The point is: would you rather spend your time playing the game, or reading someone's stab in the dark on the mechanics of the game based on his/her personal experience and questionable expertise?

It's much easier to get the Sword of Awesomeness +10 when you follow the walkthrough.

I would rather do both, actually.

I can find out a lot of stuff on my own, but it never helps to read what someone else has figured out.

Analogy: I can figure out design patterns of programming on my own, but I can speed up the process if I read a book on it. Same with design patterns for happiness and success.

There are lots of things I consider possibilities now that were not even on my map before I read self-help books.

EDIT: s/never helps/never hurts/

Personally, I agree (although I haven't actually read any books yet, but I'm interested). But I would much rather spend 100% of my time playing the game and 0% learning mechanics than I would spend 50% of my time playing and 50% learning mechanics. I imagine the anti-self-help attitude comes from looking at the 50/50 (or more extreme) people.

Isn't that what most people do, though? And most people are not living the optimal version of their lives, or anywhere close (optimal being defined as the life one wishes one had).

Before I started reading self-help materials, I was intellectually gifted but I was a mess in terms of communication with others, emotional stability, self-limiting beliefs, knowledge of possibilities in life, luminosity aka self-insight, strategicness aka getting shit done with a plan, etc.

Studying self-help materials for the past 5 years is the most important thing I've done in my life (a quite dramatic statement perhaps, but that's how it feels to me).

That's why I get a bit upset and argumentative when people slam self-help: it's a bit like saying I shouldn't have wasted my time reading all those things, and instead should have just plodded on in darkness.

Got any good book recommendations?

What are your goals? Easier to recommend something if I know.

My guess about the people who don't want to read self-help books would be this - they read a few, the ones that they read, turn out to be useless (they pick the wrong ones). so they pretty much give up the entire genre. Trust me, for every good self-help book out there, there are dozens of insanely useless ones - it is not easy to pick the good ones on one's own. self-help books are a big industry - even those who never read anything in their life, would give a few minutes of their attention to self-help books, because ultimately, everyone wants to become better at something

I just wish there were some good ways to quickly separate junk from good books.

I think most peoples' distaste with the self-help genre is that the books often feel more like a distraction or a tease than a source of change and improvement. People read the books and start to feel productive and like the solution to their problems is within their grasp. Then when the book is finished, almost no change in behavior or thinking result and you quickly lose the "high" you had while consuming the book.

Psychological and behavioral problems are highly individualistic and can be quite complex. Say you have a problem with procrastination. Maybe you have ADD? Maybe you are depressed? Maybe you are tired? Maybe you are afraid of failure? Maybe you hate your work? Maybe your mind is focused on other problems you need to address? Maybe your work is too difficult? Etc. We could go on listing hundreds of possible causes. Well, using a tomato timer or implementing GTD isn't going to fix any of those problems.

I think that the few well written and researched self-help books that are out there can give people useful strategies if they already have their shit together, but for most people they end up as a dud. That is if these people even finish the books to begin with.