Those self-help books, and the workshops that inspired them, were a tremendous help to me when I was in my 20s and 30s. Thanks to you, I can now see that this was largely because I have so much privilege. What those workshops taught me was how to focus on a well-formed outcome. Because my family is affluent and well-connected, I was surrounded by numerous possible opportunities, and growing up involved learning how to make a choice amongst those opportunities. In such a world, it really is true that if you can visualize clearly what you really want, it will manifest. That inner visualization will enable you see opportunities as opportunities, when they show up. Without it, those opportunities will just appear to be random and insignificant events, and you will pass them by.

Unfortunately that kind of skill becomes less and less useful the fewer opportunities you have, which is why you need to have some level of privilege in order to be able to use it. Those self-help workshops will teach you how to play your cards much more skillfully, but they can’t change the hand you were dealt. Most privileged people are unaware of this, which is why so many of them think “I am responsible for my own success.“ Even with privilege, you have to work very hard and competitively to triumph over the hundreds of other privileged people who want the same thing you want. That makes it very easy to forget that there are thousands, perhaps millions, of other people who were never given a chance to compete at all.

Nevertheless, I still think that those skills are useful to people with far fewer opportunities. Your analysis of what those books leave out is spot on, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t get some things right. Learning how to spot opportunities when you have very few of them would be a very different skill. I certainly don’t have the life experiences to write such a book, and neither do the other authors you mention. But as a couple of commentators have pointed out, your medium posts clearly show both the insight and the experiences to write such a book. If you decided to take advantage of that opportunity, those other books might have a great deal to teach you.