Robbins sounds like a charlatan, but I suspect he is not. Rather, I think he has helped himself to more than his share of his own kool-aid.
Coming in at over 600 pages, this book may have thirty pages of content. The rest is self-promotion, cheerleading, continually selling how wonderful what will be appearing, in just the next chapter. And endless namedropping. In there, there are a few "secrets" about how to manage your money. For example, Robbins has "discovered" that you should save money by paying yourself first! Also, he has learned the amazing secret that its a good idea to diversify your investments.
He is such a true believer that glaring contradictions don't bother him much. He maintains, again and again and again, that he learns so much by focusing on successful people. He says that the way people become successful is by serving more than other people do. Thus, the more successful you are, the more you are providing a useful service to others. Sounds great, right. The only trouble is that a good portion of the book is devoted to getting you avoid the high fees charged by mutual funds who then underperform the market. But wait. The guys who run these mutual funds are phenomenally successful. So by his own reasoning, they must be providing a wonderful service. He never even begins to see the disconnect.
Another example is even simpler. On the one hands, the markets are a zero sum game. That means that every dollar one person wins is a dollar that someone else loses. He then says his mission is to develop a plan to make it so anyone can win with their investments. But that plainly contradicts the idea of a zero sum game. Again, not even a hint of recognition.
For his advice, as he tells us again and again, he goes to the greatest experts. And what do we learn. Some say that the markets are a random walk, and its impossible to try to beat the indexes. So the smart play is to buy the index funds that have the lowest total fees. Others say that it's possible to beat the markets, and consistently, but not for the average investor. So again, index funds. And still others say that its possible to do better by picking really good fund managers. So, no agreement. But these guys are the best, and we have learned so much!
Now its time to take MASSIVE action. Massive is an important word to Robbins. It probably appears at least once a page. I don't understand why, but he's great at motivating people, so there must be something about the word massive that provides massive motivation.
As I said, in all of the excess self-promotion, the strange! exclamation! points! , the bolded text passages for no apparent reason, there is about 30 pages of content, maybe a bit less. But that information is actually fairly good and interesting. I just wish I did not have to wade through all the rest.