Read Literature, Not Self-Help
When I was 16 years old, I thought about ending my life. I hated high school. I dressed in black. I spent hours lying on my bed, listening to The Cure. I was seriously depressed.
Until my sophomore English teacher assigned us to read Siddhartha, the 1922 novel by Hermann Hesse.
Even though English had always been my favorite class, at that point, my depression was so bad that I’d stopped doing homework. But Siddhartha made me sit up and pay attention. Here was an author saying something different from anything I’d heard before, in 10 years of public education.
What stood out to me about Siddhartha was that the protagonist (let’s call him Sid) goes through a number of distinct stages in his life. There’s the student stage, where he learns to “think, wait, and fast.” Then he becomes a lover, enamored with a beautiful courtesan. This leads him to apprentice himself to a successful merchant so he can learn to make money. Eventually, he leaves behind this stage, too, to become a wandering student of philosophy.
I realized that if Sid could reinvent himself over and over, so could I. I could move on from the arrogant stage that had caused me to lose friends and my sense of meaning in life. I could leave behind the depressed stage where I’d been wallowing in meaninglessness and negative thoughts about myself. I didn’t know what the next stage was going to be, but I knew it could be different. I still had a long and winding road ahead of me, but my perception of my situation, and my attitude toward it, changed overnight.
This story reminds me of the power that books, and especially great literature, have to transform our consciousness. They show us different possibilities, and allow us to think thoughts we’ve never thought before. Considering that everything we experience in this life is mediated by our minds, anything that has the power to change our minds has the power to change our reality. It’s literally magic.
But here’s the thing: Siddhartha is not a self-help book. It’s a classic novel. The book that probably had the deepest impact on my life–and maybe even saved it–is a work of fiction.
If you’re only reading self-help and business bestsellers, you’re missing out.
Look, I get it. As a therapist, coach, and long-time student of personal development, my desk is littered with books like Atomic Habits by James Clear, Essentialism by Greg Mckeown, and Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss.
But when I talk with friends, or with other writers and thinkers in my field, it sometimes feels like self-help and business books are all we’re reading.
Novels, plays, and poetry collections are some of the most impactful books you’ll ever read. By putting ideas in the form of memorable stories and vivid metaphors, they engage our brains in ways that nonfiction simply can’t. Reading fiction, especially literary fiction, has even been shown to improve theory of mind, our ability to understand and relate to the thoughts and feelings of others.
Finally, if we all just read the same popular self-help and business books, we all end up having the same ideas. You know: building small habits is good. Multitasking is bad. Morning routines are important.
It’s not that they’re bad ideas. But if you’ve spent any amount of time on self-improvement Twitter or YouTube, you know that everyone is saying the same damn things.
The truly original thinkers and creators out there are getting their ideas from somewhere else: oftentimes from older books, weirder books, books no one else is reading. Bestselling author Ryan Holiday has built his whole career on reading Marcus Aurelius and Seneca. The Cultural Tutor, one of the fastest-growing accounts on Twitter, spends hours a day reading art history and classics.
The novelist Haruki Murakami wrote, "If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking."
In order to think differently, you have to read differently. And if we’re going to solve any of our biggest personal, societal, or global problems, we all need to think differently, creatively, and unconventionally. So don’t just read the same 12 or so self-improvement and business books everyone else is reading. Read novels, plays, history, philosophy, poetry. Read literature. It could change your life, or even save it.
