*Read* the Comments?

I was poking around LinkedIn earlier, and found this post on successful and unsuccessful people.  I don’t like articles like this, honestly – facile and peppy, they tend to be low on solutions but high on advice which has all the generic applicability of a bumper sticker.

Why I read it I can’t say, but – most unusually for me – I stayed tuned for the comments, which were a huge improvement on the content itself.  It’s reassuring to find people being thoughtful – and, dare I say it, even engaging each other (if real discussion isn’t easy online, at least this much is).  So the easy, if over-long, list of How to Be Simply Spiffy turned out to be thought-provoking, and it was nice to see both a bit of deconstruction and CONstructive consideration of a subject.

The real issue isn’t “success” (as it’s presumably defined here, by professional advancement/material gain etc.) but satisfaction.  And the article doesn’t address that at all, not with any honesty.