I read a lot of personal development books last years (90% of them written by americans folks by the way 🤔).
Recently I fell back to what I read most before my study years : sci-fy, fantasy, dystopia. I devoured a trilogy of 400-pages books in two weeks, whereas it was more or less a pain to go through a 300-pages book about how to be become successfull in a month.
The moral of this is: story hangs me to reading, whereas reading manuals of how my life could be better felt like a struggle.
The consumption of personal development books have exploded last years. If I just take a look at my own country (France), figures are staggering for a market that is structurally thinning.
A French essayist named Julia de Funès wrote an essay around that phenomenon, which could be translated as (Im)personal development, telling (among others) that despite calling itself personal development, these books give the same manual for everyone, whatever their backgrounds. An empirical critic I could also see is to make a clear review of what brought me these readings. More or less, it helped me to change in the short-term, but never in the long run. As I took a personnal coach last year, I saw that a simple human relationship with deep enough and regular conversations can bring you more than a dozen books carefully read with shiny to-dos to apply.
It’s a subject that must be consider. Starting again from my own experience, all of my friends that are trying to start a business or simply evolve professionally always have a pile of those books with click-bait summary like « everything’s going to be perfect from the moment you start reading this book ». Well, in real world, it often doesn’t work that way. You start something big, then fail, then mourn about your failure, and then start again.
To put it in a nutshell, read what makes like reading, and think twice before some folk gives you a ready-to-apply manual for success. You’ll have to deal with reality out there 😉.