Just in case you’re new around here, let me just give you the heads up on a project I am deeply involved in.

The book I co-authored called How To Be Rich and Happy is to all intents and purposes a charitable project. When myself and John wrote the book 3 years ago we decided to turn down offers for the US and UK rights.

The reason was because we wanted to sell the book through our own site and use all the profits to publish new books to give away to good causes. If we’d sold the rights we’d never have been allowed to have done that for obvious reasons.

To date we are closing in on the quarter of a million dollars worth of books given away, but it has been a tough slog. A very tough slog.

Doors Are Slow To Open

Charities are suspicious as are many people who see the title of the book. They wrongly conclude that it’s a get rich quick type of book. It isn’t and the rich we talk about is feeling rich in spirit not just in financial terms.

Just recently I have to confess to getting a bit down about the slow progress we were making.

Even though we sold the right for the book into France, Germany, French speaking Canada (where btw it went best-seller), Netherlands, Taiwan and China and that was nice for my ego, it hasn’t really helped us with our goal to give away 1,000,000 copies.

95% of the e-mails I have sent offering books to good causes have not been returned and a similar percentage of people have been ‘unable’ to take my call when I tried a different tack.

That’s why we have been so grateful to the charities that  have supported us and helped us get so many books out there.

One Person Hated It

Anyway, as I was saying I was getting down because the goal was looking so far away and sales of the book via our website had slowed down to a trickle even though the reviews and feedback we were (and still are) getting is fantastic and universally positive.

Actually scratch that last comment. One guy who I mailed a  free copy of the book to e-mailed to complain that it was useless for people with Bi-Polar. Well yeh, I guess it is!

So we decided to add an ISBN number and for the first time make it available through Amazon. That has helped somewhat, but not really enough to have us catapulting toward our target.

After we had the first print run of 4,000 we had to do a little bit of rewriting, mainly for typos etc, but I had an idea to add a page in the book telling people what we were trying to achieve and asking them to contact us if they could help in any way.

This weekend something truly awesome happened.

A guy in Canada read the book and loved it. He then read the bit about helping out and e-mailed John to say he’d like to donate some money on the strict condition that he remained anonymous.

How classy is that for starters? People who don’t need to announce to the world they give to charity and who don’t look for plaudits have my utmost admiration.

How much did he offer us you maybe wondering and so was I when an excited John called me yesterday.

How Much???

“Fifty thousand dollars” was the answer

“Fifty thousand dollars? Are you kidding me”

“Nope it’s a 5 with 4 zeros”

“Holy shit”

“Indeed”

That equates at Canadian retail to $1,250,000 worth of books.

Not bad eh?

I felt foolish for being down on the project and thinking all our hard work was for very little when I as well as anybody knows that these things can change in a heartbeat.

Apart from the fact we can now help another 50,000 people we also think this donation and operation to get the books out there should generate some good publicity.

And hopefully that publicity can help us when we roll out the next phase in September which is making the ebook version available for any student with a .edu account to download for free.

Churchill once said: “Never, never, never give up” And to be fair I don’t think we ever would have.

However, what maybe Churchill should have said was:

“Never, never, never give up and never, never, never lose focus on the reasons you are doing what you are doing”

Goals can sometimes seem elusive and can even get us down when things aren’t going according to plan.

I’m sure you have experienced that at some stage, but if you can shift your focus away from the goal and onto your values and why you want to achieve whatever it is you want to achieve, then your likelihood of hitting it goes up exponentially.

I lost sight of that if I’m being honest which is why even Life Coaches can benefit from working with other Life Coaches from time to time.

Note: If you sign up for my newsletter in the box on the left, one of the things you will receive is my in-depth guide to goal setting.

My enthusiasm is now at an all-time high even though we still have a very long way to go and I am so thankful we retained the English language rights even though we had checks waved under our nose.

This is way bigger than any advance.

Do You Want To Help The Project?

We still need loads of help and if you’re so inclined you can assist us in any of the following ways we’d love you for it.

• Buy a copy from here, because it’s a great book ;-)
• Tell us about any charities that would be receptive to receiving some books. However, we do need to charge $25 per case of 60 books for media mail within the US*
• If you know a charity and are happy to donate a case all we’d require is the $25 shipping (USA only)
• Buy a case of 60 to give as gifts for employees, family, friends, colleagues etc for only $199 inc shipping in US
• Help us raise the profile by telling friends and/or posting this to any social media accounts you may have

If you have any goals you’re struggling with or losing heart leave a comment and let’s see if we can encourage each other.

* You may thing we’re being a bit mean on this, but the $50k will never hit our bank account as the donor will pay the bill to the printer to keep things above board and we simply don’t have the money to pay all shipping costs.