Stop Buying Self-Help Books

They were dead long before AI

I moved my publication back to Substack. If you want to hear about why, I wrote my reasons at the end. Now, onto the article…

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A couple of months ago, a YouTuber named Solomon Nelson posted a long and thorough takedown of Mike Israetel’s new book, The Aesthetic Revolution. If you don’t know Dr. Mike, he’s a fitness YouTuber who used his PhD as a marketing angle. He has a big platform but has become something of an online punching bag of late. He has several books (traditionally published), but his most recent one got hammered by one-star reviews and a wave of online hate—far exceeding the chiding he normally gets online.

Why? Well, Solomon Nelson is both an academic and a body builder (natural), and he’s made something of a project of Mike. First, Solomon cast his academic eye on Mike’s doctoral dissertation and rightly branded it poorly done dreck. And then, upon the release of The Aesthetic Revolution, Nelson went nearly line by line and made it clear to all of us that the majority of this book was written by AI.

The thing is… I don’t care that Mike used AI. And Mike himself admitted in advance that he used it. What I do care about is that, by every account I’ve read, the ideas in The Aesthetic Revolution are the same ideas he’s been putting out for years, in roughly the same order, with the jokes taken out. In watching Solomon’s video, the even more damnable aspect of Mike’s book is that there’s nothing in it I couldn’t have pulled out of ChatGPT my damn self. So what is the book for?

Lest I be thought to be picking on poor Mike, you can look at any of the self-help getting pumped out these days. (I’m not so bold as to include all nonfiction in this assessment). Is any of it helpful in a way that can’t be gleaned from a multitude of 8-year-old YouTube videos with a guy standing in front of a whiteboard? Or spending the day prompting an LLM?

Honestly, no.

Unlike Solomon Nelson, I’m not going to blame the current uselessness of self-help nonfiction on AI. Because it’s been useless, embarrassingly so, for a long time.

“This could have been an email,” but for books

A few years ago, I got served an ad for Blinkist. If you’ve managed to avoid it, Blinkist is the app that boils nonfiction books down to fifteen-minute summaries so you can “read” twelve books on your commute and feel like a genius about it. Fine. Whatever. People have been buying CliffsNotes since the 1950s. What caught my attention was the book they’d picked to sell me on: Traction by Gino Wickman.

I already owned Traction. I’d listened to it twice on audiobook. And I sat there baffled, because Traction is already about as lean as a business book gets. Wickman wrote it for people who run companies and don’t have time for a parable about a fictional widget factory that learns a valuable lesson. There’s no fluff in it to remove. On top of that, the whole EOS system he lays out comes with (free) downloadable worksheets. The author had already separated the actionable stuff from the book before Blinkist ever showed up.

The problem with Blinkist is that it treated Traction the same way it treated the rest of the Business shelf. Most of those books are one idea stretched to 250 pages because that’s the length a publisher can charge thirty bucks for.

Before AI, ghostwriting for entrepreneurs was my big moneymaker, so I’ve written a multitude of these myself. And my authors were (almost) always shocked when I told them 30k words was quite enough. Maybe 40k if you have a complex system to explain.

“But don’t I need stories from my childhood? It has to be 250 pages!”

“We can make it 250 pages with formatting; don’t worry about that. But no one buying your book is interested in your shitty step dad.”

Yes, I actually said that. My clientele is composed of hardened internet bros.

They wanted a longer book because the ones they bought at Barnes & Noble were all long. They didn’t seem to think it was a problem that they skimmed a good portion of it. Hell, they shrugged at the existence of Blinkist at all, even though its whole model gave the game away: This book is full of nonsense, so here’s the few good parts.

Then the chatbots came along and finished the job entirely. As a result, I don’t read self-help anymore. There’s no point. I used to have at least a couple in my Audible library per year. Motivation, fitness, self-esteem, business strategy, being an empowered girl boss who kicks butt and still takes care of her man. It was never exactly bursting with quality, but there were a few gems. Now, I’ve got no use for any of it in book form. On the rare occasion I read a blurb that piques my interest, one look at the prose reveals the same sloppy, inane cadence that probably isn’t AI, but sounds as though it should be. And the table of contents reveals the “system” is something I can prompt for myself. And what Claude spits out will be at least as well-written as the book.

Which raises a question I’ve been chewing on for about two years: Have I burned out on reading, or has it actually all gone to shit?

Required reading for any woman’s group ;/

We Had it So Good

To test my level of burnout, I decided to reread books I own and loved, books that I bought the ebook, audiobook, and the paperback for. Their quality is unassailable, so if I get bored with them, the problem is me. And I need to do something about that because reading is a huge part of my job.

Here are the books that I chose:

Never Split the Difference, by Chris Voss. Voss was the FBI’s lead international kidnapping negotiator, and his book is, on paper, a method for negotiating in your daily life. Mirror the last few words the other guy said. Label the emotion you think he’s feeling. Ask questions that start with “how.” Get him to say “that’s right” before you ask for anything. That’s it. That’s the method. He gives a lot of examples to back up what he says and the book is on the long side.

The thing is, it doesn’t matter. Even if you asked a chatbot for these tactics, it would do you no good at all, because the method only sticks because of Voss’s storytelling. You retain it because you listened to Voss tell you about being on the phone with a bank robber who’s lying about everything, including how many hostages he has, and has to work out which lies actually matter. Or the kidnapping in Haiti, where Voss figures out that the kidnappers are only in it for money, and only enough money to party through the weekend, so if everybody stays calm the hostage will be home by Monday. Or Voss sitting in a Harvard negotiation seminar watching one of his own tactics fail on him before he explains why it usually works.

I’ve used his method in a salary negotiation and with a mouthy bitch of an airline worker and it worked both times. I didn’t even have to study in advance. Lord knows I wasn’t expecting to do battle in the Atlanta airport. If I had been given bullet points or a summary, I would never have remembered it to apply what I read in that book. Nobody remembers chatbot output. But we remember what bad ass Chris Voss taught us. The lessons were important, yes, but how he told them made it magic.

The Gift of Fear, by Gavin de Becker, makes the same case from the other direction. Where Voss is about everyday life, de Becker is about the worst day of your life: the stalker, the stranger who insists on carrying your groceries, the fired employee who comes back with a score to settle. He hands you a list of warning signs (the unsolicited promise, the man who won’t take no for an answer, the stranger who keeps saying “we” as though you’ve already agreed to something) and any chatbot can hand you the same list. Mostly because they’ve been trained on de Becker’s work.

But the book itself makes you feel like you’re in those scary situations, makes you see why people act the way they do. As opposed to a horror movie where you’re yelling at the screen, “Stop being nice to him, he’s clearly a murderer!” de Becker spent decades reading those signs on behalf of people who were about to get hurt, and the cases he walks you through are the reason the signal actually registers when a man sidles up next to you on the street.

You can’t rehears for that day. You can only hope you retain what the book teaches. And it’s told so skillfully, you can’t help but have its contents burned into your brain.

The Courage to Be Disliked is one that I love because it made me aware of Adlerian psychology, puncturing my long-held disdain for all psychologists. I loved it not only because of it’s message (which to be clear, rubs some people the wrong way) but because of how it’s structured. Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga are (you may have deduced) Japanese and this book is translated. That might be why it’s so unique. At least to Americans. It’s built as a running conversation between a philosopher and a young man who thinks the philosopher is full of shit. Every objection the kid raises is one you’d raise. I could ask Clade to summarize the tenets of Adlerian psychology and it would ably do so. And it would probably be helpful to me in my daily life. But it wouldn’t have had the profound emotional effect this book had on me, nor set me off on a journey for change and growth.

Based on a True Story. This is kind of a cheat because it’s not self help. But it is helpful in that it makes you laugh. Norm Macdonald’s “memoir,” lies to you on nearly every page and keeps telling you so. It demands that you know who Norm is, what happened when he got fired from SNL so you’ll get why his version of it in the book is funny. He trusts you to know that the opening chapter, and how it ends, is deadly serious. And perhaps he trusts us a bit too much, because I listened to the audiobook while I was driving, and damn near ran off the road from laughter. Norm reads it himself, with another actor playing Norm’s would-be ghostwriter, who is likewise hilarious. If you didn’t think having two straight men in a comedy act would work, you’ll see in this book that you’re wrong. Norm’s humor, and his story, improved my understanding of subtlety and satire. Somehow I doubt a bot could have done the same.

The Gold Standard: Rules to Rule By, which Jeremy Piven wrote in character as Ari Gold from Entourage, is actually pretty useful in life and in business, and is so fucking hilarious it instantly makes my day better. I implore you to get the audio version. What Piven gives us not only couldn’t be given to us by AI, I doubt that audiobook could have been delivered by any other actor.

You see it, right? Every one of those books is irreducible. It HAS to be a book. It can’t be an article or a podcast or a Ted Talk. There’s a specific person on the page who paid (sometimes in blood) for what they know, and the book is the only place you can get that person. The information is good. It’s solid. But it’s not what makes you buy it. It’s the author, the person telling you that information, and doing it in such a way that you’ll remember it when it counts.

Shrodinger’s Self-Help Author

Now look at Israetel again with that in mind. Here’s a man with an actual personality. Look, he’s a bit of a weirdo. As it happens, I have a soft spot for weirdos. He has every ingredient necessary to put out an amazing book, one that teaches something a Buzzfeed listicle can’t.

But he didn’t do that. Instead, he used AI to bang on the same drum he’s been banging on YouTube: Looking good is all that matters, and you should do whatever it takes to get the body you want, up to and including surgery. And the saddest part is he could have (and would have) been forgiven for recycling the ideas in his videos if only he’d written it with some flair, some style, some originality.

Dare I say, some artistry.

Yeah, self-help books are about the ideas, but there’s only so many ways you can say “put your shoulders back, dress nice, and act confident.” What used to sell these books was the style, the humor. The humanity.

Mike gave us none of that, and neither do the slop artists pumping out self-help books these days. It seems there have never been more of them. And yet I can’t find a single one worth listening to.

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Well, look who came crawling back

Six months ago, I announced I was moving my publication off Substack and over to Ghost. I had plenty of reasons, and they were solid. Alas, there were two big problems. 1. Ghost doesn’t support video uploads (a huge problem if I want to give my own supporters early access to YouTube videos and/or short update content). and 2. My audience wasn’t enthused about the shift. Previously prolific commenters and sharers of my work fell silent. And though it seemed like I had removed barriers for new people to find me, it didn’t actually turn out that way.

1. So… here I am again. My website it still kristinmctiernan.com

2. If you’re a paid supporter, your subscription follows you here

3. Now paid supporters get the videos EARLY with no ads

4. We have a dedicated chat

5. And I’m pretty over Twitter, so Substack Notes is my primary social media

All that to say, I’m glad you’re here and that you are patient with my occasional lack of foresight.