There’s a moment in just about every reader’s life. A moment when you get a temptation to pick up and read a self-help book. Well, what if I’ll learn how to win friends and influence people (you do it with positive thinking), study the 7 habits of the highly effective people (most of the habits have to do with positive thinking and buying a nice leather organizer), learn “the Secret” (“the Secret” is positive thinking), get things done (you write down all your brilliant ideas in a whole bunch of folders and buy a really nice label printer) — maybe then I’ll become rich, you think.
Yes, the self-help industry probably created a lot of millionaires. Most of them are the people who sell the books, seminars and organizing tchotchkes. I’ve also heard about one dude who found an obscure Victorian era self-help book, scanned it, replaced all the outdated words in it, turned it into an eBook and made some serious bank selling it on a website.
Maybe there are people who have awoken the giant within and now have a 4 hour work week. I simply don’t know. I’ve met a few billionaires and a many millionaires, and I’ve listened to many of them telling the story of how they became rich. Most of the stories involved luck, very good sales and people skills, perseverance, and hard work. But only twice I’ve heard a self-help book with a preposterous title mentioned by these people. This book did wonders for them. I’ll tell you what this book if you’ll buy my book or send me $100 via PayPal. Well, all right, since you’ve been reading my blog for so long I’ll tell you. That one book is … drumroll … Sams Teach Yourself Perl in 24 Hours. The funny thing is that wealth creation can be accomplished with magic words that look similar to this:
my $dbh = DBI->connect( "DBI:$driver:$database", $user, $password, ) or die $DBI::errstr;
Side note: there’s no apostrophe in “Sams” because the company is named after not after somebody named Sam, but after Howard W. Sams, a contemporary of Dale Carnegie.
In any case, the internet is lousy with stories of absolutely ordinary people who became rich after picking up a computer language book. You don’t believe me? Read this one and let me know what you think.