Self-help books. You either like them or dislike them. While I have a large collection of them, I also know some people who won’t touch them. The self-help variety has been with us for centuries, from The Holy Bible, The Bhagavad-Gita, Buddha’s The Dhammapada, Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance, to modern-day entries like Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life, and Martin Seligman’s Learned Optimism.
Enter Tom Butler-Bowdon and his 50 Self-Help Classics, a compilation of 50 inspirational books from yesteryears’ sages to present-day gurus. It underscores the popularity of the self-help industry, which, as the author reveals, is getting bigger and bigger. Butler-Bowdon claims that the 50 classics he’s selected have collectively sold over 150 million copies (at the time of his writing), and the total number for the entire genre has reached more than half a billion copies and growing. Without a doubt, the self-help business is good business.
You can get astonished moving around the self-help section in bookstores. They have become so huge, and that’s no surprise to followers who believe that self-help guides simply recognize their right to dream and to make the dream a reality, to be empowered and enriched and to bring the value of empowerment and enrichment to help others.
In the foreword of 50 Self-Help Classics, Butler-Bowdon remarks, “A self-help book can be your best friend and champion, expressing a faith in your essential greatness and beauty that is sometimes hard to get from another person. Because of its emphasis on following your star and believing that your thoughts can remake your world, a better name for self-help writing might be the `literature of possibility.’”
The book is divided into six themes, namely “The Power of Thought” — changing your thoughts, changing your life; “Following Your Dream” — goal setting and generating achievements; “Secrets of Happiness” — doing what you love, doing what works; “The Bigger Picture” — keeping what you do in perspective; “Soul and Mystery” — appreciating your personal and professional depth; and “Making a Difference” — transforming yourself, transforming the world. Generally, all the books included in the anthology are about the never-ending search for happiness and other helpful topics — developing life goals, being positive, conquering fears and not worrying about unimportant matters.
This writer had already read the full version of about half the 50 books on the list. The classic works presented in bite-sizes provide me and many other self-help evangelists a convenient and helpful review of principles that continue to resonate today in homes and workplaces. And believing that communication is repetition, and repetition is critical to learning, remembering, and reliving, Butler-Bowdon’s work helps in that process. Here are my top 10 picks from Butler-Bowdon’s 50:
1. The truly successful will always have achieved emotional self-mastery. Emotional life is a field that can be handled with greater or lesser skill, and requires a unique set of competencies. This, essentially, is the premise of Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter Than IQ. And how adept you are at those capabilities is crucial to understanding why one person thrives in life while another, of equal intellect, dead-ends. Emotional intelligence (EQ) can be summed up in three points: you can improve your life immeasurably by applying intelligence to your emotions; emotions are habits, and like any habit can undermine your best intentions; by unlearning some emotions and developing others, you gain control of your life.
2. Faith is the one power against which fear cannot stand. You can achieve anything if you have faith in yourself. Day by day, as you fill your mind with faith, there will ultimately be no room left for fear. This is the one great idea that Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking advocates, and should not be forgotten. Master faith and you will automatically master fear. For Peale there is no greater source of personal power or guidance than the Bible, that’s why biblical quotes based on the timeless wisdom the holy book provides are mainstays of his work. Peale’s is more than a hodgepodge of Christian and capitalist morals. Consistent with most self-help classics, it says that the highest morality is the fulfillment of potential, and to give up is to deny yourself the spiritual and material rewards that are rightfully yours.
3. Try hard to see the world as another sees it. Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People helps you truly hear and appreciate what other people have to say. The book has achieved phenomenal success and sold over 15 million copies in all the world’s main languages. Today, it is still the biggest overall seller in the self-improvement field, and is predicted to be read by more people in decades to come because it essentially talks about people, a subject you may assume to know a lot about but invariably don’t. It puts firmly into the public consciousness the facts that human relations are more understandable than what you think, and that people’s skills can be systematically learned. It also carries the proposition that you can’t really influence people until you truly like and respect them.
4. Real effectiveness comes from clarity of principles, values and vision. This is the theme of Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which posits that change is only real if it has become habitual. And that customary change can happen if you, without fail, live out the seven habits — be proactive, begin with the end in mind, put first things first, think win-win, seek to understand, then to be understood, bring synergy and sharpen the saw. The book stresses that you can’t live with change if there’s not a changeless core inside you. The key to your ability to change is an enduring sense of who you are and what you value most as a person.
5. Eighty percent of effects come from only 20 percent of efforts. If you are able to identify what you’re good at, do more of it, and success will come easily. That in a nutshell is Richard Koch’s The 80/20 Principle: The Secret of Achieving More with Less. Most sales will come from only 20 percent of the product line. And applied to personal life, 80 percent of happiness comes from less than 20 percent of your time. Conventional wisdom tells you not to put all your eggs in one basket; the 80/20 wisdom advices you to choose your basket carefully, load all your eggs into it, and then watch it like a hawk.
6. You are treating others as individuals if you take into account the behavior differences of the sexes. This encapsulates the concept of John Gray’s Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, a book that stands out among thousands of titles on relationships. What are the book’s main points? A woman aims to improve a man, but a man only wants acceptance. Her unsolicited advice is never welcomed, being interpreted as negative criticism. Women are like waves rising to peaks, falling into troughs, then back up again. Men must know that the trough time is when women need men most. Men alternate between the need for intimacy and the need for distance. Men’s going away into their “cave” is not a conscious decision but is instinctive. Arguments quickly descend into hurt feelings about the way a point is being made rather than its content. Men will argue because they do not feel trusted, admired or encouraged and are not spoken to with a tone of trust and acceptance. Women will argue because they are not listened to or put high on a man’s list of priorities.
7. Getting caught up in trivia or pettiness, disloyalty, ill will and selfishness is counterproductive. The second-century work of Marcus Aurelius called Meditations warns about it, as it pushes you to appreciate your life within a larger context, and encourages you to begin each day telling yourself that you will encounter interference, ingratitude, and insolence due to the ignorance of whoever offends you. Imperfection is the theme of Meditations. It accepts that you will never know exactly why things happen, why people act the way they do, and what larger meanings events in people’s lives bring.
8. Put your little struggles into perspective. By doing this you can gain more enjoyment of other people and life in general. Richard Carlson’s Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff…and It’s All Small Stuff questions why people spend so much of their energy sweating about the little things, and completely losing touch with the magic and beauty of life. Carlson comments, “When you commit to working towards this goal you will find that you have a far more energy to be kinder and gentler.” He suggests a list of 100 interesting strategies that include, among others, to be an early riser, to let go of the idea that gentle, relaxed people can’t be super-achievers, to learn to live in the present moment, to allow yourself to be bored, to imagine yourself at your own funeral and ask if you did the things you loved when you were still alive, and to redefine what a meaningful accomplishment really is.
9. Once you admit that “life is difficult,” the fact is not of great consequence. And once you accept responsibility you can make better choices. M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled is not your usual self-help book. It contains none of the alluring promises of boundless joy and happiness that characterize personal development writing, but was still widely accepted and declared an international bestseller. Self-control is the essence of Peck’s brand of self-help. “Without discipline you can solve nothing. With only some discipline you can only some problems. With total discipline you can solve all problems,” he avers. The book attempts to bridge the gap between the scientific and the spiritual worldviews in building character and discovering the human soul.
10, Full mental health is the fulfillment of your potential. It is not the absence of neurosis, brought about by depression, anxiety or hypochondria. Abraham Maslow’s Motivation and Personality expounds on the idea more deeply, using the popular concept in psychology known as Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs.” It organizes human need into three broad levels: the physiological — air, food and water; the psychological — safety, love, self-esteem; and finally, self-actualization. Maslow defines needs as a continuum in which the satisfaction of the lower needs come before a higher mental and moral development. His premise declares that you have to meet the basic bodily requirements and reach a state where you feel you are loved, respected, and enjoy a sense of belonging, before you seek self-actualization — a state where the full use and exploration of talents, capacities, potentialities and the like is attained. You are successful as a person if you are self-actualized. You are by no means perfect, but you are seemingly without major flaws.
William James pronounces, “The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.” Self-help books can help alter attitudes and alter life. All you need is to have an affinity with and affection for them. But then again, the choice is yours — love them or leave them.
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