Do you keep buying self-help books?
Are these books sitting on your shelf, waiting for your eager fingers to leave through them, yearning to impart wisdom and inspiration through you… if only you will start reading any of them all the way through?
Are you starting to feel guilty because you haven’t read most of these books, but you can’t stop yourself from adding yet another book into your Amazon shopping cart?
Welcome to the club.
The first rule of “I keep buying self-help books but never finish most of them” club is correctly identifying the value you are buying.
FIGURE 1. Jane’s Helpful Graphic of Correct Identification of Actual Value Rendered in Exchange for Monetary Investment of a Self-Help Book.
As you can see, you are not buying a “book” when you buy a self-help book.
You are buying a feeling.
- Feeling of hope (“Change is possible”)
- Feeling of anticipation (“I’m ready for change”)
- Feeling of excitement (“I’m going to change!”)
- Feeling of comfort (“I’m not the only one who feels like I need a change”)
I see nothing wrong in investing in feelings like these. These feelings can be very motivating. Correctly identifying these feelings will extend the value of the self-help book, as you take each off the shelf and revisit those specific feelings you had experienced when you first purchased the book, and then when the books actually arrived (since you mentioned Amazon, I assume those feelings come delivered via snail mail.) Celebrate these motivating feelings!
You are buying a (calibrated) perspective.
Since each book is written from a particular experience, you are buying a snapshot moment of the author’s perspective. The author’s perspective is valid for the author, and may be calibrated to others who may have similar experiences or share similar feelings about a journey.
I see this as buying a memorialized cache of a journey. There may be some legs of the journey that don’t apply to me, so I don’t feel motivated to read through the whole book. I read what resonates.
I also like to use certain books to calibrate my growth. There are books I’ve bought that, when I first read them, I was brought to tears. After a while (sometimes after some years), I literally cannot touch these books again, I feel like I’ve grown beyond the messages on those books and those books begin to represent to me a graveyard of old beliefs. I pay these books due respect but I have no desire to read them again.
You are buying applicable advice / tip(s).
Some self-help books like to give lists or action plans. Sometimes these are useful for people who need structure to move forward, or for people who like lists and action plans.
I see this as more cost-effective than working with a coach. You get what you pay for, but it may be a good way to see whether you may benefit from working with a mentor or a coach (may I even suggest – a therapist!) to move forward.
But there’s a second rule, and it’s not a clever “see rule #1″.
The second rule of “I keep buying self-help books but never finish most of them” club is to DO the self HELP part.
Remember Figure 1? It has an arrow.
Figure 2. Jane’s Helpful Graphic of The Whole Point of Buying All Those Self-Help Books No Matter How Little Or Much You Read Those Books.
“Now where have I seen that purple bubble before…?”
Some of you may wonder. You saw it here.
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