Burg & Mann The Go-Giver

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The Go-Giver is a lot better than most morality fables and self-help novels. The advice is mostly trite oversimplifications, the story is nauseatingly contrived, and most of the empirical claims in the book are false. However, none of these were quite as bad as I expected based on other books I've previously read in the genre. More importantly, all of the specific examples the book gives are good examples. If you treat all of the in abstract discussion as what people who don't really understand abstract reasoning but do understand signaling would say to hint in the general direction of what they actually mean, most of the problems with the book go away. The particular ways that Joe, the main character, applies the "secrets" he learns are all consistent with the behavior someone would take if they did understand how the iterated prisoner dilemma is supposed to work. If you understand game theory, you understand both why this book is kinda-sorta right and also why this book is entirely wrong.

Also hyperbole upon hyperbole... until all of the universe is consumed in nothing but platitudes! Such hyperbole, like you can't even imagine unless you've read any other books in this genre which somehow manage to be even worse (despite the impossibility).

This book is about the secrets of "stratospheric success." It basically reduces to be a nice person, impact a lot of people, and create more value than you retain. Oh, but do retain some of the value you create! This is all good advice, once you subtract out the hyperbole... and add in the other three rules of the iterated prisoner's dilemma. Punish defectors. Punish defectors. Punish defectors! (I've empirically tested what happens when you drop that rule from your strategy, and the results are double plus ungood to say the least. "Always defect" is a slightly better strategy than "always cooperate" both in theory and in practice.) That's one of the problems I have with morality tales. 

The rules morality tales give are almost always great rules for walled gardens, as long as you guard your walled garden. But these sorts of books always poo-poo the need to do that. You need to do that. Otherwise you get Fruitlands.

But then there is that whole phrase "stratospheric success."

This book isn't about stratospheric success, and doing what it recommends won't bring you stratospheric success, even if you do it in the right way. Which is different from the way that the book recommends.

The following is a seven step plan for stratospheric success:

1. Be born brilliant.
2. Start learning the skills you will eventually need long before you need them and long before a bunch of other people have started to learn the same exact skills.
3. Work really damn hard to revise those skills.
4. Meet the right people and make the write connection.
5. Be at the right place at the right time.
6. Seize the opportunities you have when you have them.
7. Work really damn hard to make sure that your attempt to seize those

Sometimes, if you get very, very lucky you can skip one or even two of these seven steps, but most extremely successful people do all of them.