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.