Collection · Curated by Alice
The self-help books that started it all
- 12
- books to download
- 1890–1925
- 35 years apart
- PDF & EPUB
- free, no sign-up
Modern self-help did not begin with a TED talk. It began around 1900, with a loose movement called New Thought whose writers argued that circumstances follow attention — and who wrote it down in books short enough to read on a train.
Almost everything published since is downstream of these. As a Man Thinketh (1903) is 29 pages and has never been out of print. The Science of Getting Rich (1910) is the book Rhonda Byrne credited as the direct source of The Secret. Acres of Diamonds was a lecture Russell Conwell delivered more than six thousand times, using the proceeds to found a university.
Read them as history or as advice, but read the originals: they are far stranger, plainer and more argumentative than their descendants. All are in the public domain in the United States and free here in PDF and EPUB.
As a Man Thinketh
The Science of Getting Rich
The Game of Life and How to Play It
Acres of Diamonds
The Art of Public Speaking
From Poverty to Power
Eight pillars of prosperity
The Way of Peace
How to Live on 24 Hours a Day
The Power of Concentration
Memory: How to Develop, Train, and Use It
The Key to Success