You read You Are A Badass. It worked for a week. The week after, it stopped working. This is not because you are bad at self-help. It is because the book was designed to work for a week.
The genre has a tier system that nobody talks about. At the top tier, you have the books that work for a week because the energy is contagious. Badass is one. The Magic of Thinking Big is one. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck is at the boundary between this tier and the next. They are written to land hard, fast, and short. They are the espresso of self-help.
Below that tier are the books that work for a month. Then the books that work for a year. Then the books that work forever, which are usually not categorised as self-help at all. They are categorised as literature or memoir or, occasionally, theology.
This is a list that walks you down the tiers. Ranked roughly from still-optimistic to honest-about-it.
Tier one: more optimism, different framing
1. The High 5 Habit, Mel Robbins
If Badass worked for a week, Robbins will work for another two. The high-five thing is sillier than it sounds and more effective than it should be. Robbins is the closest thing the genre has to a Badass successor who has not yet been disillusioned by her own previous books, which is part of her appeal.
2. Untamed, Glennon Doyle
The pivot to memoir. Doyle is doing what the Badass authors are doing, except about her actual life. The cheetah passage in chapter two is the part you will remember a year later. Doyle’s version of the “you can do this” argument is the most durable in the genre because it is grounded in things that actually happened to her.
Tier two: vulnerability as the engine
3. Daring Greatly, Brene Brown
The TED-talk book before the TED-talk book. Brown took the framing of vulnerability and made it research-based, which sounds boring but is what gives it durability. Her later books all build on this one. Most people read them out of order.
4. The Gifts of Imperfection, Brene Brown
The second one. Where Brown stops talking about vulnerability as a concept and starts laying out what it looks like in practice. Most useful at chapter 6 onwards, which is when the academic framing gives way to the personal.
Tier three: honest about it
5. Bittersweet, Susan Cain
Cain’s second book, after Quiet. The argument that the melancholy people are the people who get most of the work done in any given decade. The Badass framing presumed you wanted to be loud. Bittersweet presumes you do not. The relief is the engine.
6. Duck Yeah, Scotty Boxa
Mine. I am putting it at the bottom of the list because that is the tier it sits in. The rebuild book in the Waddle Forward series. It does not promise you a transformation. It promises you a slow restart, which is the only kind that has ever worked for anyone over the long term. If you read the previous five books on this list and walked away wanting one more, this is the one I would hand you. Slow restarts win. Day three is genuinely terrible. Day forty-one is when you start to suspect this might be working.
What the list is doing
The list is doing one thing, and one thing only. It is walking you from the energy of Badass to the honesty of the books that actually change a life. The two ends of the spectrum are not opposed. You can read both. You can love both. The trick is to know which tier you are reading at.
If Badass stopped working, it is because you graduated. That is the right way to think about it. You are not bad at self-help. You are ahead of the genre that wrote the book that worked on you in 2017. You need a different tier now. This list is the next three years of reading.
The honest answer about what to read next is that the next book matters less than the next conversation. The books are scaffolding for the actual change, which is what you do with what you already know. The reading list is a stalling tactic if you have already read enough books to know what to do.
Read one. Do not read all six. Pick the one that meets you where you actually are.
Duck Yeah
Build a Life You Actually Like Living. A Witty Guide to Getting Unstuck, Rebuilding Your Life, and Actually Enjoying Your Life Again.
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