The Problem with Self-Help and Personal Development Books

Why Is It Good for Us?

Reading self-help and personal development books can become an excellent resource in dire times, especially when no one helps you around. If there is trouble coming to us, we can just open the book and look for the right advice so we could implement and change the situation.

Besides that, reading those books' genres prepares us for the worst thing that could happen at any time it shows up. Becoming more prepared for anything means you improve your overall quality of life in the long run.

For example, if you don't know how to handle anxiety, then you resort to some book on how to combat anxiety. In that book, you’ll not only find what anxiety is but also the reason or causes of why anxiety can happen. After you know what anxiety is and the causes behind it, you read every piece of advice to overcome anxiety.

The process of transferring anxiety knowledge from the books into your brain and applying it to your real-life anxiety problem could be one of the crucial moments that could entirely change your life to be better.

You can live a life where anxiety is no longer an issue in your everyday life.

The same goes for personal development books, like books about building a habit or mindset. The book opens a new perspective inside our minds thus altering our behavior to become much more positive and productive than ever.

In summary, those books are the gem of how we live our lives in a way that no one can understand before. It’s a rare knowledge for equipping ourselves to be a better person in the future with someone else's proven advice and life lessons.

Why Is It Bad for Us?

Now I will point out why reading self-help and personal development books are bad and give a real problem in our life.

I’ll make it clear once again.

Why are so many people reading self-help and personal development books going nowhere?

It’s because when you or other people read the books, you’ll feel reassured by the author's advice, life lessons, or ideas that seem to match your life condition.

As if there were some sort of justification on behalf of your condition and that’s okay since the best-selling author book you read is also going through the same hardships as yours. Or maybe the author had the same thought as yours. Whatever it is, there is some sort of harmony both in your and the author's thinking and experience.

After you find the justification for your life condition, you’ll find more and more and more justifications. It appears you want to find a new perspective, but you merely just find an excuse for staying away from the action.

You’d rather stay inactive but make it look as if you were active by reading the self-help and personal development books.

You’ll get addicted to them for such a long time and eventually, you are going to enter a state of motion. To best describe the word motion I’ll quote it from James Clear in his best-selling book called “Atomic Habits”.

James Clear says:

Action, on the other hand, is the type of behavior that will deliver an outcome. If I outline twenty ideas for articles I want to write, that’s motion. If I actually sit down and write an article, that’s action. If I search for a better diet plan and read a few books on the topic, that’s motion. If I actually eat a healthy meal, that’s action.

He furthermore states that:

Motion makes you feel like you’re getting things done. But really, you’re just preparing to get something done. When preparation becomes a form of procrastination, you need to change something.

Motion is beneficial but it is never going to take you to the results you want to achieve.

Final Thoughts

After knowing the problem with self-help and personal development books, I hope we all set strict and clear rules for preventing such tragedies from happening to us. I believe everyone who is going to read this article understands really well that inaction is a slow destruction of our mind and body.

Make a rule where you will get the action going after reading one or several books you have read. With this, you can also gain both the knowledge and experience, and more importantly, it can achieve the goals you always want to achieve.

The books you read must serve a definite purpose.