Self-Help Classics

  "Whatever you can do or dream you can do, begin it! Boldness has power, magic and genius in it."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Homo Sapiens is a species remarkable for ‘the fantastic number and variety of its wants’, as William James put it. Our extravagance of desire, rather than innate physical ability, led us to the creation of art and science and the mastery of the globe, and it is what keeps us going in our daily lives.

The books I have been reading and researching for the last four years celebrate this sort of desire. They are inspired by a yearning for more of an existence than the one we have today - not more things, but more adventure, more love, self-mastery and self-knowledge. This is the sort of intensity of desire that can help us to slash open the canopy to our dreams. Yet a person imbued with the self-help spirit is not necessarily after a perfect life, or a purer life, or even a life of achievement, but simply more life.

What is self-help?

The literature covers a vast territory across time and borders, but there is one thing that makes it hang together: the refusal to accept 'common happiness' or 'quiet desperation' as the lot of humankind. It acknowledges life's difficulties and setbacks as real, but says that we cannot be defined by them.

Samuel Smiles wrote the original Self-Help in 1859. He feared that people would think it was a tribute to selfishness. In fact it preached reliance on one's own efforts, a never-say-die pursuit of a dream that did not wait on government help or any other kind of patronage. Smiles was originally a political reformer, but came to the conclusion that the real revolutions happened inside people's heads; he took the greatest idea of his century, ‘progress’, and applied it to personal life. Through telling the life stories of some of the remarkable people of his era, he tried to show that anything was possible if you had the gall to try. By his philosophy, we may not all have been 'born to win' as some modern self-help books say, but we had to go to the grave knowing we had lived.

In Smiles’ time most people's lives were mapped out for them, making the idea of 'charting their own destiny' pretty exotic. Today though, most of us have choices, almost too many. This has created a mass requirement for self-leadership that has not happened before in human history - millions of people are free to do what they want in life as long as they have the interest and the time.

Wealth of choice maybe wonderful, but opportunities still have to be seized. To prosper and make an impact in today's world we need things like vision, emotional intelligence, ethics, an awareness of history and a thirst for knowledge and ideas. These qualities can’t be force-fed by education or family or religion, or even provided by your firm. We are in a time in which institutions may be able to protect us from hunger and thirst and cold, but will not be able to airlift us out of the misery caused by absence of purpose, or ignorance of how to change ourselves.

The democracy of leadership that we live in now means that everyone can be the best in some way or other, and self-help is a key source of inspiration for this new world. These books may help the Napoleons of this world to achieve their grand ambitions, but their real focus is on the full expression of the self.

The Self-Help Phenomenon

"Power exists – as it always has – in providing people with dreams. Dreams that touch people, excite or arouse them. Once it was Marx, Kennedy and Martin Luther King who brought us dreams. Now, it is Michael Dell, Bill Gates, Anthony Robbins and Stephen Covey."

Jonas Ridderstralle & Kjell Nordstrom, Funky Business

The self-help book was one of the great success stories of the 20^th century. An exact number is impossible to calculate, but my list of 50 classics alone has sold around 150 million copies, and if we add the further list at the back of the book and consider the thousands of other self-help titles, the final number would run well over half a billion.

Self-help as an idea has, of course, always been around, but only in the 20^th century did it become a mass phenomenon. Books like How To Win Friends and Influence People (Dale Carnegie, 1936), The Power of Positive Thinking (Norman Vincent Peale,1952) were bought by average people desperate to make something of their lives, and they were willing to believe the secrets of success could be found in a paperback. Maybe the genre took on its ‘trashy’ image because the books were so readily available, promised so much, and contained ideas you were unlikely to hear in college or in church. Whatever the image, people obviously had a new source of life guidance and they loved it. For once, they were not being told what they couldn’t do but only to shoot for the stars.

It is the actual writing of the self-help genre which makes you love it – its passion and no-nonsense punch, fireside informality and directness, humour (ironic or not), and the way it makes you feel you are being let in on a secret. The books are often a person’s best friend and champion, expressing a faith in the reader’s essential greatness and beauty that no one in real life ever did. It is this emphasis on thinking big and daring to dream that makes self-help the ‘literature of possibility’.

The lives of the writers also fascinate. Dale Carnegie was a poor farm boy who didn’t see a train until he was 12, but after stints as a salesman and actor found his niche running wildly YMCA courses for businessmen on how to communicate better. Those courses became a book with an initial print run of 5000 that has now sold over 15 million copies. Norman Vincent Peale was a Minister in New York City whose sermons were so popular people queued around the block. His classic, which has taught the world how to think positively even in the greatest adversity, itself received over 30 rejection slips before eventually being published. And consider Napoleon Hill, who went from a log cabin and delinquency to become an adviser to Franklin D Roosevelt and friend of steel baron Andrew Carnegie. Hill, whose work was based on interviews with hundreds of the most successful people of his day, was ahead of his time in showing us that all wealth began in the mind.

The classic 20^th century titles mentioned above were the result of years of research to identify the ideas and techniques that had impact on real lives. Later self-help is more conventionally scientific, a lot of it derived from motivational and cognitive psychology. On the whole, validation by laboratory tests has not been essential to the best self-help writing; what matters is whether something has worked in your life, and if you really want to change it your life, you will be much better served reading Susan Jeffers, Anthony Robbins or Stephen Covey than by taking psychology courses at university.

Most of the contemporary writers are American, and while this may seem like ‘cultural imperialism’, in reality self-help values are universal. The United States was the first to put the ‘pursuit of happiness’ into its constitution, but every country’s government tries to deliver it. The Statue of Liberty may sit in New York harbour, but is a world symbol of personal reinvention and a new life.

There is also the perception that self-help is too money and success oriented. One of the themes of the self-help classics is that success and abundance are not separate things to ‘get’ but are part of a person’s whole being and attitude. This is a concept with ancient roots that needs to be distinguished from the unthinking materialism of today, in which a person can be reduced to a ‘consumer’.

Self-help may be a mass phenomenon, but its holy grail is the expression of uniqueness. It celebrates what Teilhard de Chardin called ‘the incommunicable singularity of being that all possess’ – the fact the evolution happens by differentiation, not be matching up to some general standard. Through conformity we can achieve only excellence; by being more and more ourselves we become outstanding.

About 50 Self-Help Classics

The classics I have written about are of course not the definitive list. The selections are the result of my own reading and thinking, and may be quite different if another person were to undertake the same project. The focus is on 20^th century self-help classics, but much older works are included because the self-help ethic has been with us through the ages. The Bible and the Bhagavad-Gita, for instance, may not have been thought of as ‘self-help’ before, but I hope I can argue the case for their inclusion. The Bible is, of course, the repository of so many of our great stories of self-transformation, and gave humanity the idea that money, class and ethnicity mean nothing before the power of love. I look at the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Emperor made newly famous in the recent movie Gladiator, whose stoic campfire musings at the end of his day on the battlefield still carry incredible force and freshness.

The American transcendentalists Thoreau and Emerson also have a definite place in the self-help canon; it was Thoreau who told to ‘walk to the beat of a different drummer’, and in Emerson’s essay ‘Self-Reliance’ we have one of the most elegant summations of individual possibility ever written. And though many people think of self-help as being about relationships, dieting, selling, self-esteem, I found myself focusing on the bigger picture works. Man’s Search For Meaning, by the Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl, is a book that can shake you to your bones and put your daily troubles into their proper perspective.

No one book or author can ever give you ‘the answers’, but an exploration of the genre can lead you to a place where you can find your own. Self-help rightly has the reputation for being too earnest, but the best books make us want to give style to our character, to live, as Benjamin Franklin did, with panache.

                                         Tom Butler-Bowdon