Okay, so I have a thing for self-help books. I like getting to see how other people define success and how they achieve their goals. Often, I find ideas I want to adopt. And sometimes I find ideas that I don't. Pat Flynn's How to be Better at (Almost) Everything had quite a few ideas I enjoyed, and a few that I might have disagreed with.
To get the disagreements out of the way: Pat Flynn is a diehard capitalist who has a grudging—or at least, I hope it's grudging—respect for Donald Trump, and who is very vocally Christian-leaning. Obviously as a queer, socialist-leaning, Trump-despising, agnostic, when he pushes capitalist hustle culture or gives out semi-apologetic Trump praise, I rolled my eyes. That being said, overall, I agree with the premise of How to be Better at (Almost) Everything. From the outset, Flynn builds an argument in favor of generalism as opposed to specialization. Basically, Flynn argues that rather than getting to specialized in one area—say, creative nonfiction—we should be working on developing a skill-stack, where we develop a set of skills that we are slightly above average in. He suggest a handful of essential base skills: discipline, focus, logic, persuasion, and faith. From these base skills, the goal is to then focus on the skills you are interested—say, creative nonfiction—and then, once you've got your skills your interested in, you build the skills that help you make money off of your skills you're interested in—teaching, publishing, marketing.
I wouldn't call these ideas ground-breaking, but in a world, where I've spent the past decade funneling myself through more and more specialized education, it was nice to be able to hear someone make an argument for developing a wider skill-set.
A final note: Pat Flynn's writing style leans comedic, or at least sarcastic. He also focuses a lot on physical fitness and weight loss. If you're looking for a more touchy-feely self-help book, this one might not be the best fit. However, I am still excited to try a few of his ideas and see where they take me.