Why Self-Improvement Matters: Where the Idea Came From and What the Research Says Works

Start hereSmiles's Self-Help opens by calling "Heaven helps those who help themselves" a well-tried maxim. Yet the book grew from talks he gave to young men teaching each other in a hired room. Is self-help something you do alone?

Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help (1859) began as talks he gave to a group of young men who were teaching each other in a hired room. This page starts with the word, then looks at two early self-improvers in their own words. Then it turns to what research says helps people change, and what tends not to. It ends with five small things to try.

011. A simple example

Two people make a New Year’s resolution about exercise. One writes stop being lazy. The other writes walk after work on Mondays and Thursdays, and tick it off on the calendar.

The studies below look at the differences between those two lines: doing versus stopping, a set time and place, and a record you can see.

022. What the word means

The verb improve comes from an Anglo-French verb, emprouer, meaning to make profit from. One of its senses today is to increase the value of land or property, for example by farming it. Its first known use in English is from the 15th century.

Our reading: at its root, to improve something meant to get more value from it.

033. Where self-help comes from

Franklin’s chart

In his Autobiography, Benjamin Franklin describes the “bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection”. He listed 13 virtues, and made a little book with a page for each one.

• He gave a week’s strict attention to each virtue in turn.
• He marked “by a little black spot, every fault” on a daily chart.
• He was surprised to find himself so much fuller of faults than he had imagined, but saw them diminish.

His verdict on the whole effort is worth reading. He wrote that he “never arrived at the perfection” he had hoped for, “but fell far short of it”. “Yet I was, by the endeavour, a better and a happier man”. He wrote this part at Passy, near Paris, in 1784. Our summary of Franklin’s Autobiography goes further.

Smiles’s Self-Help

Samuel Smiles signed the introduction to Self-Help in London in September 1859. He wrote that the book began as an address to evening classes formed in a northern town for mutual improvement.

• Two or three young men had started meeting in winter evenings to improve themselves by exchanging knowledge.
• As more joined, they eventually hired a room that had been used as a temporary cholera hospital.
• In his words, “Those who knew a little taught those who knew less”.

The book itself opens by calling “Heaven helps those who help themselves” a well-tried maxim.

In a preface dated May 1866, Smiles answered two objections:

• Some readers had taken the title to mean a eulogy of selfishness. He replied that helping oneself in the highest sense “involves the helping of one’s neighbours”.
• Others said it noticed too many men who had succeeded, and too few of the multitude who had failed. His answer was that failure is “the best discipline of the true worker”.

Our reading: the worry about success stories that leave out the failures was put to Smiles within seven years of his first edition.

Partly Self-help means doing it alone. Smiles did praise self-reliance, writing that “help from without is often enfeebling in its effects”. But his book grew from talks to a class of people teaching each other, and he wrote that helping oneself in the highest sense involves helping one’s neighbours.

044. How big is the industry?

We looked for a reliable figure for the size of the self-improvement industry and did not find one we could check. The one commercial estimate we opened describes a research process of industry interviews and its own modelling, and sells the full report. So we print no number.

055. What research says helps

Specific, hard goals

Edwin Locke and Gary Latham summed up 35 years of research on goal-setting theory in 2002. Even critics of goal-setting accept its main finding. In 2009 four business-school researchers wrote that hundreds of studies had shown specific, challenging goals can boost performance.

The same critics argued that the benefits had been overstated and the harms largely ignored. The harms they listed included a narrow focus that neglects other areas and a rise in unethical behaviour. Locke and Latham replied, in words the critics later quoted, that the critics’ evidence was “largely anecdotes”.

Our page on turning a big goal into a step for today covers this debate in more detail, with a planner you can try.

If-then plans

Research calls a plan in the form if this happens, then I will do that an implementation intention.

• A 2024 meta-analysis of 642 tests found that these plans helped with thinking, feeling and behaviour outcomes.
• Effects were larger when plans had an if-then format, people were highly motivated, and the plans were rehearsed.
• The same paper found strong signs of publication bias. Its corrected estimates ranged from d = .35 with one method to d = .15 with a more conservative one, and the authors call the effect robust but small.

Habits take weeks to months

In one study, 96 volunteers chose an eating, drinking or activity behaviour to do daily in the same context, such as after breakfast, for 12 weeks.

• The time it took participants to reach 95% of their own limit of automaticity ranged from 18 to 254 days.
• The curves were fitted to each person’s scores over the study’s 84 days. Our reading: times longer than that are projections from the curves.
• Missing one opportunity to do the behaviour did not materially affect the habit formation process.

Doesn't hold up Every habit takes 21 days to form. In this study the time ranged from 18 to 254 days. James Clear traces the 21 days to the plastic surgeon Maxwell Maltz. Maltz wrote that it takes “a minimum of about 21 days for an old mental image to dissolve and a new one to jell”. Our Atomic Habits summary has the full story.

Tracking progress

A 2016 meta-analysis of 138 randomised studies, with 19,951 people, found that interventions to monitor goal progress helped people reach their goals on average. The effect was larger when the outcomes were reported or made public, and when the information was physically recorded.

Our reading: Franklin’s chart was an early version of this, though we found no study of his chart as such.

Something to do, not something to stop

A 2020 study followed 1,066 people from the general public who made New Year’s resolutions. Those with goals to do something were significantly more successful than those with goals to avoid something: 58.9% against 47.1%. Success was self-reported, and at one year 55% of those who answered considered themselves successful.

Two cautions. Participants wrote their own resolutions, and were randomised only to different levels of support. Our reading: so the do-versus-stop comparison shows a link, not proof that the wording caused the success. Three of the four authors receive royalties for a book on New Year’s resolutions, based in part on this study.

066. What tends not to help

A 2002 paper by Oettingen and Mayer compared two ways of thinking about the future. Positive expectations, judging a wished-for future as likely, predicted high effort and successful performance, but the reverse was true for positive fantasies. The four studies covered graduates looking for a job, students with a crush, undergraduates facing an exam and patients having hip-replacement surgery. Effort and performance were measured weeks or months later, up to 2 years.

Partly Picturing your success helps you get there. In these studies, enjoying a fantasy of success went with less effort, while judging success likely went with more. A separate 1999 study found that students who pictured the steps, such as good study habits, studied more and got better grades.

Our page on affirmations looks at a related idea, repeating positive statements to yourself, and what later studies found.

077. How to use it

• Write it as something to do. Walk after work rather than stop being lazy.
• Add one if-then line. If it is 6 pm on Monday, then I put on my shoes.
• Keep the same time and place, and expect weeks to months. A missed day is not a reset.
• Keep a record you can see, or tell someone. Franklin’s chart is an old version of the same idea.
• Improve with others. Smiles’s audience was a small group teaching each other. The stretch-zone page has a tool for choosing the next small step.

08Quick answers

09Use this

10Quick quiz

How we checked this · Last checked October 2026

• We read Franklin's Autobiography and Smiles's Self-Help in their Project Gutenberg texts, and Merriam-Webster for the word, in a browser because it blocks scripts.
• For the research we read each study's abstract, the accepted manuscript of the 2024 if-then meta-analysis, and the 2009 goal-setting critique and its rejoinder.
• We read Locke and Latham's 2002 review in abstract only, so we give its scope and not its detailed figures.
• The habit study's abstract reports 96 volunteers, 82 with enough data to analyse, a model that fitted for 62 and a good fit for 39; it does not say which group the 18 to 254 days covers, so we give the range as the abstract does.
• For picturing success we also read the abstract of a 1999 study that compared picturing the steps with picturing the outcome.
• The 2020 resolutions study was not randomised by goal type, and three of its authors earn royalties from a related book; both are stated on the page.
• We found no size estimate for the self-improvement industry with a method we could check, so we give none.

How we check every article →

11Sources