I noticed that most self-help books are excessively verbose and padded with fluff to bump the page count. Most of those books could be a blog post if they actually tried to distill and convey the key points efficiently (but blog posts don’t sell as well as books).
This though came to me after reading the reviews for Ultralearning by Scott H Young, and realizing that I’ve felt the same with Atomic Habits and Deep Work. Although those books all convey very important and valuable ideas, reading them cover to cover is simply a waste of time.
Passive consumption of information is not the best way of learning, and reading (especially self-help books) is exactly that. Reading by itself is amazing and can bring so much value to our lives, but from now on I prefer to save my reading time for fiction books.
Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.
Self-help books usually focus on discussing the how and why one should act to achieve a certain goal in life. Most of that can be distilled in very short and simple pieces of information. The problem is that those types of discussions are hard to convey in a way that sticks with the reader, as there is a lack of cornerstone elements that enrich the message in a way that makes us remember it.
Authors of self-help books recognize that problem, and as a way to remediate that, they pad the books with many short stories about real life applications of those ideas. The problem is that those stories don’t usually fit the goal of the book (which is to just get those core ideas), and usually seem just extra fluff with no additional value. When that happens, we end up in the worst of both worlds: a long book with very little density of information and weak cornerstone elements to make the message stick with us.
On the other hand, fiction books have a clear goal: tell a story. And they have the most absolute freedom to do just that. A good side effect of it is that most stories also carry a message, and when it is transmitted in a book with good cornerstone fictional elements, the message becomes much more powerful and has a greater chance of sticking with us.
As a result of that, fiction books are usually much more powerful and efficient in conveying core ideas, even though they are usually way longer than self-help books. The creative freedom of fiction authors allow those books to expand our world in ways that self-help books could only dream of.
In summary: most self-help books should not be books in the first place: they should be short articles or blog posts. Books should convey meaningful and rich stories that are to be enjoyed, and not some watered down version of an info article. Self-help authors are motivated to water down the contents of their books both in an effort to make the message stick better with readers and reach a reasonable page count to pass those ideas as a book that can actually sell copies instead of an article or blog post that can be given away for free.