So Help Me

We can’t get enough of its sage wisdom, which explains why the self-help industry is booming. But is what it has to say all that sage, asks Josh Sims.

- Josh Sims

The Beatles—those are the lyrics to ‘Help!’—had every material advantage in life, but still, as the Fab Four matured, they found themselves leaning in—to borrow the title of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s book—to Eastern philosophies, specifically the teachings of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. To be sure, if he had written a book, it would have been a huge bestseller.

Plenty have done just that. Helping oneself—to improve one’s life in whatever way one deems fitting—might well be an entirely logical thing to do. It’s a positive urge. But the more dubious, potentially detrimental and somehow embarrassing genre of assistance known as self-help is something else—a global industry of advice too often given by the inexpert to the insecure. And yet, according to Harvard Business Review, the self-help industry—not just the books, but CDs, audiobooks, conferences, coaching, webinars, retreats and so on—is, within the next two years, predicted to be valued at a staggering USD13.2 billion. We must really need help.

It’s been noted that, almost by definition, the self-help advice can’t work or we wouldn’t have to keep going back for more of it. Much self-help advice is, furthermore, from people who are already privileged. It doesn’t speak to the real world, either in addressing most readers’ place in life— the tired and poor have neither the time, the money nor the support to restructure their life in order to, say, drastically cut their working hours—or their ability; despite the claims in Timothy Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek that anyone can learn to read 300 percent faster, see if you can get to the end of this article in a minute and take it all in.