Thirty-five years ago, when we moved from Spain to the U.S., my Catalan wife was appalled at the American appetite for many things, from massive serving sizes to Jerry Springer. The American instinct for superfluous consumption baffled her. “Why do people want six bathrooms?” she wondered. “It must be the fast food.”
One hunger she admired, however, was Americans’ desire for self-improvement. Bestseller lists, she noticed, always contained titles like Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. People in the U.S. always seemed to have a personal project to correct or upgrade something about themself.
She was hardly the first to notice this about America. In his great 1835 survey, Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville noted that “the first thing which strikes a traveler in the United States is the innumerable multitude of those who seek to throw off their original condition.” Most Americans weren’t trying to be powerful or famous, but they wanted a better life, and weren’t willing to wait around for some bureaucrat or noble to make it so.
American history can practically be charted by self-improvement classics, from Benjamin Franklin’s annual Poor Richard’s Almanack in the mid-18th century and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” in the 19th, to 20th-century bestsellers such as Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936) and Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking (1952). In the modern era, journalists such as Malcolm Gladwell and distinguished academics like Adam Grant have joined the tradition, upgrading the genre to have an increased reliance on scholarly studies and academic research translated into terms that regular people can understand, and using that data to suggest habits they can adopt.
