The 7 Things We Really Want (Based on 297+ Self-Help Book Titles)

I Analyzed the Titles of Over 297 Best-Selling Self-Help Books (and Read Over 100) to Identify Our Core Desires

Photo by Shiromani Kant on Unsplash

I read about one self-help book a week, on average. To keep track of that, I have a “Reading List” in Trello to track what I’ve read and what I’ll read next. Recently, my queue was ran dry.

So, I googled “The 100 Best Self-Help Books Ever Written,” and “The 100 Best-Selling Self-Help Books of all time,” and read every result on the first page of Google for each. I then copied and pasted all those book titles into a list in Trello, getting rid of some that only appeared in one such list and combining ones that appeared multiple times, then rank ordered them by best-selling (and, to be honest, ones that I had heard of before).

Then, I grouped them into categories. I tried all different kinds of category names — finance, relationships, productivity, etc — but I had to keep renaming those categories to get them to fit properly.

That’s when something strange jumped out at me: these categories speak to the underlying desire of the reader (me). First, I have a desire or problem, then I pick out a book whose title suggests it can help me fulfill that desire or solve that problem.