I think "touched a nerve" should be a last assumption. If you can't point to any obvious things wrong with the article maybe people are reacting to it negativel

I think "touched a nerve" should be a last assumption. If you can't point to any obvious things wrong with the article maybe people are reacting to it negatively for emotional reasons. But I think it's uncharitable to just jump to that straight away. So let me lay out for you a reasonable alternative that we can prefer as an explanation for why people are responding negatively: Because it's a fundamentally bad article. I'll make that case. The first point that the article tries to push is "Don't make reasonable excuses". To justify that point he tells a story about a woman that was successful despite facing incredible challenges. Here's the problem with that though: She succeeded, but that's got nothing to do with reasonable excuses. Did she make reasonable excuses? I don't know. Why are we taking the message from her story that we should not accept reasonable excuses? Surely a story to justify not making reasonable excuses should actually involve someone succeeding because they didn't make reasonable excuses. And this underlines a fundamental issue with the article - it's true that by definition the most successful people are abnormal. But it's not useful. The least successful people are abnormal. The important bit is how you're abnormal. This is exacerbated by the fact the article is so basic and formulaic in its structure. It's the old 7 habits of highly effective people. You make a pithy statement, you write a little bit explaining the claim that doesn't really justify the statement - it justifies a very specific reading of the statement to the point of the pithy statement being meaningless, and then it tells you an anecdote. The anecdote doesn't justify the claim whilst simultaneously wildly over-stating the importance of the claim. John Wooden won basketball games because he stopped worrying about things he couldn't control! Great! Firstly, that's not abnormal, and secondly I'm fairly certain practicing basketball had more to do with his success. All I'm saying is that the structure and style of this article is bad. You can argue about the merits of the things he's proposing, but they're proposed in such a 1990s self-help way of presenting these things, and it's not even well executed. As a result it's really easy to bash.