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A Love Letter to Authors from 1979 on How to Get What You Really Want
Barbara Sher’s Old School and ahead-of-its-time “wishcraft”
Before there were Instagram influencers, dime-a-dozen life coaches, and slick-packaged, live-my-amazing-six-figure-life gurus, there was Barbara Sher. And she was amazing. She was a struggling single mom with a “useless” degree in New York City in the late 1960s, prone at times to a scattered brain, exhaustion, low self-esteem, complaining, and other nonproductive habits.
But she had kids to feed. And she had a heart of gold and a forged-in-fire belief in her fellow humans — and their right to be fulfilled and not settle and live their best life. She eventually became a best-selling author, workshop leader, public speaker, and — in her down-to-earth, affirmations-are-dumb, self-improvement-doesn’t-work way — a pioneering life coach with her own wand of manifestation to wave.
Her first book, Wishcraft: How to Get What You Really Want (1979, 2009), has sold over a million copies and still offers us fresh, brilliant, relevant advice. Throughout the book, she tackles things that were issues then and are still issues for many of us now: ways society and culture and all of us may make some things harder for women than men — and how to work with and around those things; and toxic…
