Chicken Soup for the Soul 20th Anniversary Edition Read Free

importance of operating from space of love, believing in yourself and your dreams, always following your heart, trusting your intuition, setting high goals, overcoming obstacles, and never ever giving up on your dreams.
    In 1991, a strange thing happened. One day, out of the blue, someone asked me, “Is that story you told about the Girl Scout who sold 3,526 boxes of Girl Scout Cookies in one year in a book anywhere? My daughter needs to read it.” And the very next day someone asked, “That story about the boy and the puppy — is that in a book anywhere? I need to read it to my son.” And it continued day after day for the next month. “I need to read that story about the boy with the amputated leg who went on to become a tennis star to my staff. I need to show them that they really have no excuses not to excel in life.” “Is that story you told about the boy who was burned in the motorcycle accident in a book anywhere? I want to send it to my son in college.” Day after day I was asked the same question — “Is that story in a book anywhere?”
    One evening I was flying back from Boston to Los Angeles, where I was living at the time, and it suddenly struck me. It was as if God were knocking on the side of my head and saying, “Wake up! You’re supposed to put all of these stories you have been collecting into a book!” For the remainder of the flight I made a list of every story I had ever used in a speech or a workshop. By the time we landed in LA I had a list of 70 stories.
    That night I made a commitment to myself to write up two of the stories on the list every week until I had them all completed. So every night from about ten o’clock until midnight I would work on a story, writing and rewriting it until I was satisfied with it. After nearly a year I had completed all 70 stories I had listed on that plane ride plus a few more I had picked up during the year.
    It was about that time that I met my friend Mark Victor Hansen for breakfast. Early on in our conversation Mark asked me if I was working on anything exciting. I told him about the book, and he immediately said, “I would like to do that book with you.”
    “Mark,” I said. “I’m almost completely finished with the book. Why would I do that?”
    “It’s easy,” he replied. “First of all, I think you should have 101 stories, not 75. When I was a student ambassador in India, I learned that 101 is a number of completion. Second, some of your best stories you originally learned from me. And third, I am a really good marketer and promoter, and I think we would make an awesome team.”
    I told Mark if he could contribute the remaining 26 stories, and if they were really great, that I would be willing to do it. I loved Mark and I knew that he was a consummate promoter and salesman. True to his word, in less than a month Mark came up with the remaining stories we needed to get to 101. Now all we had to do was sell the book to a publisher.
    About a week later Mark and I met Jeff Hermann, a literary agent, at a party in Palm Springs, California. We told Jeff about our book and he got very excited about it. He asked us what the title was. Funny thing — we were so engrossed in finishing the book, we had never even bothered to come up with one. We brainstormed a few at the party, but nothing seemed to capture the essence of the book. Since Mark and I were both meditators, we agreed to spend at least a half hour every morning for the next week in meditation seeking a title.
    The first two days we both drew blanks. Nothing had come to us. And then on the third morning while I was meditating, I suddenly saw the image of a huge green chalkboard like the ones in school classrooms. Then a hand appeared — I imagined it was the hand of God — and wrote the words Chicken Soup on the chalkboard. I said to the hand, “What the heck does chicken soup have to do with this book?”
    The hand replied, “When you were sick as a child, your grandmother gave you