Right off the bat, let's put to rest some misconceptions about who should and who shouldn't be writing advice books. There's no point in getting advice from hopeless failures. A hopeless failure has experience with only one mode of living, the hopeless failure mode, and can only give advice of a negative variety: "Don't do what I did." "Don't do this." "Don't do that." And no matter what hopeless failures tell you, life is much more about deciding what to do than what not to do.

On the other hand, enormous sucesses have little to offer in the way of practical advice for ordinary people. Because of their enormous success they are so far removed from the struggles faced by the rest of us that their advice tends towards matters Olympian, of interest only to other mega-sucessful people. For example, you probably won't be interested in how to approach crucial decisions about the layout of your private jet cabin. I can remember wasting a day and a half reading billionaire Paul Allen's Should the Seats Face EachOther, or All Face Forward? (The answer, if you care, is that they should all be swivel seats, which can be locked in place for takeoff or landing)

No. The perfect person to write an advice book is me. Someone who is very sucessful and yet still flies commercial, albeit first class, separated from ordinary people by no more than a flimsy curtain. I know what its like to struggle, or at least have some dim recollection.

From the beginning of Al Franken's advice book, Oh, the Things I Know