Fifteen minutes before my interview with inspirational guru Jen Sincero, I nip into a chic boutique in downtown Manhattan, where I am drawn to a pair of conch shell-pink sandals. Exquisite as they are, I can think of no possible justification for buying them. Yet for the past few days I have been steeped in the work of Sincero, who in her bestselling You Are a Badass books urges readers to stop accepting anything short of their wildest dreams. According to Sincero, it is necessary to live courageously and to “align” one’s actions with one’s deepest desires. That could mean quitting a humdrum job, buying a fancy car or investing in assistants to free up the time to devote to big-picture concerns. I visualise a more successful version of myself, writing Vanity Fair cover stories and turning down assignments while wearing the pale pink clogs, and hand over my credit card.
Sincero’s books aren’t the sort of thing you hear about at dinner parties. Yet even in New York City, where image-conscious subway riders tend to listen to podcasts unless they have a Sheila Heti or Rachel Cusk volume to flaunt, candy-colored Badass volumes have become a mainstay, filling the void the Twilight books left. Initially published in 2013 to little fanfare, the first Badass instalment has gone on to sell millions of copies. It holds the No 3 spot on the New York Times bestseller list, after 121 weeks on the chart. Sincero’s British publisher, John Murray Press, has sold more than 150,000 copies, with a quarter of those sales in audiobook format. “I call it the yellow snowball,” Sincero says of her lemon-coloured hit when we meet for tea at a swish hotel bar. “It keeps growing and growing.”
Sincero is three weeks into a month-long book tour for the paperback of its follow-up, You Are a Badass at Making Money, which focuses on how her mind-over-matter empowerment tactics can help people to achieve financial gains. She urges her readers to identify their deepest desire and act with single-minded determination to call their dreams into being. “There’s no big mystery to this stuff,” she writes. “If you want something badly enough, and decide that you will get it, you will.” The opposite of a victim, a “badass” doesn’t let the world tell her what she’s worth. She – there are hes, but the disciples I’ve spotted in the wild are predominantly female – is deaf to criticism, immune to self-doubt, ready to spring to action. “If you try getting through this book and decide it’s a bunch of crap, you can go back to your sucky life,” Sincero writes. “But maybe, if you put your disbelief aside, roll up your sleeves, take some risks and totally go for it, you’ll wake up one day and realise you’re living the kind of life you used to be jealous of.”
Sincero employs engaging anecdotes about her partying 20s in Spain and “lolling about in bed with this guy I picked up in Macy’s” to make her points. Hers is a sassy brand of positivity engineered to appeal to millennials who may find themselves mired in uncertainty yet allergic to the drippy prose common to self-help literature. And Sincero’s stratospheric success comes as US papers brim with op-eds by women headlined: “I want to be rich and I’m not sorry.” The stigma around ambition and money has all but eroded.
“If you want to be a powerful woman, you need money,” Sincero, 53, says. “It gives you options and freedom so you don’t have to think about money all the time.”
There is little of the human wind chime about Sincero. She is tall and poised, with a Jane Birkin fringe and a pierced nose. Her manner is matter-of-fact, bordering on severe. She peppers conversation with “awesome” and “crap”, words that set her books apart from their less sassy competition. Even Sincero will admit that it is her irreverent, you-go-girl delivery rather than any patented formula that has struck a chord. “Everybody said that I wasn’t saying anything new,” she recalls of the slew of publishers who turned down the book. “I knew I was saying it in a new way.” Yes, there are stacks of books that will explain that what we put into the universe will be reflected back to us. But only Sincero will tell you: “Imagine the relief and feeling of accomplishment when you and money are BFFs, coming and going into each other’s lives, happily supporting each other, braiding each other’s hair.” Only Sincero will say: “The universe is having a heart attack thinking about how awesome you are.”
Positive thinking is as old as time. The ancient Greek philosopher Epictetus maintained that: “The thing that upsets people is not what happens but what they think it means,” a sentiment echoed in Hamlet’s “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” More recently, authors such as Rhonda Byrne (The Secret, The Power) and Esther Hicks (Ask and It Is Given) have popularised the “law of attraction” theory, which rests on the power of positive thoughts and good vibrations. Sincero belongs to that tradition, and urges her readers to identify their dreams and take terrifying risks in order to be the “brightest, happiest, badassiest version of yourself”. But Jessica Lamb-Shapiro, author of Promiseland, an absorbing history of self-help, points out that Sincero’s sales technique bears the hallmarks of the greatest success stories in the field. “Sincero claims that she’s less qualified than her reader, and that if she could do it, anyone can. But she also suggests that she knows exactly what the reader should do, and they should buy her book to find out,” she says. “That’s a favourite move, dating back to How to Win Friends and Influence People.”
Yet positive thinking can be dangerous when it tips into flat-out denial. People dealing with serious mental health issues are far better served by exploring them with a professional than by papering over their emotions with forced optimism. Even those experiencing low-grade levels of frustration might not be best served by forcing a shift in outlook. A University of Queensland study in 2012 found that when people think others expect them not to feel negative emotions, they end up feeling worse. A team led by Gabriele Oettingen, a New York University psychology professor, found that visualising a successful outcome can make people less likely to achieve their goal. “You might feel less depressed in the moment if you engage in positive visualisations,” Oettingen said, “but over time you get more depressed. What happens is people feel accomplished and the energy goes down, as does the effort that you need to bring about a positive future.”
And there are other dangers inherent in following the advice of books such as Sincero’s, which take little account of people who, for whatever reason, have few economic resources. If you can’t put food on the table, or a decent roof over your head, or your class situation means you can’t get a decent education, no amount of positive thinking is going to fix it. Not to mention the risk of signalling to the universe that one is “ready to kick some ass” with outlays of money that readers have no guarantee of recovering. When asked about her doubters, however, Sincero sounds unruffled. “It’s not about being all yippy skippy all the time and denying ourselves our emotions,” she says. “But we can choose to focus on, and stay focused on, whatever we want. It’s meant to wake us up to our choices so we have the opportunity to make the ones that bring us joy.”
Sincero grew up in the suburbs of New York, in a household that featured “no religion and nothing close to spirituality”. She spent her 20s living in New York City writing copy for Sony Records while performing in a band called Crotch. She then moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, and started another group, the Jenny Clinkscales Band. A romantic entanglement with a band member led to the publication of her first book – a young adult novel called Don’t Sleep With Your Drummer. Sincero, who by this point was living in Los Angeles, went on to publish another book based on her romantic adventures, a nonfiction guide to sleeping with women, for straight women. “I was getting paid nothing to work my ass off,” she says. “I just kept hoping that miraculously I would make money. I was in a lot of pain and confusion.”
By her late 30s, Sincero was so desperate she decided to give self-help a shot. She read countless books, attended seminars and hired a woman named Gina DeVee to be her life coach. With DeVee’s encouragement, Sincero decided to pivot away from writing and start a business aimed at helping executives write book proposals. “Being cool was always very important to me, but I decided to get rich, so I went for it,” Sincero says.
The business took off immediately. Realising that she was more interested in boosting her clients’ confidence than offering literary critiques, Sincero turned to life coaching. Her teachings and philosophy went into the book that would become the yellow snowball. Running Press, a small publishing house known for stocking-fillers, eventually made an offer. Word of mouth built, and in 2016, three years after it came out, Badass hit the New York Times bestseller list.
The money-focused followup was published in the spring of 2017, perfectly poised to tap into the wave of feminism that encourages women to view what were once considered indulgences as tools of empowerment, to see facials and body scrubs as lifesaving instruments of self-care. Sincero advises her readers never to settle, and is leading by example. In addition to switching publishers – Sincero is now with Viking, a division of Penguin Random House – she recently left her longtime agent for Alexandra Machinist, a rising star at Hollywood powerhouse ICM. “It was terrifying,” Sincero says. “I’d been with my agent for 15 years. I was like, ‘Am I a bad person? Am I one of those people who’s really successful and leaves their agent?’ But I just didn’t like the agency at all. And they are not hurting for cash – they did really well!” she says with a laugh.
Sincero is no longer offering her services as a life coach – although videos are available for a fee on her website – and is taking a temporary break from writing Badass books as well. For the moment, she says, “I just want to hang out with people I love and laugh my ass off.” She is writing a film screenplay with one of her best friends, and a television show with another.
The author, who now lives in a small town in the mountains near Santa Fe, New Mexico, is unapologetically rich. She enjoys having the means to travel and to give generously to causes such as Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union. “I’m renovating the crap out of my home, which is super-duper fun,” she says. “All I really want to talk about is tiles …”
Sincero’s eyes move away from mine and I turn to see a man bearing down on our table. He apologises for interrupting, and reminds Sincero that he was one of her video clients a few years back. “Because of you my business has been extraordinarily rewarding and my life has changed,” he gushes, handing her a card. Throughout the interaction, Sincero seems slightly on edge. She eases when the man returns to his seat and types his name into her phone. “Look at that, there he is,” she says with a weary chuckle. “It’s so nice see people take information and go kick ass.”
You Are a Badass by Jen Sincero (John Murray Publishers, £9.99). To order a copy for £8.49, go to guardianbookshop.com
