We Reviewed Gucci Mane’s Guide to Greatness And We Already Feel Greater

This week, husband, father, trap legend and bestselling author Gucci Mane released his second book, The Gucci Mane Guide to Greatness.

TL;DR: The Gucci Mane Guide to Greatness is clever, inspiring and ego-free thug motivation, written for everybody. We love it. 

As you may know, this is #GuwopTheAuthor’s second literary work, following 2017’s The Autobiography of Gucci Mane, which hit #4 on The New York Times Best Sellers list when it arrived on shelves in September 2017. 

Both books are published by Simon & Schuster, although the coauthors are different — the autobiography was written with former XXL Magazine music editor Neil Martinez-Belkin, while Soren Baker, former editor-in-chief at The Source, helped with Greatness.

This matters, because there’s a big difference in the way Gucci’s narrative voice comes through in the text. His autobiography dealt with stories of gun violence, prison sentences, drug addiction and more (Gucci’s wild as hell). 

It reads much more like a memoir, with longer sentences that present an extremely thoughtful side of the man born Radric Davis. An example of this is near the end of the autobiography: 

“To start a new chapter, you’ve got to turn the page on the last one. Still, every now and then I do think it’s okay to stop and look back, just for a moment, before continuing on your way.”

The new self-help book waxes far less poetic, but punches no less powerfully with shorter statements that are just as impactful, if not more. Greatness, in its brevity, is another example of Gucci’s always underestimated and under-celebrated genius. 

Not counting intro, the new book has nine chapters, beginning with “Part I: The Essentials,” which are broken into seven subchapters. Smartly, in the table of contents, there are page numbers not just for the chapters but the subchapters, letting you get right to the point. 

In other words, if you want to read what Gucci has to say about the subject of “It’s Imperative That I Change the Narrative,” you go straight to page seven and you’ll quickly absorb such good advice as “If you don’t like the story you’re living, you have the power to change the narrative.” 

Here are a few other examples of Gucci’s penchant for “If/Then” wisdom:

• If you just keep working and growing, it’s not even about the acclaim.
• If you do less, you’ve got less leverage. That’s it. 
• If you say you’re tough, that you’re bad, that you’re resilient, show me resilience.
• If you take things one day at a time, you’re less likely to do something foolish, to do too much or not enough.
• If you’ve got to drop 10 albums a year to make the same amount of money as somebody that made one album, do it.

Throughout the book, you find yourself truly soaking up Gucci’s positive vibes, and getting maybe a better idea of what makes the man than his autobiography provided.

He talks about being resilient since he was a child, and defeating self-doubt. He talks about the loss of Kobe Bryant, and compares the tribulations of Kobe, Antonio Brown, Tiger Woods and others to his own public-facing troubles. 

He talks about pushing through those times, and times to come, even bringing up the coronavirus, on page 128, as a challenge that is going to test us all. 

“There’s nothing I can tell you that can affect you, other than, ‘Hey man. Wash your hands, stay home, and be safe,’” Gucci says about COVID. “We’ll have to see what the planet is going to do. What humanity is going to do.” 

Then he talks about how people with money and resources can insulate themselves from COVID’s effects, while others without are getting double-whammied because the inability to go to work compounds their financial situations, making them more vulnerable all around. 

The point he’s making is that personal responsibility is key to self-preservation, as he confirms later on down the page. “Tragedy won’t stop anything. If I didn’t save for what’s ahead, then whatever happens to me, honestly, I deserve it, because I worked for it but didn’t plan far enough ahead.”

It’s tough love for sure. But there’s also a lot of love for the woman in his life. In one of the more touching chapters of the book, “Part VIII: The Power of Love,” Gucci gushes for 28 pages about Keyshia Ka’oir, starting with the subchapter, “I Love My Wife.” Here’s how it begins:

“Marriage is one of the best things that ever happened to me. My wife makes me so happy. I found a great wife, a supportive wife, a wife with an income who helps me, a wife who was already financially literate and had skills she could help me with. She challenges me to get better.”

If you don’t have a big-ass Gucci Mane smile on your face while reading that — and looking at the beautiful photos of the loving couple (the book really shines with photography, BTW) — your heart is so icey that you might as well get it tatted with an electrified ice cream cone. Burr. 

All in all, The Gucci Mane Guide to Greatness a fantastic read. Like Gucci’s rap lyrics, it’s simple and easy enough to get into that you can quickly pick up what he’s putting down. 

It’s another piece of evidence in the case of the state versus Radric Davis’ brilliance, which proves it doesn’t take long, flowery sentences and philosophical gas to motivate people. Sometimes all you need is logic.