Jack Canfield, Author, Speaker & Motivational Trainer | The Success Principles | SSP Interview

Welcome to the Success Story Podcast. I'm your host, Scott Clary. On this podcast, I have candid interviews with execs, celebrities, politicians, and other notable figures, all who have achieved success through both wins and losses, to learn more about their life, their ideas, and their insights. I sit down with leaders and mentors and unpack their story to help pass those lessons onto others through both experiences and tactical strategy for business professionals, entrepreneurs, and everyone in between. With a further ado, another episode of the Success Story Podcast. Thank you so much again for joining me today. Very excited to be sitting down with Jack Canfield now. I'm going to list off a couple of things that Jack's done over his career and this is going to give you an idea of the accolades and the career that he's had, the successes that he's had. So obviously he's very well known for the chicken soup for the soul. So that's a billion dollar publishing empire. I think over 500 million those books sold worldwide, multiple New York times best selling author of the Success Principles, the power of focus, the Aladdin factor, Daredewin, he's delivering the lot of traction, a lot of Success Principles, coaching for breakthrough success, and many more. He's been on over a thousand TV and radio shows. He's trained over three thousand Success Principles, Trainers, and these are people that are helping other people in 100 and 7 countries, founded the Transformational Leadership Council, Nationals, Speakers, Soldiers, Speakers, Hall of Fame, Harvard graduate, on top of all of that with a master's degree in psychological education. Thank you for sitting down, Jack. I really appreciate it. I pleasure. Glad to be with you. Yeah, no, it's very exciting. And I always love, you know, I read the notes on the website or the Wikipedia or whatnot, but that's obviously just like the highlight reel. So I'd love to, you know, hear a little bit more about how you came to be, you know, the Jack can feel. Well, Scott, I started out as a normal middle class kid in Wheeling, West Virginia. My father only made $8,000 a year, but that was enough back in the 1950s and 60s to live with. And I did get a scholarship to go to Harvard, not because I was super smart, but because I played football. And so I got to be on a football team there and played rugby. And my senior year, I took a class called Social Relations 10, which was all about human behavior. We got to sit and talk about our feelings and goals and values. I'd never done that before. And it was like a revelation for me. It was like a camel coming upon oasis that had water that I had not drunk for a long time. So I said to my advisor, I said, how do I get into school in psychology? He said, you can't major Chinese history. That's an undergraduate. I don't think that's going to work. He said, but you can speak into psychology through education. So I ended up going to the University of Chicago in their school of education taught that all black inner city high school. And that's where my world changed. I was sitting in a laundromat. And I was literally living on about $300 a month at that time. I was paying $79 a month for an apartment. I was eating these 21 cent dinners, which was just spaghetti noodles and tomato sauce and garlic salt. It was awful. I literally had a bed that came out of the wall. So I could get to my clothes. When I put the bed up, I could actually move around the apartment because it was so small. But this guy came up to me. I was in a laundromat doing my laundry in this guy. Somebody says, put your book down. Talk to me. I didn't. Whoa. So I did that. Turns out he was a graduate student economics. And he was going to his lecture series up at this other college. And he said, would you like to go with me? And I said, sure. So I went up there. And there was a guy who was the National Center of Human Potential Director, guiding Herberdotto, Dr. Herberdotto. And he said, we only are using 10% of our brain, 10% of our potential. We can be learning seven languages. We can do all kinds of things. We can walk on fire. You know, like Tony Robbins teaches Firewalk. And I was like blown away by this. I said, I want to do it. I went up afterwards. And I said, Dr. Herberdotto, where do I do this in Chicago? He said, what is this place called the W Clement and Jesse V. Stone Foundation? I went there. Took some workshops. Turns out W Clement Stone was a self-made millionaire worth about $600 million in 1970. And he was the best friend of Napoleon Hill. They wrote two books together. So Napoleon Hill was, you know, a rough thing to go rich. So I started going to workshops with with W Clement Stone. And then his foundation hired me to start teaching teachers this work. And so he taught me that success is not a four-letter word. I was kind of counter-cultural, almost a hippie back then, shaved my beard, cut my hair, started teaching these principles, learned about affirmations and visualization and goal setting and values and intention and do it now and all these things he taught. And then he said, I want you to set a goal that's so big that if you achieve it, it'll blow your mind. Well, as I said, I was only making foundation, I think I was making about 20,000 a year. And he said, why don't you set a goal to make $100,000 a year? And I said, I don't see how I can do that. He said, it's irrelevant. You don't need to see how. You just need to commit to the what? So I did that. And within the couple of years, I've made $92,328 in one year. I said, wow, this really works. So I started writing about it, teaching about it. And eventually, you know, did the chicken super to soul series, what the success principles books, all those other books you mentioned came along. But I just, the thing for me was I just kept doing the principles. You know, everything he taught me I did. I have a lot of people that read my book and they get shelf esteem because they read the book. They put it on the shelf, but they don't do the exercises. So this new workbook I've written called the Success Principles Workbook, I almost put on the cover. Don't read this book. I want people to see that and go, what? And then you pick it up and would say, do this book because it's not a book to read as much as it is a book to do. So the Success Principles book, the original books sold over a million copies in 20. What's up to 47 languages now? And what happens is that I would meet people that read the book and they change their life. They double their income. They lost weight. They became entrepreneurs. I met one person that went literally from homeless to making about three million a year in three years. He drives exotic cars. He wears two Rolexes one on each hand. I think that's a little bit much, but he's never, never floats your boat. But generally most people weren't. And I, and I noticed anyone who went through our coaching program took a live seminar with us, their life transformed. They were doing really, really well. So I said, is it possible we can put a seminar or a coaching program between the covers of a book so that if people did the exercises that are in there one in a time in a row, they would end up successful. So we tested that with a number of people who were unfamiliar with our work and never read a book. Didn't know who I was. And that we achieved that. People doubled their income. They lost 50 pounds. They got out of crappy marriages. They started their own businesses. They were running a business. One guy doubled his income in six months, doubled it again in six months. Now he lived six months of the year in Mexico during the winter and six months up in Canada running a construction company up in the Vancouver area. So the basic idea is that I teach there's something that if you know the combination to a lock, the lock has to open. A lot of people are missing some of the numbers. So it doesn't matter how hard you work to open that lock if you're missing a number, it's irrelevant. But you could be a third grader if you know the numbers correctly and you have them in the right order, the lock will open. So the workbook that I wrote in the Success Principles original book is really like a combination to a lock called Success. And if you do the right thing in the right way and the right time and the right order, it has to work. And I literally have, you know, tens or hundreds of thousands of people around the world who've proven that. But we can talk about those principles as we go through this. I was going to say. So I think the missing green for a lot of people because when somebody looks at a book like that, they just think like, oh, that's that's a lucky use case where one person, you know, found success. But I'm sure that's not something that I can achieve. Or you do have people that buy into it. And it's good. Or maybe they buy into it. And then it doesn't work for them. And they get, you know, disenchanted. Like you said, like that, I like that analogy, the shelf esteem. That's a good analogy. So, so how do you, so first of all, I guess, I don't want to do a multi-faceted question. But what are the principles and how do you ensure that you have the drive to to stick with it? Which is I'm sure one of the main success factors. Well, you first, yeah, I was in India for most of February, mostly went over there just to get healthier at this retreat place where they do how you're ready medicine. And I wasn't sick. I just wanted to longevity kind of stuff. And there was a doctor there who was worth about $60 million. He was in the lineage of doctors over Buddhist doctor doing how you're ready medicine for 2500 years. And his teacher who lived to be 114 said to him, and then he said to me, the three things you need to know to be happy in life is number one, what you want. Know how to get it and know how to enjoy it once you get it. And most people fall down in one of those stages. Either they don't know what they want. You ask them, what do you want? Well, I don't know. I want to be rich. I want to be independent. But what does that mean? It's not specific. They don't really know what that lifestyle would look like. They're not, they're not clear. The second thing is how to get it. And most people don't know. I mean, you and I went to schools that did not teach you how to be successful. They taught you history and literature and math. And I always say, you know, nobody, nobody failed in life because they didn't know the five causes of the French American war. You know, it just never happened that way. And yet they don't know how to set goals. They don't know. I mean, we have a statistic now that says only 10% of North Americans that includes United States and Canada know how to set. They graduate high school having learned how to set goals. They don't know why to do it. They don't know how to do it. They don't know the importance of it. They don't know the research behind it. And once they set a goal, they've never been taught what are the steps to actually achieve it. I believe we should have a course in school called self science education or life 101 skills or something like that. And literally starting in middle school, all the way through high school, you got kids graduate. You can't even balance a checkbook let alone set a goal and achieve it or start a business. You know, we're training people to be employees. We're not training people to be entrepreneurs. You know, up until 15 years ago, you couldn't even go get a degree in entrepreneurship, let alone learn those kind of skills in a school. One of my friends who actually lives in Vancouver runs a association of dance instructors in dancing schools. And he said to his kids once, he said, I want you to go write either an application to college or a business plan. And his daughter wrote a business plan, his son wrote an application to college and they came back and it was a weekend assignment. He was going to give him 20 bucks if they did it. And the one that wrote the application to college, he said, wrong answer. He said, you're never going to get rich just because you go to college. You're going to get rich if you learn how to run a business. And so basically, I think people unfortunately are learning to be employees. Go to schools, sit still, don't, you know, don't rock the boat, do what you're told, graduate, go work for someone, do the same thing. As opposed to learn how to think creatively, set goals, go out and achieve and build a team, reinforce that, learn how to bring investment money into your life and so forth. So anyway, to go back to your question, like, what are the principles? Basically, what I've done in the Success Principles workbook, which I'll just hold up so everyone can see what it looks like here. This just came out recently is I've taken 17 of the 64 principles that are in the Success Principles book, core principles, the things you need to do, the absolute basics. And we put them in order. So the first one is take 100% responsibility for your life. Most people are blamers, complainers and excuse makers. You know, we see that even now with the coronavirus, we have the president of the United States, blaming the Chinese, blaming the world health organization. Everyone's like blaming someone else to do nothing Congress, the Democrats, blame the Republicans or Republicans, blame the Democrats. Nobody's focused on how do we just get it done. So I teach this formally in that first principle, E plus R equals O, an event plus your response to the event equals an outcome. So whatever the event is, the event could be your wife leaves you, the event could be you get sick, the event could be the coronavirus, the event could be a recession, the event could be a new technology comes along and puts you out of business, just like Uber really liked out a lot of taxi cabs and limo companies. And so that's an event. How you respond to the event is what produces the outcomes you experience in life. In other words, your health, your happiness, the quality of your relationships, those are all outcomes of how you've responded to an event. We know that there are people during the last recession who got really wealthy. There are other people during that same recession who didn't. You know, I just heard Robert Kiyosaki recently talking about the hero of Rich Dad Poor Dad. He was talking about how when the recession was coming and he saw it coming, he went and brought a lot of money and when all these properties went belly up, he bought them at a low price. He's now a billionaire just because he did that. So part of it is seeing the trends, studying trends, noticing the trends. I grew up in West Virginia. You hear all these coal miners saying, oh, we did everything sucks. No one's using coal anymore and blah, blah, blah. Well, they saw that coming for 20 years. Nobody wanted to change because it was uncomfortable. And so basically change requires people to be uncomfortable and do something new. Do something different. When the coronavirus pandemic started, the business owners who pivoted and did something uncomfortable did something different. They're surviving. The people that just went, oh, this is not right. This is not fair. You know, I saw, I saw, they called memes the other day. It was a vision board. He said, I didn't put this shit on my 2020 vision board. And no one saw it coming, but it's a perfect example. Yeah. So how do you react? Yeah, like, you know, I don't know if you're familiar with a company called B&I Business Network International. Guy named Ivan Meisner started that and now I have like 9,500 chapters around the world. Think of that 9,500 chapters. Well, the CEO of that, when his friends started to happen in December in China, realized this was because of virality of this and the ability of it to move so quickly, he said, this is going to come all over the world and they have chapters all over the world. So he started then to figure out how to put this whole thing online and do it through Zoom calls, you know, all their chapter meetings. And they pulled it off. They were ready when it happened. Unfortunately, you know, our healthcare system in America did not do the same thing. And now we have these real huge hot spots in New York and, you know, Detroit and Chicago and Louisiana and so forth. So I think the reality is that we have to not blame, we have to take responsibility and then our our response to the event is what gives the outcome. So there's only three responses you can have to anything. Your thoughts about it? The images you conjure up in your head about it and then what you say and do your behavior. And so a lot of people right now and probably going forward for months are in fear. They're in anxiety. They're imagining bad things happening. If you're in the present moment, you and I are in the present moment. We're having a great conversation. You've got food. You have some money. Everything's good. And so the reality is in order to feel afraid, you have to go into the future and go, well, three months for now. Not gonna be good. Three months for now. I might lose all my clients. Three months for now. But it's not three months for now. It's now. So fear is required in order to get afraid. You have to go into the future. If there was a snake in your office right now slithering toward you and you started to get afraid, the only reason you're afraid is because you're imagining it biting you. It hasn't bitten you yet. So you have to go into the future. So what we want people to do is come back to the present. Whatever you're in fear, your energy's in the amygdala, which is the back part of your brain, the lower brain stem, and fear hijacks the prefrontal cortex right up here. And so the prefrontal cortex is where you have your rational thoughts and where you have creative thoughts. And right now more than anything as business people, as anyone who wants to be success in any area of your life, you have to be able to think clearly and also think creatively. And so what you want to do is not be in fear. And there's a lot of things you can do about that. Number one is coming to the present moment. Right now, everything's fine. The other thing is create positive images of the future, rather than negative images of the future. Zig Ziglar, who was a great motivational speaker, said once, fear is negative goal setting. Worrying is negative goal setting. You're imagining something in the future you don't want. Just as easy to stop the movie and replace it with an image of what you want. And so you see a lot of people that are doing that. People that are starting to say, okay, for months, I wanted to take my business online. I wasn't doing it. Well, now I kind of have to. For months, I wanted to lower my staff and do more outsourcing. Well, now I have to. And so basically, I think that we just have to take 100% responsibility to realize it's not the coronavirus. It's not the pandemic. It's not our government. It's not the economy that's ruining our lives. It's our response. And two plus two equals four. There's always will. So if I've been getting four, the world's doing two, I'm doing two. Four is comfortable. We're great. All of a sudden, the world does one. And for some people right now, the world's doing zero. You can't do zero plus two and get four. So you've got to change what you're doing. And here's the bad thing about that or the uncomfortable thing. I'm going to ask you to fold your hands like this. Actually, go ahead and do that. I'm going to do that. And everyone watching do that. And notice what thumb is on top. So your left thumb is on top. Correct. Left thumb. Yeah. Yeah. It's a mind too. Now, what I want you to do and everyone watching this, unclass your hands and move all the fingers up a notch. So the other night, other thumbs on top. Don't just move your thumbs. Now, how does that feel? Feels awkward. It feels I don't like it. It was awkward. I don't like it. What does your body want to do? It wants to go right back to where it was before. So let it go back to where it was before. Right. And that's where most people are right now. They're where they were before. Where you were before isn't working anymore. Yeah. Do something different. So whenever we fold our hands a new way, it's going to feel uncomfortable. And everything we're going to do in the future for a while to create the new normals going to be uncomfortable. It's going to be out of our comfort zone. I always have say, everything you want that you don't have is just outside your comfort zone. That call you're afraid to make and don't want to make because it's uncomfortable. That request that you want to make the putting yourself out in a certain way for fear of how people will judge you. All those things are uncomfortable asking for investors, asking for people to buy a product from you when everyone's like holding on their money right now. I have friends in my business, which is speaking and training, who are actually making more money right now than they were before year over year last year, 40% up. Why? Because they instantly pivoted, put together packages for people, reduced the price, gave them payment plans and said, you're a sequester at home right now. You can't do the normal things you're doing. You don't have that hour commute both ways at the end of the day. You have two extra hours. What can you do with that? You can educate yourself. Now, if you don't want to spend money to do it, you can go to YouTube, you can go to TED Talks, you can go to Masterclass, there's all kinds of things on the internet that are available to do. But the point is, it's not the event, it's your response. So that's the first principle, is you got to pivot. The second thing is, be clear while you're here. What is your purpose? Most people do not know what their purpose is. They don't know what their why is. Why are they here? I believe everyone is born with an inborn purpose, something they're meant to do. Sometimes you see it really clearly. I have a nephew, he's about three. And he already has a total baseball catchers uniform, the mask, the little chess guard, the catchers glove. He didn't want a first base mate. He didn't want an outfielder's met. And literally at the age of three, you can throw him the ball. He catches it. You throw him the ball. He hits it. He wants to go to the baseball. He started to cry when he heard it might not be a baseball season this year. He's three years old. So he was born this passion for baseball. Someone else was born for a passion to play music. Someone else was born for a passion to cook. I mean, I have a chef that comes when I do events to my house, and I hire her to come cook. She loves to cook. She used to cook with her mother when she was seven years old. My wife could care less about cooking. You know, it's just not the thing it makes her, but paint. She loves to paint. You know, so everyone has that thing inside them. They're meant to do. And if you find that and find a way to monetize it, which you can do, one of the people I know is the things you want to do more than anything else about it, the greatest joy. And by the way, joy is the signal from your body that you're doing what's on purpose for you. So she said, my joy is surfing. How do I make money surfing? Well, I said, you could become a coach and you can take women because she likes women. You can be on your bikini and Hawaii and you can teach women how to surf. And you teach them how to surf as a metaphor for how they manage in their companies. So if you miss the trend that's coming, like if you don't think about surfing, you have to paddle before the wave gets there. Yeah. So it kind of picks you up and you get up on the board. If you wait too long, well, you do you miss the trends in business? Are you missing the trends in your staff? Are you not seeing what's going on? You're not responding fast enough? Or if you're on surf or you get up on board, you go too far forward, the board comes out of the wave and you tip over, are you going far too far ahead of your team? And it always plays out. How you do anything is how you do everything. So she's making 50,000 a month teaching women how to surf because she's charging $5,000. She gets five to 10 women in her surfing class and she's happy doing what she's doing. So once you're clear about your purpose, the next thing is to decide what you want. What is your vision for her? It was teaching that for you, it might be doing your podcasts, running trainings, having your own company, whatever it might be. And then you say, okay, what are the goals? So I say you have seven areas of your life. Number one, finance, number two, profession job and career, number three family and friends, relationships, number four, your health and fitness, number five, fun and recreation, number six, what we call personal, what do you want to own, what experiences you want to have, what growth experiences, spiritual growth, personal growth, and then last contribution. And I want you to have a vision for every area of your life, what it would look like if you were succeeding in each of those areas. And then we turn that into goals. The goal is how much by when. So it's one thing to say, I want to live in a nice house on the ocean. That's a hope, a vision and tension, but it's not a goal. A goal is I will own a 3000 square foot house on Pacific Coast Highway on in Malibu, California by January 3rd, 2021 5 pm. So the subconscious mind won't kick in to figure out how to do that until you set a deadline, until you make it specific. And once you've got that, then we have to do you have to believe it's possible. But that's another thing. What are the limiting beliefs that are keeping you from getting there? One of the people I was working with recently never finished anything. And when we went, when he went back and looked at what that was about, he went back to when he was in high school, he was running a mile race and his legs gave out in the last couple hundred yards. And he literally told himself, I can't finish things. And here he is in his 40s trying to finish a book and every time he sit down and get close to doing it, he would just screw it up, he would distract himself, he wouldn't do it, he'd create problems in his life, et cetera. Once he went back and realized where that belief came from and changes the belief to, I can finish anything I start, he finished his book, went on to become the best selling book, so on and so forth. And here's the thing about beliefs. Beliefs are just a choice. You can choose to believe anything you want. The belief is simply a thought you think over and over and over. Unfortunately, when we grow up, we take these beliefs on as if they're true. You know, it's not okay to be angry. It's not okay to cry for men. It's not okay to ask for what you want. Don't be a nuisance. You know, whatever we got programmed to do, but we can totally change that belief through repetition, through affirmations, and doing the thing that confronts the belief and finding out the bad thing that didn't happen. I had a friend who had a belief he could never be stupid. He ended up going to MIT, graduated in third grade, he was so afraid of looking stupid. So he had a therapist who sent him to a 7-11 and said, you have to go into the 7-11 and say, where's the nearest 7-11? Yeah. And then he sent him to a Chinese restaurant and he left. He said, I like a pizza. And they go, well, this is a Chinese restaurant. We don't serve pizza. And he went, nothing bad happened. They didn't throw me out. Nobody hit me. My dad didn't come out of the eaters and slapped me across the face. And so those are the three ways. Tony Robbins teaches if you can't you must. If you're afraid to do something, just go do it. And when you do it, that's why the firewalk is so powerful. I remember doing the firewalk with Tony and walking across the fire and got to the other end and said, oh my god, I didn't think I could do that. What else have I been telling myself I can't do? And for about three weeks, I was on fire. I'm calling everybody doing everything, you know, just like it released so much energy in me and didn't even know I had it. What are your skydiving, bungee cord jumping, mountain climbing, mountain repelling, whatever the thing is, those things really help you confront your fears. And then, you know, as we said before, how you do anything is how you do everything. So it's very valuable. I'll speed this up a little bit. But affirmations of visualization, most people don't do that. They think it's woo-woo, new age stuff. Napoleon Hill taught that every Olympic athlete I've ever met uses affirmations and visualization. You know, Bruce Jenner, who became a woman. But before that, when he was in the Catholic, he had 10 pictures that he would put up on the ceiling of his hotel room with pushpins, of him achieving whatever level he needed to achieve in every event. And I heard that, and I actually met his mother. I asked him if it was true. He said, yeah, everywhere he went, he put those pictures up and then he would close his eyes and he would see himself throwing the javelin that far, doing the steeple chase, having the time for that, you know, the hundred yard dash, whatever it was. And so it's critical that we train our subconscious mind in order to be able to what's what I want to say. See the resources that are out there. Like right now, you're not aware of what you're feeling in your right foot. But as soon as I say right foot, you can feel it, right? Of course. Yes, yeah, yeah. What was happening is all those nerve impulses from your right foot were coming up your spine into your lower brainstem where your particular activating system lives and it was being filtered out is unimportant. Now, three things control what your filter lets in. One is something like someone saying your right foot. So if someone brings your attention to something, another is your beliefs. If you don't believe it's possible to own a Mercedes, half the time in a world you won't even see a Mercedes go by when it's right in front of you, because it doesn't match your belief system. You definitely can't see yourself in one. You know, anyone in the world can go into a Mercedes dealership and test drive a Mercedes. But some people go, I could never see myself doing that because they literally can't see themselves doing that. So when you start to visualize things, you open up perceptions that will allow you to see things in your environment that we're always there as resources. You also open up the flow of creative ideas from your subconscious mind. And so you start waking up at three in the morning or you're in the shower or you're driving to work. What I call hands busy mind free time and you start having creative ideas. And so by we have to plant the seed in your subconscious mind that could then grow into an idea that your conscious mind can perceive and then act on. And that's one of the key principles is action. There's two kind of actions. Obvious actions. You want to be a doctor, gotta go to medical school, gotta study physiology, anatomy, chemistry, biochemistry, biology, et cetera. Now there's what we call inspired actions. When you start visualizing and affirming your goals, you're going to have these inspirations to do something but go to that Starbucks instead of that Starbucks. Call my brother. I haven't talked. Why should I call my brother? I don't know. I just feel like she's called my brother. And what happens is when you do that magical things happen. So for example, Bon Jovi, the great rock and roll star who I actually had to fortune to meet once. The story he tells is that he was a garage band in New Jersey and not known. He wanted to be a rock star. So to be a rock star, you got to get radio play. Today, you know, you can get on iTunes. You couldn't do that back then. And you couldn't get a record deal. If you didn't have a record, you couldn't get a record. If you'd have foreign owned radio, it was a catch 22. You couldn't, it was very rare that people made it. And so one day, he's listening to this radio station. And he hears the guy say, wow, it's really late here at KMBY. I know one's listening out there. I don't even, if you're listening, let me know. And a few people called him and he said, wow, this guy's over here thinking no one's listening. Now, this will be 4 9 11 when you could actually go into a radio station, walk up to the window where the guys behind it and put up, you know, play a song from Mandy from Jack, you know, whatever. And you can't do that anymore to security. But anyway, so he's going to get a pizza and a six pack of beer and a six pack of coke if the guy didn't drink beer. And he goes over to the radio station, holds it up. The guy says, come on in. They're eating their pizza and he says, so kid, what do you do? So I got a rock band. You any good? Yeah, I think so. So you wouldn't have to have a demo tape with you. He says, yeah, I do. Of course he did. So he gives me the guy to demo tape. He said, would you listen to one of my songs while you're playing one of the other songs? He says, sure. He listens to it. He says, wow, you're really good. He said, well, here it is. It's 2 30 in the morning. You don't think anyone's listening anyway. Would you be willing to play one of my songs on radio? I can tell everyone, hey, my song was on radio. He says, sure, you brought me a pizza. Why not? He plays a song and wow, the switchboard lights up. Who's this Bon Jovi kid? You know, where do we find more of his music? Well, they ended up playing three or four of his songs that night and having a great conversation. He started doing that all over New York and New Jersey and he became known and eventually got a record deal. Now, if he hadn't acted on that inspiration, which occurred to him in that moment, we might never have heard of Bon Jovi. You know, so the point being is that when you get these inspirations, you have to ask, act on them. And so to go back to our, you know, want to go to medical school, you got to be a doctor, you got to study all this stuff. The story of one of my students who wanted to go to medical school and she's studying for biology and undergraduate school, a senior year and all of a sudden, she remembers Mrs. Jones's husband died and she thought, I should take her some cookies. I don't know if I want to bother her. I should take her some cookies. So she makes some cookies, takes them down to her house, knocks on the door. She answers the door, says, Mrs. Jones, I'm really sad that your husband died. I used to babysit for you and say, oh, I remember you. Come on in. So she went in and she goes into the living room. There's a guy sitting there and she says, hi, who are you? Says, I'm her nephew. Oh, really? What do you do? I'm the admissions director at the university, Stanford University Medical School. Well, I'm thinking of becoming a doctor. Well, they created a relationship and because of that, she got into Stanford Medical School. Now, if she hadn't acted on that inspiration, that intuitive hit to make those cookies, she wouldn't have succeeded. So a lot of people, they don't trust their intuition. They don't access their intuition. So just to finish this model, real quickly, once you have, you start taking actions, you have to respond to feedback. Most people are afraid of feedback. They don't want feedback. They're afraid of negative feedback. There's a great question that I learned from Dan Sullivan who teaches something called the strategic coach program. He actually lives in Toronto, part of the year you may know him. I've heard of, yeah, I've heard of his work before and I've never been to, but I know a couple of my peers that have been to his stuff. Yeah, it's really great work. And one of the questions he taught us to ask was, on a scale of one to 10, how would you rate the quality of? And then you can ask my product, this podcast, me as a coach, me as a husband, me as a dad, me as a vendor, this real estate transact, whatever it is, you want feedback on. And anything less than a 10 gets a follow-up question. What would it take to make it a 10? That's where the value is. Now most people don't ask that question because they're afraid of what they might hear. Like for many years, my wife would tell her sister, her mother, her friends, you know, things she didn't like about me and my relationship, but I'm the only one who could change it. So when I learned that question from Dan, I came home and I said, let's start doing this ritual every Sunday night. We'll ask each other on a scale of one to 10. How would you rate the quality of our relationship this week? And I would usually get a nader and I, which was great. One week I got a four. I said four, what would it take to make it a 10? When she said number one, don't interrupt me in the middle of a joke because you think you can tell the punchline better, which I still think I can, but I realize it's not a good marital practice. Number two, she said, you know, when our grandson's visiting, he's seven now. He says, I don't care if it's the NBA playoffs, you put him to bed. I get him up in the morning, your job's put him to bed. I don't have to interrupt you in the middle of a basketball game and remind you. And then she said some other things, but then she said when it really hit me, she said, do you know what four play is? I said, yeah. She said, you might want to revisit that idea. She tells it like it is. She tells it like it is. Now, you know, for weeks her mother probably knew she wasn't happy or girlfriend, but I'm the only one who can do something. So most people don't want to hear that kind of feedback. It's hard, but it's the only way you can get better. Ken Blanchard or what the one minute manager said, feedback is the breakfast of champions. So I encourage people ask for feedback. Think about this. The reason chicken soup for the soul did so well and it did well. So we've sold half a billion books that you mentioned in the introduction was every book we would send out that the last 120 to 140 stories that we were considering, you know, putting in after reviewing hundreds of stories. And we would say to a group of 40 people, old young teenagers, Republican, conservative, don't care, you know, Catholic, Jewish, anything at all. Suburban, urban, rural, whatever, grade this story on a scale of one to 10. 10, you love it. It gives you goosebumps. It makes you cry. You want to tell someone the story. Anything, you know, anything less than that, whatever you think it is. Anything less than a nine, rated by 40 people across the board from all different categories. We wouldn't publish. So that's why the stories had such universal appeal. They appealed to everybody no matter how old they were, where they were, what their beliefs were, whatever. And that feedback, and some stories I wrote never made it into a book. And I could have put them in there because of my ego, but they didn't score. It might have scored a 8.4 or something like that. And I said, hey, this is about meeting the needs of the reader, not meeting my ego needs, and that's why the book did so well. The first chicken soup for the soul book was rewritten six times. I literally, the last time I took it off to a retreat area, say there are three days of it, every story out loud, just listen to how did it sound. We didn't come trippingly off the tongue is one of my actor friends says I wouldn't put it, I would edit it till it did. And that's why the book, so I think that books hold a hundred million copies around the world. No, that's very good. Listen like that. That's a master class in mindset and motivation wrapped up into more than 50 minutes. You're one of the easiest interviews I've ever had, so I appreciate it. I didn't have to think of a single question, but no, in all seriousness, I understand the immense value you bring in the book, and obviously this is something that you are so evangelical about. And I think for good reason, and I really do believe that more people should have, you didn't go through all the principles. That's what the book's for, but I think that even the ones you mentioned, these are just things that I personally align with completely, and I've heard them from various sources, and I've also heard them from yourself, and these are not things that are so obscure or so out there. I think these are just really good things to internalize and to bring into your life. Regardless of what you do, what you're trying to accomplish, they're so agnostic of situation, and that's what I really appreciate about it. But I think that for somebody who is in a tough spot, and they are only seeing the future, as you said, what is the first step? Because you can go through all the principles, but all at once is definitely overwhelming for someone who's in a tough spot. I totally agree. What we recommend in the book, because I did have a co-author that helped me write the first book, just do some of the writing for me as well, is that we recommend, you start with one chapter at a time. I recommend one week at a time, so 17 weeks, but it's about four months, basically. Some people do it faster because they just do, and literally at the end of four months, you can be a totally different person, a totally different place, and so it's important to you integrate the principles. We recommend one week at a time, and there are exercises you do, in the book. There are some exercises where we ask you to like maybe appreciate three people a day for a week. Notice what happens when you start appreciating people. There's journal writing exercises in there. There's places to write down your key learnings. There's some questions that we take you through as sequence of questions, and when you answer those questions away they're structured, it creates an aha experience. You start to realize, I mean, one of the things we exercise called a difficult and troubling experience. So what's something in your life that's difficult or troubling you? Well, it might be my relationship with my sister, and then how are you keeping it in place? Well, I'm not confronting her about how much money she's spending that I'm helping supporter after she came out to rehab. Then you can say, what's the payoff for keeping it like it is? Why I don't have to confront my wife and have an argument with her about it, I don't have to confront my sister, blah, blah, blah. What's it costing you? What's costing me $10,000 a month? What would you rather have? I'd like this. What would you do? What would you have to do to do that? What have to do this? When will you do it by? So you're forcing the action. You're forcing the next step. You're forcing the awareness to come up, because most people don't realize everything we do in life that doesn't work has a payoff. For example, when you were sick as a kid, think of the payoffs. You didn't have to go to school. In my house, they brought the one TV set into the bedroom. You got to drink ginger ale. We know that ginger actually is good to drink, but ginger ale is very cool. Sometimes you got the tension from your parents. You never got otherwise. I had a student once. The only time his dad ever paid attention to him in college was when he got in trouble. He drive up from Connecticut to Massachusetts, and he'd like try to bail him out. That was how he got his dad's attention. Well, there's other ways to do that that are less. Of course, that's really good. Then how this is structured is really to keep people taking that next step, right? Is that really? It literally is step after step after. Each step builds on the one before it, and they really should be done in order. I recommend that you get an accountability partner. One of the things we teach is mastermind groups and accountability partners, which is in the book. One of the problems people have keeping themselves motivated to do something that requiring the fold your hands the uncomfortable way, because there are some things that require you to change, but the changes are for the good. If you and I were accountability partners, we would go through the course together, perhaps, or if you want to just be not do that, you just be my accountability partner. I would tell you the five things I'm going to do every day to work on this course, and then tomorrow I'd have to tell you did I do them. I teach the rule of five, which is five things every day will get you anywhere you want to go. You want to lose weight, stop eating sugar, exercise for 30 minutes, drink more water, take a 20-minute walk after dinner, read something motivational, don't eat after eight o'clock. Those are things that everybody knows. If you want to be a better salesperson, make five calls to set up meetings, send out 10 thank-you notes to the people you call. There are certain things we know. I was a consultant for Remax. They have his five, ten, fifteen, five rule, and everyone it does it. They have five in-person meetings to sell a property or list a property, make ten phone calls to set up future meetings, send out 15 thank-you notes, literally handwritten or send out cards you can use those to the people. You're guaranteed a six-figure income. It's just research proves it. We know that five actions a day toward your breakthrough goal, the main goal you have, whatever it is in life will get you there. So whatever that goal is, lose weight, have a better relationship with my wife, you know, double my income, have more free time, whatever it is. But the thing is accountability. There was a woman named Gail Matthews up at the college in Santa Rosa, California called Dominican College, where she took five groups. She had one group just have a goal. Think it. Don't write it down. Second group write it down. Third group write it down and come up with action steps. Fourth group do all that but tell somebody that you set the goal. Fifth group be accountable to someone on a regular basis before you finish the goal. Each one of those things you added, increase the ability, increase the number of people that actually achieved their goals. Went from like I think it was 33% up to 76%, like about a 40% increase. One of the big things was having an accountability partner. So many people listening to calls like this, listening to these kind of podcasts, etc., are solo entrepreneurs. They don't have a boss. And so there's nobody telling them what to do. And so we tend to do the easy things first, the comfortable things first. So when I have an accountability partner and you telling me these are the five things I need to do. And then I talked to you the next day, did you do them? And you have to say, no, I didn't do that one. And two days in a row, I didn't do that one. Pretty soon you get so embarrassed, you just do it, you know. Like if the government up there said sending your taxes by a certain time, your revenue candidate, if you're in Canada, I rest down here. If they didn't say that, no one would ever get around to it, right? That's true. But when you have a deadline and someone holding you accountable, because there are consequences to not sending in your taxes. And you can build a bit less up here than down there, but yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I saw a great cartoon recently where this mother's asking a child, or the child says to the mother, mom, what's a Canadian? She says, oh, that's a North American son with health insurance and no guns. It's not, it's not wrong. That's good. But the point, the point being that, you know, if I have a negative consequence, for instance, when I work with my coaching clients, if they don't, if they want to do it, like one of my friends wanted to learn to dive off a diving board, he was really paralyzed about it. So I said, great, you know, you're going to find a diving coach. But what's going to be the reward you're going to give yourself? Well, I'm going to take his wife, they're going to go for a two-day weekend vacation. What's the consequence if you don't do it? Now this guy is Jewish. And he said, my consequences already checked for a thousand dollars to the Ku Klux Klan, the KKK, which is a pretty negative consequence. Exactly. One that was so reprehensible, you know, he wasn't. And he literally told me on the first diving instructor moment, he went out on the diving board and he looked down. And, you know, when you're diving, it's into a pool that's eight feet deep, there's three feet from the board, and you're six feet tall. So it's a lot of this, you know, at the bottom. And he told the coach, I'm afraid. I'm afraid. And the coach said, well, then come off the board. He said, you're fired. You know, then he found someone who wasn't going to put up with that BS. But there was no way he was writing a check for a thousand dollars. So if you have a negative consequence, along with the reward, we're either we're either motivated by a way from something or towards something. If you put them both together, there's much more likelihood you're going to do it. So having an accountability partner, building a consequence, building a reward, pretty much guarantee yourself success. I love it. I guess just I want to ask just a few lighter questions about, you know, what what you're doing. Like you've been you've been working at this for like such a long time. But you're still putting out stuff. Like you're still putting up books. Like what do you want to do? Next, like when is retirement ever a thing? Or are you just like, no, that's like asking someone who likes to play tennis or you're ever going to retire playing tennis. I mean, they'll play until their legs give out, right? You see the senior tournaments where they're 65, 70 and they're out there. So what's next then? What's next after this book? Well, I'm working on three books at the moment. One's called Tuesday. Now I feel lazy. You're not lazy. You're just not, you know, we have different different purposes, but different interests, whatever. So I'm working on on love versus fear, which is really appropriate to what we're dealing with now. I'm writing a book with someone who lives up in the, she was in Quebec, actually. Yeah. A woman named Least Janelle, we're writing a book about becoming unstuck. She, we developed a process that really gets people unstuck, eliminates limiting beliefs. And then there's a guy who lives in Toronto. You probably have heard of named Raymond Aaron. Raymond's writing a book with me called The Power of Wow. How do we wow our customers? In other words, if I wowed you in some way, you'd tell someone about it. When I go to the where it's Carlton, I was doing a book tour for chicken soup for the soul. And I get in late at night, missed dinner. And when I get to my room, I open the door and there's a chair sitting there with a note and a thermospodal and a bowl and a spoon. It says, your books have been chicken soup for our soul. We know you arrive late. You may have missed dinner. This is chicken soup for your body. And it was a warm. That's nice. That's very nice. Now here I am still telling that story because they wowed me. And so we collected all these stories of how people in different industries have created wow experiences at the university level, brick and mortar stores, online stores, whatever. So those three books I'm working on. But most importantly is my train, the trainer program. We've now trained, as you mentioned, over 3,500 people in 107 countries to do the work I do to teach the success principles. We've had people in Nepal right after the earthquake going around the small villages, teaching people that they could rebuild people in Africa and Yemen and places where there's really horrendous things going on, teaching this as well as in the universities and people doing in corporate world, etc. My goal is to have a million people teaching this by the year 2030. So now we're moving from training trainers to training trainers of trainers. That's the next leverage point. And then eventually I'll have regional directors in India and Northern Africa, the Middle East and so forth. So we have an online version for most people because they can't travel, especially today. And we also have a live version we do. We've lived about 60 people a year, but the online version we have hundreds of people going through at a time. Is it like the way that you've built out the business, just like a natural? Do you find progression of what sort of like where was I guess the point where you decided to make like helping people and and really just enabling people like your career? Like where was where was that point? Well, I was in that transition I mentioned earlier about I was in Chicago. I was at the University of Chicago. And part of what that program was a two-year master's program was a year of practice teaching. So we taught like three-fifths time and then went to class like how we can do stuff. And I they they there was orientation week and he took us to three schools one a suburban school a really rich suburban school and a inner city tough school. And one of them was actually called rich township. It was the name of the township. The girls were wearing madras skirts and they got circle pins and they you go into their homeic class that looked like you know a kitchen I can't even afford that you know and and then you go to this inner city school where the kids were like just the desk were all carved up the teachers weren't really enthusiastic to be there the textbooks were old and used nobody looked good you know everyone was like depressed and I thought wow I could make a difference here. So for some reason I ended up teaching in an all black inner city school and that's when I met that's when I met the guy who at the laundromat who said so I I just wanted to I wanted to contribute you know I got involved in a civil rights movement and did a lot of that work with Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson for a while and then it just became larger human rights women's rights everyone's rights we all should be living magnificent lives unfortunately that's not the case we see yeah even today how the coronavirus is hitting all the poor people much worse than unfortunately I've seen a couple articles on it it's disproportionate like extremely disproportionate yeah exactly exactly and when I was in India we went into the slums there and you cannot social distance in the slums I mean people are sleeping five and six in a room people are the walkways between the buildings are like you know two people wide so as you're walking on you're brushing everybody it's going to be a cluster so yeah I'm not real happy about that because I love the country but I think that I forget your question now or come no no it was it was no no it was just it was like what started you on this path I just love what drives yeah wanting wanting to make a difference you know I just I just that's what turns me on you know when I watch someone's eyes light up and they get it or I get an email from a 15-year-old who said I used to 15-year-old email me a couple years ago my mother bought your success principal's book my mother never reads never and I was saying why did she buy that book so I wanted to see what was in it and he said I stayed up two nights in a row reading it and I was getting F's and flunking out of school I was smoking dope I was skipping classes smoking weed in the parking lot with kids I was drinking now I stop smoking dope I'm not drinking I'm going to class I'm getting A's and B's all because of your book that makes my day I can go for a week on that you know I mean so it's it's what I meant to do it's what I do well and I love it when I'm up in front of a room or even now talking to you you know you heard me go on that on it's it's no I can feel the the authentic passion that's why like in all seriousness like you were you were really easy interview because it wasn't like pulling things out it's like you just you live it I can it's you can tell when you when you speak to somebody really like is living their authentic self it's nice to see and I just wondered where the the passion came from it was very good yeah yeah okay so last actually two more two more quick two more quick question sure first one I'm curious as to your answer could ask everyone this one lesson you would tell your younger self I tell myself one or two things and one number on right sooner writing changed my life I would have written books sooner I didn't I think I'd low self esteem and then believe it I was capable of doing that who was I to write a book what did I have to say but I did and I would say dump you afraid to ask people I grew up being told not to ask you know don't bother people don't ask don't be a nuisance and as a result of that I I didn't have a lot of dates because I was afraid to ask a girl I would definitely do that I learned what I after I went to high I finished high school I went off the college I had a crush on this girl so bad and she was beautiful and she was a cheerleader of the other school and I never asked you're gonna get a four to ten on on your wife's survey I never asked her out I found out at the end of my freshman year someone knew her at the college that they she went she said she had such a crush on you she wondered why you never asked her out I was like oh no you know so who knows but I would have taught myself to ask ask ask ask sooner good um and you know you motivate people for a living where do you go to learn where do you go for motivation outside of your own you know your own content you can't name your own book so who else do you look at look behind me look I know I was wondering obviously I'm not I'm not scared to ask like what uh you know what good books you'd recommend so well I've read I've read three thousand books I've actually read three thousand books I probably have another eight or nine hundred that I've bought that I haven't read yet I mean they're literally piled up on the floor my wife thinks they're gonna fall down on me from the side of my bed and jump something God forbid hopefully not yeah but I go to books I tend to read self help books mostly business spiritual psychological success um you know anything any breakthroughs I just read about a breakthrough about aromatherapy where if you do these smells at the same time you're remembering old memories it accelerates the PTSD disappearing so I'm actually going to take a certification class on how to do that um so I I go online I watch other people's youtube videos I mean think about this you could probably learn everything Tony Robbins has to teach if you just watches youtube videos the same thing is true for me you know and I think that uh you know I encourage people to do the book because it's structured in a certain way but I I've taken master classes I've watched I don't know how many thousands of hours of 10 talks and 10 x talks I'm just curious you know I would have watched more but my wife says you've got to come to bed by 10 o'clock you know you have to be in relationship with me we are married but I'm just I just can't learn enough fast enough but I want to learn it and apply it and that's a good idea to prove my work a little bit now I was going to say that I think that the the the word you mentioned that I've heard before is curious and that's a word that I've always I've seen that tie to success like a lot people that are just very very curious and they always just want to learn more and that you do that over the course of your career and like the end result is incredible so well I'll tell you one thing before we go I wrote a four two books last year one was called Homeless to Billionaire by guy named Andres Perra he literally emigrated from Sweden to Thailand was Homeless on the beach and that was it was 19 years old at age 35 is worth three billion dollars and then there's another guy named Raphael Badzi I wrote a four of his book called The Billionaire Secret and what I learned from what reading one person's billionaire book and then the other one was with the Raphael he interviewed 21 billionaires 17 countries 17 different industries and every one of them got up before 5.30 in the morning every one of them read for an hour a day every one of them exercised and every one of them meditated so as Tony Robbins says success leaves clues these billionaires are telling us you want to be successful read more information is knowledge applied information is power so my mentor W. Clement Stone said it's not enough to read you have to assimilate it and apply it and that's really what I've tried to do with my successful workbook is give people the information of how to apply it to their life and I'll just say this before we have if you want to get a copy you can go to all those standard places you know Amazon I was going to ask where to get more so amazon.com amazon.ca barns and number.com but if you want to get a free one hour and a half masterclass which is even deeper than what we went into here that I recorded when a book first came out for about 2500 people but the replay is available you can go to these success principles workbook.com forward slash order you'll still end up ordering through amazon.com or see where everyone to go but you'll also get a couple of digital products we have for free and also you'll get this masterclass that you can watch and replay many times if you want because repetition is the key to learning. 100% and just to reach out and get in touch with yourself what's your best socials to consume more of outside of the book just well I would go to jack canfield.com if my website everything's there you can also find me on facebook and on twitter you send some stuff over I can link it in the show notes too yeah for sure all right that's all I got thank you so much I appreciate the chat that was that was really good that was really really really fun that's all for today thanks again for joining me on another episode of the success story podcast you can download or stream this podcast wherever podcasts are available including iTunes Spotify Google Stitcher iHeartRadio and many others you can also watch this podcast on youtube if you haven't already please subscribe and share this podcast with your friends family co-workers and peers please leave us a rating on iTunes it takes about 30 seconds as it allows other people to find our podcast and let's our amazing guests reach even more people with their message and remember any rating is fine as long as it contains five stars I'm Scott Clary from the success story podcast signing off