If you are a young adult, I’m sure that even if you have not bought a self-help book you know someone who has. They may have claimed that it completely changed their approach to life, or maybe they read the first couple pages and left the book out on their desk: showing off to the world that they are taking necessary steps to better themselves. After all, what is $15 in exchange for completely overhauling your entire life. Americans throw almost 1 billion dollars down the drain every year into books that they either never finish or forget about in a month.
I have some friends who have 5-10 of these books lying around. I guess that having 10 books increases your success 10 times as much as having just one. The self-help industry doesn’t stop just producing books; there is over a $9 billion market for other self-help remedies such as inspiration videos and websites where you have to subscribe to get the 3751 steps to success. My favorite example of such a scheme is by one of my favorite characters, Tai Lopez. The man flexes his massive “knowledge”; to become like him and own a Lamborghini all you need to do is sign up for his $1000 course (not actually the price). But the crazy thing is that people do sign up for these things and pay a lot of money into these programs.
Here is the inherent flaw with all of these self-help gurus: any general strategy for success either is so obvious that the only issue is you are too lazy to follow it or is too broad to apply to what you want to do. If Bill Gates wrote a book with his tips to success, reading it won’t make me a billionaire. It probably won’t make you one either. Reading some story on Quora or seeing an inspiration video on YouTube about making your bed doesn’t make you a successful person.
I think Malcom Gladwell’s book, Outliers, has a very good analysis about why some people are successful and some are not. He concludes with the point that almost everybody who was successful got lucky with some circumstances that helped them along the path. Bill Gates got lucky to have access to a computer at a time when few were around, hockey players lucky enough to be born in winter months were the oldest at the time of club selection, and children in China were lucky to have a number system which helped develop mathematics. They all had the privilege of circumstance to give them an advantage.
Obviously, that doesn’t mean that we should just stop trying to be successful. Even though we are helped by unforeseen circumstances we still need to put the effort to succeed against others.
Let me save you guys $15 next time you are considering buying a self-help book or paying for a subscription. Being organized is better than being disorganized. Putting effort in is better than being a lazy degenerate. Learning what you need to do for your line of work and practicing it is better than not doing those things. Stop saying that you are going to do something and actually do it.