I was disheartened when I read about all these successful people and their lofty advice. I was more disheartened when I realized their advice is just the random stuff they happened to do that on their path to success, and that equivalent advice of the myriad failures that complement them would never be heard (and that both were of approximately equal value). Despite how in the overmind the notion of "correlation is not causation," this snake oil is surprisingly only beginning to go out of fashion.
I like to read self-help. I think it can actually change your life.
The problem is finding actual good self-help. Most stuff is garbage or dives too deep into a specific topic.
One of my favorite authors is Orison Swett Marden (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orison_Swett_Marden) who writes well-rounded self-help and founded a magazine ironically called "Success". There's also Samuel Smiles who wrote the original title called "Self-Help".
If you go back in time far enough, you will come to the conclusion that most self-help stems back to certain influences at the time. You can go as far back as to the tao te ching, meditations, or even the bible. Not much of this stuff changes, but is repackaged with modern examples of successful people into bestsellers.
> You can go as far back as to the tao te ching, meditations, or even the bible.
The Tao Te Ching with the adjonction of its commentaries is a book on Confucian moral and ethic. The Meditations is a journal and also mostly a book about ethics. I think linking them to modern self-help books is somewhat disingenuous.
I deeply believe that if people actually stopped reading self-help books and read books about ethics instead the world would definitely be a far better place. “How to live a life worth living?” is after all a far more interesting question than “How to do the most of your life?”.
I bought and read Robert Kiyosaki - Rich Dad Poor Dad followed with Donald Trump - The Art of the Deal.
After reading these I felt worse than at the time I was actually mugged on the street. I think I paid like $20 for both books and muggers got something like $15 I had on me.
the irony is that they are just giving the audience what it wants - a causal formula for success. a guy just saying "i got really lucky" over and over would get no readership.
2. My cousin has a connection to cheap money and invited me into a social circle where I could use it
3. I was willing to make people angry and unhappy along the way
4. I somehow fit into someone else's plan, and I get some decent scraps of riches for existing and pretending to do something important
These seem to be the main keys to success. I will admit that someone who's completely incompetent is less likely to succeed with access to just one or two of the above (excluding 4, which can stand on its own for a period of time), but if he's got all of the first 3 or 4 alone, success is pretty well guaranteed, regardless of ability or worthiness. I'm sure there are exceptions, but the vast unwashed rabble of successful people I believe have something from the above list.
