Self help

Samuel Smiles

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“”If you’re reading it in a book, folks, it ain’t self-help. It’s help.

—George Carlin

Not to be confused with legal self-help, which really is helping yourself.

Self help is the umbrella term given to a fairly large genre of self-guided instructional materials, particularly those centering around improving one's personal life. Self-help books, courses, and groups cover a vast amount of territory, including psychology, motivation, sex education, fad diets, law, and family issues. Ideas often flow between the self-help movement and other enthusiastic groups of people who like to confidently tell strangers how to live, such as the pick-up artist community, LessWrong, moralizing religions, or some practitioners of martial arts. Most self-help doctrine is only peer-reviewed in the sense that sometimes authors talk to each other while using the urinals or stalls in the publisher's water closet. Many self-help systems derive in fact from very dubious principles drawn more from pop spiritualism than from science. It has been suggested that the name is misleading because, as George Carlin put it, "If you're looking for self-help, why would you read a book written by somebody else?"

Although the self-help movement has parallels in ancient philosophy and religious practice, the modern form was born in the 19^th and early-20^th centuries with books like Samuel Smiles' Self-Help (1865) and Dale Carnegie's How To Win Friends and Influence People (1936). Today, it is especially popular in the United States,^{[citation needed]} due to that country's inculcation of individualism and emphasis that virtue is rewarded. If one's society or culture is very unequal, and one's place in it largely depends on accidents (like who one's parents are, particularly in terms of class and race), then that would be too horrible to contemplate, so it must be wrong!

Self-help books have, through time and by design, consistently stood against social change by blaming the individual, rather than (for example) institutionalized racism or sexism, for not having enough will to advance in society. This was exemplified in 2018 by Tony Robbins' public shaming of a sexual-abuse survivor and of the #MeToo movement in general.

Instructional materials for other subjects — particularly the sort that might also be taught in school — might reasonably be considered "self-help" as well, though the term is not always used in those cases.

Any self-help system or theory will work just as well as any other — for a time. (The placebo effect may play a role here.) But given the nature of human nature, somehow each system needs continual reinforcement ("Buy the next book!" — "Come to our next church service!" — "Take the next course!") — or else the "seeker" moves on to the next self-help fad. Either outcome further fuels the vast and burgeoning self-help industry and its market.

All self-help systems peddle two different notions:

1. People have the potential to be, have, or do anything they want.
2. People should always be living at their full potential.

In other words, you are always supposed to be a god, and if you're not, you suck.

Some famous self-help books

Title	Author(s)	Published	Comments
Freedom: Credos from the Road	Barger, Ralph "Sonny"	2005	How you can achieve and excel by applying the immense wisdom of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club to your life.
The Courage to Heal	Bass, Ellen, and Laura Davis	1988	About child abuse and recovered memory; highly controversial and mostly rejected by the scientific community.
Games People Play	Berne, Eric	1964	Book which popularized Transactional Analysis, an influential concept in 1950s and 1960s psychology which has since fallen out of vogue but remains influential within the self-help market.
Honoring the Self	Branden, Nathaniel	1983	Branden turned to writing self-esteem books after his acrimonious split with Ayn Rand and the Objectivism movement
How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World	Browne, Harry	1973	Self-help through anarcho-capitalism for societal dropouts. Browne later twice ran for president on the Libertarian Party ticket.
Chicken Soup for the Soul	Canfield, Jack, et al	1993	Plus a large series of books which followed. Generally filled with glurge rather than pseudoscience.
Don't Sweat the Small Stuff (And It's All Small Stuff)	Carlson, Richard	1997	Plus a large series of books which followed.
How to Win Friends and Influence People	Carnegie, Dale	1936	It was targeted at people with social difficulties and anxieties. Charles Manson used the book to recruit his merry band of murderers.
How to Stop Worrying and Start Living	Carnegie, Dale	1948
Shut up and stop whining: How to end your addiction to self help books	Ctibor, Javiar	2024	Okay, not really, but he is thinking of writing it.
EST: Playing the Game the New Way (The Game of Life)	Frederick, Carl	1974	Presents the concepts taught in Erhard Seminars Training in book form; the author was sued by Werner Erhard claiming it was an infringement on his intellectual property rights but the suit failed and the book became a best seller in 1975.
I'm OK, You're OK	Harris, Thomas	1969	A classic presentation of Transactional Analysis, on the best seller lists for two years in the early 1970s.
We Are Not Afraid	Hickam, Homer	2002	Some truly banal positive thinking 'n' go-get-em motivational talk wrapped in teh American flag and "we stand up to bullies after 9/11" BS here, written at about a 6th-grade reading level.
Think and Grow Rich	Hill, Napoleon	1937	Considered a classic on entrepreneurship written during the Great Depression; much of it is about good planning for the future and positive thinking, but it includes the pseudoscientific concept of tapping into "infinite intelligence" and a weird chapter on sexual sublimation.
Born to Win	James, Muriel and Dorothy Jongeward	1971	More Transactional Analysis
Rich Dad, Poor Dad	Kiyosaki, Robert and Sharon Lechter	1997	Financial self-help combined with The Secret.
Psycho-Cybernetics	Maltz, Maxwell	1960	Despite the esoteric name this is mostly basic goal-setting and developing one's social skills with some Christianity and self-hypnosis mixed in.
Let's Develop	Newman, Fred	1994	An attempt to promote Newman's controversial Social Therapy to the self-help market.
The Power of Positive Thinking	Peale, Norman Vincent	1952	A collection of veiled self-hypnosis techniques and difficult to substantiate anecdotes. Peale was the Trump family's pastor, eventually showing some extremely negative aspects of purely 'positive thinking'.
12 Rules for Life	Peterson, Jordan B.	2018	Heavily guided towards young men seeking guidance. Filled with about what you would expect from JBP.
Harmonic Wealth: The Secret of Attracting the Life You Want	Ray, James Arthur	2008	On the New York Times bestseller list in 2008. The author later made the news in October 2009 when 3 died and 19 were hospitalized after a 2 hour "sweat lodge" ceremony at a large group awareness training he was conducting in Sedona, Arizona.
Reader's Digest Do-It-Yourself Manual	(The editors of Reader's Indigestion)	1965	A classic volume of professional tips and projects.
The Miracle of Psycho-Command Power	Reed, Scott	1972	A poorly-conceived and frankly ridiculous ripoff of Psycho-Cybernetics and Think and Grow Rich mixed with pseudoscientific information on handwriting analysis and claims to teach you how to control others' actions by staring at them.
Awaken the Giant Within : How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Destiny!	Robbins, Anthony ("Tony")	1992	Summed up to one sentence: "Get off your butt and do something." Recent motivational stuff includes such things as fire walking (seriously).
Possibility Thinking	Schuller, Robert	1967	A Christian televangelist's contributions to the self-help market.
Be Happy, You Are Loved	Schuller, Robert	1986	Again, a Christian televangelist's contributions to the self-help market.
Passages	Sheehy, Gail	1974	Very popular, reasonably "wise", but if the reader is not on the same "life track" as her chapters, it rapidly loses value.
Self-Help: With Illustrations of Character, Conduct and Perseverence	Smiles, Samuel	1859	Collection of stories praising those who improved their lives through hard work, thrift and education. Available online for free.[3]
In Tune With the Infinite	Trine, Ralph Waldo	1897	"Send out your thought—thought is a force, and it has occult power of unknown proportions when rightly used and wisely directed—send out your thought that the right situation or the right work will come to you at the right time, in the right way, and that you will recognize it when it comes." Available online for free.[4]

Other books that purport to make your life better if you read them

• Bach, Richard, Jonathan Livingston Seagull — omnipotence through adrenaline junkiehood. Lots of bird photos to inspire the reader.
• Covey, Stephen, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People — Covey managed to parlay that book into an empire of personal organizers and inspirational material.
• Johnson, Spencer, Who Moved My Cheese? — a rodent parable.
• Hubbard, L. Ron, Dianetics — later became the basis for a noxious cult.
• Orr, Leonard and Ray, Sondra, Rebirthing in the New Age — Barely edges out The Miracle of Psycho-Command Power as the most ludicrous piece of shite ever to come out of the whole self-help/New Age mess. Claims you can achieve physical immortality.
• Schwartz, David, The Magic of Thinking Big — popular among salespeople and business; Amway is fond of promoting this one too.
• Redfield, James. The Celestine Prophecy - how to vibrate yourself off the planet.
• Pirsig, Robert, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values — how to use spanners without getting your hands dirty.
• Byrne, Rhonda, The Secret — a 2006 book/movie about the supposed power of wishful thinking.
• Trump, Donald The Art of the Deal — 1987, an entirely ghostwritten "autobiography" of Donald Trump's. The book is an 11 step program for business success directly inspired by Norman Vincent Peale's works. The ties to Peale and Trump run deep; Trump went to Peale's church and Peale presided at his first wedding.

Some generic stuff that needs crystallising

• Trudeau, Kevin — an ever-growing list of books "they" don't want you to read.

Skepticism for the whole damned movement

• Brown, Derren — Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine ISBN 978-0552172356
• Salerno, Steve — SHAM: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless ISBN 978-1400054091

See also

• Blaming the victim
• Human potential movement
• Neurolinguistic programming
• Pick-up artist