Jack Canfield

Chicken Soup for the Soul started in 1990 as a plan by two motivational speakers to print the stories they had been telling from the stage. Jack Canfield, born in Fort Worth in 1944, holds a degree in Chinese history from Harvard and a master's in education from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He taught high school in Chicago from 1967 and ran self-esteem workshops in Santa Barbara before the first collection appeared with Mark Victor Hansen in 1993; the series has since passed 250 titles. The Success Principles, written with Janet Switzer and published by HarperCollins in 2005, gathers his rules for goal setting, persistence and asking directly for what you want. His qualifications are in teaching and psychology rather than business or finance, and the book supports a commercial operation: the Canfield Training Group sells seminars, coaching and trainer certification. He also appeared in the 2006 film The Secret.