064. "In Search of Excellence"

Publishers know more about selling books than the writers. Harper and Row, well known publishers stumbled on a report written by Tom Peters and Waterman and approached them with the idea of publishing it. Tom bluntly said it was a report and not readable and they could not hope to sell even 10,000 copies to recover their cost. The publishers differed and securing their permission, printed it. About six million copies sold in the following years. For non-fiction, it is remarkable. The publisher knows what the reading public will respond to more than the writer who writes for his own satisfaction.

Tom Peters was of the hippy generation and his one craving was for Freedom, freedom from all types of constraint. The hippy movement, whatever the shape it took, was a movement of freedom of the deepest human urges. Tom represented that vibration in Spirit as well as Letter, but he did not know what actuated him. Whether the publisher knew this or he had another commercial acumen is not known. Tom, who had such a great urge for freedom as a vibration of his being was unaware of it. This is recent history.

Every man born has the Spirit in him but is not fully aware of it. German doctors once cut open every organ of the human body in search of the soul and failed to find it! The thousands of Rishis who realised Brahman over the centuries have left in the very bodies of the Indians the light of their realisations. No wonder we do not find it or know whether it can play an active part in our modern daily life. When Tom's subsequent books were to be published, it is said, he asked for a million dollar advance. If only we discover the Spirit and come to call it into play, of course, we will put it to great use.