451–460 of 513 posts
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.
> Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no
Afaik Tim Feriss hasn't done anything notable in the past decade. No surprise that his one best seller is finally dropping off the cliff.
Without some incredible developments in AI, and as long as competition and desire for a better life still exist, I see no future where self-help books go away.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
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Perhaps, but them how do you explain the claimed pattern that sales had been unusually consistent until just recently?
Well, the If Books Could Kill episode about The 4 Hour Workweek came out September 2023... https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-4-hour-workweek/id...
Couple of other anecdotal data points: 1. Guy I know who is an exec coach says that a chatbot can do a lot of what he does. 2. I am absolutely seeing lots of people asking ChatGPT a question and treating its answer as the truth. So I can well believe that, in an age where you can get a quick answer to anything for free, that the market for books is collapsing. Having said that, I also suspect that many of these self-…
Executive coaches always kind of perplexed me. I’ve tried a few ofer the years and while it was nice to chat with someone smart I found their advice was pretty hit or miss as I read a lot and most of the basic stuff seemed familiar. So I always wondered how they stayed in business and that they seemed at risk for disruption if anyone cared about their market. So I guessed that maybe they’re for people who don’t want…
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> A lot of the accusations of misogyny were well founded, but there were also a lot of people who genuinely just did struggle with why they couldn't meet people, and who wanted to genuinely improve. Agreed > and there are lots of ways of framing the non-manipulative, non-creepy parts of a lot of dating coach advice in ways that nobody would consider misoygynist. Yea, agreed One issue is that pickup artists always fra…
The funny thing is that a while after having spent time reading up on it but not really tried many of those techniques, I ran into a woman in a club who started running "textbook game" on me, and in that context reciprocating and trying out even techniques I'd never feel comfortable with on someone who didn't know what was going on was fun because I could tell she also immediately recognised it. It ended up being a f…
The whole status dance was never my thing.
Or more like playful banter? Those vibes are super fun, even though I am not much of a banter guy.
> The biggest problem with a lot of those techniques is when one side isn't aware - and of course that is often why they were being thought.
Seducing someone on pure technique, while possible, screws with many things. One of them is one’s self worth, as someone like that is now dependent on being a certain way that isn’t them.
> But, yeah, the part you list are all definitely interchangeable.
95% of my whole game is listed there, haha.
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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. W…
Please share “better father” books.
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.
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 thi…
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The funny thing is that a while after having spent time reading up on it but not really tried many of those techniques, I ran into a woman in a club who started running "textbook game" on me, and in that context reciprocating and trying out even techniques I'd never feel comfortable with on someone who didn't know what was going on was fun because I could tell she also immediately recognised it. It ended up being a f…
Textbook? So the whole status dance? The whole status dance was never my thing. Or more like playful banter? Those vibes are super fun, even though I am not much of a banter guy. > The biggest problem with a lot of those techniques is when one side isn't aware - and of course that is often why they were being thought. Seducing someone on pure technique, while possible, screws with many things. One of them is one’s se…
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There are no doubt a lot of good self-help books out there. But there's very likely way more crap ones out there from armchair psychologists
Yup, so one just reads up on psychology, psychiatry and neurophysiology branching into sociology and anthropology, approximately to a graduate level. After which all this self-help looks quite naive. This sure takes 10-15 years, but the result is that you begin to understand wtf is going on around.
People will still own the ideas. The way they are shared is changing yet again. Just like a kindle carried a Book to a user, and LLM with RAG will do as well. Printing books wouldnt make sense anymore except for "Traditionalist who love feeling a crisp page between their fingers"