The Secret of Chicken Soup

I must admit, once I discovered the superficiality of The Secret, I was a little disappointed by the endorsements from otherwise credible people like Dennis Waitley and Jack Canfield.

Canfield of course is one of the co-creators of the “Chicken Soup for the Soul” series. On page 40 of The Secret he says “Since I learned The Secret and started applying it to my life, my life has truly become magical.” He then goes on to describe the good life he is enjoying. He concludes: “All of this happened, and continues to happen, because of knowing how to apply The Secret.

What he says interfaces with the teaching of The Secret that it isn’t hard work that makes you succeed, it is right thinking.

Fortunately, before I saw those words, I’d read a book that talked about authors and writing. One of the authors featured was Canfield’s coauthor Mark Victor Hansen. Mark describes how he and Jack went about getting the mega sales they’ve achieved:
Rejected by 35 publishers, 228 attempts to find a 1-800 number that spelled a word that worked with their books, interviewed the 101 best selling authors, made a list of 1094 things to do and did them, developed a 25 year business plan.

“You have to write a great book first, then spend 90% of your time marketing and hustling…We use focus groups to select the best stories…We try to be in front of a mass of people every day. There has never been a day that we haven’t done media (radio or TV interviews, articles) at least one a day, 20 some days… It took five years for us to become big. ”
(In another source I heard them say they did at least 5 interviews per day, anytime of the day or night for a solid year.)

So, did Chicken Soup become an industry due to sending out positive thought vibes to the universe, or did Jack Canfield and MVH have a great idea, and then work their little white buttocks off to tell people about the idea?