My self-help book

I have a huge distrust of self-help books. I know some good ones must exist, but in general they seem to me to follow a fundamentally weak model:

* Offer one pithy observation.
* Create as many variants of it as you need chapters.
* Fill those chapters with vaguely related blather and a lot of anecdotes.

Once I saw self-help books in this light, I experienced exactly the reaction you'd expect from me: I felt the urge to write one.

I do, however, have another Jon & Lobo book under contract, and I'm madly working on it, so taking on a self-help book seems like a bad idea.

Which is why I'm going to write mine in miniature, with just the main observation and the intros to the chapters.

Tomorrow: We begin.