: How to write a guide based on personal experiences without sounding as if I'm bragging? Specifically, I'm thinking to write a generic financial guide based on my own experiences. Personal finance,

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I am answering as the author of "A Modern Approach to Graham and Dodd Investing."

I wrote about my own investing experiences, but linked it to a body of established theory the ("Graham and Dodd" approach of the 1930s). I then discussed how I updated the approach between its original (1934) version and my (2004) version, discussing trends and developments in the investment world in those 70 years.

You're probably talented, but if your ideas are sound, they are probably linked to some academic or practical theory. So discuss the original version of some established theory, your version of it, and explain why your version represents an improvement.

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Make sure to humanize yourself. You're on the right track by worrying about bragging: in addition to being unpalatable to most people, braggarts tend to reduce their own authority by the expression of it.

You can humanize yourself in several ways:

Don't just talk about what you learned, talk about the mistakes you
made in getting there (this was my own mistake early on, when trying
to keep my own mistakes hidden from my students). Then talk with
other people and use their experiences to back up your own, lifting
it out of mere anecdote and into the realm of common human
experience.
You can also state an opinion and back it up with other
authorities. In fact, mentioning other authorities, even those who
may be in direct competition with you, can show that you play fair,
and this is always admirable.
Lastly, leave your hard and fast financial rules for later in the chapters. If you start with rules, you risk early doubters abandoning your chapters early. On the other hand, building up to your rules can gradually build confidence in what you say.
One last way to humanize yourself is to write with frequency on your own website. By becoming someone whom others turn to for advice, you build authority via the voice of the crowd. And if there is one thing a crowd likes, it's the sound of its own voice.

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I've read a number of such books recently, and I think there are two things that make the difference for me as a reader:

1: Focus on the material, not on yourself.
2: Make sure the advice is good.

If I read a book where the author focuses on him or herself and personal experiences, but doesn't offer much generalizable guidance, I experience it as a vanity project. On the other hand, if the book has a lot of practical, usable advice, and mentions the author's own experiences exclusively when they are of direct value to the reader, then I don't experience it as bragging at all.

tl;dr If you have to constantly remind the reader of your qualifications, you're probably doing it wrong.

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