How to read a self-help book

Published on September 15, 2023

You enthusiastically start a good self-help book, but it doesn’t really get you anywhere. A week later, your life is exactly the same as it was before reading it.

How do you get out of this? How do you make sure your life really changes?

The short version:

1. Your life changes when your actions change.

2. Keep your insights in a form that’s easy to find again. That way, you’ll recognize your own pitfalls earlier and more quickly.

3. Experiment with what you read.

4. Experiment with what you read.

5. Add action steps to your routine.

6. Measure whether you’re actually doing what you say you want to do.

It all starts with the insights you gain from a self-help book and ends with how you implement them.

Insights from a self-help book

A self-help book is written to expose the reader to new insights. It’s therefore important to follow the underlying concepts so the resulting actions make sense.

When something is understandable and logical, it’s easier to follow through.

Write down insights

Writing down the insights that made sense to you lets you look up why they mattered later, without going through the whole book again.

That’s very useful, because from time to time you’ll probably wonder why you’re doing something, especially when it gets difficult.

At those moments, you can return to your notes.

How do you make your notes easy to find? I use a digital note-taking system, Obsidian. But there are many options. For example:

1. Obsidian.

2. Evernote.

3. OneNote.

4. Notion.

The most important feature is being able to tag your notes. Then you can find everything about a particular subject with one click.

Regularly reread your insights

Once you have a system for storing your insights, it’s useful to use it for rereading as well as storage.

That lets you:

1. Remind yourself why something matters.

2. Check whether an insight is still relevant.

3. Find more examples or connections with other insights, actions or notes.

It’s powerful, because working with something helps you make it your own!

Pick a day each week and give it a try.

Experiment

To know whether something works for you, you first have to try it.

Follow the book first

When you’re unfamiliar with something, it’s good to do everything by the book at first. Otherwise, you get too caught up in your head and:

1. Make it far too difficult for yourself.

2. Don’t know whether it will work.

3. Find it hard to tell whether something doesn’t work or whether your own adjustments are the problem.

I really struggled with this when trying recipes. Just follow the recipe first and learn what you like, what works and what doesn’t.

Be aware of what happens

During this doing phase, it’s not yet helpful to make value judgments. You’re simply taking stock.

Trying a new recipe is a useful example. Take your time and note things such as:

• What do I need? An onion too?

• How many bowls, pans and cups do I need?

• How long does this recipe take from start to finish?

• Does it taste salty, sweet or sour?

• How filling is this meal, and for how long?

And so on. The key word here is curiosity!

Evaluate and adjust

Now you’ve done exactly what the book prescribed, you can decide for yourself whether you like it.

Only now is it time for a value judgment.

The most important question is:

• “Does this make things better?”

If so, look at how to keep it, turn it into a routine and optimize it.

If it doesn’t make things better, ask whether you want to try adjusting it. If so, the experiment starts again. If not, that’s fine too; just try something else.

Keep going until things do improve.

Try to do this without judging yourself. You’re trying something new, and that never goes perfectly on the first attempt! Expecting that of yourself would be unfair.

Returning to the recipe example, you might discover you hate chopping onions. You could leave them out. Or you might decide that the recipe needs too many pans and creates too much washing-up.

Then you could decide: “Okay, we’ll leave out that onion,” or “I’ll only make this recipe at weekends.”

Record everything in your notes:

1. What works, and why.

2. What doesn’t work, and why not.

3. What you’ll try differently.

The beauty of your notes is that they’re a living document. You can always change something; it’s never permanent.

New habits

Experimenting is followed by integration. You’ve decided you want to do something in a particular way because it adds value.

The trick now is to do it and keep doing it!

Start small

Starting often takes the most effort. That’s why it’s important to keep the beginning small.

Just as rolling a snowball makes it bigger and bigger, a small beginning naturally leads to the next step.

Connect it to another action

The next step is to connect this small action to something you already do during the day.

If you want to write for your blog every day, for example, you could open your text editor after breakfast, once you’ve put your plate on the counter.

The next small action is opening the document, followed by writing a sentence.

Before you know it, you’ve started!

Make it easier for next time

Because those initial actions can cost so much energy, removing all the friction is very effective.

For example, lay out all your running clothes the day before.

When you want to run, you won’t need to spend half an hour gathering everything. You can focus on the first small step: putting on your running clothes.

Before you know it, you’re out the door!

One-off actions

One-off actions are the easiest, but they’re still important. For example:

1. Buying things that make something easier or are necessary.

2. Throwing away things you no longer need or don’t want to consume.

Schedule these one-off actions around your regular life. If you already need to go into town, add a trip to MediaMarkt for something to your list, for example.

What you can do today

To finish, here are a few practical tips for reading your next self-help book:

1. Start small. Create a note or use pen and paper.

2. Write down at least one action step you want to take.

3. Connect that action step to a moment in your day.