The part about self help books is absolutely true-- I find much more useful "advice" and guidance from narrative nonfiction (e.g. memoirs, biographies, etc.) and great fiction than I ever did with conventional "motivation" books.
Once stumbled across on a TheOnion-like website: You can be successful reading self-help books: by writing a self-help book after reading sufficient number of them.
There is a quote from one of Roger Ebert's movie reviews:
"No one with a feeling for literature and poetry can read the typical best-selling business or self-help book with a straight face, because their six rules or nine plans or 12 formulas are so manifestly idiotic, and couched in prose of such insulting simplicity."
I find most poetry manifestly idiotic as the self-help books.
The reason self-help books are written the way they are written, is because that's all there's to it. They have a formula that's pretty logical and people find it "idiotic" because in the inside, they already know what they have to do, yet for some reason they resort to these books.
I mean, for example, any given how to startup book:
- Find a problem
- Develop an idea to solve a problem
- Get your hands dirty
Abstractly, that's pretty much it. There may be some other insights, but in general, that's what you get. Again, most people, by common sense already know that, but they keep reading self-help books. I have yet to find the reason.
I always try to find good business books, but can rarely stomach them. I'm planning "The Snowball"[0] as my next try, but any recommendations for business books that are not "manifestly idiotic" would be welcome!
That's obviously a massively wide field - any particular business topic that you're interested in? Given we're on HN, the VC world is often of interest - I can recommend Brad Feld's 'Venture Deals' if you want to get an easy to digest "anatomy of a venture deal" book. If you want something more geeky on the finance side, you'd be hard-pressed to overlook the Allen & Brealey bible 'Principles of Corporate Finance.'
The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder. In general, books about the ups and downs of a particular business are better than books about business in general. That said, The Personal MBA is a good primer on the basic concepts of microeconomics. Just in case anyone reading this thread could use that!
