I believe modern capitalism operates quite differently from the methods preached in this book. There are clear limits to relying solely on a labor-intensive mindset without strategic leverage.
I didn't have any special talents, outstanding skills, or privileges. In my twenties, I worked 69 hours a week for two straight years. Yet, I only made minimum wage and had nothing to show for it. I didn't develop any meaningful skills, either. Simply putting in the effort didn't guarantee I would get everything.
Ironically, it was the choices I made during my downtime—taking a step back, reflecting, and reorganizing my thoughts—that actually allowed me to earn more money. Even then, the working hours were much shorter, around 52 hours a week. That choice was programming. (Though, to be fair, even that is getting tougher now because of LLMs.)
My conclusion is that all advice from successful people is heavily packaged. I constantly think about the concept of 'effort.' What exactly is genuine effort? What is deliberate practice? In modern capitalism, the kind of effort that gets rewarded isn't trading time for money; true success lies in building assets that decouple your time from your income.
However, even that feels somewhat meaningless to me now. If we constantly assign value to everything and strive only to be the 'best,' I'm always left wondering: does that make me a meaningless person?
Looking at it coldly, I am heading into my mid-thirties, and I have only just finished paying off my student loans and the debt I incurred from being scammed. I don't have a fancy degree, nor have I built a globally renowned program.
My bank account currently sits at $30, and I'm worried about next month's rent. But because I've survived so many different grinds, I have the confidence that I'll figure out a way to live on somehow. Though, I do feel a bit regretful about not having been married yet.
More importantly, though, I feel that the more value we place purely on money, the more the other joys of life fade away. Living life itself is an effort. Pausing to look back is also an effort. The only thing that truly renders the time in our lives meaningless is believing that the 'present me' has nothing left to learn from the 'past me.' Everything I've gone through has definitively helped me in some way.
I believe these types of books are ultimately just acts of assigning arbitrary values to sell copies. They manufacture the idea that their specific worldview is the 'correct' one just to collect book royalties and speaking fees. But the way I see it, life is not built on these linear values. Life rests on non-linearity.
The more you try to cram life into a linear framework, the more you inevitably lose the non-linear values. Think about how computers represent numbers. Human cognition perceives a continuous, infinite line, but computers represent it as discrete dots (floating-point numbers), right? I believe there is a similar kind of 'precision loss' in life when forced into linearity.
Capitalism defines surplus, "meaningless" time as an inefficiency and preaches that we must try our absolute best at all times. But from everything I know, the world simply doesn't work that way. There are only people who desperately want to believe it works that way.
Some people waste their time on a stack of paper filled with mere letters. Some waste it making images appear on a computer screen. Others shed tears while watching television. None of these actions make absolute logical sense, and I believe life is precisely the sum total of all these incomprehensible acts.
I highly doubt whether it is right to confine the entirety of life into a tiny box called 'success.' I believe the shape of that 'success box' depends entirely on the shape of one's own life. From that perspective, the showman's text doesn't address the complex leverage required in modern society; it simply looks like a tool designed to sell the false illusion of the American Dream.