> "Here's a few good points and ideas, surrounded by a fuck-ton of anecdotes and proverbs, because you're not going to pay $20 for a magazine article."

Though to be fair, sometimes those anecdotes are useful. I like examples, especially ones where an idea is applied to a situation that resembles my own. Also repetition is helpful to actually have a concept sink in.

Also, what's filler for you may be the most relevant section for someone else (e.g. an anecdote that matches their situation but not yours, or necessary repetition).

Also, I think software engineers, at least, have a bias to optimize for concision that can sometimes be counterproductive. For instance, I doubt a moderately long article that fully explains the core concept of cognitive behavior therapy would be as successful at actually changing the behavior of a depressed person than a more "redundant" book-length version. Maybe the short version would still work for some people, but that doesn't mean that's the best version for the majority of people.

I think we’ve lost the plot. The important thing is if you can recall and then use what’s in the book.

If it takes repetition or length to do it, so be it.

Some books even recommend you read them a second time for that purpose, like Getting Things Done and How To Win Friends and Influence People.

I think for the layman, those anecdotes that strike on pathos are what sticks. I remember the stories about patients who avoid mishaps through checklists that caught the wrong limb being marked and their (understandably) irate reaction more than statistics.

This is exactly what I remember from the book.

I actually think this book is one of the rarer examples where the various stories and anecdotes that are sometimes seen (rightly) as “padding”, are actually in this case quite effective at getting the message across in quite a memorable way.

It’s been a while since I read it but I seem to recall a lot of similarly effective stories about airline pilots too.

A book needs to be read 10-15 times in order to internalize it. Otherwise, when you're in the moment, you'll forget and revert to your usual pattern.

Is there research that 10-15 times is the threshold or is that based on your personal experience?

It's based on anecdotal evidence, particularly with sales training.

A charitable view I hold on days when my mood is good is, for each of us at any given point in life, there exists a magic sequence of words that will make a concept stick. That may be a story that hits one "right in the feels". That may be a sentence, the right sentence, that makes a complex concept finally click in one's head. So all those books, each talking about the same thing, each repeating an article's worth of content 200 different ways - they're maximizing the amount of readers that find the magical uttering, for whom it all falls into place.

On regular days with regular mood, I say it's just easy way of milking people, and that self-help genre died soon after being born, i.e. back in the days of Dale Carnegie.

IMHO both of these views are true. Some books make the "milking" part more obvious than others.

Last year I heard someone call out the value in your mind being exposed to a topic for a length of time. I've found this to be true. I recently reread The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and forming my own mental model and brushing it against what three book had to say gave me more value than just absorbing the book's content.

I'm so so immensely relieved to learn I'm not the only one feeling this things.

Happened with all the self-help or self-improvement books I've touched.

The most excessive example of this being "getting things done" which was very trendy about ten years ago: the first third of the book were literally about the author bragging about results (but without any way to fact-check).

Have you read the book “Give and Take”?