Disconnect with the stories.
Most self-help focuses on wrong examples. Subjects of self-help content are people with great success, fame, money, etc. Stories fitting the templates of rags-to-riches and a lone hero battling impossible odds. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, Christiano Ronaldo, Kobe Bryant, Will Smith etc, the select few people known to the whole world (which would at any point of history be a few hundred people out of 6 billion). Do you ever look at these people and wonder if they are even real? Are they even people? Are they humans just like us? We feel disconnected from people who have made a name for themselves in the world, the people we admire and aspire to be. This disconnect is a great source of frustration. At its root lies our inability to imagine a path that takes us from here (us) to there (them). It doesn’t help that the stories available in public discourse about exemplary people only provide us with the highlights. The stories start from the point success was already achieved, completely skipping what happened before. A person was born, went to so and so college, fast forward a decade or two is at the top of their field. Sometimes these stories, in the act of self-attestation, provide cherry-picked evidence of exemplar quality when they were young – a story by a parent, teacher or coach which are at best anecdotal. We are only handed out the final few chapters of their biographies. Rather than serving as inspiration, it becomes a source of overwhelm and envy. Pitching ourselves against giants leads to self-loathing, inaction and paralysis.
Too many random reminders of other people’s success too soon may simply terrify us into inactivity and unwittingly prevent us from putting any single plan into practice. We leap from target to target without knowing how to focus. In order to achieve anything on our own, we need to be free for extended stretches from the psychological pressures exerted by news of others’ feats. – Alain de Botton (article)
It would be better if self-help content provided a more average picture. Instead of highlighting a single person who made it, summarise where all those who started similar ended up. Focus on the signal and not on the noise and outliers. Instead of showing a person too far away that it starts seeming unreal, show the intermediate people. There are people at every point in the path between here to there. People striving at every step, failing or succeeding, dropping out or moving ahead. Highlight the good, the bad and the ugly of in-betweens.
Temporary boosts.
A lot of self-help content is packaged as quick-fix solutions, which provides a temporary boost of motivation that might propel you to get out of your bed and clean the room once but soon the high fades and one finds themselves at square one. With time this becomes an addiction of its own. You start craving a higher and higher amount of these boosts to be able to do anything.
Preachy tone.
Do X, Don’t do Y, Just do this, X steps to become Y. Niche self-help books and authors often assume that they have found the elixir to all problems of readers, and now they are telling it to so YOU SHOULD APPRECIATE AND FOLLOW IT. Actually improving yourself is hardly ever a matter of a single issue. It’s a whole process of slowly changing your negative thoughts, fears, habits and behaviour. Infact in my opinion, reading biographies could be better self-help than self-help books themselves. A biography would help you learn about someone’s life and reflect on it without that being force-fed to you. And you are more likely to follow the advice of someone you admire rather than self-help authors themselves (The value of advice is a product of two things, the effectiveness of the words or method suggested × the value of the person in your eyes)
I always like to learn, but I don’t always like to be taught
– Winston Churchill