The secret is, there is no secret

The secret to lose 10 pounds in a week, the secret to be more productive, the secret to appear on Google's first page, the secret to become a millionaire. I used to read those, but now they seem more like a cheap attempt to make money off of desperate people. On the web, spam site took those books and refurbished them into click bait articles who exist for the sole purpose of generating more page views and ad impressions.

There are some great books that deal with these issues but they are obscured by the plethora of written in a day type of books that hope to make a quick buck. Just like the web has made us blind to the animated ad on the left, we are conditioned to ignore any of those titles.

Yet there is still something to learn in the self help section. Instead of looking for some 12 steps that will make you a multi-millionaire in a forth night, there is a more subtle message you can benefit from in books that talk about the authors journey. No one knows how to be successful. Success is often pure luck that we try to justify in a quantified number of steps.

And someone's mistake is just that, that person's mistake. I firmly believe that you can only learn from your own mistakes.

The Michael Scott secret to success in business:

A good manager doesn't fire people, he hires people... People.... and People will never go out of business.

I like start by inspiring you. You cannot learn from books.
Replace these pages with life lessons, then you will have a book that is worth its weight in gold. (destroy student books).

There are 4 kinds of business: Tourism, food service, rail roads and sales. And hospitals slash manufacturing, and air travel. First you need a building, then you need supplies. You need something to sell, this could be anything...

Maybe in a less comical way, but that's what those How to be a millionaire books sound like if read out loud.

Not to say that they are all like that, but it is easy to differentiate a good book from one that is on the shelves for the sake of selling a copy. With the power of the internet you can simply look up the author. You can see if he practices what he preaches.

What I rather read is the journey the author went through. There is much more to learn in this, you can pick up little things from the story that the author probably didn't even intend to share in that manner.

The moral of the story is always the same. You have to work hard and you have to work smart. Throw away the "don't work hard, work smart" motto, hard work is always part of the equation.

Coming up with an idea and finding the right team to work on it is definitely something we can call working smart. But the excitement never lasts too long, at some point you have to do the boring work. And that's where work hard comes in.

I too am guilty of always wanting to work on the cool new exciting project. That's why people rather quit then face their boss. That's why all developers have a graveyard where they throw all their projects, in favor of the cool new idea they just thought of. It's much easier to ignore the old and work on the new, but then we never learn from the past.

Rome was not built in a day. Anything that you want to grow and be successful will require a lot more than a microwave mentality.

It takes years to gain 50 pounds, yet some pills promise to make you lose it all in 10 days.

Reading any book dubbed "How to become a millionaire" will have the same effect of taking the pills. You will take them, you will be excited and you will be disappointed.

At the end of the day, if you want to do anything well, you will have to go through the long and hard way.

The secret of success is just that; a secret. You will never know it.

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