Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Jack Canfield (@JackCanfield), known as America’s #1 Success Coach. Jack is a bestselling author, professional speaker, trainer, and entrepreneur. He is the founder and CEO of the Canfield Training Group, which trains entrepreneurs, corporate leaders, sales professionals, educators, and motivated individuals how to accelerate the achievement of their personal and professional goals. 

He has conducted live trainings for more than a million people in more than 50 countries around the world. He holds two Guinness World Record titles and is a member of the National Speakers Association’s Speaker Hall of Fame.

Jack is the coauthor of more than two hundred books, including, The Success Principles™:  How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be, The Success Principles Workbook, Jack Canfield’s Key to Living the Law of Attraction, The Aladdin Factor, Dare to Win, and the Chicken Soup for the Soul® series, which includes forty New York Times bestsellers and has sold more than 600 million copies in 51 languages around the world.

Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!

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Tim Ferriss: Jack, Jack, Jack, it is so good to see you.

Jack Canfield: Glad to see you, my friend.

Tim Ferriss: And I’m so thrilled that you’re here, and we’re seeing each other again.

Jack Canfield: Yeah, this is fun.

Tim Ferriss: It has been a long time, and as I warned you before we started recording, I said, “I really doubt people in my audience have the full context or even partial context.” So I wanted to give them some of the backstory, because one could make a compelling argument that I owe my career as such to you, because you made the introduction to Stephen Hanselman, who became my book agent. At the time, he was a, I suppose, former superstar editor on his way to becoming an agent. So we were both starting out in a sense, and you made that introduction.

But there’s even more backstory that I have to share with folks. That would have been 2005, 2006. I was around 27, 28 at the time. Much earlier, this would have been when I just moved to Silicon Valley, I was riding around in my mom’s hand-me-down POS minivan, which was broken in every way imaginable, listening to Personal Power II on cassette tape, to and from my job as I commuted on 101.

I was eating at Jack in the Box, in the parking lot of a Safeway a couple nights a week, because that’s what I could afford. And I was volunteering for a group called the Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs, which is a mouthful, but SVASE, and I had volunteered, which I still recommend to folks, because I knew nobody, nobody knew me, and I always tried to do extra jobs as a volunteer. And eventually they said, “Wow, this kid really likes working for free. Let’s give him more responsibility. Hey, would you like to organize some speakers for a main event?” And I thought to myself, “Absolutely. This is a great way for me to meet some of my heroes.”

And I invited Trip Hawkins of Electronic Arts. I invited you, because of the phenom, of course, we’ll talk about it, but Chicken Soup for the Soul, I invited all sorts of folks, and that was the first time that we met. You graciously agreed to come to that. And here we are, God knows how many, to almost 20 years, more than 20 years later, and I’m so happy to have you on the podcast. So thank you for all of that.

It’s just, it’s — these are these Sliding Door moments, where there’s no way I could play the alternative, but the what if certainly looms large. What if you hadn’t said yes to come to that event? What if I hadn’t reached out and said, “Jack, all these notes I have from this lecture I’ve been giving to this high-tech entrepreneurship class, is there anything here?” And frankly, I hoped you would say no, because I didn’t want to write a book. And you were like, “Actually, I think there’s something here.” And before I could say anything, you started making introductions, and here we are. So thank you for everything, Jack. I really appreciate it.

Jack Canfield: Well, let me just say — 

Tim Ferriss: More than I can say.

Jack Canfield: Let me just say you’re someone who knows how to take advantage of an opportunity. You’ve done really well.

Tim Ferriss: You know, you’ve got to take your shot when you can take your shots.

Jack Canfield: That’s right.

Tim Ferriss: 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 materials beforehand. We’re going to run out of time before we run out of topics, but ultimately, we will rewind the clock, and go back to some of the beginning chapters. But I have to ask, because there is a bullet here. The story behind more than 300 million copies sold in China. How does that happen?

Jack Canfield: Well — 

Tim Ferriss: Because I’m imagining chicken soup does not have the same connotation over there. So I don’t even know if the title’s the same.

Jack Canfield: Well, what happened is a company called Anhui Publishing and they decided to publish the book. And what’s interesting is we had a contract that they would pay us 10 cents for every book sold in China. But Anhui was half owned by the government, and half owned by private equity. So they decided to make it a textbook to teach English to kids in high school with — 

Tim Ferriss: Oh, wow.

Jack Canfield: — Chinese on one side, English on the other, and they printed millions and millions of books. Because it was in the schools, which was the government side, we didn’t see one penny of millions of books sold. So I learned how to write better contracts in the future. But the fact is, a lot of Chinese people have had major transformations because of the books have taken off, and they have sold them in the general public as a result of kids learning a lot in school, showing it to their parents, so on and so forth. So it all works out, it all paid off. But that was a major lesson for us. You know, you’ve got to be really, really careful when you’re in — when you’re interacting with the Chinese and making deals, they’re very, very clever.

Tim Ferriss: You’ve got to be, you’ve got to be careful.

Jack Canfield: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: There is an expression, I’m not going to say that everyone uses this, but in Chinese, which is “Néng piàn jiù piàn,” which is “If you can trick them, then you should trick them.” And not saying everyone subscribes to that, but you’ve got to have your wits about you.

Jack Canfield: Right. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: For sure.

Jack Canfield: That’s true.

Tim Ferriss: So part of the reason I love doing this podcast is it gives me a pretext for doing a bunch of internet sleuthing on my friends without seeming like a stalker or a crazy person. And I really had no understanding or grasp of your childhood, your upbringing, anything like that. Could you speak to — a bit for folks, just the basics — 

Jack Canfield: Sure.

Tim Ferriss: — of where you grew up, what you learned or didn’t learn from parents, or household, things of that type?

Jack Canfield: Sure. Well, I was born in 1944. My father was in the Air Force. World War II was going on. He trained bomber pilots, actually. And so from the time I was born until the time I was six, we lived in three different states with — on military bases. I don’t remember much of it at all. But when I was six, we moved to West Virginia, which is where I mostly grew up, in Wheeling, West Virginia, a steel town, coal mining, all that kind of stuff. And my father was an alcoholic, and he got violent when he was drunk, and my mother decided to divorce him when I was six, and we went to live with my grandmother. And I actually lived in the attic of her house for years, and then eventually she met my stepfather, who had just come out of the Navy.

And I grew up poor. We were not wealthy at all. And so, my father was one of these people, when I went off to college, my stepfather, he said to me — he gave me $20. He looked over me in the eye and he said, “Now, there’s that.” He says, “If you need a helping hand, look at the end of your own arm. There’ll be no more gifts coming from me.” So, okay. So I learned early on, I worked my way through high school. I was a lifeguard of the country club pool. So I was always — I had this thing I was in, but not of. I was in the country club, meeting girls whose parents were, but I wasn’t of that.

And I went to a private military school from the fifth grade, so I graduate high school. My rich aunt had a son named Jack who died. If I was — talk about kismet and fate, if my name was Bob, we’d not be talking right now. But because I was Jack, she adopted me after his death, and sent me to a private school in town. So I got a much better education than my brother, or anyone else. And, but I — again, I was in, but I wasn’t of — I wasn’t a doctor’s son. I didn’t — the president of the guy who owned the Cadillac dealership, that was not my crowd. Yet I got to hang out with those kids, and eventually got into Harvard on a scholarship to play football. I was a football player. I was an honorable mention all state. I was an end, all that kind of stuff.

And I grew up thinking, you know, you’ve got to work really, really hard, which I did. I worked my way through Harvard. I cut grass. I cleaned the dorms. I did all — got up and served food at 6:00 in the morning and then fell asleep immediately in French class, because I was so tired, you know?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Jack Canfield: I remember one day, I’m like this, falling — I’m totally asleep in this class at 9:00 in the morning, and this professor comes over and he shakes me awake and he says, “You can leave now. The class is over.”

Tim Ferriss: That’s a very understanding comment from the teacher.

Jack Canfield: I know, I know. Well, whatever. And then I majored — this is interesting, I majored in Chinese history, which is interesting why. Later I learned that I had past lives in China and Tibet, and so it made sense to me. But at that time, it was this — my freshman year, I got all Cs in everything. Here I was, A student, high school, get to Harvard. I always say I graduated in the half of the class that made the top half possible. So there were a lot of smart, smart kids there, valedictorians from their school.

And I said to my counselor, “I need an easy A for my sophomore year.” He says, “Well, this guy, he used to be the ambassador to China, he gives everyone an A, why don’t you take his class?” And he knew Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong, he had slides of everything, and I got the A. But I fell in love with Chinese history for some weird reason. So that was my major, and so I always tell people, it prepared me really well to do the work I do. It had nothing to do with it, you know?

My senior year, I took an elective class, I said, “I need another easy A.” And someone said, “Take Soc Rel 10.” Soc Rel, Social Relations 10. It’s an encounter group. You just sit in there and talk about your feelings and everybody gets an A.” So I went over there and I took the class, and I fell in love with human potential. Oh, my God. There’s this thing called psychology, and people, and human behavior, and feelings, and motivation.

So I said, “Well, how do I get into that?” And they said, “Well, it’s a little late to get into psychology,” you had to study as an undergraduate and I hadn’t. And they said, “Well, you could sneak into psychology through education.” 

So I went to the University of Chicago, got a master’s degree in education, taught in an all Black inner city high school for two years, and I got Teacher of the Year my first year, and became — I went to Jesse Jackson’s church. I became friends with people in the jazz community. Really got deeply — I would say probably for a year, I almost wished I was Black, because I thought white people are milquetoast. And these Black guys, they’ve got — they’ve got energy, and the poetry, and the songs, and the music, and the dancing, and the anger, and the fear, and all that.

And so then, basically I started realizing my students were not motivated. They didn’t believe they could learn, because they were Black in the inner city, and they didn’t have role models. And that became my passion. How do I motivate them to achieve? And I met W. Clement Stone, my mentor, he was a self-made — he was worth $600 million in 1968, which is when I was there.

Tim Ferriss: Wild.

Jack Canfield: Yeah. His best friend was Napoleon Hill, who wrote Think and Grow Rich. And together, they wrote a book together. And then also he wrote a book called The Success System That Never Failed. And that’s where I learned about motivation, and setting goals, and having vision, and values, and working hard, and using affirmations, and visualization, and all of that.

Tim Ferriss: So let me — Jack, could I pause you for a second?

Jack Canfield: Oh, please do. Do.

Tim Ferriss: Because there’s so many different avenues we can go down here.

Jack Canfield: Sure. Sure.

Tim Ferriss: I want to come back to W. Clement Stone. $600 million. Just — we’ll come back to that, because that’s a mind-boggling number, especially at — for that point in time, but any time, even now. But if we back up for a second, Teacher of the Year, first year in Chicago. What made that possible? What do you think contributed to that?

Jack Canfield: I think what happened was it was, this school, probably five years earlier, was all white and Jewish, and then it was this Black invasion, they would call it, into the community, and there was this flight flight out to the suburbs. So what happened was a lot of the teachers didn’t really want to be there. They wanted to go with the kids who went. So there was a certain kind of malaise, and almost an upset that they had. And I think a lot of them didn’t treat the kids very well.

And the other thing is nobody was teaching African American history. I was teaching history, and American history, and world history. And I found a book called Before the Mayflower, and it was by a guy named Lerone Bennett, and it was a book about African American history. It’s just a paperback. I think it was like $3.95. I bought one for every one of my students, and I would teach Black history along with white history. You know, history’s always written by the victors, so basically white history is our history, and they didn’t know any of this stuff. And the fact that I would do this, and the fact that I was loving, and kind, and motivational, and believed they could do everything, it made them, I think, just like me, because I was on their side.

And then they started an African American Club, African American Studies Club. They asked me if I’d be a sponsor. I said yes. So that was another thing. I ended up coaching the swimming team, because the guy who was supposed to do it had majored in basketball. He was a phys ed teacher. He didn’t know that much about swimming. I had swum competitively in high school, and was a waterfront instructor in summer camps in Maine, and teach kids to swim and all that kind of stuff.

And I think the last part of that was that I was starting to do these human potential activities in my classes. You know, I’d get them into pairs and have them do — go back and forth, say, “I can’t.” And then I’d have them go replace that sentence with, “I won’t.” And which feels stronger? Which feels more true? Which is — and they go, “Yeah, can’t is really a victim word.” So I was doing maybe 10 minutes of that every day, along with teaching my history, and I think that’s kind of why. 

And the big moment for me, this is so cool, you know you have these little moments in life where you get affirmation from outside. So Sammy Davis Jr. was at school, he was going to do a talk to the kids. He’d written a book called I Can. And he was there when I got the award. They gave me the award the same day. And I’m walking offstage, and he looked at me and said, “You must be really cool to have gotten that award from those kids.” And I think I lived on that for days.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, that’s a hell of a compliment, from a hell of a — 

Jack Canfield: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: — hell of a person, and a hell of an entertainer.

Jack Canfield: Yeah. And you’re like 22 years old or something, you know, it’s a big deal.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, the right words at the right time. I mean, just like you were probably offering the right words at the right time to a lot of those students.

Jack Canfield: Right.

Tim Ferriss: So if we flash forward to W. Clement Stone, how did he make $600 million? That’s just, again, not to fixate on that, but I mean, that’s — 

Jack Canfield: Yeah. I think — 

Tim Ferriss: — a non-trivial sum of money.

Jack Canfield: Three ways. Number one, he started an insurance company called Combined Insurance, and it was really low premiums. In other words, the price you paid for it. And he believed everybody could afford something, and he wanted to insure the people that often wouldn’t be insured by the big companies. And because of that, and then he also hired people that were not college graduates to be salespeople, and then he had them — he had a training system. This is so cool. Think about this. So he’d go in, here’s his training system. He’d tell him what to do, you know, maybe a Monday class. He said, “Now we’re going to go tomorrow and I’m going to go in.” And he’s teaching these kids who never graduated college to sell to CEOs of banks, and companies. It was intimidating for them. He said, “We’re going to go in, I’m going to make a sale, at least a presentation. You watch what I did.”

And so, goes in, they do the presentation, either sold or didn’t, they go out for coffee afterwards. “What did you notice I did?” “You did this, you did this, you did this.” “Okay, but you missed that. Next time, watch that.” They go in, they do it again. Did it about three or four times in the morning, and a fourth time they’re going in, and he just turns to the kid and he goes, “This one’s yours.” So he just stepped back. And a kid, maybe he made it, maybe he blew it. But afterwards he’d go out and say, “Okay, you missed two things. We’re going to go to the next one and watch me do those two things.” Next one, he’d go, “This is yours.” By the end of the day, they knew how to sell. It was a — 

Tim Ferriss: That’s incredible.

Jack Canfield: It was amazing. So he had salespeople all over the country selling these low price insurance things. Second thing he did, he was a genius when it came to real estate. He invested in a lot of real estate. The coolest thing he ever did, if you go into Chicago on rails, that’s a big area where they, you know, bring beef in, and they were processing beef all those days, and it’s also a big central distribution point for everything. There’s a place, it’s just huge, wide, like six rails wide going into the main station. And there was no more real estate to buy, and so he said to the guys who own the railroad land, he said, “Can I buy the air rights over the railroad tracks?” And they said, “Sure.”

So if you go to that part of Chicago, there are all these buildings over the tracks, which he got a 100-year lease on the air rights and they built these huge skyscrapers, which he then got the royalties for, or the commissions for, or the rents for, whatever. So he was just very creative. And the third thing he did, he invested well in everything else, as well. So a lot of it was investment. And then he also produced Success magazine, started by W. Clement Stone. And he was a speaker, he had books he sold, and the magazine, Og Mandino, who wrote The Greatest Salesman was the — so I’m working in the Stone Foundation at one point. So I quit teaching. I worked for Stone and I — 

Tim Ferriss: Why did you quit teaching?

Jack Canfield: Because Stone offered me a job.

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Jack Canfield: So Stone said, “We have this achievement motivation program. We’re teaching teachers to do it, to go into the schools. We don’t have anyone that’s had inner city experience. You do. Would you come work for me?” And it was like more than I was making as a teacher, and I went, “Yeah, okay.” And it’s him, right? Working for him was amazing, and he just took everybody under his wing, loved them. Imagine you’re young, you’re 23, maybe, and he says to you, “Work in my foundation, go teach this stuff. If there’s any training you ever want to take anywhere, it’s on me. Go for it.” I took 37 weekend workshops that year.

Tim Ferriss: You’re the edge case he has to budget for.

Jack Canfield: Yeah. It was like a grant from the government or something. So I took all these workshops, everything from Dale Carnegie to Gestalt therapy, and body work, and meditation, and so he funded all that, which was great. But he really was an amazing being that just — I learned so much by being in his presence, you know?

I’ll tell you a story. So I got an intake interview first day, and he says to me, “Do you take 100 percent responsibility for your life?” And I said, “I don’t know.” He said, “It’s a yes or no answer, son. Think.” I said, “Well, based on I don’t even understand it, probably no.” He says, “Do you ever blame anybody for anything?” “Yeah.” “Do you complain about anything?” “Yeah.” “Do you ever make excuses why you didn’t achieve something?” “Yeah.” “You don’t take 100 percent responsibility.”

So he introduced me to the whole concept of 100 percent responsibility, and then he said to me, “Do you watch television?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “How many hours a day?” I said, “I don’t know. Good Morning America, the news, maybe a movie at night, 11:00 or something like that.” He said, “That’s three hours a day.” He says, “Cut out an hour a day.” I said, “Why?” He said, “Because that’ll give you 365 additional hours a year to be productive. Divide that by a 40-hour work week, that’s nine and a half weeks. I’ll give you a 14-month year. You’ll be much more competitive than all the people in your field if you do that.” So I did that. He was teaching me in the fricking in interview, like, you know.

Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.

Jack Canfield: So it was cool.

Tim Ferriss: What were some of the things that really stuck with you after you got the job? Whether it was through osmosis, whether it was through direct teaching, like why did that job, and that mentorship have the impact that it did? Were there any other examples or stories that come to mind?

Jack Canfield: Yeah. He challenged me, because I mean, as an educator, I was probably making, back then, $30,000 a year if I was lucky. That was like — now people make a lot more, inflation. But what happens is, he said, “I want to challenge you to make $100,000 a year. And if you do it, it’s only because of what I taught you.” And he taught me to set goals, to believe in them, to visualize it, like as if it’s already happening, have an affirmation, “I’m so happy and grateful I’m now whatever.” And I started doing that, and I took the goal of $100,000 seriously, and every morning I’d wake up, and I’d put — oh, I put a $100,000 bill on the ceiling, that — I didn’t even know one existed at the time. Banks actually trade them back and forth. But I took a $100 bill, I projected it with a — remember overhead projectors?

Tim Ferriss: Sure.

Jack Canfield: I projected onto a piece of like flip chart paper, traced it, added some extra zeros, and then I put that on the ceiling. Every morning I wake up, I see that, say my affirmation, which went, at that time, “God is my infinite supply and large sums of money come to me quickly and easily as I earn $100,000 a year.” And about, I’d say maybe a month or two into it, I’m in the shower, and I had $100,000 idea, because I’d written a book called 100 Ways to Enhance Self-Concept in the Classroom, and I used to get a quarter, 25 cents, for every book that got sold.

And, I said, “Wow, sell 400,000 books, I get $100,000.” That was my first $100,000 idea. And so, to make a long story short, because I could do a half hour in that story, I literally started to sell more books. I started a bookstore, literally a mail order bookstore, where you could buy my book, had one product, and then, my wife at the time said, “You know, we’re selling that book.” I know what happened. She had ordered something in the mail, and have you ever ordered something in the mail and it comes, and then there’s like five flyers for other products they have in the box?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, sure.

Jack Canfield: So she had done that. Said, “Why don’t we sell other people’s stuff?” So we’d added other products, and I hired a high school kid to come in after school and to sell the books, ship them out, and so forth. So long story short, I did not make $100,000. I made $92,328, but I went like, “Okay, this is a success.”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Jack Canfield: And then my wife says, “Do you think it’ll work for a million?” I said, “Only one way to find out.” So literally we set a million dollar goal, and that happened with Chicken Soup for the Soul, the second year, I got four checks, Tim, you know this because of your success with the books. The first time you get a check for a million dollars for three months’ royalties, you go, like, “Are you kidding me?” It’s, like, it changed my life, you know?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I mean, that’s — I mean, that’s a juggernaut of a success. But people probably don’t realize quite how much rejection went into that, but maybe we could start at the beginning, in at least the Genesis story. Where did Chicken Soup for the Soul come from? I mean, people have seen — everyone listening has seen this book at some point, chances are, unless they’re 18, perhaps, and have like never been into a dentist’s office, or a physician’s office, or an airport, or fill in the blank, right? I mean, it’s ubiquitous.

Jack Canfield: Right.

Tim Ferriss: How did it start?

Jack Canfield: So I was going around doing workshops for teachers on self-esteem, motivation, that kind of thing, and I was always telling stories, just because I noticed when I was a high school teacher, if I was talking historical facts, kids were looking out the window. If I was telling a story about an escaped slave who became an ambassador, or my own story, or something from Jet magazine or Ebony magazine, the kids would pay attention.

So stories capture us. And all the great teachers, Buddha, Jesus, we know they told stories, and parables, and so forth. So one day, somebody said, “That story you told about the Girl Scout who sold 3,328 boxes of Girl Scout cookies in one year, is that in a book anywhere? My daughter needs to hear that story.” And I went, “No.” And over a course of two months, I must have had four people a day say, “Is that story in a book? Is that story in a book? Is that story in a book?” So I’m coming home on a plane from Boston to L.A. where I was living at the time, and I said, “How many stories do I really know?” So I wrote down every story, the dog story, the Girl Scout story, the puppy story, the Mount Everest story, whatever it was 70 stories. So I said, okay, that’s a book. So I made the commitment that every night I would work on a story, and at the end of the week I would have two stories. And if I did that for a year, I’d have 101 stories, 108, whatever. So I did that. 

And when I was about, I don’t know, five-sixths through, I had breakfast with Mark Victor Hansen, who became my co-author. And we were having breakfast in Beverly Hills at this place. All these human potential leaders would come to this breakfast. And the Inside Edge it was called. And so Mark said, “What are you working on?” I said, “I’m writing this book.” And he said, “You should let me finish it with you.” I went, “That’s like telling Stephen King, you should be his co-author because he’s five-sixths of the way through the book. How do you justify that?” He says, “Well, some of the stories you tell you stole from me.”

I said, “Maybe three, Mark. Come on.” And he said, “But I’m a much better salesperson than you. I’ll be the upfront voice person.” I said, “Well, give me 30 more stories and we’ll talk.” Because I had 70 at that time. So he said, “Okay.” Came back. He did it. So basically it was a made in Heaven. He really was good at getting the word up. We were in a mall once, believe this Tim, we were in a mall where he is, I think it was B. Dalton bookstores. They were in a lot of the malls.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I remembered B. Dalton.

Jack Canfield: Yeah. And so we’re doing a book signing and there’s nobody there. So Mark goes out into the mall and he just starts walking up and down the mall yelling, “Are you guys crazy? There’s a book signing in B. Dalton right now with these two amazing authors about the best book in the world. You all should be in there.” And so he’s doing that. And about 40 people came into B. Dalton. And then Mark walks up to the front of the room where I am ready to do the little talk before the signing. And they all gasped, like “You’re the guy who was in the hall.” But he would do that. I was too shy to do that. It worked out really well. 

But you talked about rejection. We were turned down by 144 publishers once we had a manuscript. Then it took us over a year to sell the book.

Tim Ferriss: When I think about that story, and I think about The 4-Hour Workweek, which was also turned down, Steve and I got front row seats, obviously to this by 37, 39 publishers, something like that, imprints within the publishers. And maybe tell me if this resonates or not, but you can have a bad idea that gets rejected, just because something gets rejected a lot doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. But in this case, I had tested everything in the classes, so I knew what worked. I knew that the material stuck, so to speak. And you had been testing stories also in front of audiences. And people had been asking you, “Where can I read this in a book?” But was there anything else that contributed to the perseverance to go through that many rejections?

Jack Canfield: I think it’s what you just said for us too. We had tested these stories over and over and told them we got standing ovations. Many of the stories in there, the first book were what often are called in the speaking business, your signature story that other people had let us use with their signature stories. So we knew they were tearjerkers, they were inspirational, they made you laugh. They made you feel like you want to call up and tell your mother, “I’ve got to read you this story.” So basically we knew that, like you said, you knew that from your experience. What I find in the book world, especially in the New York publishing world, is everybody wants something that’s a copy of something that already worked.

So basically when you come along with something radically new, like your idea was, and our idea was, up until then, no collections of short stories had ever worked. Because they were all fictional. And they were too short to get engaged with the characters and really go get involved. Whereas all these stories were in categories like on love, on overcoming obstacles, grief and so forth that are the human things that everybody lives with, which is why they’re so touched by it. And we just knew to stick with it. And we would’ve self-published eventually, and I would’ve made a lot more money, but I didn’t really want to be a publisher. I wanted to be a speaker and a writer. 

Tim Ferriss: So I’m going to read something here. You can tell me if this needs some fact-checking, but this is from Thrive Global. This is a Q&A with you. So here we go. It’s just a paragraph. 

“Eventually, we went to ABA, the American Booksellers Association, and went booth to booth for two or three days and on the final day, this one new publisher employee said: ‘We’ll read the manuscript.’ Some people wouldn’t even take it, and they read it and loved it, and they said they’d publish it. We said, ‘How many books do you think you’ll sell?’” And this is their response. “Oh, 20,000 if you’re lucky.” And then your response, I think this is you.

“‘Well, we want to sell a million and a half in a year and a half,’ I said.” This employee “laughed, and then a year and a half later we’d sold 1.3 million copies.” 

To sell 1.3 or 1.5 million copies is so hard. I mean, it is so hard to do unless you happen to be very, very lucky somehow in capturing lightning in a bottle. But usually there’s a lot of elbow grease behind it. So two things. Well actually it’s just really one thing. What went into selling that many copies over a year and a half? And were you still using affirmations? Was that still one of the ingredients in the cocktail?

Jack Canfield: Yeah, we were doing the mindset work. But it’s a combination. I always say it’s mindset, skill set and ready, set, go. The set go. I wanted another set. Action. It’s action. So someone had told us that the book, The Road Less Traveled, the author of that book had done five interviews a day for the first year. Five interviews a day. And Scott Peck. And that book was on the New York Times list for 12 years — 512 weeks, something like that. 

Tim Ferriss: That’s so long. 

Jack Canfield: Yeah, I think it’s a record. I mean, you were really close, I think. Maybe you still are. I don’t know. But the reality was I thought, “Well, if that’s what works, let’s do it.” So Mark and I actually had gone to five bestselling authors and then read about Scott Peck and we talked to John Gray, who wrote Men Are from Mars.

We talked to Ken Blanchard, who wrote The One Minute Manager, we talked to Barbara De Angelis, who wrote a book on love and then another book on TM that someone had written that was successful. And we said, “What should we do?” And they all said, “Do as many interviews as possible. Get in front of everybody.” I know you did the blogger thing, which was brilliant. We did the radio thing. Now I think podcasts are better than radio. I always tell new authors because the people listening to them, they’re your audience. There’s a focus, whereas radio may have a bigger reach, but not everybody’s your audience. But anyway, five a day every day for a year.

So we created what we call the rule of five. It’s a book by John Kremer called How to Sell a Million Books, something like that. And it’s a great book. We bought the book and we took every idea that was in that book and we made a Post-It, little two-by-three Post-It, put it on a wall. And if you went down the wall of our company at that time, Self-Esteem Seminars, it was just covered with Post-Its. And every day we’d take something off and either do it five times or take five Post-Its off and do each one time call it church, can we talk in your church? Can we call five PXs in the military?

And we’d say, “Are you carrying our book? Can I send you one? If you like it, will you carry it?” Call bookstores. “Are you stocking it? Can we send you one? If you like it, will you carry it?” Call them back two weeks later. “Did you get it?” It was nonstop. We were giving talks at churches on Sunday morning, Wednesday night, whatever. The ones that have bookstores, we’d do signings. We signed in the parking lot. I spoke at every damn conference there was.

I didn’t care where it was or how long it took to get there. If it was there, we did radio shows that were at two in the morning. Maybe a trucker driving through Montana will hear it, but maybe he’ll like it. Maybe he’ll buy it. Maybe he’ll tell his daughter and the daughter will tell her friends. So literally it was that level of nonstop activity. And it was interesting because we were pretty amped up in the beginning. And we talked to the psychic guy and, he was in trance, he’d go, “It would be as if you would go to a tree with a very sharp ax. And you would take five swipes at that tree every single day. Eventually, even a redwood would have to come down.” And we went, okay, rule of five. That’s what we’re going to do.

Tim Ferriss: What prompted the trip to the psychic? Do you remember?

Jack Canfield: Yeah, I do. We knew his wife and she was a friend of ours. And then he turned psychic, if you will, and he was doing these readings. And they were awesome. So we just thought, well, why not? Let’s ask him what we should do.

Tim Ferriss: And how old were you, or what date was this? Either one? Roughly? When the first Chicken Soup for the Soul came out.

Jack Canfield: ’93, and I was born at ’44. So what is that, 49 years old, something like that.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. And when it hit, when you sold the 1.3 million copies in a year and a half or whatever it added up to be, how did that change your life?

Jack Canfield: Dramatic.

Tim Ferriss: In what ways did that affect your life?

Jack Canfield: Well, it allowed me to move out of a very small house. It allowed me to get a better car, all that kind of stuff. I think more so, it was an affirmation from the world that the work I was passionate about was needed. And so it wasn’t just the money, it was the confirmation that my intuition, that my passion was correct. You’re probably familiar with the concept of Ikigai, which comes from the Japanese. Whereas if you love to do something, that’s one thing. Are you good at it? Does the world need it? And are they willing to pay for it? So all four of those have to come together for this thing that you’re passionate about to actually work. In this case it did. So I thought, okay, my purpose is needed. It’s going to work. I can make a living at it. So it was a big confirmation of that, I think more than anything. And yeah, I bought three sweaters in different colors and all that kind of stuff. I went through my nouveau riche stage for sure.

Tim Ferriss: If the sweaters were the extent of the nouveau riche, then I feel like you have very good restraint. The title itself, Chicken Soup for the Soul, because that ended up to be such an incredible format also for extending that into a million different verticals, right? Chicken Soup for the Fill-in-the-Blank Soul. And this I suppose is a nod to the intuition or unorthodox approaches, but how did that title come to be?

Jack Canfield: Well, we had an agent who was going to take us to New York and meet with publishers. And we didn’t have a title. So Mark and we are both meditators. So we said, “Well, let’s just meditate and ask the universe source, God, whatever you want to call that energy, for a title.” So would go to bed mark’s really hyper. He’d go to bed chanting, “Make a best-selling title, make a best-selling title, make a best-selling title.” I would just go and I would, every morning I’d sit for an hour and I’d say, “Okay, God, give a title.” And on Wednesday, so two days, nothing happened. Third day, I’m sitting there and all of a sudden this chalkboard appears, green chalkboard like in school, and the hand comes out and writes “chicken soup” in script on it. And I said to the hand, “What the hell does chicken soup have to do with this book?”

And the voice said back, “When you were a kid, your grandmother gave you a chicken soup when you were sick.” And I thought, “But this is not a book of sick people.” And the voice answer back, “People’s spirits are sick. They’re in resignation, hopelessness, and fear.” We were in the first big recession, 1993. The Gulf War was going on. Downside. A lot of things that are happening now, were happening then the economy was tanking and people were losing jobs. So timing was good in terms of people needing inspiration. That played out well. So I went Chicken Soup for the Spirit, Chicken Soup for the Soul, and I got goosebumps. Told my wife, she got goosebumps. Called Mark, “What do you think of this?” He got goosebumps, called her agent, he got goosebumps, went to New York, met with 21 publishers, seven a day for three days. Nobody got goosebumps.

So basically that led to the 144 rejections. And you’re right, we went to the American Booksellers Association, booth to booth. We were both wearing backpacks full of these spiral bound, 20 stories from the book, the best stories. “Would you publish this book? Would you be interested in this book?” And most people wouldn’t even take one, let alone — and then Peter Vegzo, who’s the guy who did publish it, you’re right, he said, “20,000,” and we said, “No.” And he laughed. He laughed out loud at us. And later he said, “Yeah.” 

Tim Ferriss: He may have just laughed. Was it laugh as in “I don’t believe her,” or was he like, “That’s some chutzpah.”

Jack Canfield: He laughed, because he thought we were freaking crazy, he thought we were — 

Tim Ferriss: Insane.

Jack Canfield: “You guys are nuts.” And what happened was the first shipment he made was 800 books to, I think it was Barnes and Noble, might’ve been Borders. And they sold 80 books the first week. He said, “When you sell one 10th of your inventory the first week, that’s a phenomenon.” Next week, 92.” The next week 150, he said something was happening. It shocked him. And they reached a point where literally they started with those presses that do this kind of thing. And now then they had to go to a rotary press like you see in the movies when the newspaper’s getting printed. And they had three shifts just doing nothing but printing Chicken Soup for the Soul. And I remember one December, the guy who was in charge of the money, the CFO of that company, told his staff, I never knew this until later, he said, “Don’t take any more orders for delivery in December. I don’t want any more revenue for tax purposes this year.”

Tim Ferriss: And meanwhile, you’re following the rule of five. You’re calling the churches, you’re speaking in on Sundays, you’re calling the PXs, you’re doing all of the things. Were there any particular breakthrough moments or interviews looking back at these hundreds of things that you tried? Were there any that really seemed to help the book break through?

Jack Canfield: I think as far as interviews go, being on Good Morning America definitely made a big difference, being on Fox and Friends. In other words, major national TV shows, which didn’t happen immediately. You start out local and you basically create some reels of someone that can talk and they’ll consider you if they’re a producer on the big shows. But those big shows, we’d be on them and then sales would just boom. But the word of mouth more than anything, I think, Tim, what we noticed was we’d have these big sales and then nothing would happen for a week or two. And then there’d be big sales, and it would take people a week or two to read the book. They’d tell everybody the word of mouth was crazy, and it was like a chain letter.

It just kept going and going and going and going. Geometric progressions. I think the other thing that was really big for us, it was a company called SkillPath, sometimes you get these marketing things and say, “We’re going to be doing a workshop on AI, and we’re going to do it in Davenport, Iowa on Monday. And it’ll be in the middle of Iowa and Tuesday. It’ll be there.” So there have these people running around doing seminars everywhere in little towns that we would never,

Tim Ferriss: Is it like Learning Annex back in the day, similar or different?

Jack Canfield: Well, Learning Annex, and I spoke at those places as well, it’s similar, but here’s the value of this. What happened is, let’s say you’re a trainer for this company. You’re going to five cities in Iowa in a day a week, and you’re going to teach the same course, and there’s someone else teaching how to communicate with your boss, someone else teaching you how to use Excel, whatever. Now what happens is that those are places we never would’ve gone. And in the back of the room, they were selling our books. So we got a lot of book sales and places, and then that word of mouth thing would take over and it would just keep exploding, exploding, exploding, exploding, exploding. And what’s fascinating is I had sent the book to the guy who runs that company and said, “Would you sell this book as part of your backroom?”

Because I knew they did backroom, mostly audio programs back then. They were like $60 for six cassettes. And so he said, “Well, I know there’s no money in a book or whatever.” So then he was a Christian and he always led the Wednesday night men’s group or something. And he always liked to start with a Bible story. And he gets to the group and he doesn’t have a Bible story in his mind. He opens up his briefcase. There’s a Chicken Soup book. He reads the story, it makes him cry. He goes in, he reads the story to his Bible group. They go, “Can you read any more stories?” That night, he read seven stories from the book to his Bible group. “Maybe I should reconsider.” So they did.

Tim Ferriss: I want to emphasize something for folks, and this is through my own lens and bias of course, but what part of how you can improve the likelihood of word of mouth with a book like that, or any book really, if you’re dealing with, especially, I think non-fiction stories, is practice it in front of live audiences. You just get such valuable feedback. It is not the same. Speaking of someone who’s done 800 plus podcast episodes, it’s not the same as virtual feedback. Being able to see faces, see when people are getting distracted, see when they’re taking notes.

To hear what they ask you after you’re done teaching or presenting, it allows you to refine your materials so well. I have thought, actually, I’m sitting here in Austin, Texas right now, and I have an idea for a short book, which of course, I’ve been trying to write a short book for 20 years. I haven’t yet succeeded. But I have this idea for a short book, and I’ve thought about maybe reaching out to UT Austin here to teach a class just to work on the material and try to present it, because it worked so well for particularly the first book. And for people listening who might think, “Well, times have changed. Now it’s all about TikTok and this and this and this.” Yes, certain things have changed, but a lot is still the same. So I just wanted to speak to the live audience piece of it. Because I think it’s so powerful.

Jack Canfield: Well, I never write what I haven’t spoken about a lot first for the exact same reason you’re talking about, because I get real feedback about what lands, what doesn’t land, where did I confuse, where did I give them enough information, where was I redundant, et cetera. And people now, they get a book and they instantly go to create an online course, which they haven’t taught live. At least teach it online live before you just record it and put it online. So yeah, it’s crazy what people don’t do what they should.

Tim Ferriss: So to maybe just put a bow on the chapter of Chicken Soup for the Soul, you’ve got some crazy accolades related to this, right? The Guinness Book World Record with seven Chicken Soup books on the New York Times bestseller list simultaneously. That was in 1999. There are so many bullet points that I could list off that are just completely nuts. When you think back to somebody saying, “Hey, if you sell 20,000 copies, you’d be lucky.” And then flashing forward to some of these. You ended up selling the name, the backlist, so 220 plus title titles, all future royalties, the trademarks, et cetera. How did that happen? How did that come to pass and why did that happen?

Jack Canfield: I think two things. We got burned out on the process. When we first started it we were doing a book or two a year, and by the end we were doing eight or nine books a year because the publisher wanted more because everything has an arc. And so what happened was the success was starting to dwindle. There was a little saturation in the market, perhaps. We’re niching books now. Where the first books had universal appeal across the board. When you start doing Sports Fan Soul or Golfer Soul, you start to limit the size of the audience. And so we’re doing all these books and we got tired, and I got burned out at the level of not another one-arm guy climbing Mount Everest story or one-legged. I should have been inspired. It was like, “Ah, not another.”

My mother died and she loved bluebirds, and a bluebird landed on our windowsill. So I knew it was my mom, and it probably was. But after a while, I’m tired of hearing that. I knew I was getting a bit jaded. This is not the thing. And also I think I was tired. So the guy who was the CEO of our company at the time noticed all that and said, “Would you like to sell it?” And I said, “Well, for the right price.” So we sold it for tens and tens and tens and tens and tens and tens of millions of dollars. So yeah, it was a good offer. It happened at the right time. So that’s how it happened.

Tim Ferriss: As you’re noticing the saturation and the niching down, and when you’re checking in with yourself, you don’t have a full-body yes. You’re like, “Oh, my God, another — don’t know if I can do it.” Were you doing things in parallel that you then kept doing after you sold things off? Because for a lot of people that could become their identity, and once they sell it, they’re like, “Oh, my God, what do I do now?” And they have this void that could be really terrifying. And I’m just wondering how you thought about what you did after that and if you already had something in the hopper or if there was another plan.

Jack Canfield: During that whole time, I was running seminars and three, four, five, 600 people seminar, sometimes 700, 800 people in a room. I did one seminar in India that had 7,000 Herbalife people in it for three days, and they only spoke Tamil. The whole thing was translated. And so I had that going. That was always happening. And the Chicken Soup was kind of like, it was a parallel track to my workshops and my seminars. So basically, yeah, that was always there.

I knew I could go back to that, and not go back to that, but just shift my energy over to that. And I did. And that’s when Patty, my business partner, said, “You really should consider putting all these success ideas into a book.” And that’s what led to The Success Principles, which is the second chapter of my life, if you will, in terms of that being. But I was always teaching success ever since W. Clement Stone. And so yeah, it wasn’t like I was like, “Oh, I’m going to quit being a corporate person, and I have no other idea what I’m going to do, which is I can’t see how. It’d be scary.”

Tim Ferriss: And I have a first edition copy of The Success Principles, how to get from where you are to where you want to be. Because before The 4 — when was the pub date on The Success Principles?

Jack Canfield: 2005.

Tim Ferriss: 2005. Right. So it came out two years before The 4-Hour Workweek. And I think I have a brief cameo in there, probably because of the kickboxing stuff or something else.

Jack Canfield: I tell that story. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, so I have a signed copy at home. At my parents’ house, actually. I keep it right where I can see it, so I’ve had that ever since. And what was it like stepping into The Success Principles? Were you nervous about that because the bar had been set so high with Chicken Soup for the Soul? Were you able to let go of that? What was that experience like?

Jack Canfield: Well, there is a little bit of an identity thing. I became known as the Chicken Soup guy and I had to let go of that. Some people still see me that way, which is fine. But no, I think for me it was a very natural transition. It was a book. I knew how to sell books. People would say, “How long did it take you to write that book?” I’d say 20 years because I was collecting all that data about what works in terms of success. And the actual writing took about a year and a half. I would write from 7:00 at night. Sometimes all of a sudden I’d hear birds singing and it would be getting gray. “Oh, my God, I’ve been up all night typing.” I had the regular — 

Tim Ferriss: It’s that bluebird again. I’m kidding.

Jack Canfield: Well, I had a regular job, which was to run my seminars. Unfortunately, most of them were on weekends and evenings, but basically I would go to bed at 7:00 in the morning and sleep until noon, one o’clock, then get up and do my business again and then write. So thank God my wife could put up with all that, but she did and it worked out really well. But yeah, it was not that hard. And I like writing. I like wordsmithing. I’ll give you an example, so I have a chapter in there about the guy who wrote Sleepless in Seattle, the movie. And the next chapter is about a guy who’s a coffee roaster. It’s all about perseverance, not giving up. And he’s up in Seattle and he’s sleeping on these coffee beanbags because he couldn’t afford an apartment. Now he’s uber rich, but what happened was one of his major clients was a coffee shop down in Long Beach, California.

And he would ship the beans through UPS and UPS had a strike. And I was able to go, “Wow, blah, blah, blah. I was writing Sleepless in Seattle. In Seattle, this guy was also sleepless.” I love that, being able to make those kind of takeaways and stuff. And then his chapter is called “Going the Extra Mile.” When the strike happened, he said, “I can’t let this guy flounder and not have the beans he needs.” And he drove them himself 1,250 miles from Seattle to Long Beach. I said, “He was willing to go more than one extra mile. He went 1,250.” Playing with words like that is really fun for me.

Tim Ferriss: What was the reason for continuing to do the seminars? Because presumably you’d done very well financially from, as you mentioned, some of the royalties from Chicken Soup for the Soul. Was there something you got personally from doing the seminars? Was it kind of an insurance policy of sorts to have an additional revenue stream? Why did you keep doing so many in-person events?

Jack Canfield: I love doing it. I know you participated in a lot of sports and you get really good at them fast because the way you play, but whatever your favorite sport is, you play it because you love it when you’re playing it. For me, nothing turns me on more than being up in front of a group, sharing ideas and stories and experiential exercises where people are interacting and watching their lights come on, their eyes get bright, their awarenesses happen, the breakthroughs happen. All of a sudden they’re coming up and they think, “Oh, my God.” And then watching them name their children after me and write their first book and leave shitty marriages and stop letting their husbands abuse them. And I love it.

I’m kind of retiring right now and literally that was the hardest part of that decision was so I had to get my wife to agree that I could do X number of workshops a year. And now it’s other people are doing all the work. I’m not renting hotels and filling them and doing all that kind of crap I used to do. I used to have 12 staff. Now I have two.

Tim Ferriss: And what is your age now, Jack?

Jack Canfield: 81.

Tim Ferriss: All right. You are sharp as a razor’s edge. And I have to ask two questions. Number one, what do you think contributes to that? Maybe you also have some fantastic genetics. I don’t know, but you’re very, very sharp. You have a lot of energy. And then the related question is, I’m not questioning the decision, but why retire? Why change what you’re doing?

Jack Canfield: Well, I realized there were things I want to do that I haven’t done. I want to become a really good chef cook. I want to learn how to oil paint. I play guitar mediocrely. I want to learn to play the piano. All these kind of hobby things that most people do as they go along in life, I’ve kind of piled him up at the end. I have a 12-year-old grandson who I absolutely adore, who’s the coolest kid. He’s an old soul kind of kid and amazingly talented. I want to spend more time with him. I want to spend more time with my wife. I think I owe her that after all the time she’s put up with me being on the road and I enjoy being with her. And I want to just explore things because they’re fun, not because I need to. And so I want to read a book because it interests me, not because I’m getting ready to write something or I’m getting ready to whatever.

And it’s funny, I never thought I would retire. I told everyone for years I would never retire and then I was doing an ayahuasca experience down in Costa Rica and I literally — I’ll tell the story real quick.

Tim Ferriss: Please.

Jack Canfield: The intention that we were to hold that night was forgive the unforgivable. And I thought, “I’ve forgiven my parents. I’ve forgiven people who embezzled from me. I’ve forgiven people who stole from me. I’ve forgiven the guy who bullied me in school, forgiven both my ex-wives, their lawyers.” I forgiven everybody. What’s left to forgive, but I’ll do it. So I take the medicine and I’m lying there on my mattress and all of a sudden Vladimir Putin’s face comes up. I thought, “God, I’ve got to forgive Vladimir Putin?” Who I think is one of the more evil guys on the planet.

So I literally started to see his childhood. I saw what motivated him. He wants to be seen as majorly significant, that he did something outrageously huge, put the Soviet Union back together. How does he do that? You start bringing all these countries back that they gave away, like Ukraine and Poland and all those places. And so I finally forgave him and I felt this energy just leave my body. I didn’t know I had such animosity toward him. And then the next thing I see is my door to my office and the office opens and the first three feet of my office is a shrine to how significant I am. It was like the Guinness Book World Record, magazine covers, awards, honorary doctorates, people that made me honorary sheriff of this town.

I’ve got more damn stuff. And I realized part of my motivation has been to feel like I was worthy of being here. I made a difference. I’m significant. Now, it’s a huge philanthropic, loving, service-oriented heart in my body, but I realized how many honorary doctorates do you need. I’m Doctor Doctor Doctor Doctor Canfield. It’s like I would go away for four days on a trip to give a commencement speech to get another doctorate and I’d leave my wife and my kids. It was crazy. And so I had that awareness and I thought I really need to slow down and take a look at all that motivation. And part of it, being 81, my 80th birthday last summer, 81st birthday in August, I just realized there’s a lot I want to do that I’m not doing. And I’m going to just shove all this work stuff to decide. Not totally. I’ve got four books I’m still writing, so I’m not retired retired, but the road warrior, the three weeks in Asia —

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, the road warrior. The travel.

Jack Canfield: Yeah, all that and I’m not doing that anymore.

Tim Ferriss: I love how four books is the retirement plan.

Jack Canfield: I know.

Tim Ferriss: 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 that. What do you think has contributed to you being as vibrant, full of energy, and as sharp as you are?

Jack Canfield: 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 resistance between what’s coming through and what I want to do. I can’t say I’m fearless totally, but very few fears in my life anymore. Just if I want to do it, we’ll do it. And so that inner struggle is mostly gone. That uses up a lot of energy and creates disease in the body. I don’t have a lot of limiting beliefs anymore. One of the books I’m writing is a belief change process that I developed with somebody that literally works, so I’ve cleared just tons of that stuff. I’m a big fan of Byron Katie. Do you know her work?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. Her work is amazing. People can find PDFs online also of her work, which are super helpful, the turnarounds and so on.

Jack Canfield: I did that work for years. I’ve not ever been with her, but I did her work. And I don’t get upset about anything. It just is what it is. That whole idea, it is what it is. My desire to change it 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 all just called whatever. So that is a big piece of it. I meditate regularly. I cleanse. I told you before we came on that I’m in the eighth day of a 10-day cleanse. So all this stuff coming out of my body, detoxing. I do saunas regularly. I won’t say I exercise every single day. That’d be a lie, but I exercise enough to keep things moving. I only listen to comedy channels on my XM radio. I laugh a lot. I think laughter is very healing. I love your digital detox concept, which I actually put in the 10th anniversary edition of The Success Principles.

Tim Ferriss: Amazing. I didn’t even know that.

Jack Canfield: Yeah, I’ll have to send you a copy. I can’t believe I didn’t do that. But anyway, so I think that, organic food. When I was in graduate school at UMass in Amherst, I was 23, [24], something like that. My best friend, we played racquetball every night. He was the owner of a health food store, so I got into the organic thing, the supplement thing, the cleansing thing, all of that really, really early on. And then doing the ayahuasca, the plant medicine, anything that’s not clear comes up and out. So that’s all good. And I’m very loving. I get massages regularly. All the things people tell you to do, I’m mostly doing for longevity.

Tim Ferriss: That’s a good list. I’m taking some notes for myself. I’m going to add a few more in the rotation. So you mentioned the ayahuasca, so let’s talk about that. I was surprised not because I would expect anything otherwise, but I wasn’t aware that you had these experiences. Is that something that goes back many decades or is there something that prompted you to engage with plant medicine?

Jack Canfield: No, it doesn’t go back many decades. I mean, I did not smoke pot in high school and college. It made me fall asleep, so my drug of choice on weekends was a couple beers or a vodka tonic or whatever. And that’s another thing, I stopped drinking quite a bit ago, but the reality was I think in graduate school — this is so funny because the guy who eventually became the head of drug education for New Hampshire is a person who introduced me to mescaline and peyote and things like that, but I only did a few journeys. I did LSD once, I think. I never did cocaine. I was afraid of all that. I didn’t want to get addicted and I’d seen people who had, so none of that for years and years and years and years.

And then Lynne Twist, who runs the Pachamama Alliance, was taking people down to the rainforest in Ecuador to help raise consciousness about let’s save the rainforest. And I went on one of those trips and one night, one of the journeys, one of the things you do is take ayahuasca in the jungle with a real shaman that’s there. And I did that and I had amazing breakthrough experiences. And so I became interested in it. 

Tim Ferriss: How old were you when you had that first experience, you’d say?

Jack Canfield: I’m thinking 20 years ago maybe with — 

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Jack Canfield: Yeah, something like that. And then when I learned about Rythmia and I thought, “Well, I want to do that.” And the thing I liked about Rythmia, for those who don’t know, it’s a center in Costa Rica. And it was founded by a guy who was, in his own words, a total asshole. He was a womanizer, a drug addict, a drinker, got in fights in bars all the time. And so eventually he was going to commit suicide because he couldn’t get his life together. He’d been in and out of rehab so many times. And he was worth about $60 million, I think, but he was miserable. So he said he was going to commit suicide, and somebody told him and said, “Don’t commit suicide until you go to the rainforest and work with this guy named Maganda.” So he looks him up and looks like a resort and he signs up to go there and gets down there. I mean, the resort images were bullshit. It was an old house, dirty mattresses, cockroaches, all this stuff.

Tim Ferriss: Hotel paradise. Yeah.

Jack Canfield: And it was funny because when he got there, he tells this story. He got there and he flies down in a private jet, that whole thing. He gets there and Maganda meets him at the airport. He says, “Get my bags, man.” Maganda is this African guy. And he says, “Get your own, man. I don’t carry your bags.” He’s used to being treated like a king. So they get to this place that doesn’t look anything like the brochure and he’s about to leave and he says, “Come on, lie down.” And he gets in there, about eight people lying head to head in the middle of a circle in the garage on mattresses. And they do ibogaine, which is an African — 

Tim Ferriss: Hell of an introduction.

Jack Canfield: Yeah, but it totally rocked his world because what happened was he ended up going back to his grandfather and he realized his grandfather had been sexually violating him his whole youth and he totally repressed all that. That’s why he was so angry, was he was repressing. And then finally, I love this last line. He’s lying there and Maganda just taps him on the head and goes, “Happy birthday, man. You’re reborn.” And he was. And so he decided what he wanted to do is help people have his experience. And the second time he did ibogaine, he said, “You’re supposed to open a center, but don’t do it with ibogaine. Do it with ayahuasca.” So we started that center. So I’ve been down there five times, do four journeys every time you’re there, so 20 journeys. And they’ve been life-changing for me, just literally life-changing. And I think that’s another reason I’m so light and it’s all good.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, the pharmacology of ayahuasca in and of itself, super, super fascinating for people who might be interested. Also outside of the DMT, which is found in the chacruna. The leaves of the shrub actually related to the coffee plant, but the actual vine itself contains a lot of interesting properties. And I think it’s ESPD50, this ethnobotanical search for psychoactive drugs. There’s a presentation from that that goes into some of the potential properties around neurogenesis and so on from the beta-carbolines and so on themselves in the vine. So even the vine has some very, very interesting properties. 

What have you observed as someone who’s been a practitioner, a student, a teacher in the, for lack of a better term, self-development space for many decades now? What do you think is often missed or under-taught? You’ve seen lots of different waves of different things that have become popular, fallen out of popularity. Is there anything you wish folks paid more attention to?

Jack Canfield: Well, I think several things come to mind. I don’t think about that very often, but several things come to mind as you ask the question. Number one, I think most people don’t understand the impact of unconscious limiting beliefs. That they watch The Secret, they visualize, they affirm, and then somehow it’s not working and they don’t know why. And so it’s always either fear or limiting beliefs or just lack of willingness to take action that basically corrupts the process. And I think for me, why I’m writing a book about this limiting belief process is I’ve just worked with literally thousands of people. Twice a year I’ve been doing these free sessions where I’ll get 700 people sign up and I’ll do this belief process with them. And I’d say 99 percent of the people have a major breakthrough. I had a woman got rid of arthritis in 20 minutes.

I mean, ridiculous stuff. And so these beliefs we’re holding onto that usually got formed between the age of three and eight, somewhere in that range because of some experience we had, usually a traumatic experience. You make a decision, that’s never going to happen again. It’s not safe to say what I want. It’s not safe to ask for things. It’s not safe to be sexy, make noise, whatever. What happens is that we don’t realize we have that belief. And so we do all the things we’re supposed to do and it doesn’t happen. And it’s very frustrating and sometimes people give up on the whole human potential movement because they’re doing all these things that the gurus are teaching them, but they’re not dealing with this block. I’ll tell people it’s like calling up Domino’s Pizza to order a pizza and then having this other voice call them and say, “Forget the order.” And you wonder, “Why isn’t this showing up?”

And so all this work that so many of us taught in The Secret and so forth, that seems to be a missing piece for a lot of people, I would say. And fear, which is based on limiting beliefs is my experience, which we imagine bad things happening in the future, it’s a visualization process usually or a thought process which we can intervene on as well. But I think those are the two big things that people don’t understand very well. And then I think what we’re seeing today that I’m a bit more aware is the power of community, the power of support, the power of not being alone. That there are people there to hold you back and lying when you go off.

My sister just called a couple hours ago and was having a really tough time and just spending 10 minutes with her she was back where she needed to be. But she didn’t have anyone to call, which is increasingly true for her as she gets older and doesn’t have a lot of friends who’ve died and so forth. I think that’s really critical. And I think more and more people are becoming aware of that. That’s why you’re seeing all these communities evolving. And I think one of the reasons that plant medicine’s taken off is because it deals with all those limiting beliefs. They come up. And as we say at Rythmia, “What’s coming up is coming out, so don’t resist it.”

Tim Ferriss: That’s a good one.

Jack Canfield: And you get to clear it.

Tim Ferriss: I want to come back to something that we spoke about or you spoke about early on with W. Clement Stone in his intake interview when he asked you do you take a hundred percent responsibility for your life? And the reason I want to revisit that is that I grew up in a family where there was a lot of complaining. There was a lot of finger pointing, a lot of blaming, and the villain would change depending on the context. And I’ve worked very hard to try to correct that training for myself. And most of the time I would say I do pretty well, but there are certainly times when I seem to revert back to that early experience and find myself complaining about — maybe I don’t complain, but I blame. Right? Maybe it’s just internally. Maybe I don’t give voice to it, but there could be some blaming. How do you encourage people to take more or 100 percent responsibility? What are the steps for people who recognize that’s what they want to do, but perhaps have the habits of blaming, pointing fingers, complaining?

Jack Canfield: Well, I’ll start with a story. A couples therapist told me once she was working with a couple and they were arguing about whose fault it was that something had happened. And a therapist said, “Well, I’m glad to see you agree on something.” And they said, “What?” “Well, you obviously agree that if you could figure out whose fault it is, somehow that’s going to make your life better.”

Tim Ferriss: That’s outstanding. Yeah.

Jack Canfield: So basically I teach a little formula equation, if you call it. E + R = O, event plus response equals outcome. So when there’s an event and you blame somebody or something, the government, the bank, the economy, your mother, your sister, your neighbor, the boss, whatever you’re blaming for this experience you’ve just had, that event plus your blaming does not produce a better outcome. So we all want a better outcome. We want to experience joy, freedom, peace, love, success, abundance, whatever the outcome that we want, health, longevity, whatever. And certain behaviors do not do that, so I’ve never found a place where blaming produced a better result. You don’t feel better and you don’t solve the problem in a way that really gets you anywhere because you’ve just blamed somebody.

And it’s amazing how much our culture supports blaming and complaining. I used to call bars “Ain’t it awful?” clubs. Every profession has their own bar. They go to the firemen go here, the police go there, the lawyers go there, the doctors go there and they bitch and moan about everything that happened that day. The economy, the president, the minister of the hospital, whatever. So the reality is it lets off steam and you get agreement, but you don’t get resolution, you don’t get breakthrough, you don’t get better results. So if you look at E + R = O, there’s only three responses you have any control over. Your thoughts, your images, and your behavior. That’s it. You can’t manage time. You can manage your thoughts in relation to time.

You can manage your visualizations in relation to time and your behavior, but we think we can control things outside of us. We can only control our response to things outside of us and notice what kind of outcome that produces. And what you’ve done magnificently and what I’ve done a lot as well is look at who are the people that are succeeding. What are their responses to certain events? How do they relate to this situation? Which ones produced the better results? I mean, your book, the Titans book, is just amazing. All these people telling you what worked.

Tim Ferriss: Thank you.

Jack Canfield: If you haven’t read that, by the way, guys, please do. It’s incredible. So what happens is blaming, we just discovered, we talked about it. And it’s incredible what people blame. I mean, look at our president right now. He’s blaming everybody for everything. It’s unfortunate, but he does. But it’s not producing particularly great results as a result of it. Complaining, in order to complain, you have to have a reference point of something better you prefer. So I can’t complain about my girlfriend if I don’t have an image of some woman who’s better than my girlfriend, right?

Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.

Jack Canfield: Now, the reality is that nobody ever complains about gravity. You’ve never seen an old person walking through the mall, all bent over going, “Gravity, I hate gravity. If it wasn’t for gravity, I wouldn’t be all bent over. Gravity sucks.” Never said that. Why not? Because you can’t change gravity. Everyone knows gravity just is, so we don’t complain about it. So anything you’re complaining about, you have to have a reference point in your mind of something better. Better job, better country, better president, better whatever.

And what happens then is we — when we become aware of that, we have this better option that we’re not willing to risk creating. So therefore we complain about it, and it lets off steam. It gets people to go together. Yeah, I know. My wife is the same way, whatever it is, but we don’t get a better result. So I always say, imagine a situation where every woman in the world dies except my wife. Big thing comes down from outer space, zaps yours with some energy field. My wife happens to be in a lead mine that day. She’s the only one to survive. Would I come to work and complain about my wife? No. Why not? She’s the only one. There is no option, right? So we wouldn’t complain about it.

So basically, if you’re complaining, my response to that is what would you prefer? What would you have to do to create that? One of my friends runs a workshop he does over in Europe. He’s a European, corporate consultant, and one of the questions he asks people, even when they’re pissed off at the company they work for, he says, “On a scale of one to 10, how would you rate your quality of life working here?” And they go, “Three.” He’ll go, “Why so high? It’s not a zero. Something is going on there, right? So why so high?” Which floors them. It kind of breaks the chain of their thought. And then he goes, “So what would be an eight for you?”

Never goes to 10. That’s too big a leap for people. He goes, “What would be an eight for you?” “Well, this would be happening. This would be happening. What could you do to help generate that result? What could you do to help make that happen in your company?” Because that’s really what you have to do. You can’t just sit there and bitch, and moan. Nothing is going to change.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So you mentioned Tools of Titans, and I wanted to just, not to push the book, but it brought to mind because I put together these books mostly as reference books for myself and Tools of Titans, in particular, was an example of not wanting to let learnings from these interviews fall through my fingers, like sand through an hourglass.

And one of the essays in that book is taken from Jocko Willink, who’s a famous Navy commander. He has done a million things since. His first public interview ever was on this podcast ages ago. People can find videos of this too, but it’s just called “Good.” And so if you’ll indulge me for a second, I just want to read a second — 

Jack Canfield: Sure.

Tim Ferriss: — just a minute or two of this. So this “Good,” this is the title and Jocko has a great video of this for people who want, but it’s also in the book. So “Good.” “This is something that one of my direct subordinates, one of the guys who worked for me, a guy who became one of my best friends pointed out, he would pull me aside with some major problem or issue.” This was when Jocko was in the military. “That was going on and he’d say, ‘Boss, we’ve got this thing, this situation. It’s going terribly wrong.’ I would look at him and say, ‘Good.’ And finally one day he was telling me about something that was going off the rails. And as soon as he finished explaining to me, he said, ‘I already know what you’re going to say.’ And I asked, ‘What am I going to say?’ He said, ‘You’re going to say good.’ He continued. ‘That’s what you always say when something is going wrong or going bad, you look at me and say, good.’”

“And I said, ‘Well, I mean it because that’s how I operate.’ So I explained to him that when things are going badly, there’s going to be some good that will comfort. Oh, the mission got canceled? Good. We can focus on another one. Didn’t get the new high-speed gear we wanted? Good. We can keep it simple. Didn’t get promoted? Good. More time to get better. Didn’t get funded? Good. We own more of the company. Didn’t get the job you wanted? Good. Go out, gain more experience and build a better resume. Got injured? Good. Need a break from training.” It just goes on and on, and on.

And then he says, just to maybe put a pin in it, he says, “Now, I don’t mean to say something trite. I’m not trying to sound like Mr. Smiley positive guy. That guy ignores the hard truth. That guy thinks a positive attitude will solve problems. It won’t, but neither will dwelling on the problem. No, except reality. But focus on the solution. Take that issue, take that setback, take that problem and turn it into something good. Go forward. And if you’re part of a team, that attitude will spread throughout.”

And I feel like you reflect that. And certainly Jocko is an archetype of many types. And it’s also, for me at least, makes it clear that it’s something you train yourself to do, right? If it doesn’t come naturally all the time, just like an exercise habit or anything else, this is something that you have to condition yourself to do with reminders and practices. Are there any reminders or practices that you have for yourself to stay on the rails, so to speak, with the 100 percent responsibility?

Jack Canfield: Yeah, I guess so. I think, well, I’ve always got something I’m working on and you have to have something that keeps it in your focus. So if I’m engaging in some kind of negative self-talk then I take and I create an opposite affirmation and I’ll put that on some Post-Its and put on the refrigerator door and on my bathroom mirror, and stuff like that. Because we know that normally you probably have other data than I do on this, but neuroscience tends to tell us that it takes about 66 days to change a belief. And it can take longer depending on who it is and how badly that belief is ground into you through the trauma of it. That’s creation.

But generally, it requires repetition. There’s a guy, I forget his name right now. He’s the head of peak performance at West Point. He wrote a book about it. And one of the things when I read the book that he does is when the students are wanting a behavioral change, they create an affirmation and he teaches them every time you walk through a door, reach up and touch the door jamb and then say your affirmation. Now, I have a repetitive system that’s built in that tells me to do that. And you think about how many doors you go in and out of every day into the bathroom, into the kitchen, out of the kitchen, into your car, back out, whatever.

And so it’s that level of repetition until it becomes ground in. They don’t have to repeat it. I mean, I know my phone number. I don’t have to repeat it. Well, I did when I first got it. And you want to get your new ideas like that. I always say if you can build in four new behavioral shifts a year, think about in 10 years you got 40 new shifts. That’s a lot. So for me, for example, when we read the — what’s the book? Shaman from Mexico. Boy.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, it’s Carlos Castaneda?

Jack Canfield: A different one.

Tim Ferriss: Different shaman from Mexico.

Jack Canfield: Yeah, this is me being sharp at anyone. Anyway, he had The Four Agreements. That’s the guy, the book.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, this is Don Miguel.

Jack Canfield: Miguel Ruiz. Don Miguel Ruiz.

Tim Ferriss: There we go.

Jack Canfield: Yeah. So my wife and I decided we’ll take The Four Agreements and we’ll work on each agreement for three months. And so for three months, that was the agreement of not making other people wrong, thinking positive, etc. And we had to reinforce that and we had little signs that told us what to focus on and so forth. So I think it’s important to do that because as you know, we are so distracted today now with AI and scrolling through Instagram. I mean, I even get caught in that occasionally. I’ll go looking for something on YouTube and the next thing I know I’m watching old reruns of Jay Leno. But I think that reminders are important.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’m going to use the doorway. That is a great cue. It’s actually something. If people want to read, Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming. Doorways are also really helpful for some of that. People can check out Stephen LaBerge if you want to go into a really weird town. And also for people who might be wagging a finger at me, I know that Carlos Castaneda was not a shaman, but it was The Teachings of Don Juan, I think, A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. That was the book that I was thinking of.

Jack Canfield: Yeah. That was one of the first books I read. It was a great book.

Tim Ferriss: 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 post or some — I think, yeah, this is from jackcanfield.com productivity tips. And you, like me, I’m sure have quite a few blog posts. I’ll just read the headlines here for a second. There’s “Clean up Your Messes,” two, “Focus,” three, “Just Say No,” four, “Practice the Rule of Five,” which we’ve talked about a bit. Five, “Meditate.” And this is going to seem so mundane, but I’m very curious if you could expand a bit on “Clean up Your Messes” and how you go about doing it. Because I have a few Achilles heels, as I suppose we all do.

And one of them is I collect so much goddamn paper. I’m a hypographic note-taking maniac, and I just have paper. It metastasizes to cover every flat surface that I have. I try to take photos here and there and digitize, but it’s messy and it really agitates me. I’m not saying that that’s ideal. Maybe it shouldn’t bother me, but how do you think about — why is number one of five on productivity tips “Clean up Your Messes,” and how do you do it?

Jack Canfield: Well, you’re talking to a fellow person that needs the same rehab, just so you know. I take more notes at a conference than almost anybody and I’ve got literally books full of notes and taking notes when I’m listening to stuff and podcast, things. I think the problem is that every time you look at all that, it’s taking your attention. And so the research that I’ve read says we have the ability to hold about seven attention units at a time.

And so what happens is that you’ll notice the research also. If you haven’t paid the bill yet, any good waiter or waitress could tell you what you had. As soon as you pay the bill, you ask them 10 minutes later, they don’t remember anymore. They don’t need to. So what happens is all those attention units are being taken up by things that are incomplete. So messes in my world are incompletions. So anything that’s incomplete. Now that can be that thing you started, you didn’t finish. It could be that letter you were writing the book you’ve not finished up the notes you have over here.

But what I’ve learned to do is find a place for those things. I have lots of filing systems. I have filing systems in my computer. I have filing systems. I bought 10 drawers in my office that are file drawers. And so things go in those places. And if I need to remember something to do it, I have what’s called a comp file. So let’s say I need to do something March 28th, I have a folder called March. So in the 1st of March, I go through that folder of everything I put in there, and then I put it into my counter for those days. Or I can put it in now called Steve on March 28th.

But if there’s papers related to that, things we’re going to talk about, whatever, it goes in my March file. So it’s there. It’s not in my visual cue. What happens is whether it’s a relationship we’ve all had that experience of walking through a grocery store and seeing someone down the aisle we don’t want to talk to. So we go down the aisle and hope we evade them because it’s incomplete. So all that energy is taken up because it’s not complete. All the things you’ve never said, the upsets, the thank you’s, the acknowledgements, the wanting acknowledgements, and not having got them are taking up space in your head.

So everything you can close up, it’s almost like you’re taking a piece of paper off the desk and pretty soon you have a clean desk. Do you know Dan Sullivan’s work? The Strategic Coach?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. He’s got some great stuff. He’s got some great stuff.

Jack Canfield: Well, one of things I learned from him, he doesn’t have a desk. He’s got three or four offices with conference tables and he’ll go into one and say, “Bring over that stuff.” And he’ll work with one of his people. They do all the things they need to do. They walk out with all the papers, he’s done. Doesn’t have that pile up shit that I deal with and you deal with. But the reality is that everything that’s incomplete, you walking through the hall of your house, you see a little crack in the wall and you go, “Oh, it needs to get fixed.”

Pretty soon you won’t see that crack because you have to block it out of your awareness to pay attention to other things. So now things are not getting handled that need to get handled. And also if you do keep paying attention to it, that’s time you could have spent writing your book or thinking about your project or loving your mother or giving good feedback to your girlfriend or whatever. So the reality is it’s really important to clean that up. And there’s financial messes, there’s garage messes, there’s the attic, the tool drawer, the door that has the leashes.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, my God. I can feel my cortisol piling up as I’m listening. Sounds like you’re in my house on my nanny cam.

Jack Canfield: I’m going to send you — I have a sheet of 21 things you need to clean up. I used to work for a company called insight training seminars, and if you were a trainer, you had to clean all that up because you had to be living that you were complete and you couldn’t teach it if you weren’t living it. So basically think about it, financial records, your checkbook, now balance, stuff in your car, clothes that don’t fit anymore. I mean people go — you could go down a list of all that stuff. I literally had to go through my clothes at one point. I’m a shirt whore. I love shorts. 

Tim Ferriss: It’s another thing we have in common. No, I have so many t-shirts. It’s just unacceptable. It’s indefensible.

Jack Canfield: I know, I know. But I had to go through and clean it out because it got to a point where I couldn’t even put anything in the closet. And so the rule is if I haven’t worn it in the last 60 days and it’s not a tuxedo or something like that, it’s gone. So there’s a lot of the — I love all the decluttering books that are out there and all that kind of stuff. One person said, “Go through your house, take everything you haven’t used in the last 30 days. Put it in a box, label the box what’s in it.” And if another 120 days go by and you haven’t used it, just throw it out because you’re never going to use it again.

Tim Ferriss: Well, I’ll tell you a dirty little secret, which is I moved eight years ago from San Francisco to Austin and I moved all my stuff from California into storage because there was a gap where I was shopping for a place and I didn’t have anywhere to put all this stuff. It has been sitting in storage, all that stuff for eight years, and I get a bill for it every month. And I’m like, “I should go down and take a look at that.” And I’m like, “I cannot allow myself to look at that stuff because I’m going to want to keep all this junk that I haven’t needed in eight years.” So it’s my ignorance is bliss approach. It’s a small tax to pay at this point. Oh, yeah, stuff.

Jack Canfield: George Carlin does a really good routine on stuff if you can find it. It’s really amazing.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, I will find it. George Carlin, what a genius. Also, his late night bit on Heaven and Hell, people can look that up. In Heaven, the French are the cooks, the Japanese the lovers, and this and this. And then in Hell, X, Y, and Z. It’s also worth checking out. But decluttering, the 21 things that I need to clean up, please do send that to me.

Jack Canfield: Yeah, I will. I will.

Tim Ferriss: Is that something we could share in the show notes for this episode for other people?

Jack Canfield: Sure.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. All right. Perfect.

Jack Canfield: I think it’s even a page in my book. If not, I’ll get it for you.

Tim Ferriss: All right, perfect. Jack, we’ve covered a ton of ground. I don’t want to take up your entire afternoon on a Friday, but is there anything else that — I’m not in any rush whatsoever, but is there anything else that you’d like to talk about that we haven’t covered? Anything you’d like to say? Request of my audience? Anything at all that you’d like to bring up that I haven’t already prompted?

Jack Canfield: Yeah, I would just say self-servingly that if you would like to know more about my work, the book that Tim talked about, it was found in his 20th anniversary edition, The Success Principles: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be. It’s really the basis of everything I do. If you haven’t read the Chicken Soup book, start with the first one. It’s really brilliant. One thing I did, Tim, I haven’t done it for all my books, but I did with that book, I literally after we probably edited every story five or six times, went out to Colorado to a ski resort in the summer, took three days, read every story out loud. Because what I know is when most people read, they’re sub vocalizing in their brain. They’re not speed reading.

Tim Ferriss: Sure.

Jack Canfield: And if it didn’t sound as one of my actors says coming trippingly off the tongue, I would rewrite it. And that book went on to sell 105 million copies. So basically, I think that was a good thing to do. So I always tell people, like you said, get feedback, but also read it out loud. How does it sound to you? And then make sure you get — I always say get feedback from at least 20 people. First Teenage Soul book, we had an entire high school suspend classes for a day. Over 1,000 kids read all the stories. So we had an Excel spreadsheet. They all graded every story on a scale of one to 10. And that book went on to sell, I think, six million copies or something like that.

Tim Ferriss: Wow.

Jack Canfield: So feedback. I love what Ken Blanchard says, “Feedback is the breakfast of champions.”

Tim Ferriss: Feedback is the breakfast of champions.

Jack Canfield: Most people avoid feedback because they’re afraid of what they’re going to hear. And you’ve got to know that — we call it constructive feedback. But anyway, so I would read that book, go to my website, jackcanfield.com. There’s all kinds of things there you might be interested. And it’s interesting, I normally say this, but last night for some reason I was looking up something and I couldn’t remember it. I thought it was. There’s a guy named Nick Nanton. He did a documentary of my life called The Soul of Success.

I went in there to find one little thing and, I don’t know, call it egotistic or whatever, I watched the whole hour on YouTube. It’s free. Just go to The Soul of Success on YouTube and you’ll see one of the most amazing documentaries ever made, I think, because he’s an Emmy-winning documentarian, really good thing. So that’ll give you some information about some of the stuff Tim and I talked about that maybe we didn’t go deep enough on. And that’s about it, I would say.

Tim Ferriss: And we’ll link to everything we’ve discussed in the show notes. Jack Canfield also, just to reiterate the spelling, C-A-N-F-I-E-L-D, jackcanfield.com. You can find all that. We’ll of course link to everything as per usual in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast for everybody including the 21 things to clean up. It’s going to ride hard on my OCD, which is properly diagnosed. I’m not just making that up as a swipe against OCD folks. Big shocker to anyone who actually knows me. I’m kidding.

But what I will say as we wind to a close, Jack, is that you’ve had a huge impact on my life. Your work has had an impact. You personally have had an impact. You’ve been so gracious, so patient. I don’t know if you remember this, but I remember when I was volunteering at that event, S phase. I had all the speakers. I had some type of waiver because I wanted to record everything. And the waiver was, I’m sure all sweeping and full encompassing of everything because I’d probably gotten it online somehow. I remember you had your glasses on and you pulled down the glasses like a very patient parent, and you’re like, “Timothy, I have some questions about this release.” And then you scratched everything out. You scratched a bunch of nonsense out and you signed it.

You’ve had an incredible impact on my career, and I just want to thank you for all of that and for what you offer to the world as an eternal student and as a teacher.

Jack Canfield: Well, thank you.

Tim Ferriss: I really appreciate you taking the time.

Jack Canfield: Well, I’ve enjoyed this. One of the best podcasts I’ve ever been on, so thank you.Tim Ferriss: Yeah, my pleasure. Least I can do. And I’ll say it one more time, everybody who’s listening, we will link to everything in the show notes, tim.blog/podcast. Just search Canfield, C-A-N-F-I-E-L-D and it will pop right up. Until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others, but also to yourself. Thanks for tuning in.