Your personality type is self help books

This picture was going around social media as someone's list of recommended reading to be successful in life and business:

Now I'm not anti-self help books, I've read some of these myself and there can be some great advice from some very smart people.

But have you ever met someone whose entire personality seemed to be based on what books like this they were reading or had read? Every conversation is railroaded back to one of these books, "well it's just like James Clear says..."

I've even received resumes where books like this were in the first paragraph of information, like reading Atomic habits automatically means you're an organisation machine.

Call me cynical, but when is what self help book you've read ever going to be a more important piece of information than your actual work experience/history?

Then what happens when you read this many books with overlapping topics and advice and just lead to confusion. Use dieting as an example, imagine starting a diet, let's pick the old school Atkins one that was popular 15 years ago.

Then you read about intermittent fasting and add that in. A friend tells you about Keto so you take some of the parts of that you like. 5:1? Yep that sounds good. So much dieting knowledge now that you're going to be on Pete Evan's podcast next week.

By the end of it you're not eating anything because each set of rules conflicts with the next. The reason each diet (potentially) works is negated because of the reactions caused by the next diet.

So if somebody suggests that the first thing you need to do is read books like this, I disagree. These books can be great as supplements but (IMO) DOING the actual thing first is where progress and learning will be highest then you might fine tune it with something learnt from a few of these books.

I want to be really clear that I'm not poo-pooing reading or self improvement at all, just don't ram it down everyone else's throat while you're embarking on your journey to 5am emotional intelligence through rigorous habits while thinking slow and moving fast to get rich and move your cheese bed, strategically.