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Author Insight
Passion Fuels My Abundance
It’s fall 1997. An open-ended road trip that started in Toronto three months ago has landed me in Sedona and left me wondering how I, a Canadian, can stay in the US – legally and financially. That concern is still on my mind one afternoon as I amble along a favorite hiking trail. Suddenly, my eyes are drawn to the majestic rock formation known as Courthouse Butte…and it seems to be speaking to me, to be responding to my concern with five simple words: “Your books will support you.” ••• It’s now 27 years later, I’m still in the US and, in their own peculiar way, my books have supported me here or, more accurately put, my passion has supported me here...because writing is my passion. Mind you, my books haven’t supported me as I expected back then. I still haven’t hit The New York Times Best Seller list. Nor do my sales rival Stephen King’s. Yet as I have continued to write, this book and more than 20 others, I have been taken care of, all my needs have been met and my heart’s desires have been fulfilled. That I haven’t always been taken care of in ways my personality mind might prefer, that my needs have sometimes been met in ways that make me profoundly uncomfortable and that desires apart from those of my deepest heart have not always been fulfilled is irrelevant. I have been supported…by my books, by my writing, by my passion. Always.
Book Excerpt
The Way of the Abundant Fool
When young Guy Laliberté’s parents read him fairy tales and took him to see the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, they couldn’t have imagined the impact those two activities would have, and not only on their son. Fairy tales helped Laliberté believe in the conventionally impossible, and the Ringling Brothers triggered within him a passion that would revolutionize circus entertainment…and his life.
By his early teens, Laliberté was hooked on the performing arts and was producing events at his Quebec City high school. And by the time he was nineteen, he had dropped out of college, taught himself the accordion and harmonica, was proficient on stilts, was an accomplished fire-eater and had busked his way across Europe. A brief unsuccessful stint at “normal” job upon his return home persuaded him to follow his circus dreams.
From that moment on, Laliberté never gave up on his passion, and at age twenty-five he co-founded Cirque du Soleil.
If the Cirque’s first show was a modest Quebec tour with an eight-hundred-seat big top, its next, two years later in 1986, toured Canada, the US and Europe. By the time that show closed in 1990, its big top had more than tripled in size to twenty-five hundred seats. By the time another two years had passed, Cirque du Soleil was running simultaneous shows on three continents.
Through the 1990s and until March 2020, when COVID-19 shut down all its productions, Cirque du Soleil’s expansion seemed limitless, growing from a single show to nineteen shows in more than three cities on six continents, employing nearly five thousand people from fifty countries, and generating nearly a billion dollars in revenue.
Today, despite severe pandemic-related setbacks, Cirque du Soleil is as popular as ever, and Laliberté, who sold his final stake in the company a month before the COVID shutdown, is said to be worth $1.6 billion.
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