[yajoe]

I completely agree :)

Success-styled self-help is a lot like the lottery. There are millions of analytical, intellectual, objective issues with each (e.g. YMMV, survival bias, terrible odds, etc.). What they have in common is they allow users to dream "what if" and have fun (e.g. "escape") with those dreams. Both advertise this fantastical thinking in terms of "how you can" -- either buy the lottery ticket or buy my book -- but they still mostly boil down to entertaining people with dreams.

And heck, I love dreaming as much as the next person and love articles (or his comics) like this for that very reason... but I don't get hung up on trying to predict whether the content is strictly perfect just as I can't predict whether a random number printed on cheap paper will be life-changing.