Self-Help.Get A Copy. Friend Reviews. Reader Q&A. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. The whole self-help genre got its name from this book, published back in 1859. It suffers from the same flaws of the genre it defined. But these flaws may be with its readers, not with the books. Despite constantly stressing the need for diligence, patience in enduring hardships, and any other character virtue you can think of, this book reads like an extended Rocky training montage. It's a string of biographies of high achieving people, like Newton, James Watt, Adam Smith etc, but by The whole self-help genre got its name from this book, published back in 1859. It suffers from the same flaws of the genre it defined. But these flaws may be with its readers, not with the books. Despite constantly stressing the need for diligence, patience in enduring hardships, and any other character virtue you can think of, this book reads like an extended Rocky training montage. It's a string of biographies of high achieving people, like Newton, James Watt, Adam Smith etc, but by condensing a lifetime of effort, toil and hardship into a few pages at a time, you constantly get hits of instant gratification, a sense of exhilaration of achievement, but without really feeling the anguish of the struggle enough. Thus, it kind of subverts its own point, because the values it exhorts don't really sink in. Isn't the "self" in self-help redundant anyway? These books are picked up by people who feel the need for outside help, it should be called just help. And that designation should only apply to books that propose a set of doable, practical heuristics for everyday living on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, like "Getting Things Done" for instance. The other kind is the more vague, uplifting sort of self-help books that are supposed to be helpful, but that are mainly read for their comforting but delusional effects, making you think that maybe, just maybe this one book will kind of push you over the brink to self-realization, that it will be so inspiring it will remove the effort needed to make an effort. But it often just has the opposite effect, making you hungry for more pep talk, more inspiration, filling your head with wise quotations but making you less self-reliant because of it. This book actually makes the same point pretty early on: "Help from without is often enfeebling in its effects, but help from within invariably invigorates. Whatever is done for men or classes, to a certain extent takes away the stimulus and necessity of doing for themselves; and where men are subjected to over-guidance and over-government, the inevitable tendency is to render them comparatively helpless." Despite the warning though, you will probably continue reading it for it really does give you an uplifting feeling. It's dense, very well written, and it has an old school no non sense feel to it. There are no proposed shortcuts here, just sweat and toil. Would any of the people who are mentioned in this book have had read this kind of stuff to get motivated? Or is it just comfort food for us average folks, who secretly hope that we will somehow adopt some of the traits of the greats by osmosis or something? Well we have the example of Sakichi Toyoda, founder of Toyota, who is said to be greatly influenced by this book. It follows then, that all the supposed flaws of this book are really with the reader and his expectations, not with the book. I give it five stars. I would give fewer stars to myself you see. . more. |
Новинки: