The Man Who Sells Self-Help Thinks China Could Be a Huge "Chicken Soup" Market | 100 People With Ideas

What he preaches is nothing more than folk wisdom — "people learn fastest and grow fastest when they're uncomfortable." But he believes it, so he says it with real sincerity.

Last week, at the Norwegian Embassy, we interviewed a TED speaker named Erik Bertrand Larssen. He is a mental training coach, and he has come to China to sell self-help. You Are Far Stronger Than You Think (《你远比想象中强大》), published here at the start of the year, has already sold 60,000 copies — no small number by the standards of the publishing business.

On the morning of the interview he had just finished a talk at the embassy. The embassy controls who comes and goes strictly; to get in, people attending had to leave their ID cards at the door. Even so, more than 60 excited readers packed into the crowded room before the talk began. When the time came, Larssen walked to the lectern in a pale blue slim-fit suit, hair cropped close to his head, a black leather bag in his hand. "Hello, China!" he said, smiling down at the audience — professional, well practiced.

The talk ran an hour. Larssen told the story of how a frail little boy grew into a tough man in uniform, and the plot held no surprises, the sort of thing you find in a pulp inspirational novel: as a child he was bullied often, decided his life would be finished if it went on that way, started training without let-up, and ended up a paratrooper in a NATO army. I suspect he has told this story many times in many rooms; this time it also took in his tours in Afghanistan and Kosovo. After the army he spent years at an investment bank, then became a mental training coach.

The talk ended and the interview began. For some reason I wanted to push back at him, so I asked, "Do you believe in fate?"

We have little affection for self-help, and we dislike telling people, blindly, to strive harder. Since he became a mental training coach, most of his clients have been Microsoft employees, Norwegian government officials, Olympic champions — people who treat life as a battlefield by nature, who drive themselves hard, and who may seek out counseling only for a passing dip in mood. I doubt Larssen has ever given mental training to someone lazy by disposition.

He heard the question, hesitated, and said, "I admit people come from different backgrounds. But every day you can become a little better than you were." Sensing the challenge in it, he added, "I have to admit, I often wonder what it is I do for a living. All day, from morning to night, I sit there talking to people, listening to people, chatting with people. I often envy my entrepreneur clients. They're doing something solid, making something you can touch, and I just move my lips."

But there is plenty of evidence that on the mainland the business of moving your lips for inspiration is not so hard to run. The Willpower Instinct, another book about success and self-discipline, has held its place on Amazon China's bestseller list for years since it came out in 2012, with the first volume alone selling more than a million copies — which shows how well the subject sells here. It is probably that market Larssen and his team had in mind. His trip this time was short, though; after a few brief talks he left.

Larssen in China (Photo: He Naosi)

Larssen in China (Photo: He Naosi)

Larssen in Zhongguancun (Photo: He Naosi)

He is too busy. In the past eight years he has given more than 600 talks, hosted a program built on his "mental training method" (The Bertrand Method), spoken at TED, trained athletes on Norway's national teams, and run staff training for 112 of the world's 500 largest companies.

He is also the father of four children, and his daily life consists of flying back and forth between Norway and New York.

How does a life get pushed, step by step, to this point? A line from his book may explain it: "The decisions people make are usually subtle, but once you make the right one, it becomes a process that keeps accelerating."

As a child he was nothing like a tough guy. By his own account, when he was 12 the other boys in his class threw snowballs at his clothes, using him as a target for "slam dunks," and after that he left school. At home he resolved to become strong, and for a boy in his teens the strongest image available was the Norwegian paratrooper. At 19 he was accepted into Norway's reserve officer school and went through airborne survival training. He then worked eight years for the Norwegian Ministry of Defence, and in that time took part in many international missions: Bosnia and Kosovo with the marines, Macedonia and Afghanistan with the commander of the army's airborne forces.

Underneath it all, of course, he did not believe in war. The more wars he took part in, the more he felt war solved nothing. There was another reason he left the Ministry of Defence: from the moment his military life began, pain had stayed with him. At first he thought the pain in his head and neck would ease once he lived a normal life, so he enrolled at the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration.

Because of the pain his studies went slowly. He found it hard to concentrate, and the discomfort lasted the whole day, right through to bedtime, without lifting. He felt his life was under a permanent overcast and would never get better. One day his father called and asked how he was. He told his father the truth: life was hard, he had no friends, he was in pain. And low. They talked about this and that for a while, and then his father came out with a line: "Erik, you are at the stage where the wheat is separated from the chaff. This is when you should show what you're really made of."

Saying that was not easy for his father. A little later Larssen happened to talk with the family pastor, a man the family knew well, and told him about the morning's conversation: life was hard, he was in pain. Again he got a startling answer: "Isn't that interesting?"

"That human beings have so many emotions, that one person can feel both extremes!" The pastor seemed perfectly at ease. On one side of human feeling are happiness, joy, achievement, safety; on the other, gloom, fear and loss. A life swings back and forth between the two.

These conversations made Larssen see that "life really can't get worse than this." He had nothing now, so he had nothing to lose. He began to pull himself together and get his body back in order, trying to "separate the wheat from the chaff." Even so, it took him a full 11 years to go from enrolling to graduating.

After the business school he went to work at an investment bank. It was during those very hard years that he grew curious about the thing people call a winner at life — what was different about the people who thought themselves successful and were thought successful by others? Larssen started talking to old people. Whenever he met one he would ask, "Looking back on the whole of it, how has life been?" Most answered calmly: life had passed so-so, not bad on the whole. A smaller number spoke of its bitterness, saying that to live a life was to walk a tightrope the entire way, and it was genuinely hard. But a very few answered, "The journey has been wonderful!"

So he watched that very small group closely, and soon found what they had in common: they were all fairly emotional people. Between having an idea and acting on it they rarely hesitated, and even when the result fell short of what they hoped, they still came away with the experience they wanted.

Larssen was starting to understand something, and then, by chance, he read Awaken the Giant Within by the psychological trainer Anthony Robbins, a top-tier trainer who had worked with Clinton and the tennis player Andre Agassi. So people really can make a living at this? It struck him that this was what he wanted to do too. Anthony Robbins had gotten there first and put into words what Larssen had been turning over for a long time. Six months later he flew to London to hear Robbins speak in person.

To attend that talk he took every last bit of money out of his bank account, bought a business-class round-trip ticket to London, and rented a suite near where Robbins was speaking. He had a vague sense that something large was about to happen in his life. On the day, there were 10,000 paying attendees. He bought the most expensive seat and sat at the front right of the stage. He listened and analyzed as he listened: what is this man doing that makes so many people listen to him? What makes so many people pay for his advice? Could I be a man like that?

Larssen's father had once been a rower. After Larssen got back from London, his father asked whether he wanted to sit in on a training session with Olaf Tufte, Norway's Olympic rowing gold medalist; the whole rowing team was preparing for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. He said yes.

At the training center he found the rowing team's Olympic training director standing on the dock, watching his athletes. Larssen could do nothing — hang around the dock a while, then take the car home as usual. Or he could work up the nerve to walk over to the training director and say he was a mental training coach. Selling yourself that directly really is awkward. But he had already made up his mind: he was going to be a mental training coach.

He walked over and struck up a conversation.

The director was plainly interested in what Larssen had done before. A few weeks later Larssen was invited to speak to the Swedish rowing team about how he had handled exhaustion and pain in the army. What surprised him was that in the end the training director wanted a coach himself. He needed someone to talk to, someone who could help him become a better coach — and that was Larssen's first job as a mental training coach. A conversation on a dock started his career.

Before the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Larssen also worked for eight months with the Norwegian wrestling champion Nina Solheim. Solheim was late in her career by then and badly wanted an Olympic medal. Larssen traveled to Beijing with the Norwegian wrestling team, and Solheim got the medal she wanted on her own merits — a silver, at that.

The more he watched, the more Larssen found that the distance between the so-called winners at life and everyone else was astonishingly small. Successful people pay close attention to detail; they have built good habits and are good at making a run of correct decisions. That is all it is. Most people have both the ability to solve their problems and the resources to do it, and yet, faced with a problem, they take the easiest, most comfortable way out. For anyone who wants to change, his advice is blunt: "Truly successful people burn their boats. Staying on the old road stops paying. Stopping what you're doing right now costs you something. But the effort you spend will pay off in the end."

The more you talk with Larssen, the more mental fitness looks like a skill, no different at bottom from any other skill — the way a financier is good with numbers, a company boss is good at managing staff, a skier is good at coming down a mountain fast.

He does not make a mystery of "mental training." He insists it is all plain wisdom. Time, for instance, is the only capital we have and the one thing we cannot afford to lose; managing time is like keeping a wild animal, which you have to feed, tend and follow. The other point is constant practice. A documentary cameraman has to master many shooting techniques to do his job, and some of them have to become habits before they will raise his odds of catching the best shot.

Larssen has been up and down enough times, and he is not a young man now. At this age he has plenty to worry about — his family's health, and the pressure that comes from critics. But compared with his younger self he can accept his own low points better, because he knows what having nothing feels like: several times in the past he lost the shirt off his back. Compared with his younger self, he is better at living alongside the low points. "Always be ready to hit bottom."

That preparation turns out to be surplus to requirements, though. He is busy now, with no time to feel low. His way of handling swings in mood has hardened into a theory, The Bertrand Method; this year Norway's TV3 shot a documentary series and asked him to host a program on the "mental training method." His new book, Hell Week, comes out in the United States next year.

Does he plan to build a business in China? Of course — the Chinese market is simply too tempting. As for what he charges for consulting: "That depends on supply and demand." At this point Larssen shook off the hesitation and uncertainty of the interview's first minutes and, for the first time, relaxed and smiled.