I think P.T. Barnum wrote the prototypical "Self-help: finance/entrepreneurship" book in "The Art of Money Getting: Or, Golden Rules for Making Money" [0]. A lot of it sounds like the stuff you hear getting hammered to death on motivational TED talks. It's a pretty short book and he doesn't go into too much exposition on a lot of the issues he addresses, with the exception of debt. He probably spends half of the already short book on talking about the evils of debt, especially debt put into things that aren't assets. It's not the debt that is the problem, it's the mindset you have to be in to take the debt, the mindset that the debt puts you in, and the mindset of the type of person that continues to use debt, especially destructively. There are some closely related issues with spending money, which tie in nicely.
It's an interesting read. This book was written in 1880, and if not for the dated writing style, would fit right in to the modern day self-help genre. It really helps underscore the idea that there's "nothing new under the sun."
