemplate them and keep them more front of mind. I tend to think of it almost like right thought right action. It's also worth noting that sometimes you just need to be at the right moment in time for a lesson to resonate and stick so reading such books can provide more opportunity for that to happen. I do, however, try to limit who and what I read though because there is a lot of derivative garbage out there.
- phlsa 4mo ago
  Exactly that. I also think of reading self-help books (or management books) as giving myself time to engage with the subject. Even if there is no groundbreaking new information, it gives me time to think about the topic. If you couldn't tell yet, I'm a slow reader.
  - nmcfarl 4mo ago
    I am not a slow reader, but I realized what you did - that these books give me a chance to engage with the topic and if I spend enough time with a subject, I might learn something from myself even if I learn zero from the actual book. My solution to this problem is to set these books next to one of the two comfy chairs in the house. When I sit in one of these chairs, I consider whether I want to read a chapter, I can only read one chapter, I can only have two of these books going at one time. And under the system it takes me about three months to finish one of the books up from less than a week. I also find I no longer hate• most of them and I learn a lot more. • they still have a very high DNF rate.
coliveira 4mo ago
What I find funny is people saying in social media that they read dozens of books, and when you see what they're reading is mostly self-help volumes! If you read one or two of these books you already know what they'll say in 100s of others. It's very similar to religious books: the content is always the same, they just rearrange things so people will continue consuming more of the same ideas.
eru 4mo ago
> Do these books/seminars actually teach you something new about being married or a father, that you didn't know before? Like what? I'm as skeptical as you are, but teaching you something you didn't know before ain't the only channel they could conceivable help through. Eg reading their bible can help a devout christian, even though there's nothing in there they didn't already know.
kqr 4mo ago
I recently read Attia's Outlive which is about what sort of lifestyle makes one more resilient against diseases of old age. I'm not in a position to verify more than a few of the factual claims made by the author (and a lot of it sounds like mumbo-jumbo), but it was persuasive enough to get me to exercise for health (instead of performance at a specific event) and my life has gotten much easier since I came to that realisation. Maybe I would have done so eventually without the book, but I'm glad the book sped the process up.
- lotsofpulp 4mo ago
  >it was persuasive enough to get me to exercise for health Why was this one guy more persuasive than the recommendation of basically every medical organization in the world? Also, his correspondence with Epstein is quite damning.
  - kqr 4mo ago
    Mainly that the advice was more structured, maybe? Note that I was exercising before, only I didn't do it for health. But I also didn't suffer from any obvious problems. What I got out of every medical organisation in the world then is "You're fine. Don't worry about it." I was probably fine, but I'm even more fine now; I'm capable of doing more of the things I enjoy.
    - lotsofpulp 4mo ago
      > What I got out of every medical organisation in the world then is "You're fine. Don't worry about it." This is alien to me, because for at least 50 years now, heart disease and diabetes has been at the forefront of basically every developed country’s health problems, for which the only solution proposed by all health authorities has been to eat less and healthier, and to do cardiovascular exercise almost every day. Even from elementary school, I remember being taught in gym or health class that being active and exercising was necessary for long term health.
      - Levitz 4mo ago
groundzeros2015 4mo ago
Yes. I think about a few framings from books all the time.
matwood 4mo ago
> Do these books/seminars actually teach you something new about being married or a father, that you didn't know before? Maybe you were born with all the knowledge necessary to be a good father/husband, but I certainly wasn’t. I imagine most people just have their parents to go off of, and we all know what a can of worms that can be.
- noufalibrahim 4mo ago
  I'd wager that most people have just their parents to go off of and a few recallibrate using their own experiences, learning, and introspecting about them. Those are the few to whom books and seminars are useful as sources. I think, for a large number of people, self-help (especially the short form high intensity style content that influencers post is just "content" to "consume" - a form of cheap entertainment that's thrown out almost as soon as it's consumed. There's no enduring change. That takes time and an semi-innate desire to change. Then, all these things become sensible and useful. I'm not a big fan of Ferris but I'm willing to bet that someone who sits down with one of his books and works through it slowly applying the lessons to his or her own life will see some kind of change as opposed to the typical person who just asks an LLM to summarise the book or a video about it and then decides that they've changed.
TeMPOraL 4mo ago
Knowledge has to come from somewhere. Not everyone has perfect parents to couch them on marriage and parenthood.
n4r9 4mo ago
It's "learning how to..." rather than "learning that...". Good self-help books can provide a framework to understand how your own childhood development influences your current behaviours, and how you can work to change. I'm currently reading "Parenting from the Inside Out" which goes into both the psychology and neurology of the developing brain, and explains how insecure childhood attachment can propagate across generations. I have a mixture of dismissive/avoidant and anxious attachment thought patterns, and it's been helpful to put this into context by reflecting on my own childhood and where they might have come from. Those patterns gradually feel less like something I'm "stuck with" and more like something I can challenge and master.
- digitaltrees 4mo ago
  That's awesome personal insight. My next door neighbors are childhood psychologists and when my daughter was 18 months old I mentioned I was trying to be very intentional about creating secure attachment and the things I was doing to facilitate it. They said in a very supportive and amused tone "oh it's too late, the attachment window has closed by now" then after a long pause said "she is fine and clearly has secure attachment to you and her mom" By I myself have done a lot of work to understand ways to shift attachment styles similar to yours.

Fr0styMatt88 4mo ago

I mean I can see it. Books are just a way to transmit one’s thoughts and experiences to other people. So it’s no different to being exposed to someone with a different viewpoint. Common sense isn’t common or innate, it’s tribal knowledge. There’s that XKCD about someone learning something new that was just thought to be something everyone knew. Also you don’t know what you don’t know. Agree though — coaching and persuasion are a huge part which is why I think a lot of these books seem ‘fluffy’ if all you’re wanting is a collection of facts.

sanswork 4mo ago

I'm definitely a better father because of a bunch of the self help books I've read. Things like better ways to communicate with my son, more effective ways to transfer knowledge, encourage independence, etc. Other areas of my life have definitely improved too though I agree when people say most self help books could be a blog post and in cases where it's an expansion of a blog post I'll generally just go read that. With these types of books(and I read a lot of self help) I generally expect to get like 1-2 good pieces of advice/ideas per 200 pages so I generally just scan through them until I hit areas that seem high value then read those areas more deeply. I've read all of Tim Ferriss' books and haven't really gotten anything I can think of from his stuff to be honest they are a bit too general for me but I've gotten some good advice from his podcast though I only listen to maybe one episode in 10 when it is with someone or about something that sounds very interesting and even then I tend to scrub through it since there is a lot of filler in a 2 hour podcast.

rfc3092 4mo ago
Please share “better father” books.
- AnimalMuppet 4mo ago
  Here's the problem: You can be a bad father by being too strict, or you can be a bad father by being too lenient. In Zion National Park there's a hike called Angel's Landing. You wind up on this ridge, with a 1000 foot cliff on one side and a 500 foot cliff on the other side. And the ridge is not very wide - only a couple of feet in some places. Parenting is like that. You think, oh, I see people causing problems by being too strict, so I want to back away from that cliff. But there's a cliff behind you, so don't back too far... And the problem with parenting books is that, if you're the kind of parent who needs the books warning you about being too strict, then the books that warn against being too lenient are probably the ones that resonate more with you. That is, you're drawn to the ones you don't need, not to the ones that you do need. All that said, yes, get books and read them. Be sure to get a variety of them. I can't give specifics off the cuff, as I'm well past that phase now.
  - digitaltrees 4mo ago
    Totally agree especially since each kid is different and responds to the same technique differently. But there are common things like attachment theory, boundaries creating safety, the tactics of repair after conflict.
  - frankosaurus 4mo ago
    Well stated. I read Nurture Shock before my kids were born. One of its main arguments is to praise effort rather than natural abilities ("you worked hard" rather than "you're smart"). Being one who naturally withholds praise, its message of not over-praising resonated with me. In retrospect, I should have praised kid #1 more. It took me 10+ years to realize that. The book was not wrong but also not the message I needed.
    - 4mo ago

DrewADesign 4mo ago

Only hard facts change your perspective? Lacking happiness or charisma or confidence or the ability to quit smoking or any other run-of-the-mill self-help topic isn’t caused by a lack of relevant data: it’s a matter of perspective. Often, the best way to push through the problem is getting the perspective of someone that’s thought about it more. Whether self help books are an effective medium for that is another topic, but if they’re not, lacking hard facts wouldn’t be the problem.

digitaltrees 4mo ago

Yes. I learned new techniques like: victim vs author perspective. wife and I did a training where she went first, learned the the technique (tell a story of a fight like you are the most sympathetic victim then tell it again like you were the author) and it immediately shifted both of our perspectives about a conflict we hadn’t been able to resolve for 6 months because she told both versions and immediately understood where I was coming from. I am personally grateful we both know that technique now.

jayers 4mo ago

Self help usually doesn't teach you anything that is new. Usually they just repackage the same common sense that you've heard a million times before in a new way. That doesn't mean it is useless though, I have had my own life changed by several self help/business books. Sometimes you just need someone to tell you common sense in the right way so that you actually listen to it.

digitaltrees 4mo ago
You don’t come out of the womb with common sense. And you don’t know all common sense possible.
nephihaha 4mo ago
What if you are raised in a toxic environment? Many are. The news media is also packaged in such a way as to cause fear, alarm and misery. Sometimes you have to break free of that. There is a lot of bad advice out there especially in the modern world.

thepryz 4mo ago

I view self help books in a similar light as management books. They're usually not going to teach me anything new. What they will do is present something I already know, in potentially new ways and new contexts that allow me to contemplate them and keep them more front of mind. I tend to think of it almost like right thought right action. It's also worth noting that sometimes you just need to be at the right moment in time for a lesson to resonate and stick so reading such books can provide more opportunity for that to happen. I do, however, try to limit who and what I read though because there is a lot of derivative garbage out there.

phlsa 4mo ago
Exactly that. I also think of reading self-help books (or management books) as giving myself time to engage with the subject. Even if there is no groundbreaking new information, it gives me time to think about the topic. If you couldn't tell yet, I'm a slow reader.
- nmcfarl 4mo ago
  I am not a slow reader, but I realized what you did - that these books give me a chance to engage with the topic and if I spend enough time with a subject, I might learn something from myself even if I learn zero from the actual book. My solution to this problem is to set these books next to one of the two comfy chairs in the house. When I sit in one of these chairs, I consider whether I want to read a chapter, I can only read one chapter, I can only have two of these books going at one time. And under the system it takes me about three months to finish one of the books up from less than a week. I also find I no longer hate• most of them and I learn a lot more. • they still have a very high DNF rate.

coliveira 4mo ago

What I find funny is people saying in social media that they read dozens of books, and when you see what they're reading is mostly self-help volumes! If you read one or two of these books you already know what they'll say in 100s of others. It's very similar to religious books: the content is always the same, they just rearrange things so people will continue consuming more of the same ideas.

eru 4mo ago

> Do these books/seminars actually teach you something new about being married or a father, that you didn't know before? Like what? I'm as skeptical as you are, but teaching you something you didn't know before ain't the only channel they could conceivable help through. Eg reading their bible can help a devout christian, even though there's nothing in there they didn't already know.

kqr 4mo ago

I recently read Attia's Outlive which is about what sort of lifestyle makes one more resilient against diseases of old age. I'm not in a position to verify more than a few of the factual claims made by the author (and a lot of it sounds like mumbo-jumbo), but it was persuasive enough to get me to exercise for health (instead of performance at a specific event) and my life has gotten much easier since I came to that realisation. Maybe I would have done so eventually without the book, but I'm glad the book sped the process up.

lotsofpulp 4mo ago
>it was persuasive enough to get me to exercise for health Why was this one guy more persuasive than the recommendation of basically every medical organization in the world? Also, his correspondence with Epstein is quite damning.
- kqr 4mo ago
  Mainly that the advice was more structured, maybe? Note that I was exercising before, only I didn't do it for health. But I also didn't suffer from any obvious problems. What I got out of every medical organisation in the world then is "You're fine. Don't worry about it." I was probably fine, but I'm even more fine now; I'm capable of doing more of the things I enjoy.
  - lotsofpulp 4mo ago
    > What I got out of every medical organisation in the world then is "You're fine. Don't worry about it." This is alien to me, because for at least 50 years now, heart disease and diabetes has been at the forefront of basically every developed country’s health problems, for which the only solution proposed by all health authorities has been to eat less and healthier, and to do cardiovascular exercise almost every day. Even from elementary school, I remember being taught in gym or health class that being active and exercising was necessary for long term health.
    - Levitz 4mo ago

groundzeros2015 4mo ago

Yes. I think about a few framings from books all the time.

matwood 4mo ago

> Do these books/seminars actually teach you something new about being married or a father, that you didn't know before? Maybe you were born with all the knowledge necessary to be a good father/husband, but I certainly wasn’t. I imagine most people just have their parents to go off of, and we all know what a can of worms that can be.

noufalibrahim 4mo ago
I'd wager that most people have just their parents to go off of and a few recallibrate using their own experiences, learning, and introspecting about them. Those are the few to whom books and seminars are useful as sources. I think, for a large number of people, self-help (especially the short form high intensity style content that influencers post is just "content" to "consume" - a form of cheap entertainment that's thrown out almost as soon as it's consumed. There's no enduring change. That takes time and an semi-innate desire to change. Then, all these things become sensible and useful. I'm not a big fan of Ferris but I'm willing to bet that someone who sits down with one of his books and works through it slowly applying the lessons to his or her own life will see some kind of change as opposed to the typical person who just asks an LLM to summarise the book or a video about it and then decides that they've changed.

TeMPOraL 4mo ago

Knowledge has to come from somewhere. Not everyone has perfect parents to couch them on marriage and parenthood.

n4r9 4mo ago

It's "learning how to..." rather than "learning that...". Good self-help books can provide a framework to understand how your own childhood development influences your current behaviours, and how you can work to change. I'm currently reading "Parenting from the Inside Out" which goes into both the psychology and neurology of the developing brain, and explains how insecure childhood attachment can propagate across generations. I have a mixture of dismissive/avoidant and anxious attachment thought patterns, and it's been helpful to put this into context by reflecting on my own childhood and where they might have come from. Those patterns gradually feel less like something I'm "stuck with" and more like something I can challenge and master.

digitaltrees 4mo ago
That's awesome personal insight. My next door neighbors are childhood psychologists and when my daughter was 18 months old I mentioned I was trying to be very intentional about creating secure attachment and the things I was doing to facilitate it. They said in a very supportive and amused tone "oh it's too late, the attachment window has closed by now" then after a long pause said "she is fine and clearly has secure attachment to you and her mom" By I myself have done a lot of work to understand ways to shift attachment styles similar to yours.