As a miserable teen I developed quite a crush on the self-help industry. On my darker days I could be found poring over the works of the industry’s earliest progenitors – Napoleon Hill, Dale Carnegie, Mary Baker Eddy, Norman Vincent Peale. Later, I moved on to their modern-day successors – Wayne Dyer, Steven Covey, Tony Robbins, Leo Buscaglia, etc. I couldn’t get enough of the stuff, the central message being that a positive mental attitude was all that stood between…