[Cthulhu_]

I can't stop referring to the irony that the gist of "the 4-hour work week" is to write a book about working only 4 hours a week.

But also pretty much all of the self-help books I've read can be summarized in a few paragraphs, that is, a blog post. The rest is repetition or examples. Which are important for learning and understanding, I suppose, but when an AI can both tell you the gist of it while applying it directly to your current situation, they can't compete.

[wyclif]

Tim Ferriss has been called out on these "ironies" for years now: https://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/01/08/5-time-management-...

[NeutralCrane]

The repetition and examples aren’t there for learning. They are there for monetization.

This is my biggest issue with the self-help industry. There is a lot of self-help books out there with ideas that are genuinely valuable, or at least worth considering. But as you say, the entirety of the idea can be conveyed perfectly well in a blog post. But you can’t sell a blog post. So it has to be padded out with cruft into a book length publication that can be sold to people.

That’s how AI undermines the industry. It has those general ideas and can convey them in the simplistic, cruftless versions that are most helpful, and can iterate back and forth with someone on applications to their own life.