Saturday, October 08, 2005

Jack's Soup is good for you




JACK Canfield is a man known to many who have read his Chicken Soup series. Together with his partner Mark Victor Hansen, both men have produced more than 75 titles under the Chicken Soup banner.
For years now, I have been reading those Chicken Soup series intermittently. It started with the original Chicken Soup for the Soul. Then it just snowballed.
There have been many occasions when I was so moved by the stories that tears came easily to my eyes. I wasn't sad. I was just glad that there were indeed great and wonderful deeds happening out there, and I wanted to be part of that.
I guess that's what is so marvellous about the Chicken Soup books. It rekindles a person's confidence in mankind after reading all those horrible stories of crime and murder in the daily newspapers and seeing them on the television nightly.
Recently, I came across Jack's latest contribution to society. It is called The Success Principles. It is about 473 pages. Not exactly your usual run-of-the-mill book which totals about 270 pages.
Success Principles is a fun book. Fun in the sense that it makes you want to go out and apply some of the principles to your own life. The principles are simple and straightforward. They are not state secrets.
In fact, they are so simply and down-to-earth, they may make you think of your mum or your dad because you have heard some of the principles of most of them from your parents.
The book is reader-friendly because the language is simple, the chapters are short and it is very well organised.
Some people are put off by inspirational and motivational books. I really can't understand why. Motivational books are like those by Norman Vincent Peale's Positive Thinking series, or Dale Carnegie's How to Win and Influence People, or even Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich.
Those are all marvellous books which have inspired many individuals to improve their own lives and then go on to help many others stuck in their own predicaments.
There are 64 principles discussed, explained and anecdoted with examples throughout the book. Canfield is realistic enough to point out that to achieve a fair measure of success in life, an individual needs to work hard, take risks and persists until victory is finally achieved.
It is not a magic formula where you only have to rest on the couch and everything good falls on your lap. This is not the kind of book that you read and then forget about it.
The tips you read about will have to be applied and applied constantly. You also have to practise and practise and practise. Like a beginner who start learning piano, you need to train over and over again the proper steps until it becomes second nature to you.
Success Principles won't be the kind of book that Jack Canfield will be proud of, if it doesn't taste and read like a Chicken Soup book. Indeed, it does but in a significantly different way.
Canfield has culled from his world travels and his countless hours of meeting motivational gurus and other leaders the information and gems of knowledge that proffered in this book.
I would certainly recommend this book to anyone above the age of 10. Maybe, I should lower the age limit to six, after all anyone with rudimentary education can understand Canfield's way of speaking.
Beg, borrow or appeal for this book. There is no such thing as "waiting for the right time" to read. Anytime is a good time. Don't be too proud to say that you don't know all the answers.
Here are all the answers you need. All you need to do is to memorise them and apply them one by one to your life and watch miracles happen. It's that simple, really.

1 comment:

fillip said...

Howdy, Silver Fox. Nice of you to drop by.