I’m working on the transcript of an interview I conducted with Bob Burg, for a story in a forthcoming edition of Networking Times. At one point, talking about maintaining the proper mental posture while asking for referrals, Bob says, “In a very posturized, non-threatening way, you’ve let this person know what you’d like . . .”

The person who transcribed the recording (the excellent Sandi White, my favorite transcriptionist on the planet) understandably transcribed it this way:

“In a very pasteurized, non-threatening way…”

I love it when Bob heats up his words so as to destroy any stray bacteria, molds, fungus or yeasts. Makes for much safer listening.

Which reminds me of something that happened with my dad.

For a few years before his death, we were working on a project to translate the complete correspondence between Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann (which covered decades, and has never been fully translated into English). He would translate each letter by hand onto a yellow legal pad. Then twice a week, we would get on the phone together, and he would read me his latest installment. I would type it as he read, then later clean up his English a bit and email the result to his secretary.

One day he was reading me his translation of a letter in which Brahms told Clara about a concert he had attended. He reported that when he heard a certain piece by Felix Mendelssohn, “. . . it brought me to tears.”

For the normally gruff and sardonic Brahms, I thought this was a pretty touching comment.

A few days later my dad called, laughing so hard he could hardly get the words out. Turns out, what Brahms had actually written was that while sitting through the Mendelssohn, “. . . it bored me to tears.”

I guess the Mendelssohn was just a little too pasteurized for Brahms.

A big thank you to those of you who have written asking, “What’s happening with A Deadly Misunderstanding since its release two weeks ago? And what can I do to help spread the word?”

The day of its release, the book hit #1 on Amazon in three categories: “Islam,” “Church and State,” and “Comparative Religion” and was in the top 200 (all books).

Mark has spoken on twenty-six radio interviews and is doing his best to book major media appearances—but with the two-headed media juggernaut of economic crisis and presidential politics, it’s all but impossible to get a word in edgewise right now.

The biggest impact happening is with influential individuals, who are writing to us even before finishing the book to tell us how moved they are. Here are two examples:

“I am very impressed by Mark’s forays into Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic and his determination to get to the bottom of these knotty problems. This book is a unique gift to people of deep faith and good will — a potent antidote to the prevailing deadly misunderstanding that threatens to envelope us all. I couldn’t put it down, and finished it in one sitting!” — Hon. Ali Khalif Galaydh, former Prime Minister of Somalia

“I’ve just started it and can already tell what an important and timely book this is. I hope a copy was sent to every Congressman, Senator, Cabinet member and candidates. I believe this is one of the most important issues our world is facing right now, because it has ramifications in so many areas besides just foreign policy, i.e., homeland security, energy policy, and more.” — Scott Allen, About.com “Entrepreneur’s Guide” and coauthor of The Virtual Handshake

What you can do to help:

• Once you’ve read the book, go onto Amazon.com and BN.com and share your personal views. Equally important as sheer sales is the enthusiasm of those who have read it.
• If your local bookstore is not carrying it on their shelves, ask them to. (Many stores will let you order a book without paying for it up front.) Libraries too!
• Share the book with influence-leaders in your community — authors, speakers, political leaders, pastors, imams and other religious leaders, media figures . . . anyone you know who is in a position to help influence dialogue on this vital issue.
• Explore Mark’s web site to follow events as they unfold over the weeks and months ahead!

And yes: 535 copies of the book have been bought (by the Bridges Foundation) and are being distributed to each member of the U.S. Congress.

Will that change the world? Hard to say – but it’s a place to start. It could turn out that the person you give a copy to has more influence than anyone in Congress.

Networking is like that.

A few weeks ago, I got a check in the mail for $404.79. But before I tell you what it was for, I have to digress. It has to do with my dad.

My dad was born in Germany and emigrated to the United States during the war. Before leaving his homeland at the age of nineteen, he had published his first book in German: a translation of an eighteenth-century classic text of music composition that had been used by Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and scores of illustrious others. The original text was in Latin; my dad’s translation was, of course, into German.

After arriving here, he was eventually drafted into the American army and shipped overseas, ending up back in Europe as a counterintelligence agent tasked with debriefing citizens. The war’s close found him in a town near the mountain whereupon sat the castle occupied by the legendary composer Richard Strauss (of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” fame — you know, that dramatic music that plays in the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001” when the apes discover the big thingamajig).

So my dad goes up the mountain to interrogate Strauss, and finds the old man teaching his own grandnephew composition, using . . . (wait for it) . . . my dad’s book.

After returning to the States, my dad eventually translated the book again, this time into English, and it was published here by W.W. Norton as The Study of Counterpoint.

My dad taught me composition from it when I was a teenager. It’s still used in schools today.

By now, I’ll bet you’ve figured out how this all ties back in to that $404.79 I just received. If you guessed that the check is from W.W. Norton, you’re right: it represents my portion of this royalty period’s proceeds (a “royalty period” typically being six months) — proceeds from a book my dad began as a teenager in the 1930s and started translating into English before I was even born.

After depositing the check, I went out with my son Chris and bought an LCD monitor he’s been wanting. I doubt very much that my dad ever imagined, when he was nineteen, that someday his efforts would end up paying for a computer monitor for his future twenty-year-old grandson, some years after my dad had himself moved on from this earthly existence — but that’s exactly what happened.

Residual income is like that, and so is love. They both defy the entropy of time.

They last.

What if there were a way to bridge the chasm between east and west, Muslim and Judaeo-Christian worlds? A proven approach, based on ancient truths, that powerfully affected people, conflicts and countries, and could potentially change entire cultures?

There is such a way, and you can read about it in my latest book—which launches tomorrow.

In the spring and summer of 2006, I spent several days visiting with former U.S. Congressman and U.N. Ambassador Mark Siljander, listening to him recount his amazing spiritual odyssey, as he metamorphosed from anti-Muslim Christian arch-conservative to cultural-political pioneer and diplomatic trailblazer.

During our meetings, Mark described his often hair-raising experiences over the past few decades in such dangerous places as Beirut, Libya, Iraq, Sudan, Pakistan, and perhaps that scariest place of all, Washington D.C. Even more remarkable was his chronicling of his own internal journey and the extraordinary discoveries and realizations behind it.

The result is this book, A Deadly Misunderstanding: A Congressman’s Quest to Bridge the Muslim-Christian Divide.

When you click on that link, scroll through the list of people who have endorsed the book: from the Secretary-General of the U.N. and James Baker III to Cal Thomas and T. Davis Bunn; three-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee Tony Hall and former attorney general Ed Meese; Ergun Caner, the dean of the Divinity School at Liberty University and Sayyid Syeed, director of the Islamic Society of North America. Talk about a who’s who of religious and ideological diversity!

I have personally watched Mark in action. This is no abstract theory or fluffy idealism: Mark is an extraordinary man, and the path he describes in these pages is powerful and substantial. As our publisher, HarperCollins, puts it, “Siljander’s seemingly implausible path to peace dismantles the engine of terror without firing a single shot.”

This memoir-cum-political-thriller is perhaps the most fascinating writing project I’ve ever undertaken. I genuinely believe it could change the world.

I want to personally invite you to read the book and help support Mark’s tremendously important work, in three ways:

1) Buy your own copy on the book’s release date, tomorrow, Tuesday, October 7, by going to Amazon.com or clicking here.

2) Consider buying additional copies for friends, family and influential people and opinion-leaders at your place of worship and other organizations. You can purchase multiple copies from 800-CEORead by calling 800-236-7323 or clicking here.

3) Pass the word to anyone you know with an interest in promoting the cause of peace and stability in our troubled world. Share a link to the book’s web site, www.adeadlymisunderstanding.com on your own web site, MySpace, Facebook, blog, and however else you communicate with your world.

It could make a powerful difference.

It’s finally here: the long-awaited adaptation for teens of The Slight Edge, now published by The Success Foundation under the title Success for Teens: Real Teens Talk about Using the Slight Edge.

There’s so much new material in here, it’s essentially a brand new book. Here’s a peek inside the process of how Success for Teens came to be:

First, there was The Slight Edge, which is based on Jeff Olson’s training. To create that book, I spent time with Jeff on the phone in the fall of 2004, transcribed CDs of his training, and expanded on his basic message. John Fogg had done some work with the material years earlier, and I also built on some of the pieces John had brought to the table. Jeff went over everything I’d written (as did editors at Momentum Media, the book’s publisher), and eventually that collaboration became this enormously popular book, published in 2005. And then …

Last November, at the request of the Success Foundation, I sat down with The Slight Edge manuscript and began completely “reimagining” it as raw material for a new book for teens. I adapted some passages, threw others out, wrote brand new stuff, rearranged the ideas and codified a new set of core principles (I blogged a bit about this process here) … and eventually turned over a manuscript to Success Foundation staff —

which in turn became raw material for the immensely talented Al Desetta, who further adapted Jeff’s and my stuff to make it more teen-accessible and brought together the dozens of stories, vignettes and examples from the lives of real teens (along with the help of Keith Hefner and staff at Youth Communication in New York) that bring the text alive and really make the book what it is. And there you go: a new book.

You can follow this link to read more about the book (and the Success Foundation), and find out how to buy copies (singly or in bulk).

Note: The Success Foundation is also making the book available at no cost to qualifying organizations; to see if your group qualifies, follow the instructions at the bottom of the linked page.

Earlier this year I was interviewed by humorist, author and columnist Lisa Earle-McLeod. Author of the book Forget Perfect — Finding Grace When You Can’t Even Find Clean Underwear, Lisa is hysterical and quite delightful. (Check out her site and her “Perfect Minute” video essays.)

Lisa also writes for The Huffington Post, rated #1 by Technorati on its “Top 100 Blogs” — making it the single most influential English-language blog in the world.

Recently Lisa reported on our conversation in a wonderful Huffington Post review of The Go-Giver.

Pinch me: am I dreaming?

I wrote Lisa to thank her, and included the URL for my wedding pictures. She wrote back:

“I love wedding pictures; weddings themselves are a bit of a pain, unless you’re just a drunken guest of course, but the pictures are great, and these are particularly beautiful.

“I must say, for a geeky writer, it looks like you caught yourself one heck of a good lookin’ woman.”

And you know, she’s quite right. I did, didn’t I?

(Okay: so the Huffington Post didn’t officially say I have a beautiful wife. But I’m pretty sure it meant to.)

It’s official: the wedding pictures are up for viewing on their own web site.

Here are my bride and me, in the church…

… and on our way …

… into the sunset.

The entire album is worth viewing — our intrepid team of photographers, led by the redoubtable John Fitzpatrick, are excellent at what they do!

And yes, the sky really did look like that.

Yesterday I bought a spare phone charger. At the register, I held out my debit card uncertainly at the card-swiping gizmo. The man behind the register saw my confusion and said, “Strip down. Facing me.”

I paused, then repeated his words back to him. The woman at the next register burst out laughing.

I mean, if I were entering the Army, okay. But to purchase a phone charger? That seemed austere. Strip down, facing me.

Words. Honestly, they’re pretty malleable.

I have a friend who grew up hearing “Silent Night” and thinking that “Round John Virgin” was a character in the story.

When I was little, I had a friend who used to wet her bed every night. My mom told me she had “a bladder problem.” I had no idea what a “bladder” was. I thought she said my friend had “a splatter problem.” And that made perfect sense to me.

When my son Nick was little, he had a problem pronouncing the words “airplane” and “airport.” He said, “ahhplane” and “ahhport.” This went on for a few years.

Then one day, we drove to the Charlottesville Ahhport to pick up my dad, who was coming for a visit. We collected the maestro, and as we began driving home, Nick said something about how exciting it was to “come get Grandpa at the ahhport.” Then he turned to my dad and explained in perfect English, “I can’t say airport.”

“No?” said my dad. “What do you say?”

“I say, ahhport,” Nick replied.

Last month, when I saw the Japanese edition of The Go-Giver, I didn’t see how anyone else could possibly equal that amazing production, let alone top it.

Then, a few days ago, the Korean edition arrived.

Oh, my.

Since nobody in our house reads Korean, I can’t tell what’s actually being said in the ten (!) full pages of text that come between the title page and the table of contents, but they include the phrases “sustainable competitive advantage” and “My joy in giving is greater than your joy in receiving.”

Can anyone read Korean? If you can, I’ll loan you my copy in exchange for elucidation!

The illustrations are beyond great: they’re completely adorable. Here is the cover, featuring Pindar, Joe and Claire:

(Click to enlarge image)

and a picture of Joe, Pindar, Ernesto and Nicole:

and one of Joe — you guessed it — serving coffee. (Notice Gus, Meerschaum in hand.)

They’ve made the key a critical element in the book: I suspect each Law is now called a “key” — but again, until I find someone who reads Korean, I’m in the dark.

With my way lit by some wonderfully illuminating drawings.

Today the September/October issue of Networking Times hits the stands, and with it a piece I wrote in which I talk about the value of not talking so much.

“I remember my eighteenth birthday. I was young and in love, and the road ahead was positively shimmering with possibilities. I was unstoppable, and nothing was impossible.

“Then post-eighteen life began unfolding. Strivings, successes, failures, catastrophes. Fortunes rose and fell, marriages and friendships blossomed and crumbled. Some public triumphs, some personal tragedies, more roadblocks and dead ends and cul-de-sacs than I’d ever dream the universe could supply.

“This summer, I turned fifty-four. (That’s three times eighteen.) I am young and in love; the road ahead positively shimmers with possibilities, and nothing seems impossible. It’s good to be back…”

Click here to read the entire editorial (and find out how the heck I segue from “turning fifty-four” to the “secret of empty spaces”…)