Instigating Action
A personal categorization of self-help books and the importance of thinking for oneself
As we approach the end of the year everyone is publishing their recommended book lists from the previous year of reading or setting goals for the next year.
One genre that consistently stands out in these lists is self help, self awareness books so I thought I might share some of my own thoughts for those looking to include books from this genre in their next years reading lists.
While writing this article I reflected on non-fiction books in the genres of philosophy, psychology, counseling, and self-help that I had read over the last few years and tried to categorize them in a meaningful way which would make sense to me and which others might find helpful as well. For this exercise I left out books of history, science, literature, fiction and poetry and focused exclusively on books that tried to convey ideas: again books of philosophy, psychology, counseling and self-help.
While there are numerous possible categorizations, I felt that the best way was to categorize them based on the level of generality or specificity of the ideas presented in these books. Below how I ended up categorizing these books:
Books of Wisdom containing timeless ideas regarding the human psyche and the human condition which have stood the test of time, have influenced innumerable thinkers over centuries and whose impact can be felt across many disciplines of the modern world.
Books of Personal Insights that delve into the ideas from the first category sharing unique insights, anecdotes, and reflections using the writer’s own personal experiences.
Books of Action which draw on the wisdom and personal insights of the first two categories, ground them in modern science and combine them with the writer’s own experience to create a proven, tangible framework which the reader can implement in their own life.
There is no doubt also an element of time in terms of when these books were written but that is not always the case. In general there is an increased borrowing of ideas as one moves from the first category to the last e.g. Seneca does not borrow from Montaigne and Tim Ferriss but the latter two do borrow from him. The Buddha does not quote either Krishnamurti or Mark Manson but both of them do quote him. The writers of each subsequent category are in effect standing on the shoulder of giants from the previous category and are looking to interpret their work in light of their own experiences and make it relevant to their generation.
The categorization is clearly subjective, based on my reading, but I do think that the general principle holds true: there are books out there which are geared more towards simply speaking the truth and others which want to take that truth and make it applicable in real life.
I believe that many of us when looking to improve ourselves tend to focus on reading Books of Action. We do this because we are facing challenges and seek immediate, painless solutions. We ask ourselves “Why waste time trying to figure out the solution when someone else has already figured it out”. In this quest for an immediate solution we forget that the books we are picking up are written by intelligent folks just like us who were once stuck in their lives and who instead of picking up and implementing someone else’s framework, read widely from all the categories, especially the first two, created their own framework and implemented it and continued to fine tune it through continuous learning.
We read these books attributing the success of the writer to their framework when it needs to be attributed to their process, their journey, their struggle. The process of creating their framework gave them the conviction to put it into action. Without that conviction they would never have taken the first step. As Schopenhauer wrote:
It may sometimes happen that a truth, an insight, which you have slowly and laboriously puzzled out by thinking for yourself could easily have been found already written in a book; but it is a hundred times more valuable if you have arrived at it by thinking for yourself.
For only then will it enter your thought-system as an integral part and living member, be perfectly and firmly consistent with it and in accord with all its other consequences and conclusions, bear the hue, colour and stamp of your whole manner of thinking, and have arrived at just the moment it was needed; thus it will stay firmly and for ever lodged in your mind.
Read any of the Books of Action above by Ray Dalio, Tim Ferriss, James Clear, or any other writer for that matter, and what you will find in the first few chapters is their personal story, their struggle, how they learnt from it and how they combined their experiences with timeless wisdom from Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Buddha, Montaigne, and others to come up with their life philosophy and their framework for getting results and achieving success.
I believe that all these people are successful not because they arrived some unique truth but because they arrived only at a version of the truth - their truth - which they then had the complete conviction to implement. With a different framework they would still have been successful but without the conviction they would not have gotten anywhere in life.
Reading beyond simply Books of Action by broadening our scope to Books of Wisdom and Books of Personal Insights would actually help us become more like the writers who write in the third category. The work that we will do in creating something of our own from reading the first two categories will give us the commitment to put it into action.
Building conviction to put our learnings into action is essentially why I think it can benefit us from reading from the first two categories and not simply from the last one. It can give us conviction because we have built the foundation underneath our framework, we have gone down dead ends and are convinced of their uselessness. We have in essence not just figured out what works but more importantly what does not work.
I would like to end this reflection with this quote from Matsuo Basho, the famous Japanese writer of Haiku’s, the celebrated Japanese writer and poet of Haikus, a form of minimalist poetry
Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise; seek what they sought
I would love to hear what you guys think: What do you think about the categorization? Would you change it? Would you add/move/remove any of the books? What is your view on the importance of conviction in putting frameworks from self-help books into action?
I absolutely love the excerpt from Schopenhauer that you've shared above and have saved it to return to it when I need it the most. Thinking for oneself is difficult work. It's when we are left to our own devices infront of the vastness of life and the isolation of it may break some. But it is rewarding work because once attained some fragment of it, its yours and you know the Truth in your heart of hearts. The next big step then is the commitment to what we now have gained as knowledge.