Self Help

Most self-help books promise to take you from 0 to 100, but many people reading them are starting at minus 100. The author of What's Stopping You? picks books that helped him come to grips with his own insecurities.

The author who gave us The Happiness Project passes on tips for happier living, with a little help from Samuel Johnson, Benjamin Franklin and a nun with humour on her mind.

In times of political or personal turmoil, there's a tendency to seek solace in stripping back life to its bare essentials. Minimalist thought is threaded through Stoicism and Zen Buddhism; absence and space became major preoccupations of 1960s US art. Kyle Chayka, the art critic and author of The Longing for Less, recommends five books on the philosophy that underpins the present fad for minimalist self-help.

The CEO of iOpener, a human asset management consultancy, explains how you can increase happiness and thus productivity in the workplace. She picks five essential reads for bosses and employees.

Since the publication of Samuel Smiles' Self-Help (1859) in Victorian Britain, self-help has become a billion dollar industry—and its influence is even felt in the contemporary novel, says Harvard literary scholar Beth Blum, author of The Self-Help Compulsion, a new history of the rise of self-help narratives in modern literature.