Born in 1944 in Fort Worth, TX, Jack Canfield studied Chinese History at Harvard before getting his Masters of Education at UMass Amherst. His first job was teaching at an inner-city high school. In 1976 he authored the book 100 Ways to Enhance Self-Concept In The Classroom and was named one of the US Jaycee’s Ten Outstanding Young Men of America (TOYA) of 1978.

Founder of the Canfield Training Group, Canfield holds the Guiness World Record for the most titles on the New York Times Best-Seller list at the same time (seven). He is the author of many books, including The Power of Focus, The Aladdin Factor, and Dare to Win. He was also the co-creator of a little book called Chicken Soup For The Soul.

In the early 1990s, Jack Canfield was a prolific author and in-demand speaker on self-improvement. He and fellow motivational speaker Mark Victor Hanson came up with a cool idea — why not collect real-life inspirational stories from attendees of their talks into a book? Since the stories would be like nourishment for a sick spirit, they named their anthology book Chicken Soup for the Soul.

Chicken Soup for the Soul was the third-best-selling book of 1993 and spawned a sprawling franchise of 250 unique books with 500 million copies in print.

Canfield followed up his Chicken Soup success with the book The Success Principles: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be.

The Success Principles (2015)