Maybe you should just pick one book and take it very seriously
Escaping the self-help pseudo-progress death loop and actually doing things
Religious devotion
No pastor or priest has ever said to the congregation: “You already get the Bible. You understand Jesus. We’re moving on to another book.” There is no other book. The Bible is the whole ballgame.
If you’re a devout Christian, this is how the Bible works: you read it, then you read it again and again and again for the rest of your life. You read it verse by verse, until the individual verses illuminate your life with explanatory insight. You layer the parables onto daily decisions, interactions, and experiences like a teleological algorithm. You read the Bible each morning, alongside a devotional or another book that explains the Bible. On Sunday, you learn from a Bible expert. Midweek, you meet for a Bible Study. You sing hymns and pray to the God of the Bible using the language of the Bible. Your leather-bound Bible has gilded pages and your name is embossed on the cover — and when you’re not annotating that Bible, you’re making notes in the Bible App on your phone.
Naturally, the Bible transforms and shapes the lives, identities, and day-to-day decisions of the people who do these things. That’s the whole idea, that believers should “become the word,” should embody the truths and principles of their one Holy Book. There is an obvious lesson here: if you pick one book, surrender to it, and filter your experiences through it, the book will change your life. The kind of devotion described above is so total and singular that it hardly seems sane to apply it to anything outside the realm of religion, and yet there is a whole genre of books that people turn to for many of the same reasons that people turn to the Bible. And it would cause complete life makeovers if readers applied biblical devotion to this genre in a similarly narrow way. The genre is self-help.
Self-help and personal development books are the secular equivalent of the Bible. They represent the second most popular genre of books in the world because they provide the promise and hope of personal transformation.1 Their scope is more limited and less existential than the Bible, but they target our deepest vulnerabilities and intractable personal problems: self-acceptance, wealth accretion, addiction, weight loss, priority management, presence, meaning making, winning friends and influencing people. Self-help books offer instructions for navigating the world and arriving at your desired destination, but for all their popularity, they are largely futile.
The pseudo-progress death-loop
Generally speaking, there are three reasons self-help books are ineffective. The first, is that many of these books are written by grifters and gurus, and they are packed with unproven claims that aren’t scientifically or even anecdotally supported. The second, is that there is a huge follow through problem: 80% of ‘highly-motivated readers’ don’t even finish the self-help books they set out to read, and only 2-4% follow through on the suggestions.2 And the third reason is that readers are drowning themselves in self-development content — cycling endlessly through books and podcasts and audiobooks, deeply desiring transformational change, and temporarily satisfying that desire by consuming novel inspiration rather than taking action.
All three of these problems are solved by picking a single credible self-development book by a believable author, and reading it with the kind of biblical devotion described above. This would completely change your life.
The people who are most hell-bent on changing their lives struggle with the third problem. It’s the cultural epidemic that gets no airtime. I call it the pseudo-progress death-loop. This is what it looks like: you read a self-development book and you get excited about the ideas, and you swear you’ll change your habits, change yourself, stick to such-and-such a morning routine, etc. Meanwhile, you listen to The Diary of a CEO on your daily commute and Modern Wisdom while exercising, and you feel the same buzz from the podcast interviews that you feel from the books3 (← important footnote). And in a few weeks, you’ve consumed the equivalent of 10 self-improvement books in the form of dense podcast interviews with topical experts — and you’ve downloaded one of the interviewees books on your Kindle, and you’ve started reading it even though you haven’t finished the book you were buzzing about earlier. The excitement surrounding the transformational insights from one book or interview perpetually gives way to imagined possibilities brought on by the next one.
The pseudo-progress death-loop has a simple neurobiological explanation: the inspiration you feel when you consume self-help content activates the same neural pathways that are activated when you actually do the things you’re learning about. You get a surge of dopamine from the anticipation of change, and your brain confuses the consuming insight with the enacting insight. The hamster wheel of content consumption is a roundabout and comforting way to accomplish nothing, while scratching the itch of accomplishment. Rather than reprogramming the habits that limit your potential, your habit becomes consumption itself, and you settle into a ritual of imagined transformation.
The sheer volume and chart-topping popularity of self-development content combined with the density of wisdom contained in so much of it, underscores the fact that ideas are being consumed at a rate that far outpaces any human’s ability to integrate them.
To escape the spiral of pseudo-progress you must pick one book and read it with biblical devotion — at the exclusion of everything else, for around a year.4 Biblical devotion is described in paragraph two, above. Re-read it and replace the Bible with your book of choice. You could even dial it back by about 75% and still get astonishing results, as long as you cut out other self-improvement books and stopped listening to infotainment podcasts.
Finding your self-help Bible
Let’s imagine how this works. If you read Deep Work by Cal Newport twenty-four times in a year and listened to the audiobook on all of your commutes, and studied it as seriously as a seminary student studies the bible, it would redefine your identity, and reprogram your relationship to work, time, and attention. This is a salient example, because Deep Work doesn’t provide comprehensive solutions to the problems of distractibility and focus, but it’s perfectly solid, and proven, and the author is believable, and if it became your religion for a year it would improve your concentration and prioritization to a degree that would seem unfathomable to you now. You’d feel the coach-like presence of Newport at all times, and your life would change in a meaningful way. Much more permanently than if you read several hundred of history’s most influential self-development books in a year. Deep Work is a random example; everything above holds true for The Courage to Be Disliked, or Outlive, or The Magic of Thinking Big, or an uncountable number of other books.
So how do you pick the right book to make this kind of hardcore commitment to? And how do you avoid unsubstantiated or mediocre self-help slop? This is actually very simple, just ask a few basic questions: What is holding you back, more than anything else, from having the life you want? Which author has solved your problem or done what you’re seeking to do? Have they done it multiple times, or over a long period of time? Can they clearly and convincingly explain how they did it? Have other readers used the author’s system to replicate their results? There are so many options in every sub-genre that you should have no trouble finding a book that meets these requirements. And you don’t need to pick a book you haven’t read. In fact you probably shouldn’t. You’ve almost certainly read several books that ‘hit different’ — which you promised yourself you’d re-read and actually enact. Depending on your current priorities, those might be the perfect books to return to.5
Tony Robbins isn’t Jesus, but...
This whole ‘religious devotion’ proposal isn’t entirely theoretical. I did something like it once and it worked in a life-altering way that I can still barely believe. I was twenty-six years old and I’d graduated from college with a literature degree and so I felt a reflexive condescension toward the language of self-help. But for reasons I can’t remember now, my roommate, Tim, and I decided to go totally self-help-gonzo in one of the many social experiments we were conducting at the time.
I said to Tim: “What do you think would happen if we picked one of the seminal, canonical self-help books and suspended-disbelief and just straight up did everything it said to do? Earnest, cult-like buy-in. No smirking.” He thought self-help larping would be funny, and so we chose Awaken the Giant Within by Tony Robbins without even reading an Amazon review or the back cover of the book. We chose it because of Robbins’ legendary stature in the self-help world, and because of the book’s role in his ascent. It turned out to be a paperback infomercial full of exclamation-pointed headlines like “Decisions Shape Destiny!” It encouraged incantations and it contained trademarked concepts like Neuro-Associative Conditioning™ (NAC). But we never cringed at the hyperbolic language or the acronyms, and we never flinched at the on-the-nose anecdotes. We surrendered ourselves to it, completely.
We met weekly to discuss the book, chapter-by-chapter, and we pedestaled the ideas and deconstructed them with academic rigor. Robbins said to take ‘cleansing breaths,’ so that’s how we breathed. We visualized our success. We ‘primed’ our nervous systems and chanted morning mantras. Unsurprisingly, Robbins had a lot to say about goals. And so we made a list of stretch goals — really wild and unreasonable goals — and gave ourselves a year to complete them.
We posted them outside of our rooms, and our chutzpah and determination grew with every item we ticked off. These goals and the language of Tony Robbins became the organizing forces of our lives. By the end of the year we’d crossed off nearly every item on our list of goals, and a lot more. Most of the items had to do with realizing our professional and personal potential (growing a business to $1M; writing a dissertation; feeding hundreds of homeless people, etc), but there was one, three-parted wild card item that we’d included purely for the thrill, and to see how far we could push the goal-setting idea: Sneak into the Super Bowl, the World Series, and the NBA Finals, in a calendar year.
February came, and we snuck into the Super Bowl (long story). It was among the most highly secured events in American history, so at this point we really began to believe that Tony Robbins’ was a genius for helping us understand how malleable the world is.
In April, the NBA Finals was upon us: a larger-than-life showdown between Steph Curry and LeBron James in their prime. We drove to Oakland, and we snuck in, and we sat in some of the best seats in the stadium, and when the game was over we slipped past security and stepped onto the court to soak-in the experience fully.
As I bobbed around players and coaches at center court, I turned around to look for Tim and I spotted him by the free-throw line. He was beaming, gesturing wildly, deep in conversation with the only person bigger than the athletes surrounding us: our guru, Tony Robbins. I jostled past the media and joined them. I told Tony an abbreviated version of our story: that we were reading one of his early books and taking it seriously — that because of him, in a matter of months we’d accomplished an unimaginable amount and had dozens of unforgettable experiences, including this one. It was a comically surreal full-circle moment: here we were in this preposterous place having a lifetime memory, thanking the author of the book that led us to the place where we were meeting him.
Principles
My year of Tony Robbins proves that the real way to help yourself is to pick one book and take it seriously, because Awaken the Giant Within is incredibly cheesy, a bit of a sprawling mess, and if I’m honest, not particularly special — and it nevertheless changed my life in a permanent way. It changed the way I thought about goals, and changed my view about what is possible when you set unreasonable goals and focus on them with unwavering intensity. The book worked because it weighed on me everyday in a meaningful way, because I thought about it when I made decisions, and I committed to the ideas and didn’t let anything stop me from manifesting them. I didn’t breeze through it before hurrying on to the next book. I highlighted it like a maniac, annotated it like a Bible scholar, and practiced what it preached.
But in the aftermath of that transformative year, the lesson I extracted from the experience was the wrong one: I thought that it was the book and the genre that had changed my life, when in fact it was my way of reading the book that caused the transformation. After that year, I stepped on the treadmill of pseudo-progress and began reading business books for sport and listening to podcasts in all of my downtime. I traded depth for breadth, and spent a decade floundering in the shallows of self-development — reading and consuming endlessly, integrating almost nothing.
Recently, I found myself contemplating the way devout Christians read the Bible and how it changes them, and it helped me understand what had really happened with Tony Robbins. Not long after that, I took a single book off my shelf and put away all the others. I’m now on my fourth re-read of Principles by Ray Dalio, and by this time next year I expect I’ll have read it at least twenty-four times. This year, instead of podcasts, I’ll listen to the Principles audiobook over and over again. I’ll read it in the mornings and I’ll annotate it extensively. I’ll set up and maintain and habitualize the systems Dalio describes. I’ll commit significant portions of the book to memory. I’ll overlay Dalio’s ideas onto my life like an algorithm, and I’ll get beyond rote knowledge into deep, intuitive understanding. I’ve chosen Principles for several reasons. Among them: I’m building my next business and I believe the business will be stronger if I’m able to program Dalio’s systematic approach to decision making, radical candor, and meritocracy into the DNA of my company at a foundational level — but that’s a me thing.
You should think about how you want your life to change over the next year. Then you should find a book written by someone who has a good explanation for how they got the thing you want, and you should make it your mentor, your Bible. What do you think would happen if you stepped off the hamster wheel of self-improvement, and muted all the podcasts — if you picked just one book and took it very seriously? Don’t you think it would change your life? How could it not?
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Romance is the most popular. Nothing in this essay applies to romance novels.
The reason the pseudo-progress delusion is worse than it has ever been is because of podcasts. The long-form interview podcasts that dominate the charts are most typically conversations with expert authors who recently published self-development books, and the conversations are essentially compressed versions of the books. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard the interview then read the book and thought: the book was just that interview with a bunch of formulaic fluff and redundant narrative to hit the publisher’s word count target.
To be clear, I do think that a podcast interview can change your life in the same way a book can, for the same reasons. Interviews with world-class experts or therapists or CEOs or investors or athletes usually contain nuggets of wisdom and insights that could completely and positively alter the trajectory of your life if you actually took them seriously. In many cases, the interview is part of a well-rehearsed roadshow, where the interviewee is sharing everything they’ve spent a lifetime learning. They’re often believable, and they’ve often accomplished the things you are seeking to accomplish. There is nothing wrong with the content, or the medium. The problem is that there are hundreds of credible books and shows, and new ones are released daily, and you never re-listen to the old ones, and you can’t get enough of the new ones.
You can still read fiction and other genres (I plan to), as long as you make ample time for religious devotion to the core book. (Relatedly, I think you could make something like a Joan Didion anthology your core book, or a master work of fiction, if your goal is to improve as a journalist or a writer).
If you’re having trouble qualifying this, I’d simply pick one of the top three self-help books that addresses the problem you’re seeking to make changes in — ideally, something that has been popular for several decades. Even if it’s cheesy, it’ll probably work. There are dozens of books that are capable of getting you to where you want to go, so even if there is a better book out there, it’s not really necessary to find it. And part of the reason I gravitate towards books that have been popular for decades is that many of the ‘classics’ in the genre were written at a time when the standard of writing for published work must have been much higher, because the prose is way, way better in the writing of Andrew Carnegie or Peter Drucker than the writing of Ramit Sethi or Gary Keller. And if you’re going to read something twenty times, ideally the prose wouldn’t be hacky. BUT even if it is hacky, it would still change your life.
So good man...it's hard to choose this because the downstream flow of market forces and media ecology push us toward breadth over depth. But this is the path toward actually change. Pseudo-progress death loop is a great phrase.
For me it's been Emerson and "Flow". They've meaningfully reshaped my life. It's not quite 24 re-reads in a year, but I read him every weekend at a minimum. A "trusted mentor through time and space" as I like to say
I did this by accident a few years ago with Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. I was going through a season of grief and thinking a lot about our finite time on Earth. I listened to the audiobook, bought a copy of the book, and then proceeded to read and annotate it about seven or eight times through. It definitely changed my life because I started taking steps towards the top things on my "Life-To Do" list.