The basis of self help is that everyone has the capacity to improve his or her own life and needs simply to plug in to that power inside of themselves. The first awareness of the self-consciously driven power to help oneself appears in Self Help by Samuel Smiles, published in 1859. In a direct, take charge approach that would become synonymous with the term “self help” in later years, Smiles delivers the opening line of his book: “Heaven helps those that help themselves.” And it seems that, as they say, the rest is history, as self help books seem to be more popular than ever; books such as Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life and Dr. Phil’s line of books stay at the top of the bestsellers’ list often for years at a time. Clearly what people are seeking in these books they are finding, as self help books are an ever popular genre.
Marketdata’s research shows that the self help market was worth $8.5 billion in 2003. The self help industry includes a variety of tools and materials including motivational speaking seminars, self help books, self help hypnosis CDs, computer programs, personal coaching, weight and stress management.
The first in what has become a huge market of self help books was Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, published in 1936. Carnegie had failed at a series of careers until he wrote his book investigating the role of self-confidence in relationships and its correlation to success. People could relate to Carnegie’s honesty and realness, and bought 50 million copies.
Self help books cover a wide spectrum of subjects- a 2008 search on Amazon.com for “self help books” yielded 170,557 results. The highest number of books in any category is for Religion and Spirituality, but there are self help books about romance, photography, cooking, parenting, and virtually any other area where you’d care to help yourself. A popular line of self help books is the “For Dummies” series. These seek to demystify a wide variety of topics by providing an informally written guide about anything from grammar (English Grammar for Dummies) to Catholicism (Catholicism for Dummies), and most any other subject you’d like to know more about.
Self help is most definitely a trait reinforced in us from birth… how else would we learn to walk, to read, to make friends? It should come as no surprise that we would want to continue to help ourselves the older we get. And with access to things like self help books and self hypnosis CDs, it seems improbable that we’d ever have a good reason to stop helping ourselves.
