A brief history of self-improvement
I’ve always been skeptical about self-help and not just because positive self-talk makes me cringe. It’s also not about the online degrees in life coaching I discovered as I typed this article. Mostly, I just never really knew what “self-help” meant. My confusion is perhaps best explained by the late comic George Carlin:
If you’re looking for self-help, why would you read a book written by somebody else? That’s not self-help. That’s help! There’s no such a thing as self-help. If you did it yourself, you didn’t need help.
I’ve always thought the term “self-help” was a bit vague. It seemed like a catch-all term for a genre of books that taught “personal development and improvement.” But my own skepticism aside, self-help has turned a book genre into an industry. Now, business is booming: In 2016, the U.S. self-help industry was worth about $9.9 billion dollars, according to a report from Research and Markets. Market researchers have predicted that the industry will be worth $13 billion dollars within the next four years, by 2022.
Today, the self-help industry has a peg in almost every medium available. While books were the main facet of self-help throughout most of history, today’s self-help blogs and TV shows have taken the practice digital. Workshops, seminars, and retreats led by self-help gurus and life coaches can cost self-help junkies up to $3,000 per event, while productivity apps and podcasts have taken self-help on the go.
It’s easy to think of self-help as a simple product with a good marketing team behind it, but self-help is so much more than a product. Today, the self-help industry is an ideology that has more in common with modern religion than the modern car.
Samuel Smiles’ book, Self-help, was published in 1859, the same year as Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. Smiles’ book is considered one of the earliest and most successful self-help books in history. It’s also the namesake of the genre.
