When I first heard this question, my gut reaction was an emphatic “Yes!” So many self-help/self-improvement books, business books, even some financial advice books are full of unnecessary fluff.
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People easily lends itself to a numbered list with a couple-sentence description for each. Atomic Habits is focused around four main steps. Sometimes there are graphs and charts. It could be a zine! I Know How She Does It: How Successful Women Make the Most of Their Time could fit in a fortune cookie: “Be a woman who makes six figures at least, has a flexible job, and outsources most domestic labor.” Easy peasy! I know I may be hurting some feelings with this next one, but Brené Brown is really squeezing every bit of juice out of that vulnerability lemon.
My friends: if you have not caught on after your first two Brené Brown books, then I think you might benefit by picking fruit from a different tree in a distant orchard.
All of the above answer the question of “Can most self-help books be pamphlets?” but it doesn’t really answer the question in the title which is “Should most self-help books be pamphlets?” and that, dear readers, is a different question entirely.
Before I answer this question, you should know that I’m an avid self-help reader and I am writing this from a place of fondness. In fact, many of us who read self-help can be described as “avid.” It seems so rare that a person ever picks up only one or two in the genre, likes it, then never touches it ever again. We are serial self-help readers, some of us constantly searching for someone else to tell us to get our shit together, clean up our home, set boundaries, take a nap, and unfuck literally anything in a 10-mile radius. Maybe we are looking for that one book, that singular, special thing that will finally make everything in our lives fall into place.
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