I am sick and tired of self-help books. Moreso, I am sick and tired of people pretending that self-help books are bigger than they are. To see dressed-up advice literature like Outliers and Originals constantly hit top recommendation charts only for people within the same breath to say “Oh, I hate self-help! I only read real books!” has driven me near to the point of mental insanity.

Yet, despite all of this, there is one book I would argue breaks from its shackles. It’s the only good self-help book.

No one really knew James Clear before Atomic Habits was written. Obviously he had a following — you kind of need one to write a book — but I would argue definitively that Clear pre-book and post-book had very different scales of an audience.

Clear is a simple sort of guy. Each week, he sends out a newsletter that is more or less six sentences long. It could honestly be three, but something tells me he feels compelled to give his audience just a little bit more (plus, the “1-1-1” newsletter doesn’t quite have the same zing as the “3-2-1” newsletter). This newsletter consists of 3 small thoughts from Clear, 2 quotes he read (that he often got the thoughts from), and one question (that he often asked himself to get those thoughts). Basically he is just giving you what he was going to do anyway.

Well, Clear has done this newsletter for awhile — long before any book. Because of this, he’s collected a lot of single-sentence thoughts. He got to the point where he could take a bundle of these thoughts, and stitch them together in an article. Then, he got so many articles, he went ahead and stitched them together in a book. In fact, Clear’s workflow is so transparent in his writing, that we could probably break it down exactly step by step:

1. Read a lot. (A standard requirement for most “thought leaders”)
2. As you read, write down ideas you get from the reading. Save some quotes and questions too, for the fun of it.
3. Gather enough of these that you can turn it into a weekly newsletter.
4. As you build your empire of shower thoughts, begin to bundle them together. Write filler text that allows you to turn them into an article. Make sure to follow those zany headline and SEO guidelines while you do it.
5. Write a book, following more or less the same procedure.

You see, here’s my problem with self-help. Self-help is usually just a single shower thought that’s then sandbagged into being 500 pages. Outliers can be more or less summarized by “if you practice a lot, you’ll be good at something”. Take that point then give 30 examples as to how it works.

But here’s the thing about Clear: he’s collected a lot of these thoughts. And sure, they’re all more or less related to habit-building — Clear’s bread and butter — but they are each independent and mutually exclusive. Things like “associate a bad habit with a habit you want to build” and “do the smallest possible increment of a habit to get it flowing consistently” would usually be the subject of an entire Malcolm Gladwell book, but in Atomic Habits they’re given only a few paragraphs. And on top of all that, Atomic is about half the size! [1]

A (mostly joking) metric I used to use for books was that of “revelations per page”. It is essentially a measure of how many pages do you have to go until you find something that you’ve never thought of before. For books like Originals or Outliers, the revelations per page is fairly low. This is mostly because of the boring examples stuffed into the book which reiterate the same point over and over again — usually a sign that the author doesn’t have much to say. Atomic Habits, in contrast, had a significantly higher measure of revelations per page — and this was after I had already been reading Clear’s newsletters for a few months!

To cap this post off, I wanted to end with a few reading recommendations I would say have a high measure of “revelations per page” — books that don’t bother wasting time with unnecessary filler, and are often whose publishers struggle to make longer than 100 pages.

• Nassim Taleb’s Incerto – Taleb is not for everyone, as I have said before. He rambles often, in a way you will either find immensely entertaining or egotistically dull. Personally, I’m in the former camp. Taleb’s books are also much longer than the other three I recommend, yet despite that they are often filled with points that are drastically different chapter-by-chapter. So really, it’s long because its multiple different Malcolm Gladwell books in one. Take in mind though that Taleb is more or less emulating the style of a literary great… speaking of which….
• Friedrich Nietzsche – It is funny that Nietzsche is considered to be a philosopher, when in hindsight he is probably the one who invented advice books in the first place. His take is much more poetic, much more flavorful. But he is more or less espousing opinions on how one ought to live rather than something more complicated like the basis of morality or the subject of qualia. It is also worth noting that, for the age of his works, he is shockingly easy to understand — more like a contemporary Twitter user than a 19th century author.
• The Stoics – Sure, Ryan Holiday kind of ruined Stoicism. I don’t think it was particularly his fault — man was just trying to get his bag — but now any time you mention Stoicism anywhere online a bunch of people will clown on you. That being said, if you actually go back to the first-hand sources — Epictetus, Aurelius, Seneca — there’s a lot of good life advice to know. Information that, given the fact these guys lived in Ancient Rome, really stood the test of time.
• Robert Greene – I know it is funny to make fun of Greene’s constant supervillain larping, and please do not let me stop you. But I have to give some credit where credit is due as Greene’s books do in fact follow every principle I’ve given thus far: they usually contain around 30-40 independent ideas all centered around one general category, and keep to only one or two examples per idea.

[1] – In terms of pages, they are the same. But Atomic overall has a lot less writing/density than Gladwell’s books. Think of it as comparing 400 pages in Crime and Punishment versus 400 pages in Boys & Girls Part I.