Sunday, August 28, 2005

Can-do Canfield in a Chicken Soup Can

My interview with Jack Canfield - the Chicken Soup for The Soul guy in the Star today.

(Before you go and read it, I must point out the big fat grammatical blooper in the very first sentence. This isn't what I wrote - somehow the modal verb got switched, and I come out looking as if I've forgotten how to speak my mother-tongue. I am in deeper pain than you can imagine ....)

Okay, now you can read it:
“People would always like things they don’t have. It’s human nature to want a better life” says best-selling author Jack Canfield, and Americas leading expert in Peak Performance.

It is as founder and co-creator (with Mark Victor Hansen) of the best selling Chicken Soup for Soul series (which sold more than 80 million copies sold worldwide) that Canfield is surely best known. These days there seems to be a chicken soup book catering to every sector of the market and new ones are constantly in preparation. Indeed, the public is invited to send in stories for the series and book ideas and submission guidelines are given on the website http://www.chickensoup.com/.

We might even see Chicken Soup for the Malaysian Soul one day since Canfield says that he’d be happy to entertain the idea: “if there’s editor is prepared to step forward and take charge of the project.”

Canfield attributes the success of the series to the fact that “Every story inspires and opens the reader’s heart and that they walk away feeling hopeful. The books talk about love, self-esteem, overcoming obstacles. These are all they are universal principles.”

Canfield’s latest book, co-authored with Janet Switzer, The Success Principles: How To Get From Where You Are To Where You Want To Be, is based on 64 “timeless principles” which provide a roadmap for personal success in all areas of life.

He acknowledges that there have been some excellent motivational books on the market in the past, and reels off the name of several including books by Stephen R. Covey and Napoleon Hill. “But each one gave only part of the answer. It’s like providing combinations to a combination lock: if you only know some of the numbers, it is not going to open.”

Instead, Canfield aims with this book to give his readers all the answers they need in one place, combining the wisdom of the great self-help gurus with insights his from own learning over the years (in areas as diverse as quantum physics and neuroscience), to create what he sees as being “a success bible containing everything: a sort of one stop shopping for success!”. The result is surely the most comprehensive self-help manual yet: a book both to dip into for specific advice, and one that you might just want to read from cover to cover for a total life make-over.

Canfield has been coming to South-east Asia for the past twenty years and says he sees Malaysians as becoming increasingly aspirational. On October 4th, he will be in Kuala Lumpur again to run a seminar on The Success Principles in which he will cover the most important principles in his book in depth.

He will also be running the same programme for young people a day earlier. Canfield, who is also a committed educator and an ex-teacher, says young people need to apply exactly the same principles to their lives as adults, starting with the most important one, that you must take 100% responsibility for your life.

Many children fail, Canfield says, because schools fail to teach them to be successful and parents are too often poor role models. Success is both learnable and teachable and it is not difficult to find space in the school timetable to teach the principles – as small an investment as 25 minutes a day during the home-room period has been seen to yield remarkable results including fewer reports grade to the principals office, better grade scores and enhanced athletic achievement.

A message that educators here could do well to take to heart!
I never used to be into self-help books of the kind that my friend Raman calls "just- add-water-books".

I think there's an in-built British resistance to the very idea that we might need advice. It seemed kinda sad to need someone else to tell us where we're going wrong with our lives. An admission of failure.

We associate all that bright, sparkly can-doness with Americans who distilled it from the pioneering-frontier-conquering spirit that made their nation great. It seems somehow ... alien to the British psyche. I think we'd rather embrace our imperfections lovingly and have a good laugh about them.

But I like Canfield's latest book (co-authored with Janet Switzer)The Success Principles: How to Get from Where You are to Where You Want to Be, very much and I'm enjoying improving myself principle by principle through my daily readings. (I've actually chosen the book as my bathroom reading for this month - in other words my "bog book".) I will soon be so perfect that you won't know me.

It was fun chatting to Canfield on the phone the other day. I let slip that I had sobbed my way through Chicken Soup for the Pet Lover's Soul (all those dying puppies and injured kittens and cuddly cuteness spilling from the pages ... though, come to think of it, no mention of hairballs on the sofa, masticated mice on the carpet and pools of pussy pee in the dish-draining rack as a form of odiferous protest when things aren't going their way ...).

Perhaps I should write my own self-help book one day and sell my own philosophies of life.

Think I'm going to call it:

Rat Soup for the Cynic's Soul

8 comments:

Chet said...

Where's the mistake? Either I'm blind, or don't know the English language that well, or ... they amended the online version. I guess I'll have to go and get the print copy in a while.

bibliobibuli said...

*sigh* Many folks here have problems knowing when to use will and when to use would ...

You cannot say "He will like to ..." in English. It is a question not of tense, but of modality - how the event is viewed. Pls. check a good grammar book for evidence ... I gave up being agony auntie to the English language some time back ...

Chet said...

Sorry you had to be one this morning to this little person.

bibliobibuli said...

's okay, chet. Just snarly english teacher being forced to take a walk ...

Allan Koay 郭少樺 said...

there's also a mistake in the second sentence.

but i have read your piece which i have read, and i feel your pain which i also feel.

bloody sub-editors!

Pyewacket said...

There are a heap o' editor-inflicted mistakes in Sharon's lovely article, but I'm too lazy to transcribe them all here. No point, anyway. Some editors believe it's their job to muck up good work, apparently.

Sharon, let us not forget that the first wave of can-do immigrants to America included many from England. There must've been a dollop of that bracing, (annoying) I-can-do-better spirit in the British in those Empire-building days! I think the attitude you describe is a modern, post-Empire one. See what happens when you let your Empire slip away? :-) Check with us Americans in a few years and see if we're still quite so can-do....

bibliobibuli said...

Yes, I see what you mean 3rd Chimp. The only answer is to start recolonising like mad. Since i'm here I'll start with malaysia.

Anonymous said...

Speaking of which, there actually are some good looking caucasians around here these days. In the days to come, who knows what the racial make-up will be. Maybe there will be more mixed-race people.