The past few weeks I had contact with someone who is very into this self-improvement stuff and it's fairly interesting, at least it would be fairly interesting, if he wouldn't be so pushy about it. He is even more convinced of that stuff than those people usually are - it's almost delusional to be honest. Sometimes he reads out some passages from his book, hoping he could convince me somehow. Two text passages sticked to my mind lately. The first one:
"You certainly played already some videogames. [..] One genre are RPGs, so-called role-play games, where you can create your own character and walk through the world with it and so on. Real life is not different regarding that. You can do whatever you want, you decide."
"It's important that you do what fullfills you. [..] If that's cleaning toilets, then go on and clean some toilets for the rest of your life, it's important that it's what fullfills you the most."
The moment he read this to me, I pointed out some flaws in this comparison. People who know me a bit know what I was onto. The things with both text passages is, that they completely ignore how nearly everything is already predetermined by genetics. Almost everything is determined by your genetics. Two good examples are facial attractiveness and IQ. Enviromental factors play little to no role (in the case of IQ, enviromental factors can of course make it much worse, e.g. due to air pollution and such, but barely anything can be done to raise it). And now consider that those two things are essential to pretty much all aspects of your life. Back to the first excerpt. If you have a low IQ, you most likely won't become something where those cognitive abilities are crucial and the lower it is, the more crucial it is