I think in many cases it might be hard but in an unfair way. I think some people are just wired differently. It is easy for them to stay focused and disciplined for longer, so they never worry about it or try to seek help and just do the work. People who do seek help often have some weaknesses that they cannot seem to overcome by themselves. They are vulnerable and they can be exploited by snake-oil salesmen. Some get stuck that way in a perpetuating, self indulging loop.

However there are people who have gotten help and made real progress. Think of some of the hardest things one can do: dealing with addiction, overcoming crippling fear, radically changing bad habits etc.

There's people who were weak and gotten strong. Some of them read self help books, some found social support. That's were the focus should be, not on the people who always walked the happy path and just "worked hard". Overcoming hopeless situations, stigma, bias, ego. That's actually hard.

I was a smoker for many years... everyone in the family smoked - father, mother, and brother. I was a dumb kid in an industrial town in Iowa - constant opportunity and social pull to consume nicotine.

After awhile I didn't want to be a smoker anymore and found a self help book - "Allen Carr's Easy Way To Stop Smoking." Friends of mine suggested it, and I found a PDF and read it during a dead afternoon at work.

Instead of focusing on the "hard" trope of quitting smoking it presented it as easy - hence the title. It framed the habit for exactly what it was, a drug addiction, but it never talked harshly to you about how you became a nicotine addict or the quitting process. It focused on telling you exactly what to expect if you decide to quit, and then gave you a positive framework to help overcome the effects of quitting. The overall message was always "think of how much you're going to gain by quitting... health, money, etc."

It worked, I am no longer a nicotine addict. I don't think I would have had the capability to quit without some mental reframing which that book 100% helped me accomplish.

> That's were the focus should be, not on the people who always walked the happy path and just "worked hard". Overcoming hopeless situations, stigma, bias, ego. That's actually hard.

Agree.

There's always the "work hard" narrative and I find it's often coupled with a discrediting attitude like OP's comment. The effect of that attitude demotivates more than it helps. As cheesy as it was I found the tools to fix my nicotine addiction in a self-help book ha

That was the point I was getting at - the book presented you information in a way that helped, but you still did the hard work of actually implementing it.

Almost all diets work if you stick to them, and almost nobody does. People want behavioral changes to be easy but they're not - they require hard work.

Perhaps more diet books would be successful if they treated it as a food addiction instead of a "eat healthy to look sexy".

There probably is no getting to you, but “the book presented you information in a way that helped” is the whole point of a self-help book, and when someone arrives at a better understanding of themselves or a project via presented information, it does get easier for them.

Thank the gods for Allen Carr. He helped me too.

I was a smoker for many years. One day, I decided to stop. I did not read books or got any other support. I did not want to die of lung cancer (crossing fingers!).

I now occasionally a smoke a cigarette (say, once every month or two), something that, according to the vast majority of many ex-smokers, appears to be almost impossible to do.

>"There's people who were weak and gotten strong. Some of them read self help books, some found social support. That's were the focus should be, not on the people who always walked the happy path and just "worked hard". Overcoming hopeless situations, stigma, bias, ego. That's actually hard."

Absolutely. I've also personally benefitted from some self-help books, though I've read many other self-help books that seemed to be useful at the time, but were ultimately forgettable and likely a distraction from issues I would have been better off directly taking of.

A good heuristic I've found is to prefer self-help books written by academics over influencers (anyone with a marketing background or associated with the word "guru"). Good books included those written by BJ Fogg (professor at Stanford) on habits, David Burns on useful versus self-defeating beliefs (psychiatrist and professor also affiliated with Stanford), and to a less extent Cal Newport (computer science professor at Georgetown).

As a side note, Cal Newport's advice was generally good, but — though I may be misremembering — his advice appeared to mostly be useful for people who already have a very clear goal and strong motivation about what to do, and didn't really struggle with self-defeating beliefs, close relationships that were unhealthy in life, or people who had fallen behind in mathematics skill development.

I'm skeptical about most people being wired differently. Almost anyone can greatly increase their ability to stay focused and disciplined. Those are learned skills and mainly a matter of building good habits. But sometimes people need to fail hard first due to lack of focus and discipline in order to gain the motivation necessary to improve.

https://davidgoggins.com/book/

I sincerely hope ”almost anyone” doesn’t include the vast number of people with a mental disability that severely affects executive function.

About 2.8% of the US population has a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. (In a wider study including other countries, the average is 2.4%) I have no reason to doubt this because I have far too many people I knew before my diagnosis who have since told me they have an extended family member who are bipolar. And not the “oh they have a diagnosis” kind, but people who destroy their own lives and those of the people around them. I was shocked how common it is.

And this is just bipolar. There are many other mental and physical problems that affect the ability to have discipline if they just worked on it.

Edit: I should state I definitely believe focus and attention is a skill, but you can’t effectively use a skill when your tools are broken. Good luck racing a car that’s disassembled in the garage.

There are people who are "wired differently" but as with many things, there's majority who insist they are and it's the source of their failings don't actually have a major issue.

It's a similar thing with dieting, the number of people who have gone to the trouble of actually counting every calorie they eat, restricting themselves to a certain amount to lose weight, and not lost weight is pretty small. But the number who tell themselves that they've done it is much higher.

Several times in my life I have seen what I thought were crises of willpower turn on silly contingent circumstances.

* Huge procrastination problem in college melted away as soon as I started working 9-5 in an office.

* Couldn't run 5 minutes, until I incidentally started wearing a smart-watch, tried running again, and noticed the heart rate monitor telling me to slow down.

* Doom-scrolling trances easily broken by shutting down the computer or putting the phone out of arm's reach.

I don't think any particular advice in the self-help genre is likely to be true, but these "one weird trick" style solutions do keep on working for me.

Sometimes there really is a "one weird trick" that can help people. I used to get stuck on problems and it would cripple my productivity. A programmer with two decades more experience than me noticed what I was doing and gave me the best advice of my career.

If you are interested in the solution, you can signup for my . . .

Seriously though the answer was to just do something else. Don't sit around thinking about the problem; just do something else and the problem will be easier to solve the next time you try to solve it.

That's the problem - the self help books often have good actionable advice just like the diet books do; but it can be summed up in a few paragraphs. Most of the book is often trying to convince someone it's worth doing, or providing ways to get around procrastination, etc that might prevent it.

But as you've shown, often a good mentor can do just as well, or better.

Many people reading self help books would prefer a good mentor. Books are easier to find.

>> Sometimes there really is a "one weird trick" that can help people. I used to get stuck on problems and it would cripple my productivity. A programmer with two decades more experience than me noticed what I was doing and gave me the best advice of my career.

If you could make that part about 5 minutes longer you'll have a future in YouTube commercials

The wait until tomorrow advice works well when learning a musical instrument too (at least in the beginning). I still really can't play my guitar, but when I'm trying to learn something new, I work on the hard part until I stop making progress then take a break. Often, the next day I can get a little further.

Even if there is more than one trick, all you can really apply at once is one. So best to look for a trick that seems like it should work and make it a habit. If that still isn't enough, then look for another. Sometimes you need to break a bad habit that results from this, but often it is many good habits combined that you need.