Is the Self-Help Industry a Scam?

By Paul Piotrowski on Apr 29, 2006 in Books and Book Reviews

I’d like to offer my personal opinion on a topic that I feel pretty strongly about. A few blogs have written about this topic, following an article recently posted in the Scientific American written by Michael Shermer titled “Self Help and Actualization Movement (SHAM)” which painted self-help as a scam industry.

You can have a read through the article yourself, but my favorite quote is “Do these programs work? No one knows. According to Salerno, no scientific evidence indicates that any of the countless SHAM techniques–from fire walking to 12-stepping–works better than doing something else or even doing nothing.”Ok, first of all, of course there is no scientific evidence to prove that self-help techniques work. There is no scientific evidence that they don’t work either. 99.999999% of the things we do in life are based on “truths” and assumptions that have not yet been “proven” by science. It doesn’t mean they don’t work.

If I recommended a really good movie I saw the other day, would you turn around and say “There is no scientific evidence to prove that I will enjoy the movie you enjoyed yesterday, so I am not going to spend $$ to go see it.” ??? No, if you trusted my judgement and I liked the movie, and we both like similar movies you’d probably trust my judgement and at least take the information into account when deciding what movie to see.

You can’t go through life “dis-proving” things simply by saying “There is no scientific evidence to prove it true.” I mean you can, but I don’t think it’s a very useful way of thinking and I think people will probably find you annoying. Of course I can’t be sure, because there is no scientific evidence to prove that.

Personally, I don’t know if self-help books and seminars help everyone. All I know is that they’ve helped me. I also know that quite often nowadays people come to me for advice on different topics since I’ve read all these books and they want to know what I would recommend doing, and I just give them advice based on what I’ve learned over the last 12 years mostly from reading books and self-learning in the real world applying the things I’ve learned. Last week alone I had two people thank me for the advice I gave them as it had a big impact on their lives, so it’s apparently working for them as well.

Have I read self-help books that didn’t really do much for me? Yes. There has been a few, but I’ve read hundreds of books so it’s hard not to come across one that just doesn’t resonate with you.

Was I able to drastically change my entire life after reading just one book? Not exactly. There have been a few books which impacted me in a big way and really opened up my eyes to a new way of thinking, but the majority of the books I read produce incremental improvements in my thinking, but that’s OK. That is ALL I am looking for. It’s like playing sports. A coach isn’t going to change your jump-shot percentage from 2% to 89% in one session. He can take a look at your jump-shot and give you some pointers which might increase your jump-shop percentage from 75% to 77%, and that might be ALL you need to win the game!

Let’s say that my way of thinking is only 10% different from “normal” people as a result of studying self-help books. You might think 10% is not that big of a difference. Think of it this way. Lets say that we both have $5,000 today. You go to the bank and get a savings account and they pay you 3% per year on your money. I go to a financial investing seminar that costs me $600 and I invest into a totally different set of investments that get me 13% per year on my $5,000.

You might say, big deal, at the end of the year you have $5,015 and I have $5,050 ($5,650 - $600 for seminar). That’s only a 35 buck difference after a year and it only took you 5 minutes to get a savings account but I had to “waste” a weekend at a seminar learning about investing.

Short term, very little difference. Long term, however, if you keep your money in your investment for 45 years and then go to withdraw your “savings” the day after your retirement party, you’ll have a whopping $18,907.98 saved up.

How much will I have in my investment that averaged 13%? I’ll have approximately $1,223,000.00. That 10% makes a big difference, trust me.

Now I know this is just an example, but in order to really understand the power of self-help books and courses you need to understand that small things done differently over a long period of time make a HUGE difference.

If I have read 300 books and each one only improved my thinking ever so slightly by only 1%, then I’ve already improved myself by 300% and that’s not taking into account the compounding effect. Do you need to read 300 books? No. That’s just what I did, because I like reading them. Start by just reading one, even a 1% difference can make a big difference long term.

One of the other things the article mentions is that the self-help industry doesn’t work as evident by the fact that most people who purchase self-help books buy multiple books. The logic being that if a self-help book worked in the first place, then there would be no need to buy any more books. That’s pretty lame logic if you ask me. You can just as easily argue, if the first book DIDN’T work, then people wouldn’t buy a second book, would they?

I buy multiple books on a specific topic not because the first book didn’t work, but because I want to get multiple points of view on a topic, I want to master that topic and that might require the views of several experts. It’s like getting a second opinion from a doctor. Why wouldn’t you do this?

Also, each author is an expert in his particular field. There is no one author (that I have found yet, anyway) that knows everything about everything. I wouldn’t take nutrition advice from an author who specializes in time management. That’s why there are multiple self-help books - because LIFE improvement is a HUGE topic which is pretty much impossible to cover in one single book.

Anyway, my personal opinion of the self-help industry is that it is a fountain of wisdom available for anyone who’s not too lazy to read books. I’ve read many books and they worked for me. I have also never met anyone who has read dozens of self-help books and then complained “these don’t work at all”. I have met DOZEN’S of people who are skeptical of self-help books, yet they have not read a single one.

Two other bloggers who have written on this topic are Steve Pavlina and Matt Inglot.

-Paul