In defence of self-help books | Alain de Botton
Curated from: theguardian.com
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Self-Help Books: The Ridiculed Genre
The literary world is filled with self-help books written by people from all walks of life, promising greatness, success, riches and manifestation to people who have happily lapped them up.
The repetitive and patronising words in the books are ridiculed by the cultural elite, who think that one can navigate life with ease using intuition and original intellect.
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It All Started With Self-Help Books
Philosophers in the west wrote self-help books almost 2000 years ago, whereas in the eastern world, The Bhagavad Gita and the Four Noble Truths Of Buddhism are essentially self-help for having a better, more fulfilling life, and are not simply old religious texts as many assume.
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The World Needs Guidance
The redeeming truth is that the world has always required guidance to become something other than a clerk, a doctor or an accountant.
Any person has a potential beyond just being raised by a family, getting educated, finding a job, getting married and then retiring (though all of that needs guidance too), and self-help books elevate our understanding in many aspects.
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Read More Books
The human body and mind has limitless potential, and most of it is untapped in a majority of people.
The naysayers who ridicule self-help books are viewing a human life as a static pond. A person is a river which has the potential to go and merge with the ocean. The self-help books, then become a guiding path for a person to go beyond their prescribed limits and blossom into what nature truly intended them to be.
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