The self-help genre's rules of success, habits of highly effective people, and principles of excellence are disappointingly obvious ideas inflated into book length.
Skip the self-help section and browse the internet instead. I have curated the following list of less-obvious principles:
1. Competition is for losers
2. Don't follow your passion
Career advice from 80000 Hours: https://80000hours.org/articles/dont-follow-your-passion/
3. "If you never miss a plane, you’re spending too much time at the airport." - George Stigler, Nobel-prizewinning economist
4. "If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
5. Don't pet lobsters while skateboarding
6. The fastest way to complete a task is to realize you don’t have to source
7. Interpret charitably.
People exaggerate, language is ambiguous and vague, hedging is often implied, and converting a web of thought to a sequence of text is hard--all good reasons to stop and consider how someone could be right instead of why they are wrong when taken in the most literal, intellectually-lazy way. Do steelman, don't strawman.
Propose your own principles of greatness (concisely, please) on a platform with a curation mechanism that doesn't suck. We could curate a short list of principles (10 min read) with more value add than 10 hours invested in bestselling self-help books.