How to accomplish success

Three new authors hope their book will answer an illuminating question — how did some of Canada’s most famous and successful individuals get to where they are today?

Andrew Feindel, Alexander Herman and Paul Matthews were first profiled in Metro back in 2006 where we documented their struggles to get their book published as new authors with no experience but a whopper of an idea.

Today, their book Kickstart: How Successful Canadians Got Started features dozens of interviews with some of Canada’s most notable and successful public figures, including dancer Karen Kain, athlete Rick Hansen, business mogul and philanthropist Peter Munk and even former prime minister Brian Mulroney.

Since most new graduates experience some form of uncertainty about what to do next in their lives, the authors figured the best way to find out how to achieve success was from Canadians who had already done it. Luckily for the rest of us, most interviewees confirmed that their early years were just as uncertain and restless as one might expect.

“In general, no one really knew what they were doing,” said author Alexander Herman.

“It shows there’s no single road map to get where you want to go,” added co-author Andrew Feindel.

If any one piece of advice seems to cut across all lives from the book, it would be to do what you love, not what you feel you have to do to make a living.

“One of the things that held a lot of stories together is that people were doing things they loved to do. They were quite passionate about what they do. The message was no matter what you’re doing, if you really like something you can find a way of making that your career,” Herman said.

Feindel and Herman say the hardest part was getting people to speak with them when they first started working on the book, since they had no publisher and no experience. Meanwhile, publishers didn’t want to give them the time of day since they had not completed enough interviews to have a book. It was a paralyzing Catch-22 scenario that seemed impossible to escape from.

“Publishers would say to us, ‘Great idea, come to us when you have it finished.’ The people we would try to interview would say, ‘Great idea — when you have a publishing deal, then we’ll talk,’” Feindel said.

Luckily, as more interviews started rolling in, convincing other interviewees to participate became easier due to word-of-mouth and name recognition. Still, some interviews took a lot of effort to secure — it took two years to get Brian Mulroney into the book, for example.

Rather than relying solely on their own perceptions of influential Canadians, Feindel, Herman and Matthews hit up the interviewees themselves to recommend people to include in the book.

“We asked interviewees, ‘Who would you like to see in a book like this?’” Feindel said.

Plenty of interviews were edited out for space, so expect to see them if the book becomes successful.
“There’s room for a sequel!” Herman joked.