Honestly if everyone had more of these traits, there'd probably be a lot more small businesses and fewer dejected corporate employees who feel there's no hope for the future but to grind up the ladder.
I guess my conjecture is that whatever advice you give people to "succeed in business", the monetary rewards for following it will be drastically different if 5% of people follow it vs 95%.
My hunch is that markets adjust to whatever the baseline level of competency is, and I don't see how that's different if there's a lot more small businesses. To succeed in fitness and health you must compete with yourself; to succeed in business you must compete with others.
In all my reading of self help books, the advice comes along as obvious common sense stuff, except that stuff didn't come naturally to me. First time I read the GTD book from David Allen, all of it did feel revolutionary. After a few weeks it felt so obvious, it was left scratching my head. Why wasn't doing this before? Eat that frog was somewhat similar. If you have finite hours to do a thing, why would you spend it on doing work that wasn't very rewarding to you. Stuff like ruthlessly prioritising your interests above everything else, is pure 'common sense', but rarely do people do this.
Recently books like Atomic Habits have shown many people, stuff like exercise, or cooking a healthy meal should be a life habit in itself. You are better off developing a life long habit of doing a certain set of things that are a long term pay off.
Another book I read a while back, said something very obvious. Like You are 100% responsible for your life. Regardless of whether you wish to take control or not, you are in total ownership of anything situation. You can chose to not take control and act, but you are indeed in control.
This really puts the ownership of time, resources and even the future under your total control, and on a second look, this indeed seems to be the case. Except that when I actually came to realise I definitely think and act more proactively to put life interests above everything else.
As a general rule, I only have positive things to say about some of this advice.
i think a higher standard of professional competency in general would benefit everyone, and i can’t imagine some sort of equilibrium of skillsets in the labour market where there would be no opportunity to set yourself apart in your field.
If everyone exercised more and ate more healthily, then everyone's physical condition would improve (apologies for being slightly ableist here).
However, if everyone read more books and took more initiative in the workplace, the market would adapt so that not everyone would benefit from it. Businesses would simply adjust downwards how much they pay for a given competency.