#833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen

0:00:05 Hello, everybody. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show.
0:00:11 My guest today, I’m so happy to finally have on this podcast. He effectively made my career.
0:00:15 Certainly, the four-hour workweek would not have happened without him, which is a backstory
0:00:21 a lot of folks don’t have. Jack Canfield. You can find him online, jackcanfield.com.
0:00:27 That’s Canfield, C-A-N-F-I-E-L-D. He is a best-selling author, speaker, trainer,
0:00:31 and entrepreneur. He’s the founder and CEO of the Canfield Training Group, which trains
0:00:35 entrepreneurs, corporate leaders, and more how to accelerate the achievement of their personal
0:00:40 and professional goals. Jack is the co-author of more than 200 books, including The Success Principles,
0:00:45 How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be, and perhaps most famously, Chicken Soup for the
0:00:52 Soul as a series, which includes 40 New York Times bestsellers and which has sold more than 600 million
0:00:58 copies in 50-plus languages around the world. He has conducted live trainings for more than a million
0:01:03 people in more than 50 countries, holds two Guinness World Records, we’ll talk about that, and is a member
0:01:11 of the National Speakers Association’s Speakers Hall of Fame. I love Jack. He’s so kind, so generous.
0:01:18 He’s been so patient with me, even when I was a very boisterous, chest-puffing, early 20-something,
0:01:24 way back in the day. And you can find all things Jack at jackcanfield.com. Without further ado,
0:01:30 please enjoy a very wide-ranging, very practical, very tactical conversation with none other than Jack
0:01:32 Canfield.
0:01:38 At this altitude, I can run flat-out for a half-mile before my hands start shaking.
0:01:39 Can I ask you a personal question?
0:01:42 Now would it seem an appropriate time?
0:01:43 What if I did the opposite?
0:01:47 I’m a cybernetic organism, living tissue over a metal endoskeleton.
0:01:59 Jack, Jack, Jack, it is so good to see you.
0:02:02 Glad to see you, my friend. Yeah, this is fun.
0:02:06 And I’m so thrilled that you’re here and that we’re seeing each other again. It has been a long time.
0:02:13 And as I warned you before we started recording, I said, I really doubt people in my audience have
0:02:18 the full context or even partial context. So I want to give them some of the backstory because
0:02:26 one could make a compelling argument that I owe my career as such to you because you made
0:02:34 the introduction to Stephen Hanselman, who became my book agent. At the time, he was a, I suppose,
0:02:41 former superstar editor on his way to becoming an agent. So we were both starting out in a sense.
0:02:45 And you made that introduction. But there’s even more backstory that I have to share with folks.
0:02:54 That would have been 2005, 2006. I was around 27, 28 at the time. Much earlier, this would have been
0:03:00 when I just moved to Silicon Valley. I was riding around in my mom’s hand-me-down POS minivan,
0:03:06 which was broken in every way imaginable, listening to Personal Power 2 on cassette tape
0:03:13 to and from my job as I commuted on 101. I was eating at Jack in the Box in the parking lot of
0:03:20 a Safeway a couple of nights a week because that’s what I could afford. And I was volunteering for a
0:03:24 group called the Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs, which is a mouthful,
0:03:30 S-Vase. And I had volunteered, which I still recommend to folks because I knew nobody. Nobody
0:03:35 knew me. And I always tried to do extra jobs as a volunteer. And eventually they said, wow,
0:03:40 this kid really likes working for free. Let’s give him more responsibility. Hey, would you like to
0:03:44 organize some speakers for a main event? And I thought to myself, absolutely. This is a great
0:03:51 way for me to meet some of my heroes. And I invited Trip Hawkins of Electronic Arts. I invited you
0:03:57 because of the phenom. Of course, we’ll talk about it. But Chicken Soup for the Soul, I invited all
0:04:04 sorts of folks. And that was the first time that we met. You graciously agreed to come to that. And
0:04:10 here we are more than 20 years later. And I’m so happy to have you on the podcast. So thank you for
0:04:16 all of that. These are these sliding door moments where there’s no way I could play the alternative,
0:04:21 but the what if certainly looms large. What if you hadn’t said yes to come to that event?
0:04:25 What if I hadn’t reached out and said, Jack, all these notes I have from this lecture I’ve been
0:04:30 giving to this high-tech entrepreneurship class, is there anything here? And frankly, I hoped you would
0:04:34 say no because I didn’t want to write a book. And you were like, actually, I think there’s something
0:04:40 here. And before I could say anything, you started making introductions. And here we are. So thank you
0:04:43 for everything, Jack. I really appreciate it.
0:04:46 Let me just say you’re someone who knows how to take advantage of an opportunity.
0:04:48 You’ve done really well.
0:04:53 You know, you got to take your shot when you can take your shot.
0:04:54 That’s right.
0:05:01 And it’s been one hell of a ride. So I’m thrilled to have you on. And I was looking through some of the
0:05:06 materials beforehand. We’re going to run out of time before we run out of topics. But ultimately,
0:05:12 we will rewind the clock and go back to some of the beginning chapters. But I have to ask,
0:05:17 because there is a bullet here. The story behind more than 300 million copies sold in China.
0:05:22 How does that happen? Because I’m imagining chicken soup does not have the same connotation
0:05:25 over there. So I don’t even know if the title is the same.
0:05:30 Well, what happened is a company called Ennui Publishing, and they decided to publish the book.
0:05:36 And what’s interesting is we had a contract that they would pay us 10 cents for every book sold in
0:05:43 China. But Ennui was half owned by the government and half owned by private equity. So they decided to
0:05:48 make it a textbook to teach English to kids in high school with Chinese on one side, English on the
0:05:55 other. And they printed millions and millions of books because it was in the schools, which was the
0:06:01 government side. We didn’t see one penny of millions of books sold. So I learned how to write better
0:06:09 contracts in the future. But the fact is, a lot of Chinese people have had major transformations because
0:06:14 of the books have taken off and they have sold in the general public as a result of kids learning
0:06:19 about them in school, showing it to their parents, so on and so forth. So it all works out, all paid
0:06:23 off. But that was a major lesson for us. You know, you’ve got to be really, really careful when you’re
0:06:28 in it. When you’re acting with the Chinese and making deals, they’re very, very clever.
0:06:33 You’ve got to be careful. There is an expression, I’m not going to say that everyone uses this,
0:06:34 but in Chinese, which is,
0:06:40 which is, if you can trick them, then you should trick them. And I’m not saying everyone
0:06:43 subscribes to that, but you’ve got to have your wits about you.
0:06:44 Yeah, for sure.
0:06:50 Part of the reason I love doing this podcast is it gives me a pretext for doing a bunch of
0:06:54 internet sleuthing on my friends without seeming like a stalker or a crazy person.
0:07:01 And I really had no understanding or grasp of your childhood, your upbringing, anything
0:07:08 like that. Could you speak to a bit for folks, just the basics of where you grew up, what you
0:07:13 learned or didn’t learn from parents or household, things of that type?
0:07:18 Well, I was born in 1944. My father was in the Air Force. World War II was going on. He trained
0:07:23 bomber pilots, actually. So from the time I was born until the time I was six, we lived in three
0:07:28 different states with military bases. I don’t remember much of it at all. But when I was six,
0:07:33 we moved to West Virginia, which is where I mostly grew up, in Wheeling, West Virginia. It’s a steel
0:07:38 town, coal mining, all that kind of stuff. And my father was an alcoholic, and he got violent when
0:07:43 he was drunk. And my mother decided to divorce him when I was six, and we went to live with my
0:07:48 grandmother. And I actually lived in the attic of her house for years. And then eventually she met
0:07:54 my stepfather, who had just come out of the Navy. And I grew up poor. You know, we were not wealthy
0:08:01 at all. And so my father was one of these people. When I went off to college, my stepfather, he said
0:08:07 to me, he gave me $20. He looked over me in the eye and he said, no, there’s that. He says, if you need a
0:08:11 helping hand, look at the end of your own arm, there’ll be no more gifts coming from me.
0:08:19 Okay. So I learned early on, you know, I worked my way through high school. I was a lifeguard of the
0:08:25 country club pool. I had this thing I was in, but not of. I was in the country club meeting girls whose
0:08:30 parents were, but I wasn’t of that. And I went to a private military school from the fifth grade until I
0:08:36 graduated high school. My rich aunt had a son named Jack who died. If I was, you talk about kismet and
0:08:43 fate. If my name was Bob, we’d not be talking right now. But because I was Jack, she adopted me after his
0:08:47 death and sent me to a private school in town. So I got a much better education than my brother or anyone
0:08:52 else. But again, I was in, but I wasn’t of. I wasn’t a doctor’s son. I didn’t, you know, the president of
0:08:57 the guy who owned the Cadillac dealership. That was not my crowd. Yet I got to hang out with those
0:09:02 kids and eventually got into Harvard on a scholarship to play football. I was a football player. I was
0:09:08 honorable mention all state. I was an end, all that kind of stuff. I grew up thinking, you know,
0:09:12 you got to work really, really hard, which I did. I worked my way through Harvard. I cut grass. I
0:09:18 cleaned the dorms. I did all, got up and served food at six in the morning and fell asleep immediately
0:09:25 in French class. I was so tired, you know. I remember one day that I’m like this falling,
0:09:30 I’m totally asleep in this class at nine in the morning and his professor comes over and
0:09:33 he shakes me awake and he says, you can leave now. The class is over.
0:09:39 That’s a very understanding comment from his teacher.
0:09:44 I know. I know. Well, whatever. And then I made, this is interesting. I majored in Chinese history,
0:09:50 which is interesting why. Later I learned that I had past lives in China and Tibet. And so it made sense
0:09:55 to me. But at that time, my freshman year, I got all C’s and everything. Here I was a student,
0:10:00 high school, get to Harvard. And I always say, I graduated in the half of the class that made the
0:10:06 top half possible, you know. So there were a lot of smart, smart kids there, valedictorians from
0:10:11 their school. And I said to my counselor, I need an easy A for my sophomore year. He says, well,
0:10:15 this guy, he used to be the ambassador to China. He gives everyone an A. Why don’t you take his class?
0:10:22 And he knew Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong. He had slides of everything, you know. And I got the A.
0:10:26 But I fell in love with Chinese history for some weird reason. So that was my major. You know,
0:10:31 as I always tell people, prepared me really well to do the work I do. It had nothing to do with it.
0:10:38 My senior year, I took an elective class. I said, I need another easy A. And someone said,
0:10:43 take SocRail 10, SocRail Social Relations 10. It’s an encounter group. You just sit in there and talk
0:10:48 about your feelings. And everybody gets an A. So I went over there and I took the class and I fell
0:10:53 in love with human potential. Oh my God. There’s this thing called psychology and people and human
0:10:57 behavior and feelings and, you know, motivation. So I said, well, how do I get into that? They said,
0:11:02 well, it’s a little late to get into psychology. I had a study as an undergraduate and I hadn’t.
0:11:08 They said, well, you could sneak into psychology through education. So I went to the University of
0:11:12 Chicago, got a master’s degree in education, taught in an all-black inner-city high school for two years.
0:11:18 Got teacher of the year my first year. I went to get to Jesse Jackson’s church. I became friends with
0:11:25 people in the jazz community. Really got deeply. I would say probably for a year, I almost wished I
0:11:30 was black because I thought white people are milquetoast. And these black guys, they got energy
0:11:34 and the poetry and the songs and the music and the dancing and the anger and the fear and all that.
0:11:42 So then basically I started realizing my students were not motivated. They didn’t believe they could
0:11:49 learn because they were black in the inner city and they didn’t have role models. And that became my
0:11:55 passion. How do I motivate them to achieve? And I met W. Clement Stone, my mentor. He was a self-made,
0:12:03 he was worth $600 million in 1968, which is when I was there. Yeah. His best friend was Napoleon Hill,
0:12:07 who wrote Think and Grow Rich. And together they wrote a book together. And then also he wrote a
0:12:11 book called The Success System and Never Failed. And that’s where I learned about motivation and setting
0:12:18 goals and having vision and values and working hard and using affirmations and visualization and all of
0:12:18 that.
0:12:23 I want to come back to W. Clement Stone at $600 million. We’ll come back to that because that’s
0:12:29 a mind-boggling number, especially for that point in time, but anytime even now. But if we back up for
0:12:38 a second, teacher of the year, first year in Chicago, what made that possible? What do you think
0:12:38 contributed to that?
0:12:44 I think what happened was it was this school probably five years earlier was all white and Jewish.
0:12:49 And then it was this black invasion, they would call it, into the community. And there was this
0:12:54 white flight out to the suburbs. So what happened was a lot of the teachers didn’t really want to be
0:12:59 there. They wanted to go with the kids who went. So there was a certain kind of malaise and almost
0:13:05 an upset that they had. And I think a lot of them didn’t treat the kids very well. And the other thing
0:13:10 is nobody was teaching African-American history. I was teaching history, you know, American history and
0:13:15 world history. And I found a book called Before the Mayflower. And it was by a guy named Lerone Bennett.
0:13:20 And it was a book about African-American history. It’s just a paperback. It goes like $3.95. I bought
0:13:25 one for every one of my students. And I would teach black history along with white history. You know,
0:13:31 history is always written by the victors. So basically, white history is our history. And they didn’t know
0:13:37 any of this stuff. And the fact that I would do this, and the fact that I was loving and kind and
0:13:42 motivational and believe they could do everything, it made them, I think, just like me because I was
0:13:47 on their side. And then they started the African-American club, African-American studies
0:13:52 club. They asked me if I’d be a sponsor. I said, yes. So that was another thing. I ended up coaching
0:13:57 the swimming team because the guy who was supposed to do it had majored in basketball. He was a phys ed
0:14:02 teacher. He didn’t know that much about swimming. I had swum competitively in high school. And it was a
0:14:06 waterfront instructor in summer camps in Maine and teach kids to swim and all that kind of stuff.
0:14:14 So, and I think the last part of that was that I was starting to do these human potential activities
0:14:18 in my classes. You know, I’d get them into pairs and have them go back and forth and say,
0:14:24 I can’t. Then I’d have them go replace the sentence with, I won’t. And which feels stronger? Which
0:14:29 feels more true? Which is, you know, and they go, yeah, can’t’s really a victim word. So I was doing
0:14:34 maybe 10 minutes of that every day, along with teaching my history. And I think that’s kind of
0:14:38 why. And the big moment for me, this is so cool. You know, you have these little moments in life where
0:14:45 you get affirmation from outside. So Sammy Davis Jr. was at school. He was going to do a talk to the
0:14:51 kids. He’d written a book called I Can. And he was there when I got the award. They gave me the award
0:14:56 the same day. And I’m walking off stage and he looked at me and he said, you must be really cool to
0:14:59 have gotten that award from those kids. I think I lived on that for days.
0:15:05 I mean, that’s a hell of a compliment from a hell of a person and a hell of an entertainment.
0:15:08 Yeah. And you’re like 22 years old or something, you know, it’s a big deal.
0:15:12 Yeah. The right words at the right time. I mean, just like you were probably offering
0:15:15 the right words at the right time to a lot of those students.
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0:17:44 So if we flash forward to W. Clement Stone, how did he make $600 million? It’s just not to fixate on
0:17:47 that, but I mean, that’s a non-trivial sum of money.
0:17:52 Three ways. Number one, he started an insurance company called Combined Insurance, and it was really
0:17:57 low premiums. In other words, the price you paid for it. And he believed everybody could afford
0:18:02 something, and he wanted to insure the people that often wouldn’t be insured by the big companies.
0:18:08 And because of that, and then he also hired people that were not college graduates to be
0:18:14 salespeople. He had a training system. This is so cool. Think about this. So here’s the training
0:18:17 system. He’d tell them what to do, maybe a Monday class. He said, now we’re going to go tomorrow,
0:18:24 and I’m going to go in. He’s teaching these kids who never graduated college to sell to CEOs of banks
0:18:28 and companies. It was intimidating for them. He said, we’re going to go in. I’m going to make a sale,
0:18:35 at least a presentation. You watch what I did. And so it goes in, they do the presentation,
0:18:39 either sold or didn’t. They go out for coffee afterwards. What did you notice I did? You did
0:18:44 this, you did this, you did this. Okay, but you missed that. Next time, watch that. They go in,
0:18:48 they do it again. Do that about three or four times in the morning. And the fourth time,
0:18:51 they’re going in, and he just turns to the kid, and he goes, this one’s yours.
0:18:58 So he just stepped back. And the kid, maybe he made it, maybe he blew it. But afterwards,
0:19:02 they go out and say, okay, you missed two things. We’re going to go to the next one to watch me do
0:19:06 those two things. Next one, he go, this is yours. By the end of the day, they knew how to sell.
0:19:07 That’s incredible.
0:19:14 It was amazing. So he had salespeople all over the country selling these low price insurance things.
0:19:19 Second thing he did, he was a genius when it came to real estate. He invested in a lot of real estate.
0:19:25 The coolest thing he ever did, if you go into Chicago on rails, that’s a big area where they
0:19:29 bring beef in, and they were processing beef all those days. And it’s also a big central
0:19:35 distribution point for everything. There’s a place, it’s just huge, wide, like six rails wide,
0:19:42 going into the main station. And there was no more real estate to buy. And so he said to the guys who
0:19:50 own the railroad land, he said, can I buy the air rights over the railroad tracks? And they said,
0:19:55 sure. So if you go to that part of Chicago, there are all these buildings over the tracks,
0:19:59 which he got a hundred year lease on the air rights. And they built these huge skyscrapers,
0:20:03 which he then got the royalties for, or the commissions for, or the rents for, or whatever.
0:20:09 So he was just very creative. And the third thing he did, he invested well in everything else as well.
0:20:16 So a lot of it was investment. And then he also produced Success Magazine, started by W.
0:20:23 Clement Stone. And he was a speaker. He had books he sold, the magazine, Ogmandino, who wrote The
0:20:28 Greatest Salesman. So I’m working in the Stone Foundation at one point. So I quit teaching. I work
0:20:29 for Stone.
0:20:30 Why did you quit teaching?
0:20:32 Because Stone offered me a job.
0:20:34 Oh, okay.
0:20:39 The Stone said, we have this achievement motivation program. We’re teaching teachers
0:20:44 to do it, to go into the schools. We don’t have anyone who’s had inner city experience. You do.
0:20:48 Would you come work for me? And it was like more than I was making as a teacher. And I went, yeah,
0:20:55 okay. And it’s him, right? Working for him was amazing. And he just took everybody under his wing,
0:21:01 loved them. Imagine you’re young, you’re 23, maybe. And he says to you, work in my foundation,
0:21:06 go teach this stuff. If there’s any training you ever want to take anywhere, it’s on me,
0:21:09 go for it. I took 37 weekend workshops that year.
0:21:13 You’re the edge case he has to budget for.
0:21:18 Yeah. It was like a grant from the government or something. So I took all these workshops,
0:21:25 you know, everything from Carnegie to gestalt therapy and body work and meditation. And so he funded all
0:21:33 that, which was great. But he really was an amazing being that just, I learned so much by being in his
0:21:39 presence. You know, I’ll tell you a story. I got an intake interview first day and he says to me,
0:21:44 do you take a hundred percent responsibility for your life? And I said, I don’t know. He said,
0:21:46 is he yes or no answer, son? Think.
0:21:53 I said, well, based on, I don’t even understand it. Probably no. He says, do you ever blame anybody
0:21:58 for anything? Yeah. Do you complain about anything? Yeah. Do you ever make excuses why you didn’t
0:22:02 achieve something? Yeah. You don’t take a hundred percent responsibility. So he introduced me to the
0:22:08 whole concept of a hundred percent responsibility. And then he said to me, do you watch television?
0:22:13 I said, yeah. He said, how many hours a day? I said, I don’t know. Good morning, America,
0:22:17 because of the news, maybe a movie at night, you know, 11 o’clock or something like that. So that’s
0:22:23 three hours a day. Just cut out an hour a day. I said, why? He said, because that’ll give you 365
0:22:28 additional hours a year to be productive, divide that by a 40 hour work week. That’s nine and a half
0:22:32 weeks. That’ll give you a 14 month year. You’ll be much more competitive than all the people in your
0:22:37 field if you do that. So I did that. You know, he was teaching me in the fricking interview,
0:22:45 you know, so it was cool. What were some of the things that really stuck with you after you got
0:22:51 the job, whether it was through osmosis, whether it was through direct teaching, like why did that job
0:22:57 and that mentorship have the impact that it did? Were there any other examples or stories that come to
0:23:04 mind? He challenged me. Cause I mean, as an educator, I was probably making back then 30,000 a year,
0:23:09 if I was lucky, you know, that was like now people like a lot more inflation. But what happens is he
0:23:15 said, I want to challenge you to make a hundred thousand dollars a year. And if you do it, it’s
0:23:22 only because of what I taught you. And he taught me to set goals, to believe in them, to visualize it,
0:23:27 you know, like as if it’s already happening, have an affirmation. I’m so happy and grateful. I’m now
0:23:33 whatever. And I started doing that and I took the goal of a hundred thousand dollars seriously.
0:23:38 And every morning I’d wake up and I’d put a hundred thousand dollar bill on the ceiling. I didn’t even
0:23:43 know one existed at the time. Banks actually trade them back and forth, but I took a hundred dollar bill.
0:23:49 I projected it with a member overhead projectors. I projected it onto a piece of like flip chart paper,
0:23:55 traced it, added some extra zeros. And then I put that on the ceiling. Every morning I wake up,
0:24:00 I see that, say my affirmation, which went at that time, God is my instant supply and large sums of
0:24:06 money coming to me quickly and easily as I earn a hundred thousand dollars a year. And about, I’d say
0:24:13 maybe a month or two into it, I’m in the shower and I had a hundred thousand dollar idea. Cause I’d
0:24:18 written a book called 100 ways to enhance self-concept in the classroom. And I used to get a quarter,
0:24:27 25 cents for every book that got sold. And I said, wow, sell 400,000 books. I get a hundred thousand
0:24:33 dollars. That was my first hundred thousand dollar idea. And so to make a long story short, cause I
0:24:41 could do a half hour in that story. I literally started to sell more books. I started a bookstore,
0:24:47 literally a mail-order bookstore where you could buy my book, had one product. And then my wife at the
0:24:52 time said, you know, we’re selling that book. I didn’t know what happened. She’d ordered something
0:24:55 in the mail. And if you ever ordered something in the mail and it comes and then there’s like five
0:25:00 flyers for other products they have in the, in the box. So she had done that. She said, why don’t we
0:25:06 sell other people’s stuff? So we’d added other product and I hired a high school kid to come in
0:25:11 after school and to sell the books, you know, ship them out and so forth. So long story short,
0:25:16 I did not make a hundred thousand dollars. I made 92,328 dollars, but I went like, okay,
0:25:23 this is a success. Then my wife says, you think it’d work for a million? I said, only one way to find
0:25:27 out. So literally we set a million dollar goal. And that happened with chicken soup for the soul.
0:25:32 The second year I got four checks, Tim, you know, this cause of your success with the books.
0:25:37 The first time you get a check for a million dollars for three months, royalties, you go like,
0:25:42 are you kidding me? It changed my life, you know?
0:25:47 Yeah. I mean, that’s a juggernaut of a success, but people probably don’t realize
0:25:53 quite how much rejection went into that, but maybe we could start at the beginning,
0:26:01 at least the Genesis story. Where did chicken soup for the soul come from? Everyone listening has
0:26:06 seen this book at some point. Chances are, unless they’re 18 perhaps, and have like never been into
0:26:11 a dentist’s office or a physician’s office or an airport or fill in the blank, right? I mean,
0:26:14 it’s ubiquitous. How did it start?
0:26:21 So I was going around doing workshops for teachers on self-esteem, motivation, that kind of thing.
0:26:26 And I was always telling stories, just because I noticed when I was a high school teacher,
0:26:31 if I was talking historical facts, kids were looking out the window. If I was telling a story
0:26:37 about an escaped slave who became an ambassador of my own story or something from Jet Magazine or
0:26:42 Ebony Magazine, the kids would pay attention. So stories capture us. And all the great teachers,
0:26:49 Buddha, Jesus, we know they told stories and parables and so forth. So one day, somebody said,
0:26:53 the story you told about the Girl Scout who sold 3,328 boxes of Girl Scout cookies in one year,
0:26:59 is that in a book anywhere? My daughter needs to hear that story. I went, no. And over a course of
0:27:03 two months, I must’ve had four people a day say, is that story in a book? That story in a book? That
0:27:07 story in a book? So I’m coming home on a plane from Boston to LA where I was living at the time.
0:27:12 And I said, how many stories do I really know? So I wrote down every story, the dog story,
0:27:18 the Girl Scout story, the puppy story, the Mount Everest story, whatever. It was 70 stories. So I said,
0:27:25 okay, that’s a book. So I made the commitment that every night I would write, work on a story. And at the
0:27:29 end of the week, I would have two stories. And if I did that for a year, I’d have 101 stories,
0:27:38 100, whatever. So I did that. And when I was about, I don’t know, five, six through, I had breakfast with
0:27:46 Mark Victor Hanson, who became my co-author. And we were having breakfast in Beverly Hills at this place.
0:27:51 All these human potential leaders would come to this breakfast. The Inside Edge, it was called.
0:27:56 So Mark said, what are you working on? I said, I’m writing this book. And he said,
0:28:02 you should let me finish it with you. And I went, that’s like telling Stephen King you should be his
0:28:07 co-author because he’s five, six of the way through the book. How do you justify that? He says, well,
0:28:14 some of the stories you tell you stole from me. I said, maybe three, Mark, come on. And he said,
0:28:20 but I’m a much better salesperson than you. I’ll be the upfront voice person. I said, well,
0:28:27 give me 30 more stories and we’ll talk. So I had 70 at that time. So he said, okay, came back,
0:28:33 he did it. So basically it was a marriage made in heaven because he really was good at getting the
0:28:38 word up. We were in a mall once. Believe this, Tim, we’re in a mall, I think it was B. Dalton
0:28:43 bookstores. They were in a lot of malls. Yeah. I remember B. Dalton. Yeah. And so we’re doing a
0:28:48 book signing and there’s nobody there. So Mark goes out into the mall and he just starts walking up
0:28:53 down the mall yelling, are you guys crazy? There’s a book signing in B. Dalton right now with these two
0:28:58 amazing authors about the best book in the world. You all should be in there. And so he’s doing that
0:29:03 and about 40 people came in to be Dalton. And then Mark walks up to the front of the room where I am
0:29:07 ready to do the little talk before the signing. They all like gasped, you know, like you’re the guy
0:29:15 I was in the hall. I was too shy to do that. It worked out really well. But, you know, you talked
0:29:22 about rejection. We were turned down by 144 publishers once we had a manuscript that took us over a year
0:29:29 to sell the book. You know, when I think about that story and I think about, you know, the 4-Hour Workweek,
0:29:34 which was also turned down, Steve and I got front row seats, obviously, to this by 37,
0:29:39 39 publishers, something like that, imprints within the publishers. Maybe, tell me if this
0:29:43 resonates or not, but you can have a bad idea that gets rejected, right? Just because something
0:29:49 gets rejected a lot doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. But in this case, I had tested everything in the
0:29:56 classes. So I knew what worked. I knew that the material stuck, so to speak. And you had been
0:30:01 testing these stories also in front of audiences. And people had been asking you, where can I read
0:30:07 this in a book? But was there anything else that contributed to the perseverance to go through that
0:30:13 many rejections? I think it’s what you just said for us too, because we had tested these stories over
0:30:17 and over and told them. We got standing ovations. Many of the stories in there, the first book,
0:30:23 or what often are called in the speaking business, your signature story that other people had let us
0:30:28 use with their signature stories. So we knew they were tearjerkers. They were inspirational. They
0:30:31 made you laugh. They made you feel like you want to call up and tell your mother, I got to read you
0:30:38 this story. So basically, we knew that. Like you said, you knew that from your experience. What I find in
0:30:43 the book world, especially in the New York publishing world, is everybody wants something that’s a copy of
0:30:49 something that already worked. Sure. So basically, when you come along with something
0:30:56 radically new, like your idea was and our idea was, up until then, no collections of short stories had
0:31:00 ever worked. Because they were all fictional. And they were too short to get engaged with the characters
0:31:06 writers and really like go, you know, get involved. Whereas all these stories were in categories like
0:31:13 on love, on overcoming obstacles, you know, grief and so forth, that are the human things that everybody
0:31:19 lives with, which this is why they’re so touched by it. And we just knew to stick with it. We would have
0:31:23 self-published eventually. And I would have made a lot more money, but I would have been, I didn’t really
0:31:29 want to be a publisher. That’s I wanted to be a speaker and a writer. So I’m going to read something
0:31:34 here. You can tell me if this needs some fact checking, but this is from Thrive Global. This is
0:31:41 a Q&A with you. So here we go. It’s just a paragraph. Eventually went to ABA, the American Booksellers
0:31:46 Association, and went booth to booth for two or three days. And on the final day, this one new publisher
0:31:52 employee said, well, read the manuscript. Some people wouldn’t even take it. And they read it in this
0:31:55 case and loved it. And they said, they’d publish it. We said, how many books do you think you’ll sell?
0:32:03 And this is their response. Oh, 20,000 if you’re lucky. And then your response, I think this is you.
0:32:06 Well, we want to sell a million and a half in a year and a half, I said.
0:32:11 This employee laughed. And then a year and a half later, we’d sold 1.3 million copies.
0:32:21 To sell 1.3 or 1.5 million copies is so hard. I mean, it is so hard to do unless you happen to
0:32:27 be very, very lucky somehow in capturing lightning in a bottle. But usually, there’s a lot of elbow
0:32:32 grease behind it. So two things. Well, actually, I guess it’s just really one thing. What went into
0:32:41 selling that many copies over a year and a half? And were you still using affirmations? Was that still
0:32:42 one of the ingredients in the cocktail?
0:32:46 Yeah. And then we were doing the mindset work. I always say it’s mindset, skill set, and ready,
0:32:53 set, go. The set, go. I wanted another set. It’s the action. So someone had told us that the book,
0:32:59 The Road Less Traveled, the author of that book, had done five interviews a day for the first year.
0:33:05 Five interviews a day. Scott Peck. And that book was on the New York Times list for 12 years.
0:33:07 It’s so long.
0:33:08 It’s so long.
0:33:14 Yeah. You know, I think it’s a record. I mean, you were really close, I think. Maybe you still are. I don’t know.
0:33:20 But the reality was, I thought, well, if that’s what works, let’s do it. So Mark and I actually had gone to
0:33:26 five best-selling authors and then read about Scott Peck. And we talked to John Gray, who wrote
0:33:32 Men Are From Mars. We talked to Ken Blanchard, who wrote The One Minute Manager. We talked to Barbara DeAngelis,
0:33:37 who wrote the book on love. And then another book on TM that someone had written that was successful.
0:33:43 And we said, what should we do? And they all said, do as many interviews as possible. Get in front of everybody.
0:33:49 I know you did the blogger thing, which was brilliant. We did the radio thing. Now it’s, I think podcasts are
0:33:54 better than radio. I always tell new authors, because the people listening to them, they’re your audience.
0:34:00 There’s a focus. Whereas radio may have a bigger reach, but not everybody’s your audience. So
0:34:06 five a day, every day, for a year. So we created what we call The Rule of Five.
0:34:12 It’s a book by John Kramer called How to Sell a Million Books, something like that. It’s a great book.
0:34:17 We bought the book, and we took every idea that was in that book, and we made a post-it,
0:34:22 two-by-three post-it, put it on the wall. And if you went down the wall of our company at that time,
0:34:26 self-esteem seminars, it was just covered with post-it. And every day, we’d take something off
0:34:31 and either do it five times or take five post-its off and do each one time, call a church. Can we talk
0:34:37 in your church? Can we call five PXs in the military? And we’d say, are you carrying our book? Can I send
0:34:41 you one? If you like it, will you carry it? Call book source. Are you stocking it? Can we send you
0:34:44 one? If you like it, will you carry it? Call them back two weeks later. Did you get it?
0:34:50 It was like nonstop. We were giving talks at churches on Sunday morning, Wednesday night,
0:34:54 you know, whatever. They’re the ones that have bookstores. We do signings. We signed in the
0:35:01 parking lot. I spoke at every damn conference there was. It’s like, you know, I didn’t care where it was
0:35:06 or how long it took to get there, if it was there. And we did radio shows that were like at two in the
0:35:11 morning. Maybe a trucker driving through Montana will hear it, but maybe he’ll like it. Maybe he’ll buy it.
0:35:15 Maybe he’ll tell his daughter and his daughter will tell her friends. And so literally it was that
0:35:22 level of nonstop activity. And it was interesting because we were pretty amped up in the beginning
0:35:28 and we talked to the psychic guy. He was in trance. He’d go, it would be as if you would go to a tree
0:35:36 with a very sharp ax and you would take five swipes at that tree every single day. Eventually,
0:35:40 even a redwood would have to come down. You know, we went, okay, rule of five. That’s what we’re
0:35:46 going to do. What prompted the trip to the psychic? Do you remember?
0:35:53 Yeah, I do. We knew his wife and she was a friend of ours. And then he kind of turned psychic,
0:36:00 if you will. He was doing these readings and they were, they were awesome. So we just thought,
0:36:01 well, why not? Let’s ask him what we should do.
0:36:09 And how old were you or what date was this? Either one, roughly when the first
0:36:11 chicken soup for the soul came out?
0:36:16 93. And I was born in 44. So what is that? 49 years old? Something like that.
0:36:23 Yeah. Yeah. And when it hit, right? When you sold the 1.3 million copies in a year and a half or
0:36:29 whatever it added up to be, how did that change your life? Or in what ways did that affect your life?
0:36:37 Well, it allowed me to move out of a very small house. It allowed me to get a better car,
0:36:43 all that kind of stuff. I think more so it was an affirmation from the world that the work I was
0:36:51 passionate about was needed. And so it wasn’t just the money. It was the confirmation that my intuition,
0:36:57 that my passion was correct. You know, you’re probably familiar with the concept of ikigai,
0:37:00 which comes from the Japanese, where is it, if you’d love to do something, that’s one thing,
0:37:05 are you good at it? Does the world need it? And are they willing to pay for it? So all four of those
0:37:09 have to come together for this thing that you’re passionate about to actually work. In this case,
0:37:15 it did. So I thought, okay, my purpose is needed. It’s going to work. I can make a living at it.
0:37:19 So that was a big confirmation of that, I think more than anything. And yeah,
0:37:23 I bought three sweaters, you know, in different colors and all that kind of stuff. I went through
0:37:25 my nouveau riche stage for sure.
0:37:31 I mean, if the sweaters were the extent of the nouveau riche, then I feel like you have very good
0:37:39 restraint. The title itself, Chicken Soup for the Soul, because that ended up to be such an incredible
0:37:45 format also for extending that into a million different verticals, right? Chicken Soup for the
0:37:52 fill-in-the-blank soul. Where did that, this I suppose is a nod to the intuition or unorthodox
0:37:54 approaches, but how did that title come to be?
0:37:59 Well, we had an agent who was going to take us to New York and meet with publishers,
0:38:05 and we didn’t have a title. So Mark and I said, well, we’re both meditators. So we said,
0:38:09 well, let’s just meditate and ask the universe, source, God, whatever you want to call that energy
0:38:15 for a title. So Mark would go to bed. Mark’s really hyper. He’d go to bed chanting,
0:38:20 mega bestselling title, mega bestselling title, mega bestselling title. I would just go and I would,
0:38:26 every morning I’d sit for an hour and I’d say, okay, God, give me a title. And on Wednesday,
0:38:30 two days, nothing happened. Third day, I’m sitting there and all of a sudden this chalkboard appears,
0:38:35 green chalkboard like in school, and a hand comes out and writes chicken soup and script on it.
0:38:39 And I said to the hand, what the hell does chicken soup have to do with this book?
0:38:44 And a voice said back, when you were a kid, your grandmother gave you a chicken soup
0:38:49 when you were sick. And I thought, but there’s another book on sick people.
0:38:54 And the voice answered back, people’s spirits are sick. They’re in resignation, hopelessness,
0:39:01 and fear. We were in the first big recession, 1993, the Gulf War was going on, downside, a lot of
0:39:06 things that are happening now were happening then. The economy was tanking and people were losing jobs.
0:39:11 So timing was good in terms of people needing inspiration. That played out well. So I went
0:39:17 chicken soup for the spirit, chicken soup for the soul, and I got goosebumps. Oh, my wife, she got
0:39:22 goosebumps. Told Mark, called Mark, what do you think of this? He got goosebumps. Called her agent. He got
0:39:27 goosebumps. Went to New York, met with 21 publishers, seven a day for three days. Nobody got goosebumps.
0:39:38 So basically, that led to the 144 rejections. And you’re right, we went to the American Booksellers
0:39:43 Association, boot to boot. We’re both wearing backpacks full of these spiral bound, like 20
0:39:47 stories from the book, the best stories. Would you publish this book? Would you be interested in this
0:39:52 book? And most people wouldn’t even take one, let alone. And then Peter Vegzo, who’s the guy who did
0:39:59 publish it? And you’re right, he said 20,000, and we said no. And he laughed. He laughed out loud at us.
0:40:08 And later he said, yeah, you know. He took out an ad in New York on a billboard thanking all the
0:40:10 publishers that rejected chicken soup for the soul.
0:40:21 He may have just laughed. Was it laugh as in I don’t believe her? Or was he like, that’s some chutzpah?
0:40:25 No, he laughed because he thought we were freaking crazy. He thought we were insane.
0:40:33 You guys are nuts, you know. What happened was the first shipment he made was 800 books to,
0:40:41 I think it was Barnes and Noble, might’ve been Borders. And they sold 80 books the first week. He said,
0:40:45 when you sell one-tenth of your inventory the first week, that’s a phenomenon. Next week, 92. The next
0:40:51 week, 150. He said something was happening. It just shocked him. And they started with those presses
0:40:56 that do this kind of thing, you know. And then they had to go to a rotary press like you see in the
0:41:02 movies when the newspaper’s getting printed. And they had three shifts just doing nothing but printing
0:41:06 chicken soup for the soul. And I remember one December, the guy who was in charge of the money,
0:41:12 the CFO of that company, told his staff, I never knew this until later, he said, don’t take any more
0:41:17 orders for delivery in December. I don’t want any more revenue for tax purposes this year.
0:41:26 And meanwhile, right, you’re following the rule of five, you’re calling the churches,
0:41:31 you’re speaking in on Sundays, you’re calling the PXs, you’re doing all of the things.
0:41:40 Were there any particular breakthrough moments or interviews? Looking back at these hundreds of
0:41:45 things that you tried, were there any that really seemed to help the book break through?
0:41:52 I think, you know, as far as interviews go, being on Good Morning America definitely made a big
0:41:57 difference. Being on Fox and Friends, in other words, major national TV shows, which didn’t happen
0:42:02 immediately. You start out local and you basically create some reels of, you know, you’re someone that
0:42:07 can talk and they’ll consider you if they’re a producer on the big shows. But those big shows,
0:42:12 we’d be on them and then sales would just boom, you know. But the word of mouth, more than anything,
0:42:18 I think, Tim, what we noticed was we’d have these big sales and then nothing would happen for a week or
0:42:22 two. And then it’d be a big sales. And it would take like people a week or two to read the book.
0:42:26 They’d tell everybody. The word of mouth was crazy. And it was like a chain letter. It just kept going
0:42:33 and going and going and going. Geometric progressions. I think the other thing that was really big for us
0:42:39 was a company called Skillpath and another one, I’m forgetting the name of it right now. But they were
0:42:44 doing, sometimes you get these marketing things that say, you know, we’re going to be doing a workshop
0:42:51 on AI and we’re going to do it in Davenport, Iowa on Monday. And it will be in the middle of Iowa on
0:42:55 Tuesday. It’ll be there. So there are these people running around doing seminars everywhere.
0:43:00 Is it like learning Annex back in the day, similar or different?
0:43:07 Learning Annex, and I spoke at those places as well, it’s similar, but here’s the value of this. What
0:43:13 happened is, let’s say you’re a trainer for this company. You’re going to five cities in Iowa in a week
0:43:16 and you’re going to teach the same course. And there’s someone else teaching how to communicate
0:43:22 with your boss. Someone else teaching how to use Excel, whatever. And what happens is that those
0:43:28 are places we never would have gone. And in the back of the room, they were selling our books. We got a
0:43:32 lot, a lot of book sales in places. And then that word of mouth thing would take over and it would just
0:43:38 keep exploding, exploding, exploding, exploding, exploding. And what’s fascinating is I had sent the book to
0:43:43 the guy who runs that company and said, you know, would you sell this book as part of
0:43:46 your back of the room? Because I knew they did back of the room, mostly audio programs back then. They
0:43:51 were like $60 for six cassettes. And so he said, well, I don’t know, there’s no money in a book,
0:43:57 you know, whatever. So then he was a Christian and he always led the Wednesday night men’s group or
0:44:01 something. And he always liked to start with a Bible story. And he gets to the group and he doesn’t
0:44:06 have a Bible story in his mind. He opens up his briefcase. There’s a chicken soup book. He reads the
0:44:12 story. It makes him cry. He goes in, he reads the story to his Bible group. They go, can you read any more
0:44:16 stories? That night he read seven stories from the book to his Bible group. He went, maybe I should
0:44:21 reconsider. So they did.
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0:45:43 I want to emphasize something for folks, and this is through my own lens and bias, of course, but part of
0:45:49 how you can improve the likelihood of word of mouth with a book like that, or any book really,
0:45:56 if you’re dealing with especially, I think, nonfiction stories is practice it in front of live audiences.
0:46:03 If you just get such valuable feedback, it is not the same. Speaking as someone who’s done 800 plus
0:46:09 podcast episodes, it’s not the same as virtual feedback. Being able to see faces, see when people
0:46:15 are getting distracted, see when they’re taking notes, to hear what they ask you after you’re done
0:46:23 teaching or presenting. It allows you to refine your materials so well. I have thought, actually,
0:46:27 I’m sitting here in Austin, Texas right now, and I have an idea for a short book, which of course,
0:46:30 I’ve been trying to write a short book for 20 years. I haven’t yet succeeded, but I have this idea for a
0:46:38 short book. And I’ve thought about maybe reaching out to UT Austin here to teach a class just to work on
0:46:45 the material and try to present it because it worked so well for particularly the first book.
0:46:51 And for people listening who might think, well, times have changed. Now it’s all about TikTok and this and
0:46:56 this and this and this. Yes, certain things have changed, but a lot is still the same. So I just wanted to
0:46:59 speak to the live audience piece of it because I think it’s so powerful.
0:47:04 I never write what I haven’t spoken about a lot first for the exact same reason you’re talking about.
0:47:09 I get real feedback about what lands, what doesn’t land, where did I confuse, where did I give them
0:47:15 enough information, where was I redundant, et cetera. And people now, they get a book and they
0:47:20 instantly go to create an online course, which they haven’t taught live. At least teach it online live
0:47:26 before you just record it and put it online. So yeah, it’s crazy what people don’t do that they should.
0:47:32 To maybe just put a bow on the chapter of Chicken Soup for the Soul. I mean, you’ve got some crazy
0:47:39 accolades related to this, right? The Guinness Book World Record with seven chicken soup books on the
0:47:46 New York Times bestseller list simultaneously. That was in 1999. There are so many bullet points that I
0:47:50 could list off that are just completely nuts, right? When you think back to somebody saying,
0:47:55 hey, if you sell 20,000 copies, you’d be lucky. And then flashing forward to some of these,
0:48:01 you ended up selling the name, the backlists, the 220 plus titles, all future royalties,
0:48:08 the trademarks, et cetera. How did that happen? How did that come to pass? And why did that happen?
0:48:12 I think two things. We got kind of burned out on the process. When we first started it,
0:48:16 we were doing a book or two a year. And by the end, we were doing like eight or nine books a year
0:48:22 because the publisher wanted more because everything has an arc, you know? And so what happened was the
0:48:26 success was starting to dwindle. There was a little saturation in the market, perhaps. We’re niching
0:48:32 books now. The first books had universal appeal across the board. When you start doing sports fan
0:48:37 soul or golfer soul, you know, you start to limit the size of the audience. So we’re doing all these
0:48:41 books and we kind of got tired and I kind of got burned out at the level of not another one-armed
0:48:46 guy climb onto Everest story or one-legged, you know, blank. I mean, I should have been inspired.
0:48:53 It was like, ah, not another, my mother died and she loved bluebirds and a bluebird landed on our
0:48:57 windowsill. So I knew it was my mom and it probably was, but after a while, I’m tired of hearing that,
0:49:04 you know, I knew I was getting a bit jaded, you know, like, is it not the thing, you know?
0:49:10 And also I think I was tired. So the guy who was the CEO of our company at the time kind of noticed
0:49:15 all that and said, would you like to sell it? And I said, well, for the right price, you know?
0:49:19 So we sold it for tens and tens and tens and tens and tens and tens of millions of dollars. So yeah,
0:49:24 it was a good offer happened at the right time. So yeah, that’s how it happened.
0:49:31 As you’re noticing the saturation and the niching down and when you’re checking in with yourself,
0:49:35 you don’t have a full body. Yes. Right. You’re like, oh my God, another bluebird story. I just
0:49:44 don’t know if I can do it. Were you doing things in parallel that you then kept doing after you sold
0:49:48 things off? Because for a lot of people that could become their identity. And once they sell it,
0:49:52 they’re like, oh my God, what do I do now? And they have this void that could be really
0:49:58 terrifying. And I’m just wondering how you thought about what you did after that. And if you already
0:50:01 had something in the hopper or if there was another plan.
0:50:07 During that whole time, I was running seminars. And you know, like three, four, five, 600 people
0:50:14 seminars, sometimes 700, 800 people in a room. I did one seminar in India that had 7,000 Herbalife
0:50:19 people in it for three days. They only spoke Tamil. The whole thing was translated, you know?
0:50:24 And so I had that going. That was always happening. And the chicken soup was kind of like,
0:50:31 it was a parallel track to my workshops and my seminars. And so basically, yeah, that was
0:50:37 always there. I knew I could go back to that and not go back to that, but just shift my energy over
0:50:43 to that. And I did. That’s when Patty, my business partner, said, you really should consider putting
0:50:49 all these success ideas into a book. And that’s what led to the success principles, which is the
0:50:54 second kind of chapter of my life, if you will, in terms of that being. But I was always teaching
0:51:00 success ever since W. Clement Stone. So yeah, it wasn’t like I was like, oh, I’m going to quit being
0:51:04 a corporate person and I have no other idea what I’m going to do, which is, I can’t see how it’ll be
0:51:12 scary. And I have a first edition copy of the success principles, how to get from where you are to where
0:51:17 you want to be. Because before the four, I think when was the pub date on the success principles?
0:51:18 2005.
0:51:25 2005, right. So it came out two years before the four-hour workweek. And I think I have a brief
0:51:31 cameo in there, probably because of the kickboxing stuff or something else. And so I’m a signed copy
0:51:37 at home at my parents’ house, actually. I keep it right where I can see it. So I’ve had that ever
0:51:44 since. And what was it like stepping into the success principles? Were you nervous about that because
0:51:48 the bar had been set so high with Chicken Soup for the Soul? Were you able to let go of that?
0:51:50 What was that experience like?
0:51:55 Well, there is a little bit of an identity thing. I became known as the chicken soup guy. I had to
0:52:01 let go of that. Some people still see me that way, which is fine. But no, I think for me, it was a very
0:52:06 natural transition. It was a book. I knew how to sell books. People would say, how long did it take you to
0:52:12 write that book? I’d say 20 years because I was collecting all that data about what works in terms
0:52:18 of success. And the actual writing took about a year and a half. I would write from about seven at night.
0:52:23 Sometimes all of a sudden, I’d hear birds singing and it would be getting gray. I’d say, oh my God,
0:52:31 I’ve been up all night typing. I had the regular job, which was to run my seminars. Fortunately,
0:52:36 most of them were on weekends and evenings. But basically, I would go to bed at seven in the
0:52:41 morning and sleep till noon, one o’clock, then get up and do my business again and then write.
0:52:47 So thank God my wife could put up with all that. But she did. And it worked out really well. But
0:52:51 it was not that hard. I like writing. I like wordsmithing. I’ll give you an example.
0:52:58 So I have a chapter in there about the guy who wrote Sleepless in Seattle, the movie. And the next
0:53:05 chapter is about a guy who is a coffee roaster. It’s all about perseverance, not giving up. And he’s up
0:53:11 in Seattle and he’s sleeping on these coffee bean bags because he couldn’t afford an apartment. Now he’s
0:53:18 uber rich. But what happened was one of his major clients was a coffee shop down in Long Beach,
0:53:26 California. And he would ship the beans through UPS. And UPS had a strike. And I was able to go,
0:53:32 wow, blah, blah, blah. I was writing Sleepless in Seattle. In Seattle, this guy was also sleepless.
0:53:35 I love being able to make those segues and stuff.
0:53:43 Yeah. And then his chapter is called Going the Extra Mile. Basically, I said, when the strike
0:53:48 happened, he said, I can’t let this guy flounder and not have the beans he needs. And he drove them
0:53:56 himself 1,250 miles from Seattle to Long Beach. I said, he was willing to go more than one extra mile.
0:54:04 He went, 1,250. Playing with words like that is really fun for me. What was the reason for continuing
0:54:10 to do the seminars? Because presumably you’d done very well financially from, as you mentioned,
0:54:16 some of the royalties from Chicken Soup for the Soul. Was there something you got personally
0:54:23 from doing the seminars? Was it kind of an insurance policy of sorts to have additional revenue stream?
0:54:26 Like, why did you keep doing so many in-person events?
0:54:30 I love doing it. It’s like, I don’t know if you, I know you participate in a lot of sports and you
0:54:34 get really good at them fast because of the way you play. But whatever your favorite sport is,
0:54:40 you play it because you love it when you’re playing it. And for me, nothing turns me on more than being
0:54:45 up in front of a group, sharing ideas and stories and experiential exercises where people are interacting
0:54:50 and watching their lights come on, their eyes get bright, their awareness has happened,
0:54:53 and the breakthroughs happen. You know, all of a sudden they’re coming up and they think,
0:54:59 oh my God, you know, and then watching them name their children after me and write their first book
0:55:07 and leave shitty marriages and stop letting husbands abuse them. And that just, I love it. I’m kind of
0:55:13 sort of retiring right now. And literally that was the hardest part of that decision. So I had to get my
0:55:20 wife to agree that I could do X number of workshops a year, but it’s now like, and the other people are
0:55:24 doing all the work. I’m not renting hotels and filling them and doing all that kind of crap I
0:55:26 used to do. They used to have 12 staff and I have two.
0:55:31 And how, what is your age now, Jack?
0:55:32 81.
0:55:38 All right. You are sharp as a razor’s edge. And I have to ask two questions. Number one,
0:55:42 what do you think contributes to that? Maybe you just, you also have some fantastic genetics. I don’t
0:55:49 know, but you’re very, very sharp. You have a lot of energy. And then the related question is,
0:55:54 and I’m not questioning the decision, but why retire? Why change what you’re doing?
0:55:59 I realized there were things I want to do that I haven’t done. I want to become a really good
0:56:04 chef cook. I want to learn how to oil paint. I play the guitar mediocrely. I want to learn to play the
0:56:10 piano. All these kinds of hobby things that most people do as they go along in life, I’ve kind of
0:56:17 piled them up at the end. I have a 12-year-old grandson who I absolutely adore, who’s the coolest
0:56:23 damn kid. He’s an old soul kind of kid and amazingly talented. I want to spend more time with him.
0:56:28 I want to spend more time with my wife. I think I owe her that after all the time she’s put up with
0:56:34 me being on the road. And I enjoy being with her. And I want to just explore things because they’re
0:56:39 fun, not because I need to. So I want to read a book because it interests me, not because I’m getting
0:56:45 ready to write something or I’m getting ready to, you know, whatever. And it’s funny, I never thought
0:56:50 I would retire. I told everyone for years I would never retire. And then I was doing an ayahuasca experience
0:56:57 down in Costa Rica. I’ll tell the story real quick. So the intention that we were to hold that night was
0:57:02 forgive the unforgivable. And I thought, I’ve forgiven my parents. I’ve forgiven people who
0:57:06 embezzled from me. I’ve forgiven people who stole from me. I’ve forgiven the guy who bullied me in
0:57:11 school, forgiven both my ex-wives, their lawyers. You know, I’ve forgiven everybody. What’s left to
0:57:17 forgive? But I’ll do it. It’s like, I take the medicine and I’m lying there on my mattress and all
0:57:23 of a sudden Vladimir Putin’s face comes up. I thought, oh God, I got to forgive Vladimir Putin,
0:57:29 who I think is one of the more evil guys on the planet. So I literally started to see his childhood.
0:57:35 I saw what motivated him. He wants to be seen as majorly significant, that he did something
0:57:40 outrageously huge, like put the Soviet Union back together. How does he do that? You start bringing
0:57:44 all these countries back that they gave away, like the Ukraine and Poland and, you know,
0:57:51 all those places. So I finally forgave him. And I felt this energy just like leave my body. I didn’t
0:57:59 know I had such animosity toward him. And then the next thing I see is my door to my office and the
0:58:04 office opens. And the first three feet of my office is like a shrine to how significant I am.
0:58:13 It was like the Guinness Book World Record, magazine covers, awards, honorary doctorates,
0:58:19 you know, people that made me honorary sheriff of this town. I’ve got more damn stuff, you know.
0:58:26 And I realized, oh my God, part of my motivation has been to feel like I was worthy of being here. You
0:58:33 know, I made a difference. I’m significant, you know. Now, there’s a huge philanthropic, loving,
0:58:39 service-oriented heart in my body. But I realized, like, how many honorary doctorates do you need? You
0:58:44 know, I’m doctor, doctor, doctor, doctor, doctor, Canfield, you know. It’s like, I would go away for
0:58:50 four days on a trip to give a commencement speech to get another doctorate. And I’d leave my wife and
0:58:55 my kids, you know, it was crazy. And so I had that awareness. And I thought, you know, I really need to
0:59:01 slow down and take a look at all that motivation. And part of it, being 81, it was my 80th birthday last
0:59:08 summer, 81st birthday in August, I just realized, you know, there’s a lot I want to do that I’m not
0:59:14 doing. And I’m going to just shove all this work stuff to the side. Not totally. I’ve got four books
0:59:20 I’m still writing, so I’m not retired, retired. But it’s like the road warrior, you know, the three
0:59:24 weeks in Asia, the three weeks. Yeah, all that. I’m not doing that anymore.
0:59:28 I love how four books is the retirement plan.
0:59:35 That’s Jack’s version of lazy. So I’m going to come back to the ayahuasca in a second. But before we get to
0:59:43 that, what do you think has contributed to you being as vibrant, full of energy, and as sharp as you are?
0:59:49 I think several things. I’m passionate about what I do. I follow my joy, follow my passion. So there’s not a lot of
0:59:56 resistance between what was coming through and what I want to do. I can’t say I’m fearless totally, but I have
1:00:02 very few fears in my life anymore. Just, you know, if I want to do it, we’ll do it. And so that inner
1:00:09 struggle is mostly gone. That uses up a lot of energy and causes disease in the body. I don’t have a lot of
1:00:13 limiting beliefs anymore. One of the books I’m writing is about the belief change process that I’ve
1:00:19 co-developed with somebody that literally works. So I’ve cleared just tons of that stuff. I’m a big
1:00:21 fan of Byron Katie. Do you know her work?
1:00:28 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Her work is amazing. People can find PDFs online also of the work, which are super
1:00:30 helpful. The turnarounds and so on.
1:00:35 I did that work for years. I’ve not ever been with her, but I did her work. I don’t get upset about
1:00:40 anything. It just is what it is. You know, that whole idea, it is what it is. My desire to change it
1:00:45 can also be what it is, but it’s not out of anger or out of upset, or it shouldn’t be that way. It’s
1:00:51 all just called, you know, whatever. So that is a big piece of it. I meditate regularly. I cleanse. I
1:00:58 told you before we came on that I’m in the eighth day of a 10-day cleanse. So, you know, all this stuff
1:01:04 coming out of my body, detoxing. I do saunas regularly. I won’t say I exercise every single day
1:01:09 because that’d be a lie, but I exercise enough to keep things moving. I only listen to comedy channels on my
1:01:16 XM Radio. I laugh a lot. I think laughter is very healing. I love your digital detox concept,
1:01:19 which I actually put in the 10th anniversary edition of the Success Principles.
1:01:21 Amazing. Amazing. I didn’t know that.
1:01:26 Yeah, I’ll have to send you a copy. I can’t believe I didn’t do that. So I think that organic food,
1:01:34 when I was in graduate school at UMass, in Amherst, probably it was 23, 24, something like that.
1:01:39 My best friend, we played racquetball every night. He was the owner of a health food store.
1:01:45 So I got into the organic thing, the supplement thing, the cleansing thing, all of that really,
1:01:51 really early on. And then doing the ayahuasca, the plant medicine, anything that’s not clear comes up
1:01:59 and out. So that’s all good. And I’m very loving. I get massages regularly. All the things people tell
1:02:06 you to do, I’m mostly doing. That’s a good list. I’m taking some notes for myself.
1:02:11 I need to add a few more in the rotation. So you mentioned the ayahuasca. So let’s talk about that.
1:02:19 I was surprised, not because I would expect anything otherwise, but I wasn’t aware that
1:02:23 you had these experiences. Is that something that goes back many decades? Or is there something that
1:02:27 prompted you to engage with plant medicine?
1:02:34 No, it doesn’t go back many decades. I mean, I did not smoke pot in high school and college.
1:02:39 It made me fall asleep. So my drug of choice on weekends was a couple of beers or, you know,
1:02:44 vodka tonic or whatever. And that’s another thing I stopped drinking quite a bit ago.
1:02:50 But the reality was, I think I, in graduate school, this is so funny because the guy who
1:02:54 eventually became the head of drug education for New Hampshire is a person who introduced me to
1:03:01 mescaline and peyote and things like that. But I only did a few journeys. Never, I did LSD once,
1:03:05 I think. I was, never did cocaine. I was afraid of all that. I didn’t want to get addicted. And I’d
1:03:09 seen people who had, so none of that for years and years and years and years. And then Lynn Twist,
1:03:14 who runs the Pachamama Alliance, was taking people down to the rainforest in Ecuador to help raise
1:03:18 consciousness about, let’s save the rainforest. And I went on one of those trips. And one night,
1:03:23 one of the journeys, one of the things you do is take ayahuasca in the jungle with a real shaman
1:03:28 that’s there. And I did that and I had an amazing breakthrough experiences. And so I became
1:03:32 interested in it. How old were you when you had that first experience, you say?
1:03:40 I’m thinking 20 years ago, maybe, with Lynn. Yeah, something like that. And then when I learned
1:03:45 about Rhythmia and I thought, well, I want to do that. And the thing I like about Rhythmia,
1:03:52 for those who don’t know, it’s a center in Costa Rica. And it was founded by a guy who was,
1:03:57 in his own words, a total asshole. He was a womanizer, a drug addict, a drinker,
1:04:03 a guy to the fights in bars all the time. And so eventually, he was going to commit suicide because
1:04:07 he couldn’t get his life together. He’d been in and out of rehab so many times. And he was worth
1:04:11 about $60 million, I think. But he was miserable. So he said he was going to commit suicide. And
1:04:15 somebody said, don’t commit suicide. So you go to the rainforest and work with this guy named
1:04:21 Moganda. So he looks him up and looks like a resort. And he signs up to go there and gets down
1:04:26 there. And the whole thing was, I mean, the resort images were bullshit. It was an old house,
1:04:29 dirty mattresses, cockroaches, you know, all this stuff.
1:04:32 Hotel paradise.
1:04:32 Yeah.
1:04:37 And it was funny because when he got there, he tells this story. He got there and he flies down,
1:04:42 you know, private jet, that whole thing. He gets there and Moganda meets him at the airport. He says,
1:04:47 get my bags, man. And Moganda’s this African guy. And he says, look at your own, man. I don’t carry
1:04:53 your bags. He was just used to being treated like a king, right? So they get to this place that doesn’t
1:04:57 look anything like the brochure. And he’s about to leave. And he says, come on, man, lie down.
1:05:01 And he gets in and there are about eight people lying head to head in the middle of a circle in the
1:05:05 garage on mattresses. And they do ibogaine, which is an African thing.
1:05:08 Hell of an introduction, yeah.
1:05:14 Yeah. But it totally rocked his world because what happened was he ended up going back to his
1:05:19 grandfather and he realized his grandfather had been sexually violating him his whole youth. And
1:05:24 he totally repressed all that. That’s why he was so angry. He was repressing. And then finally,
1:05:28 I love this last line. He’s lying there and Moganda just taps him on the head and goes,
1:05:30 happy birthday, man. You were reborn.
1:05:37 And he was. And so he decided that what he wanted to do was help people have his experience.
1:05:41 And the second time he did ibogaine, he said, you’re supposed to open a center,
1:05:44 but don’t do it with ibogaine, do it with ayahuasca. So he started that center.
1:05:49 So I’ve been down there five times, do four journeys every time you’re there. So 20 journeys
1:05:54 that have been life-changing for me, just literally life-changing. And I think that’s another reason
1:05:58 I’m so light and just, you know, it’s all good.
1:06:06 Yeah. The pharmacology of ayahuasca in and of itself, super, super fascinating for people who
1:06:11 might be interested also outside of the DMT, which is found in the chakruna, the leaves of the shrub
1:06:18 actually related to the coffee plant. But the actual vine itself contains a lot of interesting
1:06:25 properties. And there’s, I think it’s ESPD-50, this like ethnobotanical search for psychoactive drugs.
1:06:31 There’s a compendium that goes into, there’s a presentation from that that goes into the,
1:06:37 some of the potential properties around neurogenesis and so on from the beta carbolates and so on
1:06:42 themselves in the vine. So even the vine has some very, very interesting properties.
1:06:49 What have you observed as someone who’s been a practitioner, a student, a teacher in the,
1:06:55 for lack of a better term, self-development space for many decades now, what do you think is often
1:07:02 missed or undertaught? I mean, you’ve seen lots of different waves of different things that have
1:07:08 become popular, fallen out of popularity. Is there anything you wish folks paid more attention to?
1:07:14 I think several things come to mind. I don’t think about that very often, but several things come to
1:07:21 mind as you ask the question. Number one, I think most people don’t understand the impact of unconscious
1:07:26 limiting beliefs. They watch the secret, they visualize, they affirm, and then somehow it’s not
1:07:32 working. They don’t know why. And so it’s always like either fear or limiting beliefs or just lack of
1:07:38 willingness to take action, you know, that basically corrupts the process. And I think for me,
1:07:42 why I’m writing a book about this limiting belief process is I’ve just worked with literally thousands
1:07:49 of people. Twice a year, I’ve been doing these free sessions where I’ll get like 700 people sign up
1:07:54 and I’ll do this belief process with them. And I’d say 99% of the people have a major breakthrough.
1:07:59 I had a woman got rid of arthritis in like 20 minutes, you know, I mean, ridiculous stuff.
1:08:04 So these beliefs we’re holding onto that usually got formed between the age of three and eight,
1:08:08 somewhere in that range because of some experience we had, usually a traumatic experience. You make a
1:08:12 decision that’s never going to happen again. It’s not safe to say what I want. It’s not safe to ask
1:08:19 for things. It’s not safe to be sexy, make noise, whatever. What happens is that we don’t realize we
1:08:23 have that belief. And so we do all the things we’re supposed to do and it doesn’t happen. And it’s very
1:08:28 frustrating. And sometimes people give up on the whole human potential movement because they’re doing
1:08:32 all these things that the gurus are teaching them, but they’re not dealing with this block.
1:08:37 It’s kind of like, I’ll tell people, it’s like calling up Domino’s Pizza to order a pizza
1:08:41 and then having this other voice call them and say, forget the order.
1:08:52 And you wonder, why isn’t this showing up, you know? And so all this work that so many of us
1:08:57 thought in the secret and so forth, that seems to be a missing piece for a lot of people,
1:09:03 I would say. And fear, which is based on limiting beliefs, is my experience, which we imagine bad
1:09:08 things happening in the future. It’s a visualization process usually, or a thought process, which we can
1:09:14 intervene on as well. But I think those are the two big things that people don’t understand very well.
1:09:20 And then I think what we’re seeing today that I’m more aware is the power of community,
1:09:27 the power of support, the power of not being alone, that there are people there to hold you
1:09:32 back in line when you go off. You know, my sister just called a couple hours ago and was having a
1:09:37 really tough time and just spending 10 minutes with her. She was back where she needed to be. But if she
1:09:41 didn’t have anyone to call, which is increasingly true for her as she gets older and doesn’t have a lot
1:09:46 of friends who’ve died and so forth, I think that’s really critical. And I think more and more people
1:09:51 are becoming aware of that. So you’re seeing all these communities evolving. And I think one of the
1:09:56 reasons that plant medicine has taken off is because it deals with all those limiting beliefs. They come
1:10:01 up. And as we say, arrhythmia, what’s coming up is coming out. So don’t resist it.
1:10:03 That’s a good one.
1:10:04 Get to clear it.
1:10:10 I want to come back to something that we spoke about or you spoke about early on with
1:10:17 W. Clement Stone in his intake interview when he asked you, do you take 100% responsibility for
1:10:23 your life? And the reason I want to revisit that is that I grew up in a family where there was a lot
1:10:29 of complaining. There was a lot of finger pointing, a lot of blaming, and the villain would change depending
1:10:39 on the context. And I’ve worked very hard to try to correct that training for myself. And most of the
1:10:44 time I would say I do pretty well, but there are certainly times when I seem to revert back to that
1:10:52 early experience and find myself complaining about, maybe I don’t complain, but I blame. Maybe it’s just
1:10:57 internally. Maybe I don’t give voice to it, but there could be some blaming. How do you encourage people to
1:11:05 take more or 100% responsibility? What are the steps for people who recognize that’s what they want to
1:11:12 do, but perhaps have the habits of blaming, pointing fingers, complaining?
1:11:18 Well, I’ll start with a story. A couple therapists told me when she was working with a couple and they
1:11:22 were arguing about whose fault it was that something had happened. And a therapist said, well, I’m glad to
1:11:28 see you agree on something. They said, what? Well, you obviously agree that if you can figure out whose
1:11:30 fault it is, somehow that’s going to make your life better.
1:11:38 That’s really, that’s outstanding. Yeah.
1:11:46 So basically, I teach you a little formula equation, if you call it, like E plus R equals O. Event plus
1:11:52 response equals outcome. So when there’s an event and you blame somebody or something, the government,
1:11:58 the bank, the economy, your mother, your sister, your neighbor, the boss, whatever you’re blaming
1:12:05 for this experience you’ve just had, that event plus your blaming does not produce a better outcome.
1:12:12 So we all want a better outcome. We want to experience joy, freedom, peace, love, success,
1:12:19 abundance, whatever the outcome that we want, health, longevity, whatever. And certain behaviors
1:12:24 do not do that. So I’ve never found a place where blaming produced a better result. You don’t feel
1:12:29 better. You don’t solve the problem in a way that really gets you anywhere because you’ve just blamed
1:12:36 somebody. And it’s amazing how much our culture supports blaming and complaining. I used to call bars
1:12:40 Ain’t It Awful Clubs. You know, every profession has their own bar they go to. The firemen go here,
1:12:45 the police go there, the lawyers go there, the doctors go there. And they’d bitch and moan about
1:12:49 everything that happened that day. Like, you know, the economy, the president, the minister of the
1:12:57 hospital, whatever. So the reality is it lets off steam and you get agreement, but you don’t get
1:13:02 resolution. You don’t get breakthrough. You don’t get better results. So if you look at E plus R equals O,
1:13:09 there’s only three responses you have any control over, your thoughts, your images, and your behavior.
1:13:14 That’s it. You can’t manage time. You can manage your thoughts in relation to time. You can manage
1:13:21 your visualizations in relation to time in your behavior. You think we can control things outside
1:13:26 of us. We can only control our response to things outside of us and notice what kind of outcome that
1:13:32 produces. And what you’ve done magnificently and what I’ve done a lot as well is look at who are the
1:13:37 people that are succeeding. What are their responses to certain events? How do they relate to this
1:13:42 situation? Which ones produce the better results? I mean, you’ve been, your book, the Titans book is
1:13:48 just amazing. All these people telling you what worked and such amazing, if you haven’t read that,
1:13:56 by the way, guys, please do. It’s incredible. So what happens is blaming, we just discovered,
1:14:00 we talked about it and it’s incredible what people blame. I mean, look at our president right now.
1:14:05 He’s blaming everybody for everything. It’s unfortunate, but he does. But it’s not producing
1:14:10 particularly great results as a result of it. In order to complain, you have to have a reference
1:14:16 point of something better you prefer. So I can’t complain about my girlfriend if I don’t have an
1:14:22 image of some woman who’s better than my girlfriend. Now, the reality is nobody ever complains about
1:14:27 gravity. You’ve never seen an old person walking through the mall all bent over and going, gravity?
1:14:32 I hate gravity. If it wasn’t for gravity, I would be all bent over. Gravity sucks, you know?
1:14:37 Never seen that. Why not? Because you can’t change gravity. Everyone knows gravity just is. So we don’t
1:14:41 complain about it. So anything you’re complaining about, you have to have a reference point in your
1:14:44 mind of something better. Better job, better country, better president, better whatever.
1:14:53 And what happens then is when we become aware of that, we have this better option that we’re not
1:15:00 willing to risk creating. So therefore, we complain about it. It lets off steam. It gets people to go
1:15:05 together. Yeah, I know. My wife’s the same way. You know, whatever it is. But we don’t get a better
1:15:14 result. So, you know, I always say, imagine a situation where every woman in the world dies except my
1:15:18 wife. Big thing comes down from outer space, zaps yours with some energy field. My wife happens to be in
1:15:24 a lead mine that day. She’s the only one to survive. Would I come to work and complain about my wife?
1:15:29 No. Why not? It’s the only one. There is no option, right? So we wouldn’t complain about it.
1:15:38 Right? So basically, if you’re complaining, then my response to that is, what would you prefer? What would
1:15:43 you have to do to create that? One of my friends runs a workshop he does over in Europe.
1:15:49 He’s a European corporate consultant. And one of the questions he asks people, even when they’re
1:15:53 pissed off at the company they work for, he says, on a scale of one to 10, how would you rate your
1:16:00 quality of life working here? And they go, three. He go, why so high? It’s not a zero. Something’s
1:16:05 going on there, right? So why so high? Which floors them, kind of breaks the chain of their thought.
1:16:11 And then he goes, so what would be an eight for you? Never goes to 10. That’s too big a leap for people.
1:16:15 What would be an eight for you? Well, this would be happening. This would be happening. What could
1:16:19 you do to help generate that result? What could you do to help make that happen in your company?
1:16:24 Because that’s really what you have to do. You can’t just sit there and bitch and moan. Nothing’s
1:16:33 going to change, you know? Yeah. So you mentioned Tools of Titans, and I wanted to just, not to push
1:16:38 the book, but it brought to mind, because I put together these books mostly as reference books for
1:16:45 myself. And Tools of Titans in particular was an example of not wanting to let learnings from these
1:16:54 interviews fall through my fingers like sand through an hourglass. And one of the essays in that book is
1:16:58 taken from Jocko Willink, who’s a famous Navy SEAL commander. He’s done a million things since. His
1:17:06 first public interview ever was on this podcast ages ago. And he has this, people can find videos of this
1:17:12 too, but it’s just called Good. And so if you’ll indulge me for a second, I just want to read a minute or two
1:17:18 of this. So Good, this is the title. And Jocko has a great video of this for people who want, but it’s also
1:17:22 in the book. So Good, this is something that one of my direct subordinates, one of the guys who worked
1:17:27 for me, a guy who became one of my best friends pointed out. He would pull me aside with some major
1:17:31 problem or issue. This is when Jocko was in the military that was going on. And he’d say, boss, we’ve got this
1:17:35 thing, this situation. It’s going terribly wrong. I would look at him and say, good. And finally,
1:17:39 one day he was telling me about something that was going off the rails. And as soon as he finished
1:17:42 explaining to me, he said, I already know what you’re going to say. And I asked, what am I going to say?
1:17:46 He said, you’re going to say, good. He continued, that’s what you always say. When something is going
1:17:51 wrong or going bad, you look at me and say, good. And I said, well, I mean it because that’s how I
1:17:55 operate. So I explained to him that when things are going badly, there’s going to be some good that will
1:17:59 come for it. Oh, the mission got canceled. Good. We can focus on another one. Didn’t get the new
1:18:03 high-speed gear we wanted? Good. We can keep it simple. Didn’t get promoted? Good. More time to
1:18:07 get better. Didn’t get funded? Good. We own more of the company. Didn’t get the job you wanted? Good.
1:18:11 Go out, gain more experience and build a better resume. Got injured? Good. Need a break from
1:18:17 training. It just goes on and on and on. And then he says, just to put a pin in it, he says, now I don’t
1:18:22 mean to say something trite. I’m not saying to sound like Mr. Smiley, positive guy. That guy ignores the
1:18:26 hard truth. That guy thinks a positive attitude will solve problems. It won’t, but neither will dwelling on the
1:18:30 problem. No. Accept reality, but focus on the solution. Take that issue. Take that setback.
1:18:34 Take that problem and turn it into something good. Go forward. And if you’re part of a team,
1:18:43 that attitude will spread throughout. And I feel like you reflect that. And certainly Jocko is sort
1:18:52 of an archetype of many types. And it’s also, for me at least, makes it clear that it’s something you train
1:18:58 yourself to do, right? If it doesn’t come naturally all the time, just like an exercise habit or
1:19:03 anything else, like this is something that you have to condition yourself to do with reminders and
1:19:09 practices. Are there any reminders or practices that you have for yourself to stay on the rails,
1:19:12 so to speak, with the 100% responsibility?
1:19:17 You know, I’ve always got something I’m working on and you have to have like something that keeps it
1:19:23 in your focus, you know. So if I’m engaging in some kind of negative self-talk, then I take and I create
1:19:28 an opposite affirmation. I’ll put that on some post-its and put it on the refrigerator door and
1:19:33 on my bathroom mirror and stuff like that. Because, you know, we know it normally, you probably have
1:19:40 other data than I do on this, but neuroscience tends to tell us that it takes about 66 days to change
1:19:46 belief. And it can take longer depending on who it is and how badly that belief is crowned into you
1:19:52 through the trauma of its creation. But generally, it requires repetition. There’s a guy, I forget his
1:19:59 name right now, he’s the head of Peak Performance at West Point. He wrote a book about it. And one of the
1:20:05 things when I read the book that he does is when the students are wanting a behavioral change, they create
1:20:10 an affirmation and he teaches them, every time you walk through a door, reach up and touch the doorjamb
1:20:17 and say your affirmation. Now I have a repetitive system that’s built in that tells me to do that.
1:20:20 They think about how many doors you go in and out of every day, into the bathroom, into the kitchen,
1:20:24 out of the kitchen, into your car, back out, you know, whatever. And so it’s that level of repetition
1:20:29 until it becomes, you know, ground in, they don’t have to repeat it. I mean, I know my phone number,
1:20:34 I don’t have to repeat it. Well, I did when I first got it, you know, and you want to get your new
1:20:39 ideas like that. I always say, if you can build in four new behavioral shifts a year,
1:20:45 think about in 10 years, you got 40 new shifts. That’s a lot. So for me, for example, when we read
1:20:51 the, what was the book? Shaman from Mexico. Boy.
1:20:53 Oh, it’s Carlos Castaneda.
1:20:54 No, a different one.
1:20:57 Different Shaman from Mexico.
1:21:05 Yeah. This is me being sharp at anyone. Anyway, he had these, the four agreements. That’s the guy,
1:21:06 the book.
1:21:09 Oh, this is Don Miguel.
1:21:10 Don Miguel Ruiz.
1:21:11 Don Miguel Ruiz.
1:21:11 There we go.
1:21:15 Yeah. So my wife and I decided we’ll take the four agreements and we’ll work on each agreement
1:21:21 for three months. And so for three months, that was the agreement, you know, of not making other
1:21:27 people wrong, thinking positive, et cetera. And we had to like reinforce that. And we had little
1:21:34 signs that told us what to focus on and so forth. So I think it’s important to do that because as you
1:21:40 know, we are so distracted today now with AI and scrolling through Instagram. And I mean, I even get
1:21:43 caught in that occasionally. I’ll go looking for something on YouTube and the next thing I know,
1:21:53 I’m watching old reruns of Jay Leno. But I think that, yeah, reminders are important.
1:22:00 Yeah. I’m going to use the doorway. That is a great cue. It’s actually something if people want to read
1:22:04 exploring the world of lucid dreaming doorways are also really helpful for some of that. People can check
1:22:09 out Stephen LaBerge if you want to go into a really weird town. And also for people who might be wagging
1:22:14 a finger at me, I know that Carlos Castaneda was not a shaman, but it was the teachings of Don Juan,
1:22:17 I think, a Yaki way of knowledge. That was the book that I was thinking of.
1:22:21 Yeah. He was, he was, that was one of the first books I read. It was a great book.
1:22:28 It’s a compelling book. I mean, whether it’s real or not, it’s a fun read. So I’m looking at a blog
1:22:35 post. This is from jackcanfield.com productivity tips. And you like me, I’m sure have quite a few blog
1:22:39 posts, but you’ve got, I’ll just read the headlines here for a second. There’s clean up your messes.
1:22:44 Two, focus. Three, just say no. Four, practice the rule of five, which we’ve talked about a bit.
1:22:52 Five, meditate. And this is going to seem so mundane, but I’m very curious if you could expand a bit on
1:22:59 clean up your messes and how you go about doing it. Because I have a few Achilles heels, as I suppose
1:23:06 we all do. And one of them is I collect so much goddamn paper. I am a hypographic note-taking
1:23:15 maniac. And I just have paper. It metastasizes to cover every flat surface that I have. And I try to
1:23:22 take photos here and there and digitize, but it’s messy and it really agitates me. And I’m not saying
1:23:28 that that’s ideal. Maybe it shouldn’t bother me. But how do you think about why is number one of
1:23:32 five on productivity tips, clean up your messes? And how do you do it?
1:23:36 Well, you’re talking to a fellow person and he’s the same rehab, just so you know.
1:23:44 I take more notes at a conference than almost anybody. And I’ve got literally books full of
1:23:51 notes and taking notes when I’m listening to stuff and podcast things. I think the problem is that
1:23:57 every time you look at all that, it’s taking your attention. And so the research that I’ve read says
1:24:04 we have the ability to hold about seven attention units at a time. And so what happens is that you’ll
1:24:10 notice the research also, like if a waitress, if you haven’t paid the bill yet, any good waiter or
1:24:14 waitress can tell you what you had. As soon as you pay the bill, you ask them 10 minutes later,
1:24:19 they don’t remember anymore. They don’t need to. So what happens is all those attention units are being
1:24:25 taken up by things that are incomplete. So messes in my world are incompletions. So anything that’s
1:24:30 incomplete. Now that can be that thing you started, you didn’t finish. It could be that letter you were
1:24:36 writing, the book you’re not finished up, the notes you have over here. But what I’ve learned to do is
1:24:41 find a place for those things. You know, like if I have lots of filing systems, I have a filing systems
1:24:45 in my computer, I have filing systems, I bought 10 drawers in my office that are file drawers.
1:24:51 And so things go in those places. And if I need to remember something to do it, I have what’s called
1:24:57 a come up file. So let’s say I need to do something March 28th. I have a folder called March. So on the
1:25:01 1st of March, I go through that folder of everything I put in there, and then I put it into my calendar
1:25:07 for those days. Or I can put it in now, you know, like called Steve on March 28th. But if there’s papers
1:25:11 related to that, things we’re going to talk about, whatever, it goes in my March file. So it’s there.
1:25:18 It’s not in my visual cue. So what happens is, whether it’s a relationship, and we’ve all had
1:25:22 that experience of walking through a grocery store and seeing someone down the aisle we don’t want
1:25:27 to talk to, so we go down the aisle and hope we evade them, you know, because it’s incomplete. So all
1:25:33 that energy is taken up because it’s not complete. All the things you’ve never said, the upsets,
1:25:37 the thank yous, the acknowledgements, the wanting acknowledgements, and not having got them,
1:25:42 they’re taking up space in your head. So everything you can close up, it’s almost like
1:25:46 you’re taking a piece of paper off the desk, and pretty soon you have a clean desk.
1:25:49 You know Dan Sullivan’s work, the strategic coach?
1:25:51 Yeah. Yeah, he’s got some great stuff.
1:25:56 Well, one of the things I learned from him, he doesn’t have a desk. He’s got three or four offices
1:26:00 with conference tables. And he’ll go into one and say, bring over that stuff, and he’ll work with one
1:26:05 of his people. They do all the things they need to do. They walk out with all the papers. He’s done.
1:26:10 He doesn’t have that pileup shit that I deal with and you deal with. But the reality is that
1:26:15 everything is incomplete. You’re walking through the hall of your house, you see a little crack in
1:26:21 the wall, and you go, oh, it needs to get fixed. Pretty soon, you won’t see that crack because you
1:26:24 have to block it out of your awareness to pay attention to other things. So now things are not
1:26:28 getting handled that need to get handled. And also, if you do keep paying attention to it,
1:26:32 that’s time you could have spent writing your book or thinking about your project or
1:26:38 loving your mother or giving good feedback to your girlfriend or whatever. So the reality is,
1:26:44 it’s really important to clean that up. And there’s financial messes, there’s garage messes,
1:26:48 there’s the attic, the tool drawer, the door that has the leashes.
1:26:56 I can feel my cortisol piling up as you’re listening. Sounds like you’re in my house on
1:26:57 my nanny cam.
1:27:02 I’m going to send you, I have a sheet of like 21 things you need to clean up. I used to work for
1:27:07 a company called Insight Training Seminars. And if you were a trainer, you had to clean all that up
1:27:11 because you had to be living, you were complete. You couldn’t teach it if you weren’t living it.
1:27:16 Think about it. Financial records, your checkbook, not balanced, stuff in your car,
1:27:20 clothes that don’t fit anymore. I mean, people go, you can go down a list of all that stuff.
1:27:26 I literally had to go through my clothes at one point. I’m a shirt whore. I love shorts, you know?
1:27:34 This is another thing we have in common. No, I have so many t-shirts. It’s just unacceptable. It’s
1:27:34 indefensible.
1:27:38 I know. I know. I know. But I had to go through and kind of clean it out, you know, because it got
1:27:43 to a point where I couldn’t even put anything in the closet. So the rule is if I haven’t worn it in the
1:27:50 last 60 days and it’s not a tuxedo or something like that, it’s gone. I love all the decluttering
1:27:55 books that are out there and, you know, all that kind of stuff. One person said, go through your
1:27:59 house, take everything you haven’t used in the last 30 days, put it in a box, label the box, what’s in
1:28:04 it. And if another 120 days go by and you haven’t used it, just throw it out because you’re not,
1:28:05 you’re never going to use it again.
1:28:11 Well, I’ll tell you a dirty little secret, which is that I moved eight years ago from San
1:28:18 Francisco to Austin and I moved all my stuff from California into storage because there was a gap
1:28:22 where I was shopping for a place and I didn’t have anywhere to put all this stuff.
1:28:29 It has been sitting in storage, all that stuff for eight years. I get a bill for it every month and
1:28:34 I’m like, I should go down and take a look at that. And I’m like, I cannot allow myself to look
1:28:38 at that stuff because I’m going to want to keep all this junk that I haven’t needed in eight years.
1:28:45 So it’s my ignorance is bliss approach. It’s a small tax to pay at this point.
1:28:46 Oh yeah.
1:28:51 George Carlin does a really good routine on stuff. If you can find it, it’s really amazing.
1:28:58 Oh, I will find it. George Carlin, what a genius. Also his, his late night bit on heaven and hell.
1:29:04 People can look that up where it’s the, you know, with in heaven, the French of the cooks,
1:29:09 the Japanese, the lovers and this and this, and then in hell X, Y, and Z. It’s also worth
1:29:14 checking out, but decluttering the 21 things that I need to clean up. Please do send that
1:29:15 to me.
1:29:16 Yeah, I will. I will.
1:29:19 Is that something we could share in the show notes for this episode?
1:29:24 Yeah. I think it’s even a page in my book. If not, I’ll get it for you.
1:29:30 All right. Perfect. Jack, we’ve covered a ton of ground. I don’t want to take up your entire
1:29:35 afternoon on a Friday, but is there anything else that I’m not in any rush whatsoever, but
1:29:40 is there anything else that you’d like to talk about that we haven’t covered? Anything you’d like
1:29:47 to say, request of my audience, anything at all that you’d like to bring up that I haven’t already
1:29:47 prompted?
1:29:54 I would just say, you know, kind of self-servingly that if you would like to know more about my work,
1:29:59 the book that Tim talked about, it’s found in its 20th anniversary edition. The success principles,
1:30:03 how to get from where you are to where you want to be. It’s really the basis of everything I do. If
1:30:07 you haven’t read a chicken soup book, start with the first one. It’s really brilliant. One thing I did,
1:30:13 Tim, I haven’t done for all my books, but I did with that book. I literally, after we’d probably
1:30:18 edited every story five or six times, went out to Colorado to a ski resort in the summer,
1:30:24 took three days, read every story out loud. Because what I know is when most people read,
1:30:29 they’re sub-vocalizing in their brain. They’re not speed reading. And if it didn’t sound as one of my
1:30:35 actors says, coming trippingly off the tongue, I would rewrite it. And that book went on to sell 105
1:30:41 million copies. So basically, I think that was a good thing to do. So I always tell people,
1:30:49 like you said, get feedback, but also read it out loud. How does it sound to you? And then make sure
1:30:54 you get, I always say, get feedback from at least 20 people. First teenage soul book, we had an entire
1:30:59 high school suspend classes for a day. Over 1,000 kids read all the stories. So we had an Excel
1:31:04 spreadsheet. They all graded every story to scale of one to 10. That book went on to sell, I think,
1:31:09 6 million copies or something like that, you know? So feedback, I love what Ken Lancer says,
1:31:12 feedback is the breakfast of champions, you know?
1:31:18 Feedback is the breakfast of champions.
1:31:21 And most people avoid feedback because they’re afraid of what they’re going to hear.
1:31:27 And you got to know that we call it constructive feed forward, you know, constructive feedback.
1:31:33 But anyway, I would read that book. Go to my website, jackcanfield.com. There’s all kinds of
1:31:37 things there you might be interested in. And it’s interesting, I hadn’t, I don’t normally say this,
1:31:41 but last night, for some reason, I was looking up something and I couldn’t remember it. And I thought
1:31:47 it was, there’s a guy named Nick Nanton. He did a documentary of my life called The Soul of Success.
1:31:52 And I went in there to find one little thing and I don’t know, call it egotistical, whatever. I watched
1:31:58 the whole damn hour on YouTube. It’s free. Just go The Soul of Success on YouTube and you’ll see one of the
1:32:03 most amazing documentaries ever made, I think, because he’s an Emmy-winning documentarian.
1:32:08 So that’ll give you some information about some of the stuff Tim and I talked about that maybe we
1:32:12 didn’t go deep enough on. And that’s about it, I would say, you know?
1:32:16 And we’ll link to everything we’ve discussed in the show notes. Jack Canfield also, just to
1:32:24 reiterate the spelling, C-A-N-F-I-E-L-D, jackcanfield.com. You can find all that. We’ll of course link to
1:32:30 everything as per usual in the show notes at tim.blog.com slash podcast for everybody, including
1:32:37 the 21 things to clean up, which is going to ride hard on my OCD, which is properly diagnosed. I’m not
1:32:42 just making that up as a swipe against OCD, folks. Big shocker to anyone who actually knows me. I’m
1:32:49 kidding. But what I will say as we wind to a close, Jack, is that you’ve had a huge impact on my life.
1:32:54 Your work is at an impact. You personally have had an impact. You’ve been so gracious,
1:33:01 so patient. I don’t know if you remember this, but I remember when I was volunteering at that event,
1:33:05 S-Face, I had all the speakers. I had some type of waiver because I wanted to record
1:33:12 everything. And the waiver was, I’m sure, all sweeping and full encompassing of everything
1:33:16 because I had probably gotten it online somehow. And I remember you had your glasses on and you sort
1:33:22 of pulled down the glasses like a very patient parent. And you’re like, Timothy, I have some
1:33:27 questions about this release. And you scratched everything out. You scratched a bunch of nonsense
1:33:34 out and you signed it. You’ve had an incredible impact on my career. And I just want to thank
1:33:40 you for all of that and for what you offer to the world as an eternal student and as a teacher.
1:33:41 Well, thank you.
1:33:43 And I really appreciate you taking the time.
1:33:47 Well, I’ve enjoyed this. One of the best podcasts I’ve ever been on. So thank you.
1:33:53 Yeah, my pleasure. At least I can do. And I’ll say it one more time, everybody who’s listening.
1:33:58 We will link to everything in the show notes. Tim.blog slash podcast. Just search Canfield,
1:34:06 C-A-N-F-I-E-L-D. And it will pop right up. And until next time, be just a bit kinder
1:34:10 than is necessary to others, but also to yourself. And thanks for tuning in.
1:34:17 Hey, guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off. And that is Five Bullet
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1:34:38 basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I’ve found or discovered
1:34:43 or have started exploring over that week. It’s kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes
1:34:50 articles I’m reading, books I’m reading, albums, perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks
1:34:56 and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange
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1:35:07 So if that sounds fun, again, it’s very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off
1:35:12 for the weekend, something to think about. If you’d like to try it out, just go to tim.blog
1:35:18 slash Friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog slash Friday, drop in your email and you’ll get
1:35:21 out of the very next one. Thanks for listening.
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