Real life is not as such, everything is tossed up: win or lose. Loss, as a matter of fact, is the unwelcomed guest. [break]
Modern people pass the buck [for loss] to ‘weaker strategies for winning’, and prescribe various modus operandi for success through self-help paper mills.
Every bookstore on each town posses a different shelf for such books that tell us how to win in a more formulaic line of attack, like how to win heart of the girl you like.
The self-help genre, not only with paperbacks, has lately surpassed the idiot boxes, lecture halls and radio shows incorporating with popular culture. From leadership boost up to happy marital tips, motivational and personal growth related volumes are walking all through our lives in a more organized form.
Every time I come across with such dust-jackets, I always find them with taglines. They generally claim their million copies sale along with the examples of people who allegedly changed their lives with them, and in-turn grandiosely promise their readers.
They claim to make our unfulfilled dreams come true, turn our obstacles into opportunities and heal our personal guilt and inner turmoil.
They normally range from minor issues like the ‘fear of public speaking’ to major ones like doctor at home. No matter, how much time and money every single person spends on such books, every average man gets dissatisfied at the end, in most cases.
With the name burrowed from Self help; with illustrations of Characters and conduct of Victorian Samuel Smiles, these books are reproduced continuously like old wines refilled in new bottles, writing same and simple things over and over again.
The reasons behind proliferation of self-help volumes are the greed of money and overarching economies of both their writers and readers.
The cons of self-help books are more than their corresponding pros as they try to generalize all the problems into one and try to give universal solutions, and enforce their perspectives to all problems.
The unoriginal and hackneyed sure-shot advices provided with already-known- examples makes them more misleading and inaccurate.
One of the things I have examined over self-help books is that they lack originality on the first place, and their writers duplicate the previous books, create a well-expressed outline, set similar anecdotes, collect apt quotations and jot down the step upon step structures.
We need to be more careful about consumption of such self-help books because they can reproduce opposite results as they are published with the sole motive of profit.
Think twice before you buy when you amazingly come across with the book that tells you How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying (an internet joke), and remember what Christopher Buckley said, the only way to get rich from a self-help book is to write one.
The writer is a 23 year old environment science graduate.
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