TL;DR
An early, small-format Larry Winget book from 1995, before the Pitbull years. It is a pocket collection of advice, instructions, ideas, principles, witticisms and quotations, one short item after another, published through his own Win Publications in Tulsa.
The Little Red Book of Stuff That Works! comes from the start of Larry Winget’s writing career, a decade before Wiley published Shut Up, Stop Whining, and Get a Life. It was published around 1995 by Win Publications of Tulsa, Oklahoma, the imprint behind his early books, with the author credited as Larry H. Winget.
It is a small paperback, about four and three-quarter by six and a quarter inches and 217 pages. The subtitle lists what is inside: advice, instructions, suggestions, ideas, thoughts, observations, principles, questions, considerations, truths, notions, hints, philosophies, theories, witticisms, opinions, quotations and other great stuff that works.
What the book covers
The format is a run of short items, most a line or two long, on how to live and work better, meant to be read straight through or opened anywhere. The author description on the book presents Winget as a philosopher of success who happens to be funny. It says he teaches universal principles through stories, believes most people complicate life and business and take them too seriously, and wants readers to lighten up, take responsibility, be more flexible, stay positive and keep things in perspective.
Two ideas from that description carried into everything he wrote later. Success and prosperity come from serving others. And everything in life gets better when we get better, while nothing gets better until we get better.
The Win Publications years
Before the bestsellers, Winget published his own books. Jim Weems of Ad Graphics in Tulsa, who designed them, says Winget was his first client, starting in March 1990, and that the first project was a book called Ya Gotta’s for Success. Winget had co-owned a telephone equipment company before the career changes that led him into professional speaking, and the books grew up alongside his seminar business. Weems designed more than a dozen of them in the first few years.
Winget’s view, as Weems tells it, was that books should be a speaker’s main moneymaker, sold from the back of the room after a talk. The Win Publications list from those years shows the pattern, with titles such as:
- Money Stuff (1993)
- Stuff That Works Every Single Day (1994)
- Just Do This Stuff (1995)
- Profound Stuff (1995)
- Only the Best on Customer Service and Only the Best on Leadership (1996)
Just Do This Stuff carried a tagline that sounds like the later Winget: it isn’t about being successful, it’s about doing successful.
Keep reading
Where that early philosophy ended up: People Are Idiots and I Can Prove It!
Who should read The Little Red Book of Stuff That Works?
It suits Winget readers curious about where his ideas started, collectors of his early self-published work, and anyone who likes a pocket book they can open to any page for one quick idea. Copies are now found mostly used.
Where this book fits in Winget’s work
It belongs to his Win Publications period in the 1990s. The tone is gentler than the Pitbull books that made him famous, but the core idea is already in place. Readers who like this format will find a later version of it in No Time for Tact, his 2009 page-a-day collection drawn from the bestsellers.
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