It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want to Be
The world's best selling book
by Paul Arden
1 more
More Recommenders
“The book I’ve gifted the most is a book called "It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want to Be". The reason why I gift that book is because you can read it in 40 minutes. Each page has like 20 words on it, and each one of them captures these really big, lofty ideas. I just think it’s a magnificent book that you can sit down and will shake anybody up who reads it.”
Source →Recommended by 3 notable people, including Ran Segall and Casey Neistat
Check price on AmazonProof-backed recommendation
Amazon availability
Should I read this?
Recommended by 4 sources and appears in Creativity, Creative Thinking, and Most Recommended Books.
It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want to Be is a handbook of how to succeed in the world: a pocket bible for the talented and timid alike to help make the unthinkable thinkable and the impossible possible.The world’s top advertising guru, Paul Arden, offers up his wisdom on issues as diverse as problem solving, responding to a brief, co...
Looking for Kindle, hardcover, paperback, or audiobook editions?
Check formats, pricing, and current availability directly.
Why recommended
Recommended by 4 sources and appears in Creativity, Creative Thinking, and Most Recommended Books.
Recommended by notable people
People and public figures who have recommended this book.
Recommendation Signals
Recommendation proof is sourced from public posts, interviews, reading lists, and cited references.
Piter Dimitrov
“The book I’ve gifted the most is a book called "It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want to Be". The reason why I gift that book is because you can read it in 40 minutes. Each page has like 20 words on it, and each one of them captures these really big, lofty ideas. I just think it’s a magnificent book that you can sit down and will shake anybody up who reads it.”
Appears In
Not sure if this is the right fit?
Consider Accidental Presidents by Jared Cohen. Recommended by 10 sources.
“Accidental Presidents offers eight narrative portraits of men who succeeded to the U.S. presidency without election, using anecdote-rich scenes and readable context to show how personality and circumstance interact with office power. It’s strongest as a set of self-contained stories that make succession stakes concrete for non-specialist readers; it does not prioritize dense archival argument or exhaustive methodology, so expect some interpretive generalizations and repeated themes across cases. Use it for fast historical orientation rather than scholarly deep-dives.”
Similar books
How recommendation signals are reviewed
Each recommendation is collected from a public source — interviews, articles, or curated lists — and linked to its original URL. Books with many verifiable recommendations from respected people rank higher.