> If you acknowledge there is skill in succeeding (with a company, say, or in overcoming a bad habit, or tending your goals and beliefs, perhaps even to train more rigorously for that high jump), and that these things are moral or at least not immoral, the author's argument falls apart.
His thesis or argument is that the books and articles of his day on "success" are mainly rubbish. It is not to say that the word "success" is actually no good, or that trying to succeed at some individual thing is not good. A main point of his is that there are individual skills to succeed at specific things, but not an all-encompassing skill of "success."
I will concede that Chesterton sees people whose main mission in life is to make money as greedy, because he strongly, strongly believes that money doesn't make a person happy.