While I'm a fan of Jason and his writing, I can't help but feel that this is more of the "book about success that doesn't tell you how to actually do anything" category of self-help books (re: http://kottke.org/13/10/the-fallacy-of-success).
If you've read my work, you know that I rarely write about things I can't back up. This is not a book about "success" broadly defined. Who even knows what that means? Clearly different for everyone.
In my book I talk about:
- what it is like to dislocate your knee, undergo multiple surgeries, and come back to win a national championship in gymnastics. The good and the bad. Not so you can be a gymnast. But so you can have a framework for approaching a difficult situation in your life.
- the latest research on how to build willpower and develop better habits. So that you can be healthier, more productive, and direct your energies more towards things that matter to you in life.
- what I've learned in 16 years of training on how to learn new skills. Gymnastics is one of the most intellectually demanding sports. Ever. And thus I've learned a lot about how to master skills, and share that. Same with performing under pressure and overcoming fear. Specific, actionable tactics.
- how to get people to buy into your ideas at work. This is a problem for smart people everywhere. I have a very specific case study that I break down, then explain more tactics that I've personally found effective.
This is not about "The Secret" or passive income or vision boards. This is about specific things I've personally learned that works, and that perhaps could work for you too.
Oh, Chesterton. He wants to argue that seeking "worldly Success" per se is impossible (and impossible by definition, if he can), but ends up arguing mainly that it's immoral.
I hope no one takes his word that the only instinct that makes people rich is greed, or that it's "cheating" to seek to better yourself in any way besides skill at your trade, which we should tell young people will make them rich because at least this advice is noble even if it's "fallacious."
G.K. Chesterton is one of the most under-appreciated wits and writers of the last few centuries. And he makes some great points about the "self-help" genre in that excerpt. But he's also being a little glib here, and we risk losing some of that nuance when we just repost his excerpt.
Is 99.99% of the self-help industry bullshit? Probably. No, let's go even further: almost assuredly. And to Chesterton's point: even the authors who aren't bullshitting us might be drawing upon very personal experiences and idiosyncratic circumstances that we can't replicate. So be it. But here's the thing: nobody's ever gotten massively successful at any endeavor, skill, or enterprise without trying. If nothing else, books like Jason's may provide a boost of motivation and a wake-up splash of cold water (literally or figuratively) to those of us who've temporarily lost our paths or our focus. And if it does that for even one reader, it's served its purpose.
I don't get the impression that Jason is selling snake oil or magic checklists here. I do get the impression that his book could probably be summed up in a few sentences, and one of those sentences is probably "Get off your ass!" But a lot of people could benefit from hearing that. I know I could from time to time. I spend a heck of a lot of time writing on HN, daydreaming, and putting my biggest ambitions on hold. If this book slaps me across the face and tells me to get my shit together, so be it. Maybe I'm the kind of person who needs to pay $8 to learn that lesson -- and if so, $8 is pretty cheap compared to the opportunity cost of never learning it, or of allowing myself to forget it.
To Chesterton's point, no book about success is ever going to tell us how to be successful. But books that motivate us, that provide us interesting skills, and that -- if nothing else -- remind us to stay hungry and buckle down, can tell us why we're not as successful as we want to be. From there, it's up to us to figure out what to do about it.
Publishing magnate Felix Dennis wrote a really interesting self-help book, cheekily titled How to Get Rich. The book is essentially a very long-winded way of saying that what worked for Felix Dennis worked for Felix Dennis, and it probably won't work for you -- but, as he puts it, and as I'll paraphrase, 'Nobody ever became extremely rich without wanting to be extremely rich.' And by that he means, becoming extremely rich (or successful by any other metric) has to become a laser-guided focus, to the exclusion of all else. It's a very difficult choice people have to make, and in fact, Dennis argues that it's the wrong choice for most people. Regardless, we need to be cognizant of our choices on a daily and even hourly basis, and that's a lot easier said than done.
I don't think Chesterton was under-appreciated. When my father attended university in the 40's, he belonged to something called the Belloc-Chesterton club, and apparently those authors were all the rage at the time, right up there with George Bernard Shaw. However, unlike Shaw, Belloc and Chesterton were overtly religious, so they were discarded as religion itself went out of fashion.
My goal is only to convince you to try taking one, perhaps a week of cold showers, and see if you like it and want to keep going.
1) First off, if you're not exercising much, you should probably spend your willpower on ramping that up. In general, research has shown that willpower acts more like a muscle than a purely "fuel tank" model and taxing your willpower in small increments can actually strengthen it in the long run. [1] But in general, your shower time is already allocated for, and happens at a regular interval, so after exercise (which takes up time that people sometimes say "they don't have") it is a good place to do some willpower strengthening.
2) In the book, I actually explain that I start cold for 3 minutes and then end warm/hot. It's actually better than just going warm right away.
3) I admit that when the water is cold, you are not able to think about much. But if you turn it back to warm after a period, you still can spend the rest of the shower thinking. Also I find that clearing your head via the cold means the rest of your day's thinking is more clear, which may be worth the trade off.
Ultimately, you should just try it once, go through it, and see if it serves you.
I've got a weird question regarding this idea of "flexing the will muscle":
Do you write at all about stoic philosophy, and where it fits into your whole... outlook, or whatever the sum of your book and blog posts represents? Because the idea of subjecting oneself to unpleasant experiences (mostly in the form of denial) is a significant part of stoicism.
I've read a tiny bit of stoic philosophy (Marcus Aurelius's Meditations) but have not written much about it, mostly because I just find other things more interesting.
The book 'The Willpower Instinct' is citing research which supports this claim. There are ways to increase your overall willpower, if you like to think of it as a resource.
I'm not Jason but I'll jump in here. I differ a little from Jason with answers/philosophy on this, but we match up pretty closely overall & I've written & spoken tons on cold showers:
1) Over time, you'll find it takes less will power to do it & you'll recognize it gets easy. In other words, you get stronger and you'll find yourself spending less time worrying about whether or not you can do something & more time just doing it. Over time, you'll find yourself taking the same attitude towards other difficult or uncomfortable things in life[1].
2) This sounds like something different than cold showers, but I'll take a crack at it. When you start CST - and do it for a few days - you start to realize that it's not really as bad as you thought it would be after all[2] and every single reason why people don't take cold showers comes down to one of two different "reasons." [3]
3) I've actually had some of my best idea time while taking a cold shower. You can either choose to freak out or become really zen & when you do it's crazy the ideas you can come up with.
4) There's always the health benefits (I don't get into this a ton, but it helps with quite a few things physically from circulation to healthy hair[5].
Less speech, more stories and research. I know I come off a little aggressive and that's on purpose. Probably a little less cynical than you, but 4 months working for the gov't has moved the needle in your direction, especially with the shutdown.
Out of curiosity....isn't this a distraction from your fulltime responsibilities?
I am not hating on the book - if you were running a lifestyle, non-YC company I don't think it would be an issue, but PG & other YC partners are famous for wanting all founders to focus on just their company.
I can't see how they wouldn't think that this could be a distraction - or am I missing something here?
Again...more power to you for writing, and I am not trying to be mean....it just seems that this is either very ballsy of you (to go against what seems like one of the tenets of YC in such a brazen manner) or a hedge against bad news for the company.
Carry on....sorry I had to discuss the elephant in the room - but it wasn't addressed fully on his personal site or on the landing page for the book...soo.... :)
Also note that Sam Altman was a part-time partner before he sold Loopt. And I know plenty of YC co's who do have fairly involved side projects. The good thing is that the book's content often overlaps with being a founder. It's not like I released a "1001 Ways to Fold a Paper Crane" book.
Thanks guys. I've been blogging seriously since 2010 and it's been really great to take those "best of" articles (many of them that have hit HN) and put them into a Kindle book.
As an entrepreneur I read anything that could improve my business, but I find kindle Cloud or those services poor. I hate DRM, so normally I have to ask for the printed version with all the inconveniences and cost(I live outside US), for then cutting the sides(very fast with a power tool) and feeding the book to my fantastic Fujitsu Snapcan scanner. Then the pages are stored in a box in the loft.
So obviously I prefer to buy a PDF which is not available here.
Not having read the book, it seems to me like you are naturally inclined for achieving things by your own personality(the book is using lots of "how I...", I, I, I, me, me. The main question in business use to be how people that are different than you could express their best potential.
I see lots of books or talks of how to improve the business and step number 1 is planning everything, of course the people giving the talk are planners, they love planning everything by nature, and people that attend are naturally plan haters by nature too.
If you have dogs you see dogs like golden retrievers that love water, and others hate it, like some children love some toys and not others by nature.
Usually "one size does not fit all", personality types have to be studied so you could see what could or could not be done with the people you have.
Thanks for the comments. I respect your concerns around digital rights. There are obviously benefits to pushing through Amazon as well. If you buy the book via Amazon and then forward the receipt to winningisntnormal@gmail.com, I'm happy to provide a PDF.
As for your point about "I" - also great and one I don't address enough.
1) I do cite ideas and thoughts by other people as well as research by peer reviewed journals in the book.
2) That said, most of the book is about my experience. Here is why: I am not in your head. I have not lived your life. I can only observe other people from a far distance - look at what they say and do, guess their intentions and understanding, etc. The only thing I can definitively say with certainty is what I have learned and what i have experienced.
3) I think self knowledge is extremely important and that you (and everyone) should seek to appreciate how you differ from other people. And this filter all advice through the lens of "I'm like this, they are like that, therefore I should modulate the advice in this way". If you read my book, you get a fairly good sense of how I think ans approach things. Only you know how to modulate my suggestions to your own life and your own goals.
There few universal truths when it comes to getting shit done. What I hope to do is to illuminate ONE path, warts and all, in hopes that others can navigate their own journeys.
I doubt it's his biggest gripe(since one can always find something else to complain about on the internet), but it may be the most prominent gripe, since it is mentioned in the first sentence of the "About Jason" box.
To me, it just seems like a very irrelevant piece of information to provide at that point in the text, unless an equally prominent portion of the book is devoted to discussing why being one of the fittest people in tech(as opposed to the four thousandth fittest person, which is still pretty darn fit compared to average) is important.
One of the book bonuses is a 30 min interview about exactly that - career path. Short answer is being friendly and doing a lot of extracurriculars - started a nonprofit with some friends including a guy named Kalvin, who was a CS major, eventually became my roommate and cofounder at Ridejoy.
I'd like to know who these people are that wrote the blurbs about the book. If you just read the blurbs, you would expect the book to contain the answers to the great questions of life.
I think it's pretty awesome that you wrote a book and are willing to share your stories and insights with everyone. I'm curious if you are a natural writer or if writing is something you really have to work at. What was the process like of taking ideas from blog posts and turning them into a book?
On a similar note, you generally shouldn't use ampersands (&) in the body of text. I know your book isn't claiming to be literature, but when I'm quickly evaluating whether to buy a little-known book, the use of ampersands is a red flag of an amateur, un-edited, production. Other common ones are using "loose" to mean "lose" and "lead" to mean "led."
Hope this is helpful. I have written a book myself, so I know how much effort it takes.
