It’s a self-help book about cultivating confidence. A pretty good one at that! It’s filled with the self-help style: repeating phrases, peppering in lots of stories about how the author worked with champions to lead them to victory, strategies that consist of a sequence of steps, metaphors like “filling up your mental bank account.”

I heard that self-help is one of the most popular book genres. I just spent about 10 minutes trying to find a clean source about what genres sell the most or have the most readership, but all I got were results that make me lose faith in the system of incentives that shape what is available on the internet: Google gave me a Generative-AI “quick answer” that cited YouTube videos which in turn didn’t cite primary sources. I got plenty of content-mill websites that wrote about romance novels based on a survey, and some others that claimed history was the most popular genre. Perplexity didn’t do any better and it cited AI slop in its sources. Any kind of concrete evidence about book genres is inaccessible because of what the internet has become. Self-help is probably pretty popular.

It’s a book about learning how to be confident. I have some confidence but it’s uneven, contextual, and fragile. In my industry, I meet people with infinite, unimaginable levels of confidence on a regular basis. I don’t want to become arrogant, but it would help to understand where it comes from.

This book helped me understand confidence. A quick summary of the main points would be:

• Believe that your strengths are inherent and permanent, and your failures are situational and transient. This is from learned optimism but it’s good to repeat anyway.
• Do a lot of visualization. Visualization works! I’ve been trying to do it more often for running races, and I’m convinced of its power.
• Spend a lot of time and effort working on your internal dialogue, getting better at being supportive of yourself and getting rid of negative messaging. Have an idea of who you want to be – a 20:00 5k racer, etc, and tell yourself that. If you fall short, you’re still a 20:00 5k racer, you’re just on your way to it.
• Plus, some things that seem kind of objectively nutty, like how some athletes, when they miss a shot, prefer to believe that this makes the next shot more likely, but they also believe in the ‘hot hand’ theory, so making the next shot also makes the next shot more likely.

It’s a balance to believe enough of this stuff but not too much. But reading it written out like that made me really think about how the ‘learned optimism’ principles (your strengths are inherent/permanent, your failures are transient/situational) initially sounded to me like ‘taking credit for success and blaming others for failure’, but the inverse is pretty common, too. The situation does exist where someone (sometimes me) really does extrapolate too much from failure – treating failures as some true reflection of weakness and not enough from success – treating every success as mostly luck.

Pretty decent book, but if you get something from that bullet-list summary, you might just want to meditate on those ideas rather than reading it. The parables about Dr. Zinsser’s successful methods are never-ending and it’s at least three times longer than it needed to be.