This is the fourth of Tim Urban's series on Elon Musk, and this time it's about some reasoning processes that are made explicit, which LW readers should find very familiar. It's a potentially useful explicit model of how to make decisions for yourself.
http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/11/the-cook-and-the-chef-musks-secret-sauce.html
Small nitpick: I think the reason self-help has little effect is that most people don't apply it, not that they apply it and nothing happens.
I think a sizeable portion of people do things like daily affirmations. But even for applied self help there are often effects but the effect are neither that the person ends up as a billionaires or homeless.