On Reading self-help books

When I first started working, an older and wiser co-worker told me: “There are two ways to do things: one is the way they tell you how to do it, written or otherwise and then there is the way that things get done right.”

I have kept that in my mind and it has more of less rings true. There have been circumstances, miracles of all miracles, where the two ways coincide and we get a cosmic convergence of disparate minds, but that’s not often.

What brings this up is that I have been reading a number of books written to show the masses how to be creative, how does innovation occur, how to be gritty and resilient, how to be happy, how change our mindset, how to cope with the technology invading our world, and all of the other things that are complicating/enabling our lives. These books are generally written by journalists or economists, or university researchers. They are categorized as either leadership books, psychology books, business books, or self-help books.

They all share a structure though. The book and indeed, each chapter may start with a pithy quote which may or may not be pertinent to the chapter, but it is there. The quotes are usually coming from someone famous who has the gravitas to give purpose to the chapter with their really deep thoughts.

The book starts with a declaration that is supposed to be evocative if not mind expanding. The author would mark his territory; define his problem, the parameters, and the constraints. He would also throw in a bunch of stories which would seemingly give proof to his claims. The stories would be humorous but meaningful at the same time. Some authors would go for the anecdotal approach: great stories without much data. Some would go deep into their research and give you a lot of data, and if they are good scientists and researchers, they would also provide caveats and forewarnings about assumptions.

Support and argumentation would proceed in this way through a number of chapters laying down a recipe or formula: point, anecdote and/or data, another point, more anecdote and/or data, and so on. In the end there would be a summary and a unification of all the deep thoughts all boiled down into an easy to follow, no thinking required on the part of the reader. The promise is that whichever problem the book is supposed to resolve is so simple, so uncomplicated that a simple sequence of if-then scenarios could resolve all situations that may come. Just like the premise I started with: there is a documented solution.

In real life, we figure out what to do and how to do it. Sometimes we need to do this because the known wisdom is insufficient and confusing. Sometimes it is inadequate, but sometimes it is because human ingenuity just won’t take the status quo for granted and sometimes people come up with much better solutions by going away from the status quo.

For me that is the road less traveled, injection of human curiosity and critical thinking and solving things by the seat of the pants, an experiential approach is usually the most effective.

Indeed there is something to be said for having a reference book ready to list the best practices, but I would argue that most of these books are by and large not a list of best practices. They are a list of what people believe to be best practices and most are just people throwing stuff out. Even those who have a basis with data and documented successes, the authors don’t go into far enough depth in their explanation of their thinking to warn of the potholes along the way. Some of these omissions come from the fact that you don’t know what you don’t know and you can’t anticipate everything. Yet some omissions are more insidious: they don’t want their claims weakened or invalidated AND those careful caveats don’t sell books.

I still read those books, I am not cynical enough to ignore the possibilities available that comes from unorthodox thinking. But I do it with a very jaundiced eye. I bring to the task of reading these books with the eyes of a technical reviewer for engineering papers.