Actually good self-help books and/or books that changed your way of thinking

i am inherently cynical about books that are marketed as self-help books but also i could use some help sometimes. what are some books that changed how you think about things in a positive way? they can be "self-help books" or not

e.g. i really got a lot out of "how to do nothing" by jenny odell which is loosely self-helpy but isn't really marketed or written like a standard self-help book

"The As If Principle" by Richard Wiseman is a favorite of mine...though I wish I was better at implementing its advice!

Well of course there's the wonderful alleged "last self-help book": Lost in the Cosmos by Walker Percy. Often hilarious and deep but not, strictly speaking, helpful in a step-by-step sense.

How to Be Useful is not bad if you have to work and want to not hate it. (NB: if you have to work AND you actively want to hate work, go ahead, no one's stopping you.)

If you have intrusive thoughts and you are constantly consumed with dread and despair, consider White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts.

But no number of wild beasts will ever make me pick up a "seven habits" type thingy; fuck no.

what makes you not a buddhist

Alan Watts Art of Contemplation was pretty bitchin

There are a few books I don't remember the name of, and that's OK because they're probably really bad, but they changed my way of thinking of a few things, and frankly nobody needs to suffer through an entire bad book for these few points that I can just relay to you here right now!

One book was about this kind of hogwashy anthropologist/marketing guru that boiled down entire cultures into one word or phrases so advertisers could figure out what they're doing wrong in a foreign market. What stuck with me was he had reduced America's relationship with food to one word: fuel. Super reductive, but not wrong!

Another was this totally self-serving book about how nepotism isn't that bad by a guy whose parents probably worked in publishing or something. But it raised an obvious but neglected point that if you know someone well, you'll probably have a pretty good idea if they're a good fit for something or not, versus, say a totally broken interview process which is in place almost everywhere.

I guess that's an opposite of a self-help book -- you should really get loads of help from friends and family, as much as you can grab and unfairly lord over people who don't have your connections! Maybe the real self-help is the friends who hooked you up along the way.

Irvin Yalom, Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death. This was recommended to me by a good friend when I was going through a period of acute death anxiety. It was extraordinarily helpful.

disappointed this thread didn’t take off!

someone recently recommended “what color is your parachute to me”—looks interesting

In grad school I took a year long seminar on Plato’s “Phaedrus” and one of the other students was from the Religious Studies department and doing his dissertation on self-help. Wish I could remember his name to track down his dissertation.

Sorry…”to me” not part of the title, of course!

A few weeks ago I read Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi's Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience and found the overall schematic made a great deal of sense: having goals, focusing attention, and being unselfconscious, avoiding psychic entropy. Still, it seems easier said than done. He mentions at one point that people with "attentional disorders" will have greater difficulty achieving flow, but then falls back on saying everyone could make more effort to focus their attention. I do think it's useful to believe oneself able to improve one's state of mind — that's what self-help is for, yes? I still want to believe.

I liked Brad Warner’s books on Zen.

Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death

Anyone who can accurately pronounce Csikszentmihalyi is already 34% of the way to enlightement imo

re: first post, Jenny Odell has a new book out about time, which will probably end up being a better time management book than most time management books if for no other reason than it isn't really a time management book.

I probably don't have time to read it, though.

someone recently recommended “what color is your parachute”—looks interesting

The one part of this book that stuck with me is the section on job interviews... very useful information on what questions you should have answers for, and what you need to ask in return.

i started reading the new jenny odell "saving time" but i had to ditch it. it's not about "time management," it's more about how time became a tool of tyranny and (eventually) how it prevents us from dealing with longer-term problems like climate change. it had some interesting stuff in it but it felt a lot more academic than "how to do nothing" and for someone with lots of time anxiety issues it was more stressful than helpful

https://books.google.com/books/about/My_Name_is_Chellis_I_m_in_Recovery_from.html?id=T6kNAAAACAAJ

Listened to this audiobook on a trip a few years ago - https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780865478015/theantidote

Interesting read/listen if you’re pre-disposed to hostility toward self-help.