99.99% motivational books belong in the trash can.

There's only one you need to read and that's

The Education of a Body Builder by Arnold Schwarzenegger

Here are the most impactful quotes from it.

[THREAD]

Before long, people began looking at me as a special person.

Partly this was the result of my own changing attitude about myself.
I know that if you can change your diet and exercise program to give yourself a different body, you can apply the same principles to anything else (1/2)
The secret is contained in a three-part formula I learned in the gym: self-confidence, a positive mental attitude, and honest hard work. (2/2)
What I had more than anyone else was drive. I was hungrier than anybody. I wanted it so bad it hurt. I knew there could be no one else in the world who wanted this title as much as I did.
I knew I was a winner. I knew I was destined for great things. People will say that kind of thinking is totally immodest. I agree. Modesty is not a word that applies to me in any way – I hope it never will.
“You are a winner, Arnold.” I wrote this down and put it where I would see it. I repeated it a dozen times a day.
I had won the Mr. Universe title in my mind. My imagination was primed, my body ready. I was working to create the greatest, most perfect body anybody had ever seen.
I had lists and charts of the things I needed to concentrate on pasted all over. I looked at them every day before I began working out. It became a twenty-four-hour-a-day job; I had to think about it all the time.
So if it’s important for you to be the best and not just the winner, and it was for me, then you go on.
The biggest difference (between me and the other body builders) was that most body builders did not think I’m going to be a winner.
“Arnold,” they’d say, “you’re crazy. You’re going to burn yourself out. Slow down.” I laughed at them and pushed myself that much harder.
Positive thinking can be contagious. Being surrounded by winners helps you develop into a winner.
I get caught up in the whole idea that it’s a game to make money and to make money make more money.

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I just finished Eric Adler's The Battle of the Classics, and wanted to say something about Joel Christiansen's review linked below. I am not sure what motivates the review (I speculate a bit below), but it gives a very misleading impression of the book. 1/x


The meat of the criticism is that the history Adler gives is insufficiently critical. Adler describes a few figures who had a great influence on how the modern US university was formed. It's certainly critical: it focuses on the social Darwinism of these figures. 2/x

Other insinuations and suggestions in the review seem wildly off the mark, distorted, or inappropriate-- for example, that the book is clickbaity (it is scholarly) or conservative (hardly) or connected to the events at the Capitol (give me a break). 3/x

The core question: in what sense is classics inherently racist? Classics is old. On Adler's account, it begins in ancient Rome and is revived in the Renaissance. Slavery (Christiansen's primary concern) is also very old. Let's say classics is an education for slaveowners. 4/x

It's worth remembering that literacy itself is elite throughout most of this history. Literacy is, then, also the education of slaveowners. We can honor oral and musical traditions without denying that literacy is, generally, good. 5/x