I'm publishing a book that I think can fairly be described as a rationalist approach to self-improvement. Whereas many self-help books focus mainly on stories and what worked well for the author, our book takes a very different approach. My co-author, Jeremy Stevenson, and I read over 100 of the most popular self-improvement books of all time and carefully reviewed more than 20 types of therapy in an attempt to answer the question: What are all of the most useful psychological strategies for improving your life? Every time a book or therapy said to do something or provided a method or technique, we extracted it. We then carefully categorized the ~500 techniques.

Our conclusion, which surprised us, was that to a reasonable degree of approximation, we were able to subsume all of these numerous approaches within just 12 high-level psychological strategies. We call these "The 12 Levers," which is also the name of our book. We also investigated the evidence behind each of these levers. The book does include stories, but they are not the focus - we choose one or two stories to tell about the history of each Lever or a person who embodies it to [...]

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Outline:

(01:41) 1. A lot of techniques are recycled or repackaged

(03:20) 2. A lot of self-help techniques dont have as much evidence as youd think

(06:30) 3. Some techniques work better than others, but only on average

(07:59) 4. At a fundamental level, you control surprisingly few things.

(10:32) 5. Hundreds of self-help techniques exist, but they all boil down to just 12 broad psychological strategies for improving your life

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First published:
May 2nd, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ru4cBxNzFpzwgh6z8/a-new-rationalist-self-improvement-book-the-12-levers

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.