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

Jack Canfield http://youtube.com/JackCanfield 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 https://www.amazon.com/Success-Principles-How-Where-Want/dp/0007265492/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 and the Chicken Soup for the Soul® https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09LQVD65R/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 series, which includes forty New York Times bestsellers and which has sold more than 600 million copies in 50-plus languages around the world. This episode is brought to you by: Monarch https://www.monarch.com/tim track, budget, plan, and do more with your money: https://www.monarch.com/timAG1 https://drinkag1.com/tim all-in-one nutritional supplement: https://drinkag1.com/timHelix Sleep https://helixsleep.com/tim premium mattresses: https://helixsleep.com/timTimestamps: [00:00:00] Who is Jack?[00:01:57] How a single “yes” from Jack shaped my career.[00:04:55] A contract lesson: How Chicken Soup for the Soul sold millions in China with zero royalties.[00:06:45] Jack’s background: From poverty to Harvard.[00:09:43] Discovering Chinese history and the “easy A” that changed everything.[00:11:07] Winning “Teacher of the Year” teaching Black history.[00:14:35] High praise from Sammy Davis Jr.[00:17:37] W. Clement Stone: The $600 million mentor who turned motivation into a science (and insurance).[00:21:35] Stone’s challenge: Take 100% responsibility and stop watching TV (a 14-month year hack).[00:22:40] From visualizing $100,000 to a million.[00:25:42] Chicken Soup origins.[00:27:35] Mark Victor Hansen joins.[00:29:15] 144 rejections later.[00:31:28] The ABA miracle.[00:34:05] The Rule of Five.[00:36:05] Selling The Soul and splurging on sweaters.[00:37:27] The Soup sourced from the universe.[00:39:33] The big break.[00:41:22] Word-of-mouth magic.[00:45:37] Lessons from live feedback.[00:47:27] The burnout years.[00:49:25] Life after Chicken Soup.[00:51:05] Late-night typing marathons and pun-laden chapter transitions that led to The Success Principles.[00:54:02] How Jack’s love of transformation beats any royalty check.[00:55:07] Retirement reflections.[00:59:32] Jack’s longevity formula: Laughter, organic food, love, and letting go.[01:02:10] An ayahuasca awakening.[01:03:39] The story of Rythmia Life Advancement Center and how it’s affected Jack.[01:06:43] Breaking belief loops and understanding community as medicine.[01:10:06] E + R = O and strategies for taking 100% responsibility of one’s life.[01:22:27] Why “clean up your messes” is first in Jack’s list of productivity tips.[01:29:27] Where to begin if you’re unfamiliar with Jack’s work.[01:31:08] Ken Blanchard: “Feedback is the breakfast of champions.”[01:32:13] Parting thoughts. Show notes for this episode: https://tim.blog/2025/10/29/jack-canfield/ * For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors https://tim.blog/podcast-sponsors Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts https://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books https://tim.blog/books. Follow Tim: Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss https://twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferriss https://instagram.com/timferriss/ YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss https://www.youtube.com/timferriss Facebook: facebook.com/timferriss https://www.facebook.com/TimFerriss/ LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferriss http://linkedin.com/in/timferriss See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, everybody. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. My guest today, I'm so happy to finally have on this podcast. He effectively made my career. Certainly, the four-hour work week would not have happened without him, which is a backstory a lot of folks don't have, Jack Canfield. You can find him online, jackcanfield.com. That's C-A-N-F-I-E-L-D. He is a bestselling author, speaker, trainer, and entrepreneur. He's the founder and CEO of the Canfield Training Group, which trains entrepreneurs, corporate leaders, and more how to accelerate the achievement of their personal and professional goals. Jack is the co-author of more than 200 books, including The Success Principles: How to Get From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be,

• 0:42Tim Ferriss?

  and perhaps most famously, Chicken Soup for the Soul, as a series which includes 40, four-zero, New York Times bestsellers and which has sold more than 600 million copies in 50-plus languages around the world. He has conducted live trainings for more than a million people in more than 50 countries, holds two Guinness World Records, we'll talk about that, and is a member of the National Speakers Association's Speakers Hall of Fame. I love Jack. He's so kind, so generous. He's been so patient with me, even when I was a very boisterous, chest-puffing, early 20-something, way back in the day. And you can find all things Jack at jackcanfield.com. Without further ado, please enjoy a very wide-ranging,

• 1:26Tim Ferriss?

  very practical, very tactical conversation with none other than Jack Canfield.

• 1:33Speaker 01

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half-mile before my hands start to shake. Can I ask you a personal question?

• 1:40Tim Ferriss?

  No, I would have seen an appropriate time.

• 1:44Speaker 02

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 1:56Tim Ferriss?

  Jack, Jack, Jack, it is so good to see you.

• 1:59Speaker 03

  Glad to see you, my friend. Yeah, this is fun.

• 2:02Tim Ferriss?

  And I'm so thrilled that you're here and that we're seeing each other again. 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 want 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, 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

• 2:44Tim Ferriss?

  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 2 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 of 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 S-Base. And I had

• 3:26Tim Ferriss?

  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 more than 20 years later and I'm so happy to have you on the podcast. So, thank you for all of that.

• 4:11Tim Ferriss?

  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 classes, or anything here? And frankly, I hoped you would say no because I didn't want to write a book. And you're 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.

• 4:43Speaker 03

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

• 4:51Tim Ferriss?

  You know, you gotta take your shot when you can take your shot.

• 4:53Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 4:54Tim 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 gonna 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? 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.

• 5:25Speaker 03

  Well, what happened is a company called Anwi 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 Anwi 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 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.

• 6:00Speaker 03

  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 about them in school, showing it to their parents, so on and so forth. So it all works out, all paid off. But that was a major lesson for us, you know, you got to be really, really careful when you're when you're acting with the Chinese and making deals, they're very, very clever.

• 6:29Tim Ferriss?

  You got to be careful. There is an expression, I'm not going to say that everyone uses this, but in Chinese, which is nang pian, jiou pian, which is if you can trick them, then you should trick them. And not saying everyone subscribes to that, but you gotta have your wits about you.

• 6:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:44Tim Ferriss?

  For sure. 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

• 7:06Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 7:06Tim Ferriss?

  the basics of where you grew up, what you learned or didn't learn from parents or household, things of that type?

• 7:13Speaker 03

  Well, I was born in 1944. My father was in the air force. World War II was going on. He trained bomber pilots, actually. So from the time I was born until the time I was six, we lived in three different states with, you know, 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. 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, you know, we were not wealthy at all.

• 7:55Speaker 03

  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. Says, if you need a helping hand, look at the end of your own arm. There'll be no more gifts coming from me.

• 8:13Speaker 03

  Okay? So I learned early on, you know, I, I worked my way through high school. I was a lifeguard of the country club pool. 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 till I graduated high school. My rich aunt had a son named Jack who died. If I was, you 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. But I would, again, I was in, but I wasn't of. I wasn't a doctor's son. I didn't, you know, the president of the guy who owned the Cadillac dealership.

• 8:54Speaker 03

  That was not my crowd. Yet I got to hang out with those kids and eventually got into Harvard on a scholarship, play football. I was a football player. I was honorable mention all state. I was an end, all that kind of stuff. I grew up thinking, you know, you 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 six in the morning and fell asleep immediately in French class. I was so tired, you know. I remember one day that I'm like this falling, I'm totally asleep in this class at nine in the morning and his professor comes over and he shakes me awake and he says, you can leave now. The class is over.

• 9:34Tim Ferriss?

  Very understanding comment from a teacher.

• 9:39Speaker 03

  I know. Well, whatever. And then I made, this is interesting. I majored in Chinese history, which is interesting why. Later I learned I had past lives in China and Tibet and so it made sense to me. But at that time, my freshman year, I got all Cs and everything. Here I was, A student, high school, get to Harvard. And I always say, I graduated in the half of the class that made the top half possible, you know. 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 Chek and Mao Zedong. He had slides of everything, you know. And I got the A. But I fell in

• 10:22Speaker 03

  love with Chinese history for some weird reason. That was my major, you know. So I always tell people, prepare me really well to do the work I do. It had nothing to do with it. My senior year, I took an elective class. I said, I need another easy A. And someone said, take SOCREL 10, SOCREL, 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, you know, motivation. So I said, well, how do I get into that? They said, well, it's a little late. You would have to get into psychology. I had to study as an undergraduate and I hadn't. They said, well, you could sneak into psychology through education.

• 11:06Speaker 03

  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 got teacher of the year my first year. I went to get 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 got energy and the poetry and the songs and the music and the dancing and the anger and the fear and all that. 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.

• 11:47Speaker 03

  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. 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, all of that.

• 12:19Tim Ferriss?

  I want to come back to W. Clement Stone. I had 600 million. We'll come back to that because that's a mind-boggling number, especially 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?

• 12:39Speaker 03

  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 white 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, you know, American history and world history. And I found a book called Before the Mayflower. And it was by Gordon Roan Bennett. And it was a book about African-American history. It's a paperback.

• 13:19Speaker 03

  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 is 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 the African-American Club, African-American Studies Club. They asked me if I'd be their 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.

• 13:59Speaker 03

  I had swum competitively in high school. And it was a waterfront instructor in summer camps and main and teach kids to swim and all that kind of stuff. So, 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." Then I'd have them go, replace the sentence with, "I won't." Now, which feels stronger, which feels more true, which is, you know, and they go, "Yeah, can't's 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.

• 14:41Speaker 03

  So Sammy Davis Jr. was at school. He was gonna 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 him the award the same day. And I'm walking offstage and he looked at me and he said, "You must be really cool to have gotten that award from those kids." I think I lived on that for days.

• 15:01Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, that's a hell of a compliment from a hell of a person and a hell of an entertainer.

• 15:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, and you're like 22 years old or something, you know, it's a big deal.

• 15:09Tim 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.

• 15:18Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick thanks to our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. I don't know about you, but with so many options for banking and investing these days, also with accounts scattered all over the place, it's harder than ever to track finances. And that is why I am happy to recommend this episode's sponsor, Monarch, named best budgeting app of 2025 by the Wall Street Journal. Monarch brings your entire financial life together in one clean interface, letting you see your full financial picture at a glance. You can even have widgets that show you your spending and so on, so that you don't have to even open the app on your phone. One person on my team has tried four other budgeting apps and said linking his accounts on Monarch was by far the easiest, cleanest interface,

• 16:02Tim Ferriss?

  et cetera, et cetera. Another one of my employees said Monarch has made it so much easier for her and her husband to be on the same page financially and to track spending as a couple. So why not get serious and get simple about getting your financial act together so you can see everything in one place before year's end and get Monarch. Try it out. Use code TIM at Monarch.com. That's M-O-N-A-R-C-H, Monarch.com for half off of your first year. That's 50% off of your first year at Monarch.com with code TIM. As many of you know, for the last few years, I've been sleeping on a Midnight Luxe mattress from today's sponsor, Helix Sleep. I also have one in the guest bedroom downstairs and

• 16:44Tim Ferriss?

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• 17:24Tim Ferriss?

  So just go to helixsleep.com slash Tim. One more time, helixsleep.com slash Tim. With Helix, better sleep starts now.

• 17:37Tim Ferriss?

  So if we flash forward to W. Clement Stone, how did he make $600 million? That's just not to fixate on that, but I mean, that's a non trivial sum of money.

• 17:47Speaker 03

  Three ways. Number one, he started a insurance company called combined insurance. And it was really low premiums. The price you paid for it. And he believed everybody could afford something. And he wanted to ensure 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. He had a training system. This is so cool. Think about this. So here's the training system. He tell them what to do. Maybe a Monday class. He said, now we're going to go tomorrow and I'm going to go in. 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.

• 18:30Speaker 03

  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 do this, you do this. Okay, but you missed that. Next time, watch that. They go in, they do it again. Do that about three or four times in the morning. And the fourth time they're going in and he just turns to the kid and he goes, this one's yours.

• 18:54Speaker 03

  He just stepped back and the kid, maybe he made it, maybe he blew it. But afterwards they go out and say, okay, you missed two things. We're going to go to the next one. Watch me do those two things. Next one, he go, this is yours. By the end of the day, they knew how to sell.

• 19:07Tim Ferriss?

  That's incredible.

• 19:07Speaker 03

  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 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 maintenance 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.

• 19:51Speaker 03

  So if you go to that part of Chicago, there are all these buildings over the tracks, which he got a hundred year lease on the air rights and they built these huge skyscrapers, which he then got the royalties for, the commissions for, 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, the magazine Og Mandino, who wrote The Greatest Salesman. So I'm working in the Stone Foundation at one point. So I quit teaching, I worked for Stone.

• 20:29Tim Ferriss?

  Why did you quit teaching?

• 20:31Speaker 03

  Because Stone offered me a job.

• 20:33Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 20:34Speaker 03

  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.

• 21:09Tim Ferriss?

  You're the, you're the edge case he has to budget for.

• 21:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. It was like a grant from the government or something. So I took all these workshops, you know, everything from Carnegie to martial therapy and body work and meditation. 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. I got an intake interview, first day, and he says to me, do you take 100% responsibility for your life? And I said, I don't know. He said, is he a yes or no answer, son? Think.

• 21:48Speaker 03

  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 a hundred percent responsibility. So he introduced me to the whole concept of a hundred 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, you know, 11 o'clock or something like that. So that's three hours a day. Just 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. That'll give you a 14 month year. You'll be much more competitive than all the people in your field if you do that.

• 22:34Speaker 03

  So I did that. He was teaching me in the freaking interview, like, you know, so it was cool.

• 22:41Tim 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?

• 22:57Speaker 03

  He challenged me because, I mean, as an educator, I was probably making back then 30,000 a year if I was lucky, you know, that was like, now people like a lot more inflation. But what happens is, he said, I want to challenge you to make a hundred thousand dollars 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, you know, 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 a hundred thousand dollars seriously. And every morning I'd wake up and I'd put a hundred thousand dollar bill on the ceiling. I didn't even know one existed at the time. Banks actually trade them back and forth.

• 23:42Speaker 03

  But I took a hundred dollar bill. I projected it with a member overhead projectors. I projected it 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, same affirmation, which went, at that time, God is my answer of supply and large sums of money coming in quickly and easily as I earn a hundred thousand dollars a year. And about, I'd say, maybe a month or two into it, I'm in the shower and I had a hundred thousand dollar idea. Cause 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.

• 24:27Speaker 03

  That was my first $100,000 idea. And so to make a long story short, cause 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'd ordered something in the mail. And you ever order something in the mail and it comes and then there's like five flyers for other products they have in the, in the box?

• 24:58Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, sure.

• 24:58Speaker 03

  So she had done that. So why don't we sell other people's stuff? So we'd added other product. And I hired a high school kid to come in after school and to sell the books, you know, ship them out and so forth. So long story short, I did not make a hundred thousand dollars. I made 92,328 dollars, but I went like, okay, this is a success. Then my wife says, 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?

• 25:42Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, 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, at least the genesis story. Where did Chicken Soup for the Soul come from? 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. How did it start?

• 26:15Speaker 03

  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. But 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 the book anywhere? My daughter needs to hear that story." I went, "No." And over

• 26:58Speaker 03

  a course of two months, I must have had four people a day say, "That story in a book, that story in a book, that story in a book." So I'm coming home on a plane from Boston to LA 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 Monver story, whatever. It was 70 stories. So I said, "Okay, that's a book." So I made the commitment that every night I would write, 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, you know, 108, whatever. So I did that. And when I was about, I don't know, five, six through, I had breakfast with Mark Victor Hansen, who became my co-author.

• 27:41Speaker 03

  And we were having breakfast in Beverly Hills at this place. All these human potential leaders would come to this breakfast. The Inside Edge was called. 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." And I went, "That's like telling Stephen King, you should be his co-author because he's five, six of the way through the book? How do you justify that?" He says, "Well, some of the stories you tell, you stole from me."

• 28:11Speaker 03

  I said, maybe three, Mark, come on. And he said, but I'm a much better salesperson than you. You can be the, I'll be the upfront voice person. I said, well, give me 30 more stories and we'll talk. I had 70 at that time. So he said, okay, came back, he did it. So basically, it was a marriage made in heaven because he really was good at getting the bird up. We were in a mall once. Believe this, Tim. We're in a mall, I think it was B Dalton Bookstores. They were in a lot of malls.

• 28:40Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I remember B Dalton.

• 28:42Speaker 03

  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 at 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. They all like gasped, you know, like, you're the guy who was in the hall. I was too shy to do that. It worked out really well. But, you know, 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.

• 29:24Tim Ferriss?

  You know, when I think about that story and I think about, you know, Four 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. Maybe, tell me if this resonates or not, but you can have a bad idea that gets rejected, right? 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 these 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?

• 30:09Speaker 03

  I think it's what you just said for us too, because 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 tear-jerkers, they were inspirational, they made you laugh, they made you feel like you want to call up and tell your mother, "I gotta 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.

• 30:45Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 30:46Speaker 03

  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 like get engaged with the characters and really like go, you know, get involved. Whereas all these stories were in categories like on love, on overcoming obstacles, you know, 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. We would have self-published eventually, and I would have made a lot more money, but I would have been, I didn't really want to be a publisher. I wanted to be a speaker and a writer.

• 31:28Tim 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 and A with you. So, here we go. It's just a paragraph. "Eventually, 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, 'Well, read the manuscript.' Some people wouldn't even take it. And they read it, in this case, and loved it. And they said, they 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.

• 32:11Tim Ferriss?

  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, I guess 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?

• 32:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, we were doing the mindset work. I always say it's mindset, skill set and ready, set, go. The set, go, I wanted another set, 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, Scott Peck. And that book was on the New York Times list for 12 years, 512 weeks.

• 33:08Tim Ferriss?

  So long.

• 33:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, I think it's a record. I mean, you were really close, I think, maybe you still are, I don't know. 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 in From Mars. We talked to Ken Blanchard, who wrote The One Minute Manager. We talked to Barbara DeAngelis, who wrote The 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 it's, I think podcasts are better than radio.

• 33:50Speaker 03

  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. So five a day, every day for a year. So we created what we called the rule of five. It's a book by John Kramer called How to Sell a Million Books, something like that. 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, two by three post-it, put it on the 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 a church. Can we talk in your church? Can we, we call five PXs in the military and we say,

• 34:35Speaker 03

  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 like non-stop. We were giving talks at churches on Sunday morning, Wednesday night, you know, whatever. They are the ones that have bookstores. We 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. And we did radio shows that were like 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 non-stop activity.

• 35:19Speaker 03

  And it was interesting because we were pretty amped up in the beginning and we talked to the psychic guy. He was in trance. He go, "It would be as if you would go to a tree with a very sharp axe and you would take five swipes at that tree every single day. Eventually even a redwood would have to come down." You know, we went, "Okay, we'll do five. That's what we're gonna do."

• 35:42Tim Ferriss?

  What prompted the trip to the psychic? Do you remember?

• 35:46Speaker 03

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

• 36:05Tim Ferriss?

  And how old were you or what date was this either one roughly when the first Chicken Soup for the Soul came out?

• 36:11Speaker 03

  Ninety-three and I was born in forty-four. So what is that forty-nine years old, something like it?

• 36:16Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah. And when it hit, right, 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? Or in what ways did that affect your life?

• 36:29Speaker 03

  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 know? You're probably familiar with the concept of ikigai, which comes from the Japanese, where 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,

• 37:11Speaker 03

  my purpose is needed, it's going to work, I can make a living at it. So that was a big confirmation of that, I think, more than anything. And yeah, I bought three sweaters, you know, in different colors and all that kind of stuff. It went through my nouveau riche stage for sure.

• 37:24Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, 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. Where did that, this I suppose is a nod to the intuition or unorthodox approaches, but how did that title come to be?

• 37:54Speaker 03

  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 I said, well, we're both meditators. So we said, let's just meditate and ask the universe, source, God, whatever you want to call that energy for a title. So Mark would go to bed, Mark's really hyper. He'd go to bed chanting, make a bestselling title, make a bestselling title, make a bestselling title. I would just go and I would, every morning I'd sit for an hour and I'd say, okay, God, give me a title. And on Wednesday, two days, nothing happened. Third day, I'm sitting there and all of a sudden this chalkboard appears, green chalkboard like in school, and a hand comes out and writes chicken soup in script on it. And I said to the hand, what the hell

• 38:38Speaker 03

  does chicken soup have to do with this book? And the voice said back, when you were a kid, your grandmother gave you chicken soup when you were sick. And I thought, but this is not a book on sick people. And the voice answered 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 were 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. Oh, my wife, she got goosebumps, told Mark, called Mark, what do you think it is? He got goosebumps. Called

• 39:21Speaker 03

  her agent, he got goosebumps. Went to New York, met with 21 publishers, seven a day for three days, nobody got goosebumps.

• 39:32Speaker 03

  Basically, that led to, you know, the 144 rejections. And you're right, we went to the American Booksellers Association, boot to booth. We're both wearing backpacks full of these spiral bound, like 20 stories from the book, the best stories. Would you publish this book? Would you be interested in this book? You know, and most people wouldn't even take one alone. And then Peter Vexo, who's the guy who did publish it, you know, and 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, you know, he took out an ad in New York on a billboard, thanking all the publishers that rejected Chicken Soup for the Soul.

• 40:16Tim Ferriss?

  He may have just laughed. Was it laugh as in I don't believe her? Or was he like, that's some chutzpah?

• 40:21Speaker 03

  No, he laughed because he thought we were fricking crazy. He thought we were

• 40:24Tim Ferriss?

  Insane.

• 40:25Speaker 03

  You guys are nuts, you know?

• 40:29Speaker 03

  What happened was the first shipment he made was 800 books to, I think it was Barnes and Noble, might have been Borders, and they sold 80 books the first week. He said, when you sell 1/10 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 started with those presses that do this kind of thing, you know? And now that, 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 till later, he said, don't take any more orders for delivery in December.

• 41:15Speaker 03

  I don't want any more revenue for tax purposes this year.

• 41:22Tim Ferriss?

  And meanwhile, right, you're following the rule of five. You're calling the churches, you're speaking 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 breakthrough?

• 41:46Speaker 03

  I think, you know, 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, you know, you're 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, you know. 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 it'd be a big sales and it would take like 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.

• 42:29Speaker 03

  I think the other thing that was really big for us was a company called Skill Path and another one, I'm forgetting the name of right now, but they were doing, sometimes you get these marketing things and say, you know, we're going to be doing a workshop on AI and we're going to do it in Davenport, Iowa on Monday and it will be in the middle of Iowa on Tuesday and it'll be there. So there are these people running around doing seminars everywhere.

• 42:56Tim Ferriss?

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

• 43:02Speaker 03

  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 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 how to use Excel, whatever. And what happens is that those are places we never would have gone and in the back of the room, they were selling our books. We got a lot, a lot of book sales in 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, you know, would you sell this book as part of your backroom? Cause I knew they did backroom, mostly audio programs back then, they were like $60 for

• 43:47Speaker 03

  six cassettes. And so he said, well, I don't know, there's no money in a book, you know, or whatever. So then he was a Christian and he always led the Wednesday night men's group or something. 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. He went, maybe I should reconsider.

• 44:20Speaker 03

  So they did.

• 44:24Tim Ferriss?

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• 45:07Tim Ferriss?

  industry. So check them out. Subscribe today to try the next gen of AG1. Listeners will also get a free bottle of D3K2 and AG1 Welcome Kit and AG1 Travel Packs with your first order. So start your journey with AG1's Next Gen and experience the difference firsthand. Simply go to drinkag1.com/tim. That's drinkag1.com/tim.

• 45:36Tim Ferriss?

  I want to emphasize something for folks, and this is through my own lens and bias, of course, but 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, nonfiction stories, is practice it in front of live audiences. You just get such valuable feedback. It is not the same, speaking as 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.

• 46:21Tim Ferriss?

  I have thought, actually, I'm sitting here in Austin, Texas, right now, and I've 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.

• 46:59Speaker 03

  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 didn't I give them enough information, where was I redundant, you know, etc. 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, you know, and then put it online. So, yeah, it's crazy what people don't do that they should.

• 47:26Tim Ferriss?

  To maybe just put a bow on the chapter of Chicken Soup for the Soul. I mean, 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, right? 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 titles, all future royalties, the trademarks, etc. How did that happen? How did that come to pass? And why did that happen?

• 48:08Speaker 03

  I think two things. We got kind of burned out on the process. When we first started, we were doing a book or two a year. And by the end, we were doing like eight or nine books a year because the publisher wanted more because everything has an arc, you know. 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. They don't, well, the first books had universal appeal across the board. When you start doing sports fan soul or golfer soul, you know, you start to limit the size of the audience. So we're doing all these books and we kind of got tired and I kind of got burned out at the level of not another one-armed guy climb on Everest story or one-legged, you know, blank. I mean, I should have been inspired. It was like, ah, not another, my mother died and she

• 48:51Speaker 03

  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, you know. I knew I was getting a bit jaded, you know, like, is it not the thing, you know? And also I think I was tired. So the guy who was the CEO of our company at the time kind of noticed all that and said, would you like to sell it? And I said, well, for the right price, you know? 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, happened at the right time. So that's how it happened.

• 49:25Tim 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, right? You're like, oh my God, another bluebird story. I just 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?

• 50:02Speaker 03

  During that whole time, I was running seminars and, you know, like three, four, five, six hundred people seminar, sometimes seven hundred, eight hundred people in a room. I did one seminar in India that had 7,000 Herbalife people in it for three days. They only spoke Tamil. The whole thing was translated, you know? And so I had that going. That was always happening. And the chicken soup was kind of like was a parallel track to my workshops and my seminars. And 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. That's when Patty, my business partner, said, you really should. Consider putting all these success ideas into a book.

• 50:46Speaker 03

  And that's what led to the success principles, which is the second kind of chapter of my life, if you will, in terms of that being. But I was always teaching success ever since W. Clement Stone. 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.

• 51:05Tim 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 four, I think, when was the pub date on the success principles?

• 51:17Speaker 03

  Two thousand and five.

• 51:19Tim Ferriss?

  Two thousand and five, right. So it came out two years before the four hour work week. And I think I have a brief cameo in there, probably because of the kickboxing stuff.

• 51:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:28Tim Ferriss?

  Or something else.

• 51:29Speaker 03

  I tell that story.

• 51:29Tim Ferriss?

  And so I have a side 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?

• 51:50Speaker 03

  Well, there is a little bit of an identity thing. I became known as the chicken soup guy, you know, and I had to like 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, all that data about what works in terms of success, you know? And the actual writing took about a year and a half. I would write from seven at night. Sometimes I'd, all of a sudden I'd hear birds singing and it would be getting gray. I was like, oh, I kind of been up all night typing, you know? So I had the regular.

• 52:26Tim Ferriss?

  Bluebird again.

• 52:28Speaker 03

  Well, I had a regular job, you know, which was to run my seminars. Fortunately, most of them were on weekends and evenings, but basically I would go to bed at seven in the morning and sleep till 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 it was not that hard. 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 had. It's a coffee roaster. It's all about perseverance and not giving up. And he's up in Seattle and he's sleeping on these coffee bean bags because he couldn't afford an apartment. Now he's uber rich, you know.

• 53:12Speaker 03

  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. You know, I love that being able to make those kind of ways and stuff, you know?

• 53:36Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 53:37Speaker 03

  And then his chapter is called Going the Extra Mile. Basically, I said, he, 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.

• 54:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. What was the reason for continuing to do the seminars? Because you're, presumably you've 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 additional revenue stream? Like, why did you keep doing so many in-person events?

• 54:26Speaker 03

  I love doing it. It's like, I don't know if you, I know you participate in a lot of sports and you got really good at them fast because of the way you play. But whatever your favorite sport is, you play it because you love it when you're playing it, you know? And 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, you know, all of a sudden they're coming up and I think, oh my God, you know? 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 that just, I love it. I, I'm kind of sort of retiring right now.

• 55:09Speaker 03

  And literally, that was the hardest part of that decision. So I had to get my wife to agree that I could do X number of workshops a year. But it's now like, and 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 and now I have two.

• 55:29Tim Ferriss?

  And how, what is your age now, Jack?

• 55:31Speaker 03

  Eighty-one.

• 55:32Tim 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 just, 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, and I'm not questioning the decision, but why retire? Why change what you're doing?

• 55:55Speaker 03

  I realize there are 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 them up at the end.

• 56:13Speaker 03

  I have a 12-year-old grandson who I absolutely adore, who's the coolest damn 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. 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, you know, whatever. And it's funny, I never thought I would retire. I told everyone for years I'd never retire. And then I was doing an ayahuasca experience down in Costa Rica. I'll tell the story real quick.

• 56:54Speaker 03

  So 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. Forgiving both my ex-wives, their lawyers. You know, I've forgiven everybody. What's left to forgive? But I'll do it. Like 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, oh, God. I gotta 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, like put the Soviet Union back together. How does he do that?

• 57:39Speaker 03

  You start bringing all these countries back that they gave away, like the Ukraine and Poland and, you know, all those places. So I finally forgave him and I felt this energy just like leave my body, who 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 like a shrine to how significant I am.

• 58:08Speaker 03

  The Guinness Book World Record, magazine covers, awards, honorary doctorates, you know, people that made me honorary sheriff of this town. I've got more damn stuff, you know? And I realized, oh my God, part of my motivation has been to feel like I was worthy of being here, you know? I made a difference. I'm significant, you know? Now, there's a huge philanthropic, loving, service-oriented heart in my body. But I realized like, how many honorary doctorates do you need? You know, I'm Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Canfield, you know? 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, you know, it was crazy.

• 58:52Speaker 03

  And so I had that awareness and I thought, you know, I really need to slow down and take a look at all that motivation. And part of it's being 81, my 80th birthday last summer, 81st birthday in August. I just realized, you know, there's a lot I want to do that I'm not doing. And I'm gonna just shove all this work stuff to the side, not totally. I've got four books I'm still writing, so I'm not retired retired. But it's like the road warrior, you know, the three weeks in Asia, the three weeks, yeah, all that. And I'm not doing that anymore.

• 59:26Tim Ferriss?

  I love how four books is the retirement plan. That's Jack's version of lazy. So I'm going to come back to that I was gonna 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?

• 59:43Speaker 03

  I think several things. Passionate about what I do. And I follow my joy, follow my passion. So there's not a lot of resistance between what was coming through and what I want to do. I can't say I'm fearless totally, but I'm very few fears in my life anymore. Just, you know, if I'm going to do it, we'll do it. And so that's there's that inner struggle is mostly gone. That uses up a lot of energy and increases disease in the body. I don't have a lot of limiting beliefs anymore. One of the books I'm writing is about belief change process that I've co-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?

• 1:00:22Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:00:30Speaker 03

  I did that work for years. I've not ever been with her, but I did her work. I don't get upset about anything. It just is what it is. You know, 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, you know, 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, you know, all this stuff coming out of my body, detoxing, I do saunas regularly. I, I want to say I'm exercise every single day because I'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.

• 1:01:14Speaker 03

  I love your digital detox concept, which I actually put in the 10th anniversary edition of the success principles.

• 1:01:20Tim Ferriss?

  Amazing. I didn't know that.

• 1:01:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'll have to send you a copy. Can't believe I didn't do that. So I think that organic food, when I was in graduate school, UMass in the MR, probably it was 23, four, 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, you know? 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, you know? For longevity.

• 1:02:03Tim Ferriss?

  That's a good list. I'm taking some notes for myself. I need 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?

• 1:02:28Speaker 03

  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, you know, vodka tonic or whatever. And that's another thing I stopped drinking quite a bit ago. But the reality was, I think I, 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 ayodhi and things like that. But I only did a few journeys. Never, I did LSD once, I think. I was, 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 Lynn Twist, who runs the Pachamama Alliance, was taking people down to the rainforest

• 1:03:12Speaker 03

  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 an amazing breakthrough experiences. And so I became interested in it.

• 1:03:29Tim Ferriss?

  How old were you when you had that first experience, you say?

• 1:03:33Speaker 03

  I'm thinking 20 years ago, maybe with Lynn, yeah, something like that. And then when I learned about Rhythmia and I thought, well, I want to do that. And the thing I like about Rhythmia, 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 into 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 said, don't commit suicide. So you go to the rainforest and work at this guy named Maganda.

• 1:04:16Speaker 03

  So he looks him up and looks like a resort and he signs up to go there and gets down there. And the whole thing was, I mean, the resort images were bullshit. It was an old house, dirty mattresses, cockroaches, you know, all this stuff.

• 1:04:31Tim Ferriss?

  Hotel paradise.

• 1:04:32Speaker 03

  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's this African guy and he says, look at you, man. I don't carry your bags. He was just used to being treated like a king, right? 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, man, lie down. And he gets in about eight people lying head to head in the middle of a circle in the garage on mattresses. And they do Ibo games, which is an African thing.

• 1:05:07Tim Ferriss?

  Hell of an introduction, yeah.

• 1:05:08Speaker 03

  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 were reborn.

• 1:05:32Speaker 03

  And he was. And so he decided what he wanted to do was help people have his experience. And the second time he did, Obegane, he said, you're supposed to open a center, but don't do it with Iboge and do it with ayahuasca. So he started that center. I've been down there five times, do four journeys every time you're there, so 20 journeys. They've been life-changing for me, just literally life-changing. I think that's another reason I'm so light and just, you know, it's all good.

• 1:05:59Tim 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 chakruna, this, the leaves of this shrub, actually related to the, you know, the coffee plant. But the actual vine itself contains a lot of interesting properties. And there's, I think it's ESPD 50, this like ethnobotanical search for psychoactive drugs. There's a compendium that goes into, there's a presentation from that that goes into the, some of the potential properties around neurogenesis and so on, from the beta-carblades and so on themselves in the vine. So even the vine has some very, very interesting properties.

• 1:06:43Tim Ferriss?

  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 undertaught? I mean, 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?

• 1:07:09Speaker 03

  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. They watch the secret, they visualize, they affirm, and then somehow it's not working. They don't know why. And so it's always like either fear or limiting beliefs or just lack of willingness to take action, you know, 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 like 700 people sign up and I'll do this belief process with them. And I'd say 99% of the people have a major breakthrough.

• 1:07:54Speaker 03

  I had a woman got rid of arthritis in like 20 minutes, you know? I mean, ridiculous stuff. So these beliefs we're holding on to 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, not safe to ask for things, 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. It's kind of like, I'll tell people, it's like calling up Domino's Pizza to order a

• 1:08:37Speaker 03

  pizza and then having this other voice call them and say, forget the order. And you wonder, why isn't this showing up, you know? 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, is 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 more aware, is the power of community,

• 1:09:20Speaker 03

  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, you know? 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. It'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 in Rhythmia, what's coming up is coming out, so don't resist it.

• 1:10:03Tim Ferriss?

  That's a good one.

• 1:10:04Speaker 03

  Get to clear it.

• 1:10:05Tim Ferriss?

  I want to come back to something that we spoke about, or you spoke about, early on with W. Clementstone 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

• 1:10:49Tim Ferriss?

  about, maybe I don't complain, but I blame. 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 a hundred 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?

• 1:11:13Speaker 03

  Well, I'll start with a story a couple therapists told me once. She was working with a couple, and they were arguing about whose fault it was that something had happened. And the therapist said, well, I'm glad to see you agree on something. They said, what? Well, you obviously agree that if you can figure out whose fault it is, somehow that's going to make your life better.

• 1:11:36Tim Ferriss?

  That's really, that's outstanding. Yeah.

• 1:11:39Speaker 03

  So basically, I teach you a little formula, equation, if you call it, like E plus R equals 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.

• 1:12:02Speaker 03

  That event, plus you're blaming, does not produce a better outcome. So we all want a better outcome. We want to experience joy, freedom, peace, love, success, abundance, you know, 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. 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 at awful clubs, you know, and 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

• 1:12:45Speaker 03

  that happened that day, like, you know, 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 plus R equals 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. You think we can control things outside of us. We can only control our response to things outside of us, and then notice what kind of outcome that produces. And what you've done magnificently, and what I've done a

• 1:13:30Speaker 03

  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, you've been, your book, The Titans book, is just amazing, all these people telling you what worked, and such amazing, 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, you know, it's just, it's unfortunate, but he does. But it's not producing particularly great results as a result of it. In order to complain, you have to have a reference point of something better you prefer. So

• 1:14:13Speaker 03

  I can't complain about my girlfriend if I don't have an image of some woman who's better than my girlfriend. Now, the reality is, nobody ever complains about gravity.

• 1:14:23Speaker 03

  You've never seen a normal person walking through the mall, all bent over, going, "Gravity, I hate gravity. Wasn't for gravity, I wouldn't be all bent over. Gravity sucks", you know? Never seen 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. It lets off steam. It gets people to go together. Yeah, I know. My wife's the same way, you know, whatever it is. But we don't get a better result.

• 1:15:06Speaker 03

  So, you know, 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.

• 1:15:31Speaker 03

  Right? So basically, if you're complaining, then 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 go, "Why so high?"

• 1:15:58Speaker 03

  Because it's not a zero. Something's 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. They go, "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's gonna change, you know?

• 1:16:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:27Tim Ferriss?

  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 Jaco Willink, who's a famous Navy SEAL commander. He's done a million things since. His first public interview ever was on this podcast ages ago. And he has this, 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 just a minute or two of this.

• 1:17:12Tim Ferriss?

  So "Good," this is the title, and Jaco 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 is when Jaco 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 it to me, he said, "I already know what you're gonna say." And I asked, "What am I gonna say?" He said, "You're gonna 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, "When things are going badly, there's going to be some good that will come for it."

• 1:17:56Tim Ferriss?

  "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 then he says, just to put a pin in it, he says, "Now, I don't mean to say something trite, I'm not saying 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, accept 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."

• 1:18:36Tim Ferriss?

  And I feel like you reflect that, and certainly Jaco is sort of an archetype of many types.

• 1:18:46Tim Ferriss?

  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, like 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% responsibility?

• 1:19:12Speaker 03

  You know, I've always got something I'm working on and you have to have like something that keeps it in your focus, you know? So if I'm engaging in some kind of negative self-talk, then I take and I create an opposite affirmation. I'll put that on some Post-its and put it on the refrigerator door and on my bathroom mirror and stuff like that. Because, you know, we know it 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 its 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's wrote a book about it.

• 1:19:57Speaker 03

  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 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, you know, whatever. And so it's that level of repetition until it becomes, you know, ground in, you 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, you know? 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,

• 1:20:41Speaker 03

  that's a lot. So for me, for example, when we read the, what's the book? Shaman from Mexico. Boy.

• 1:20:51Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, Carlos Castaneda?

• 1:20:53Speaker 03

  No, different one.

• 1:20:54Tim Ferriss?

  Different Shaman from Mexico.

• 1:20:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is me being sharp at anyone.

• 1:21:03Speaker 03

  Anyway, he had these, the four agreements. That's the guy, the book.

• 1:21:06Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, this is, uh, Don.

• 1:21:09Speaker 03

  Don Miguel Ruiz. 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, you know, of not, not making other people wrong, thinking positive, et cetera. And we had to like 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. And 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.

• 1:21:49Speaker 03

  But I think that, uh, yeah, reminders are important.

• 1:21:54Tim 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 LaBeire's, if you want to go into 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 Yaki way of knowledge. That was the book that I was thinking of.

• 1:22:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, he was, he was, that was one of the first books I read. It was a great book.

• 1:22:22Tim 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. This is from jackcanfield.com. Productivity tips. And you, like me, I'm sure have quite a few blog posts, but you've got, 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

• 1:23:03Tim Ferriss?

  goddamn paper. I am a hypographic note taking maniac and I just have paper, it metastasizes to cover every flat surface that I have. And I try to take photos here and there and digitize, but it's messy and it really agitates me. And 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?

• 1:23:32Speaker 03

  Well, you're talking to a fellow person and he's the same rehab, just so you know.

• 1:23:39Speaker 03

  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, like if a waitress, 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.

• 1:24:24Speaker 03

  So anything that's incomplete. Now that can be that thing you started and didn't finish. It could be that letter you were writing, the book you're not finished up, the notes you have over here. But what I've learned to do is find a place for those things, you know, like if I have lots of filing systems, I have a filing systems in my computer, I have filing systems, I have about 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 come up file. So let's say I need to do something March 28th. I have a folder called March. So on the first of March, I go through that folder of everything I put in there and then I put it into my calendar for those days. Or I can put it in now, you know, like called old Steve on March 28th. But if there's papers related to that, things we're going to talk about, whatever, it goes

• 1:25:09Speaker 03

  in my March file. So it's there, it's not in my visual cue.

• 1:25:15Speaker 03

  So 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 that we don't want to talk to. So we go down the aisle and hope we evade them, you know, because incomplete. So all that energy is taken up because it's not complete. All the things you've never said, the upsets, the thank yous, the acknowledgements, the wanting acknowledgements and not having got them, they're 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. You know, Dan Sullivan's work, the Strategic

• 1:25:49Tim Ferriss?

  Coach? Yeah. Yeah. He's got some great stuff.

• 1:25:51Speaker 03

  Well, one of the 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 pileup shit that I deal with and you deal with. But the reality is that everything is incomplete. You're 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

• 1:26:36Speaker 03

  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, you know, the attic, the tool drawer, the door that has the leashes.

• 1:26:48Tim Ferriss?

  Oh my God. I can feel my chorsol piling up as you're listing. Well, it sounds like, sounds like you're in my house on my nanny camp.

• 1:26:57Speaker 03

  I'm going to say to you, I have a sheet of like 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, you were complete. You couldn't teach it if you weren't living it. Think about it. Financial records, your checkbook not balanced, stuff in your car, you know, clothes that don't fit anymore. I mean, people go, you can 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, you know?

• 1:27:28Tim Ferriss?

  This is another thing we have in common. No, I have so many T-shirts. It's just unacceptable. It's indefensible.

• 1:27:34Speaker 03

  I know, I know. I know. But I had to go through and kind of clean it out, you know, because it got to a point where I couldn't even put anything in the closet. So the rule is if I haven't worn it in the last 60 days and it's not a tuxedo or something like that, it's gone. I love all the decluttering books that are out there and, you know, 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 not, you're never going to use it again."

• 1:28:07Tim Ferriss?

  I'll tell you a dirty little secret, which is that 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. 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.

• 1:28:47Speaker 03

  George Carlin does a really good routine on stuff. If you can find it, it's really amazing.

• 1:28:52Tim 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. It's like, you know, 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.

• 1:29:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, I will. I will.

• 1:29:17Tim Ferriss?

  Is that something we could share in the show notes for this episode?

• 1:29:19Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, sure, sure. Yeah, I think it's even a page in my book. If not, I'll get it for you.

• 1:29:25Tim 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?

• 1:29:47Speaker 03

  I would just say, you know, kind of self-servingly, that if you would like to know more about my work, the book that Tim talked about, it's now in its 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 a Chicken Soup book, start with the first one. It's really brilliant. One thing I did, Tim, I haven't done for all my books, but I did with that book. I literally, after we'd 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 subvocalizing in their brain. They're not speed reading. And if it didn't sound, as

• 1:30:28Speaker 03

  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, you know, get feedback, but also read it out loud. How does it sound to you, you know? 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, so it's been 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 1 to 10. That book went on to sell, I think, 6 million copies or something like that, you know? So, feedback, I love what Tim Blanchard says, "Feedback is the breakfast of champions," you know?

• 1:31:15Tim Ferriss?

  Feedback is the breakfast of champions.

• 1:31:18Speaker 03

  And most people avoid feedback because they're afraid of what they're going to hear. And you gotta know that we call it constructive feed forward, you know, constructive feedback. But anyway, I would read that book, go to my website, jackcanfield.com. There's all kinds of things there you might be interested in. And it's interesting, I hadn't, I normally say this, but last night, for some reason, I was looking up something and I couldn't remember it, and I thought it was, there's a guy named Nick Nanton. He did a documentary of my life called The Soul of Success. And I went in there to find one little thing and I don't know, call it egotistical, whatever. I watched the whole damn hour on YouTube. It's free. Just go The Soul of Success on YouTube and you'll see one of the most amazing documentaries ever made, I think.

• 1:32:01Speaker 03

  Cause he's an Emmy winning documentarian. 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, you know?

• 1:32:12Tim 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 of 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, which is 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.

• 1:32:56Tim Ferriss?

  I don't know if you remember this, but I remember when I was volunteering at that event, S-Face. 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 had probably gotten it online somehow. And I remember you had your glasses on and you sort of 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.

• 1:33:41Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:33:41Tim Ferriss?

  And I really appreciate you taking the time.

• 1:33:43Speaker 03

  Well, I've enjoyed this. One of the best podcasts I've ever been on. So, thank you.

• 1:33:48Tim 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. And until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others, but also to yourself. And thanks for tuning in.

• 1:34:12Tim Ferriss?

  Hey, guys. This is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered, or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric

• 1:34:56Tim Ferriss?

  things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So, if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday. Type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. As many of you know, for the last few years, I've been sleeping on a Midnight Luxe mattress from today's sponsor, Helix Sleep. I also have one in the guest bedroom downstairs, and feedback from friends has always been fantastic. It's something they comment on without any prompting from me whatsoever. I also recently had a chance to test the Helix

• 1:35:39Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:36:21Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:37:05Tim Ferriss?

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