1 American authors sometimes forget for many people the dream is to emigrate to somewhere like America. This is a very different kind of ambition from being “So Good They Can’t Ignore You”.
2 Do we have to be very “successful” in the first place? In the sense of being better by a significant than others on some objective measure? Surely not, even though that is the inevitable premise of self-help.
3 When you pause and think them, almost all of Cal Newport’s arguments are anecdotal. Good advice for sure, but they do not even purport to be a comprehensive theory. The fact that the author has a MIT commputer science PhD does not necessarily mean the career advice is also scientifically rigorous. In fact, he does not make such a claim.
4 Some of the stories, eg the one about Jewel the singer-songer writer illustrate USA immense economic power and geographic range. She studied (seemingly on a scholarship) in a well-endowed music college, with a campus occupying over 1,000 acres. And her early life ranged from Halibut fishing in Alaska to places like New York and San Diego. Most people in other countries/territories simply do not have that scale of resources available to them.