Fiction is better than self-help books

so many different aspects it appears that fiction is better than self-help books both genre come with the intent to bring something new to the reader in fiction it's about expanding your way of thinking through imagination whereas in self-help it's more about learning new skills and strategies new ways of living fiction versus self-help now the first critic that emerges when we talk about self-help books is the fact that they do not very much engage with the reader reading a self-help book is more about scanning to find information and takeaways it's automatic and fast you're not re-interested in the narrative and to be honest most self-help books could be summed up in a few bullets points on the other hand fiction is way more fun it puts the reader in a active position using your brain to remember different elements of the stories but also anticipate future events reading fiction also means that you get access to a bigger range of writing styles some that you will like and some that you won't like the success of a fiction book very much depends on the unique prose the originality whereas with self-help books it's more about that catchy title that's going to put the book into a specific niche and that is going to better target a specific audience in terms of content now while fiction books promote empathy because you are confronted to many different characters heroes and villains and i would add that also encourages the reader to think critically because you are going to be confronted to different opinions different points of views that you are going to evaluate to agree with or disagree with if you're not convinced yet then you might have heard about those memory experts you know they organize contests every year and when you ask them what are your memory secrets well most of the time what they're going to say is that instead of learning facts just one after the other they try to build a narrative around those facts so in short you always better remember something when it's convicted through a narrative and yes it's true i don't know about you but my biggest life lessons the one i remember the most come from fiction books as cheesy as it sounds now i don't want to fall into the fiction is good self-help is bad type of discussion because self-help as we know it today i actually have a very long history and i want to argue a somehow positive history the more positive sides of self-help i'm first going to take the example of the history of self-help in the african-american community something that goes back to slavery a time where slaves just had to rely on themselves and they built strategies in terms of health care of legal assistance that was just internal to their community in the decades following abolition black people were finally able to meet at a national level and discuss topics relevant to their community and that's when the first self-help books were published one of the most famous self-help books published at that time so late 18th century early 19th century is called up from slavery from booker t washington washington was known for his promotion of black businesses land ownership basically black emancipation through economic empowerment he was a great orator and traveled a lot throughout the united states to give speeches talk about his way of life encourage people to follow his advice and even organize week-long events it sounds a lot like what today's self-help gurus do but actually it was more or less the same washington also put a lot of emphasis on the way black people present themselves arguing that a man developed character through the way he dresses do we take care of himself it's the idea of changing yourself changing the way you appear to fit what standards of respectability to earn respect from whites so because racism is about a difference in skin color a physical characteristic it means that the notion of uplift in the african-american community had to start with something physical as well so the way you present yourself to others with the proper language attitude posture african americans could become better leaders they could become better businessmen by earning the respect of white investors and to be honest that was the most effective way to get rich fast just as i did today self-help in the african american community remained a privilege and when booker t washington wrote his book and everything it was mostly directed to the black elite yet it did help black women and men to gain confidence and be proud of their bodies of the way they look the black skin is not a badge of shame but rather a glorious symbol of national greatness said marcus garvey a famous black entrepreneur of that time it's something that actually resonates with the blackest beautiful campaigns of the 1960s now we're moving back in time and to another geographical era europe with scottish author samuel smiles 1859's book self-help which among other things attacked materialism and lysiphere government the book featured sketches of working-class people becoming rich despite of adversity but also inspirational quotes from literature self-help soon became a bestseller and was very much appreciated in 19th century meiji japan to promote nationalist self-reliance against western's forced industrialization and modernization in a way thanks to smiles authors like shakespeare or benjamin franklin we're translating japanese that's what he now calls of power now moving back to 21st century while it's the other way around now americans and europeans get inspired by asian philosophers like confucius who was chinese but also religions like hinduism or principles like ban or meditation through self-help books and south hungaries will talk about how they completely change their life with stoicism or how wabi-sabi forced them to better embrace their perfect imperfections and stuff like that the argument i'm trying to reach there is that self-help can make complex philosophical ideas simpler so you don't need to have a degree in philosophy to completely change your life just read my book in 2016 the u.s self-help industry was worth about 9.9 billion dollars and it would be worth 13 billion dollars by 2022. as a response to that phenomenon researcher best bloom argues that now writers try to get inspired by self-help and how it is produced she mentioned shayla haiti's 2010 novel how should a person be and most in hammett's 2013 novel how to get filthy rich in rising ager and i'm not sure we should see it that way is it's modern literature trying to copy self-help or is it self-help trying to sound more literary can self-help outperform fiction we're not there yet the main problem self-help is facing is the quality of writing it's quite bad it appears that most self-help books have the same writing style you know a bit of humor a bit of easy to digest science a bit of anecdotes personal anecdotes i mean the way of writing a self-help book is actually quite coherent with what self-help is copy and paste obviously some will argue that self-help books aren't meant to be super well written but it becomes a bit problematic when self-help enthusiasts try to write fiction you might have heard about the alchemists to sum it up very briefly the alchemist is the story of a young and delusion shepherd who has a recurring dream of finding a treasure at the food of the egyptian pyramids during his journey to find the treasure to literally follow his dream santiago de shafford learns life lesson he gets advice from mentors and he end up working with a crystal merchant he recommends him to take risks and it pays off because after a year of working there he becomes a rich man yet santiago decides to pursue his dream to go to the pyramid and once he gets there he meets thugs and realizes all of a sudden that the treasure he's looking for is actually at the exact place where he had this dream so returns back to spain find the treasure and end of the story as you may have understood the moral of stories to follow your dream to take advice from mentors to take risks and eventually you'll get rich i actually remember reading this book and thinking that this was a very badly disguised self-help book and yet it became a bestseller i truly truly believe that self-help books trying to sound and look literally cannot work because fiction is not about the destination it's about the journey and for me the second reason why self-help cannot perform fiction is the fact that fiction is so much more diverse not need to say that the self-help industry is dominated by what middle class to extremely wealthy men that generally tell you that you are a failure because you didn't try enough which can be a bit traumatic i completely stopped reading self-help books a few years ago because i realized that i learned so much more from life experiences and the more diverse the better actually a little bit of personal history but pre-pandemic i used to go to this english exchange weekly meeting type of thing where i live here in the north of france and i met such good people with a there was this girl who spent six years in new york and came back to france after she broke up with her boyfriend there was also this girl who lived in bangladesh and then in asia and she came back to france but was kind of going somewhere else in the next few months and yes there was this very small very independent young woman who got her dream job but the thing is that she was just burning out and she was about to quit but didn't tell anybody except us complete strangers i'm getting goosebumps just thinking back on this and actually i feel the exact same way when i read a good piece of fiction or watch a good piece of fiction no one judges you just use your weaknesses it actually feels very liberating thank you so much for watching this video i hope you enjoyed it as always feel free to comment anything in the comment section down below you can comment which book change your life which book made you grow i think for me it's four three two one by paulosta feel free to comment any ideas opinions advice recommendations also don't forget to like to subscribe it really helps me grow the channel and yeah i'll see you next week

Channel: Alice Cappelle

Views: 215,665

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Id: B3zn6JVFeQE

Length: 11min 12sec (672 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 24 2021