[degobah]

You make a fair point that Chesterton seems to have a certain disdain for making money and business, but it seems like you didn't read the essay very carefully:

> If you acknowledge there is skill in succeeding (with a company, say, or in overcoming a bad habit, or tending your goals and beliefs, perhaps even to train more rigorously for that high jump), and that these things are moral or at least not immoral, the author's argument falls apart.

His thesis or argument is that the books and articles of his day on "success" are mainly rubbish. It is not to say that the word "success" is actually no good, or that trying to succeed at some individual thing is not good. A main point of his is that there are individual skills to succeed at specific things, but not an all-encompassing skill of "success."

I will concede that Chesterton sees people whose main mission in life is to make money as greedy, because he strongly, strongly believes that money doesn't make a person happy.

[dgreensp]

> It is all very stirring, of course; but I confess that if I were playing cards I would rather have some decent little book which told me the rules of the game. Beyond the rules of the game it is all a question either of talent or dishonesty; and I will undertake to provide either one or the other—which, it is not for me to say.

This false dichotomy between "talent and dishonesty" is an example of what rubs me the wrong way, and it's no small thing. It still shows up today when people get frustrated that the "best" things or people don't always succeed. If you have a band, for example, is thinking about how to promote yourselves on the side of greed rather than just being talented? What about an engineer who could use some networking advice to find a better job? The athlete who lacks discipline, or who needs to connect more fully with his dreams and motivations to burst forth and excel?

You could say these are still specific skills, just enlarged ones, but I believe there is such a thing as skill at every level of generality.

The 20th century saw new awareness of the imperfect correspondence between quality and success, for example in the form of marketing -- think cigarettes, or Bush Jr. There's also some new understanding of talent vs. success. It used to be you just called a talented but unsuccessful person "lazy." Or, I suppose, insufficiently greedy.