Why Self-Improvement Videos Don't Work

We live in the age of self-improvement. Self-improvement videos are everywhere, but few of them actually seem to work.
Having made YouTube videos myself, from the producer's side, I've noticed a few things. I'd like to talk about them here.

Advice that sells isn't advice that works

When you consume self-improvement content, you're hoping it will make you a better person. And what shows up in your YouTube feed is the content that gets rated well.

Effect and rating. There's a gap between the two.

The first gap is one of timing. Self-improvement content only produces effects when applied over the long term. But the rating happens immediately. You hit like or subscribe while watching, or right after. When you rate something that fast, there's no time to feel whether it worked. Nobody follows the advice in a video and then comes back months later to like and subscribe. You leave the like or the subscribe based on the feeling you get the instant you watch.

That's why the videos that rise to the top aren't the effective ones but the ones that stir up emotion. Motivational videos are the classic example. Which means self-improvement content has a lot of surface area for marketing. Just look at who's famous in Korean self-improvement YouTube right now. I'm not saying those people make bad content. Just think about which skill set lets a person wield influence in the self-improvement world.

The second gap is between effect and barrier to entry. If something delivers a big effect for a low barrier, it's a genuinely great method. High ROI, you could say. But unfortunately, barrier and effect are in a trade-off relationship.

For example, a video telling you to take cold showers¹ to boost dopamine will be popular. It feels like something you could try tomorrow morning. But telling people to see a psychiatrist, get an EEG or a temperament assessment, and get a prescription won't be popular. It's a high-barrier method that costs money, time, and the energy to research a clinic and book an appointment. It's also a boring story. But it definitely works.

Content that actually works demands big, concrete changes from you. That kind of content is hard to follow and, because it's specific, it isn't entertaining. That hurts your view-through rate and makes the video unlikely to blow up. Among all the content about dopamine, don't you notice that the stuff from actual psychiatrists rarely surfaces in your feed? (Same with skin — weird folk remedies trend instead of dermatologists.)

Unverified advice

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By the nature of YouTube, there's more experimental, superficial advice than verified methods. This holds just as true for blogs and Twitter, where the barrier to producing content is low. Usually it's advice drawn from personal experience, and lately, one step further, a lot of it is generated by ChatGPT. It also comes armed with trendy, science-flavored keywords like neuroscience.

It couldn't really be otherwise, because people are generally drawn to experimental stories rather than to what's commonly accepted. It's our sensation-seeking tendency. You finally opened YouTube to watch something fun — you're not about to sit through something boring. Verified methods are things you may already be using or have already heard of, or they work well but are hard to follow.

There's Andrew Huberman, who's sweeping through YouTube feeds these days. The moment he said on a podcast that you should roll your eyes upward to wake yourself up, Korean self-improvement channels went wild stitching together clips of it. But if this really worked, Starbucks revenue would drop, online cram-school instructors would be teaching dozing students how to wake up by rolling their eyes up, that would in turn show up on a Jung Seung-je superfan YouTube channel, and the government would be running a "roll your eyes up for a second" campaign to prevent drowsy driving. If a method really works, the field adopts it fast, no exceptions. You'd expect at least a video of someone testifying that it worked, but there isn't one.

Advice nobody has to answer for

One feature of self-improvement is that you never have to answer for your content. We have terms like pseudo-medicine and pseudo-science, but there's no such thing as pseudo-self-improvement. Bad medical information wrecks people; self-improvement has nothing like that. In self-improvement, anything good is good enough. The methods being proposed might do you a little good if you try them. But that's exactly why it's so easy to fall into the trap. You might be better off doing something else with that time. And it muddies what actually matters.

Self-improvement takes a long time to face criticism. Even the once-hot Miracle Morning is only now starting to get some pushback. An enormous amount of time and attention gets burned before something turns out to be less effective than it was advertised to be.

A lot of self-improvement content is also stitched together from clips of overseas gurus. Made that way, the meaning doesn't come across. You might understand the content itself, but it only turns into action once you've transplanted that person's mindset, and that's not something one or two videos can cover.
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Christians go to church every week because they want to live the way the Bible says — so if you want to transplant a master's mindset, don't you need more than one or two videos? Don't you need to go full fan: read the books, follow the guru's Twitter, and so on? Clips built from superficially extracted highlights almost never translate into action. You need to be a fan.

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Beyond the question of whether self-improvement videos work, I think feed-driven information consumption is deeply toxic to a knowledge worker's competitiveness. You need the ability to hold your own goals and go find and dig up content yourself. It's an ability that will only get rarer. With self-improvement videos too, you should be seeking out the specific skill you need — consuming content padded with marketing and abstractions designed to grow likes and subscribers will get you nowhere. I'll close with a line from Nassim Taleb, who holds a similar view.​
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Footnotes

1. Since cold showers came up — these days I do contrast baths. ↩