The ten best self-help gurus

At the Guardian, Oliver Burkeman named the ten best self-help gurus.

One thinker on the list:

Seneca the Stoic

If you think your life is hard, pity Seneca, the Roman philosopher forced to commit ritual suicide by bleeding himself to death. Before that, though, he formulated many of the basic ideas of Stoicism, which bears little resemblance to the stiff-upper-lippery with which the word has come to be associated. One piece of advice: "Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while, 'Is this the condition that I feared?'" A splendid antidote to positive thinking: focus not on the best possible outcome but on the worst-case scenario and it loses much of its sting.

Read about the other gurus on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue