Five Reasons Self Help Books Fail Us

Chances are good that if you are reading this post, you have purchased a self help book. I write that not knowing who you are, not knowing the type of people that visit this blog, but simply understanding that self help is big business.

In fact, the self-help book industry creates revenue in excess of twelve billion dollars every year. There are currently over half a million books on Amazon that we can purchase to try to change something about ourselves. Enough self improvement books are sold that they could not be accounted for even if every adult American bought one such book every three months. You would think that by now we would have all thought and grown rich, become masters at winning friends and influencing people, and learned how to work only four hours per week.

So on I suspect, dear reader, that you have bought a self help book in the past, and I’d like to share one other suspicion: You have felt let down by a self-help book in the past as well. How do I know? Because most of us have.

Let’s take a look at five reasons why self help may not result in the promises made on the cover.

1. Some Self Help Books are Written by Charlatans

If you were to browse through the half million self help books on amazon.com right now, you would come across some very well-written guides, and for every one of them you would discover about one hundred wads of cannon fodder. Among them you would find the works of get-rich-quick schemers selling nothing more than 99¢ poorly-written thousand-word documents that were pieced together haphazardly from various blog posts. They come complete with covers that look like they were scribbled on MSPaint, poor grammar, and misspelled words. It’s easy to tell which books are in this category: They have a couple of good Amazon reviews at first (written by friends) but then many from disappointed people. The answers to our problems are seldom sold by people who are merely preying on our most urgent desperations.

Unfortunately, there are other worthless books that are not as easy to identify. There are some authors who are excellent cheerleaders and motivational speakers, but they’re not very good at step-by-step instructions on how to improve yourself. They share a philosophy with Brad Goodman, a character on The Simpsons, who said about his self help product,

“You know, my course can help you with every personality disorder in the ‘Feel Bad Rainbow’. Let’s look at the Rainbow. What’s in there? Depression, Insomnia, Motor-mouth, Darting Eyes, Indecisiveness, Decisiveness, Bossiness, Uncontrollable Falling Down, Geriatric Profanity Disorder or GPD, and Chronic Nagging.”

There is a time and place for motivational reading, but pure optimism is not always the solution to our problems.

Finally in the category of self help books written by charlatans are those of New Age whackos; people who tell us that we can benefit from various types of rocks, odd geometric shapes, tapping into the minds of mysterious spirit guides, and the like have nothing to offer the serious student of self-improvement.

2. Reading Self Help Books is Satisfying

Oddly enough, sometimes the buzz we get from simply reading a self help book makes us feel successful, we stop short of actually putting the concepts we’ve read about to use. Once the serotonin and endorphins start circulating in our blood, we feel that we have done enough and we no longer see the need to enact any real change.

Then there are those of us who are more addicted to hacking life than to living it. We find ourselves reading about the latest productivity tool until we realize we’ve been unproductive for the last 3 hours.

3. We are Lazy and Not Committed

Often we buy a self help book expecting it to be the magic pill that cures our problem. I hate to have to point out something you already know, but it doesn’t work that way. Self help implies change, and change takes a lot of work. Not only do we have to learn what to do to improve ourselves, but we also have to apply what we learn. Change will require the eradication of bad habits and th introduction of good ones. None of the necessary steps is easy, and we often find ourselves slipping into our comfortable fantasies, such as what we can find on the television or in a good novel, rather than facing our own reality.

4. We are Afraid to Change

Paradoxically, no matter how much we want to experience change in our lives, we often undermine our hopes by telling ourselves that the status quo feels safe. In order to bring about change in ourselves, we first have to admit that we are not happy with some deeply ingrained portion of ourselves. It’s not enough not to be displeased with the outcome; we have to be disgusted with some portion of who we are. We have to overcome denial. Facing the truth about ourselves is an enormous and fatiguing task, and it often just feels safer to accept ourselves the way we are.

5. We Leave God Out of the Equation

Ultimately, change has to come from God. The only way we can ever have the motivation to change is if we value ourselves enough to make the effort worthwhile. Because true self worth only comes from God, it would be a fool’s errand to believe that we could improve ourselves without consulting the One who said, Without Me you can do nothing.” John 15:5. How are we to overcome our own self-imposed obstacles without the One Who has promised that He has overcome the world? John 16:33?

In Summary

In Greek mythology there is a story about Sisyphus, King of Ephyra, who was punished for a lifetime habit of lying by being condemned to roll a rock up a hill, then watch it roll back down over and over again, for all of eternity. The task of re-writing a portion of our own personalities without addressing the obstacles mentioned above would be every bit as frustrating to us as Sisyphus’ task would have been to him.

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