At a Hollywood book signing, Sir Michael Fomkin joined bestselling author Jack Canfield to celebrate Living Truth, a collection centered on authenticity, purpose and the often complicated journey toward defining success on one’s own terms.
HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — In a city built around carefully constructed images, a gathering centered on authenticity carried a certain resonance. Sir Michael Fomkin and Jack Canfield recently came together in Hollywood for a signing of Living Truth. The collaborative book asks readers to reconsider expectations and achievement, and what it means to build a life aligned with their own values.
The scene itself was straightforward: authors at a table, copies of the book stacked nearby and readers encountering the people behind the pages. Yet the occasion represented another milestone for a project that extends far beyond a traditional business or motivational book.
Published through SuccessBooks®, Living Truth: The Keys to Shedding Ideals and Expectations to Find Authentic Success brings together Canfield, Fomkin and a group of contributors whose stories explore the pursuit of a more authentic definition of achievement. The book launched on Nov. 13, 2025. Its central premise is a move beyond externally imposed expectations, toward lives shaped by purpose and personal conviction.
From Success to Significance
Canfield has spent decades in the personal-development world, becoming widely known as the co-creator of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series and author of The Success Principles. His work has long relied on a deceptively simple idea: stories can move people toward action.
Living Truth takes that idea into territory particularly relevant to the current culture of achievement, where people now present careers, lifestyles and even personal identities as carefully curated brands.
The book challenges that approach with a harder question. What happens when the life that looks successful from the outside no longer feels authentic to the person living it?
Fomkin’s contribution approaches that question through his own experience in entrepreneurship and entertainment. The founder of VIP Ignite Live has spent more than two decades in talent development, personal branding and entertainment strategy, according to his professional biography. In practice, that has meant helping aspiring actors, models, musicians and entrepreneurs navigate industries where visibility can matter almost as much as ability.
His chapter, titled “Platform,” traces that journey from a struggling Brooklyn adolescence to the work he does now. It describes stepping away from a high-profile career in order to put purpose ahead of recognition, and building VIP Ignite and The Miami News as vehicles for helping other people become visible.
It is an idea with implications beyond entertainment.
A platform can produce attention. It can create opportunity and influence. But attention alone does not determine whether a career — or a life — has meaning. What matters is what a person builds with it.
Hollywood Meets Authenticity
That message takes on another dimension in Hollywood.
For generations, the entertainment capital has meant reinvention: new names, new personas, carefully crafted public images and careers built around becoming someone audiences want to watch.
However, the modern creator economy has blurred the line between performance and everyday life. Entrepreneurs, actors, musicians and increasingly ordinary professionals now cultivate personal brands across social media. They present versions of themselves to audiences that may never meet them.
Against that backdrop, Living Truth argues for something almost countercultural: success that begins internally rather than with public approval.
For Fomkin, the theme also connects with the business he has built around emerging talent. VIP Ignite Live describes its work as connecting aspiring and experienced performers with entertainment-industry professionals while providing education and career-development opportunities.
His professional biography lists him as founder of VIP Ignite Live and co-founder of Truth Mgmt, as well as author, entertainment strategist and media producer. It also names collaborations with Canfield, Brian Tracy, Michael Gerber and Kevin Harrington.
Living Truth represents a different type of collaboration, because its subject is not simply how to become successful. It asks how to determine whether the success being pursued belongs to you in the first place.
A Book With an International Reach
The project has also developed an international dimension.
Contributors come from different professional and cultural backgrounds. Events connected to the book have also reached beyond the United States. Meanwhile in June, Vietnamese author and entrepreneur Trần Tiến Công participated in a reader event in Ho Chi Minh City focused on his involvement with Living Truth and his long-held ambition to become a co-author alongside Canfield.
That global reach reinforces the universality of the book’s central question.
Definitions of success differ dramatically across countries and cultures. The tension between personal ambition and outside expectation, however, is hardly confined by geography. Family expectations, professional status, wealth, social media and cultural ideas about achievement all shape the lives people believe they are supposed to build.
The contributors to Living Truth offer another possibility: that achievement becomes more sustainable when it is connected to values rather than comparison.
Beyond the Signing Table
The Hollywood event ultimately represented something quieter than a conventional celebration of celebrity.
A signed book is, after all, an unusually personal object to hand someone. The author writes a name, perhaps a few words, then closes the cover. Nobody can entirely predict how the reader will interpret those pages.
For Canfield, whose career has demonstrated the enduring power of personal stories, that exchange is familiar territory.
For Fomkin, meanwhile, the signing marks another stage in a career spanning talent development, entrepreneurship, publishing and media. Living Truth reached best-seller status on Amazon’s Marketing and Sales & Selling lists after its 2025 release. It also hit five Amazon New Release lists.
But bestseller lists are only one measure of a book built around questioning conventional measures in the first place.
Hollywood is a city accustomed to certain questions. Who will become famous next. Whose project will succeed. Whose name will command attention. Living Truth asks a more enduring question: once the applause, titles and expectations are stripped away, what remains?
For Sir Michael Fomkin, Jack Canfield and their fellow contributors, the answer begins with something both simple and difficult — knowing what is true for oneself, and having the courage to build from there.
The Miami News | Book at a Glance
- Title: Living Truth: The Keys to Shedding Ideals and Expectations to Find Authentic Success
- Featured co-authors: Jack Canfield, Sir Michael Fomkin and an international group of contributors
- Publisher: SuccessBooks®
- Launch: November 13, 2025
- Sir Michael Fomkin’s chapter: “Platform”
- Core themes: Authenticity, purpose, personal growth and redefining success
- Recognition: Amazon best seller in Marketing and in Sales & Selling, plus five Amazon New Release lists
- Hollywood milestone: Fomkin and Canfield appeared together for a book signing in September 2026
