The secret of self-help

This being summer, many of us are going to spend a lot of time in airports. So we may as well make the most of it. During half an hour in WH Smith in Dublin airport, I learned to take life one small step at a time, the importance of learning how to delegate, and the best way to make decisions. I picked up Warren Buffet’s cardinal rule, which is to make a list of everything you want to get done today, begin at the top and work down. I’ve learned the 43rd of Duncan Bannatyne’s 43 Mistakes Businesses Make… and how to avoid them (it’s the things you don’t do that you regret). In short, I hung around the self-help stand of the bookshop business section and filleted each of them in turn.

I love self-help books. I love the way you can take one idea and string it out over an entire volume. I love the notion that you can turn your life round for £9.99. I love the easy prescriptiveness of it all. (Having rejected prescriptiveness in religion, we pay for it from this genre.) I love the way you can get the gist of them in five minutes’ browsing, given that the fans of the genre seem to need a set of simple rules, usually summarised helpfully at the end. And I love the authoritativeness of it all: here’s how you do life, business, love.

In general, self-help is divided into two categories, relationships and business. I’d say 100 per cent of the buyers of books on relationships, how to detox them, and how to discover the goddess within, are women. As for success in business, the takers are mostly men. It says all you need to know about the priorities of the sexes.