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. But there are other categories: happiness is big now.
The daddy of the genre (I’ll get on to the grand-daddy) is Dale Carnegie, he of How To Make Friends and Influence People fame. It’s easy to mock, but, you know what? If that volume, written in 1936, had been put into my hands by a well-wisher early in life, my record on Making Friends and Influencing People would be a good deal better than it has been. One of his rules is that the sweetest sound for anyone is the sound of his own name. I’ve spent my life never quite catching names to begin with, then forgetting them, only to go through agonies when I have to introduce people. Another chapter, irresistibly entitled ‘Do This and You’ll be Welcome Anywhere’, advises that you should be genuinely interested in other people.
The Rules, by contrast, was for girls: it was the relationships book of the Nineties. That was because it followed the prime law of S-H books: summarise the underlying idea in a sentence, then in a list. It had iron rules, one to 35, about making yourself irresistible to men. Each was self-explanatory: Don’t Talk to a Man First; Don’t Call Him and Rarely Return his Calls; Always End Phone Calls First; Don’t Accept a Saturday Night Date after Wednesday. Isn’t that brilliant? The best S-H advice is concrete, and that bit about not being available for Saturday night after Wednesday is deliciously bossy. The Rules might have taken over the universe were it not that one of the authors ended up getting divorced.
Possibly the most useful S-H book I’ve ever come across proves that the formula is essentially a simple idea strung out to book length with a title that summarises the idea. It was called Eat That Frog!, the gist being that if you have a frog to eat (a difficult or distasteful task) you should get on with it before you do anything else. Works for me!
The art of filleting these books is based on the fact that somewhere the gist will be helpfully summarised, usually in a little box. In Richard Layard’s Happiness, a quick trawl through the contents page directs you towards So What Does Make You Happy? I’ll save you a tenner: it’s to be financially stable; be married rather than divorced or separated; be in secure employment; trust people; live in a sane country; believe in God. There: simple. The one S-H book that defeated all my efforts to sum it up in a quick glance was the popular but to me unreadable Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Presumably one of those habits is sticking with incomprehensible prose.
Perhaps the most influential self-help book ever was Samuel Smiles’s 1859 volume of that very name. Except he doesn’t talk much about discovering your inner goddess or keeping meetings snappy; it’s about self-reliance, hard work, perseverance and self-denial. Hard to sum up in ten easy rules, perhaps, but worth reading even now.
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