Million Dollar Monday

Unlocking the Combination to Success with Jack Canfield

January 11, 2021 Greg Muzzillo
Million Dollar Monday
Unlocking the Combination to Success with Jack Canfield
Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

Our inaugural guest, Jack Canfield, Founder of the Billion Dollar Chicken Soup for the Soul Publishing Empire discusses with Host Greg Muzzillo how success is like knowing the combination to a lock. “If you know that combination, you can open the lock. Doesn’t matter if you’re smart or not, doesn’t matter how old you are, whether you went to college or not,” explains Canfield, “The problem is some people are missing a number or two or they have them in the wrong order. I don’t care how hard you work. That lock will never open. So the combination basically is…” 

Chapter Summaries

  • 01:03 - All About Jack
  • 02:40 - In the Beginning
  • 06:05 - Chicken Soup for the Soul
  • 11:09 - The Success Principles
  • 21:34 - Some of the Lows
  • 29:52 - Big Dreams for the Future

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Jack Canfield:

And I say that success is like knowing the combination to a lock. If you know that combination, you can open the lock. Doesn't matter if you're smart or not, doesn't matter how old you are, or if you went to college or not. The problem is some people are missing a number or two, or they have them in the wrong order. I don't care how hard you work. That lock will never open. So the combination basically is...

Greg Muzzillo:

Hello and welcome to Million Dollar Monday. I'm your host, Greg Muzzillo bringing you real successful people with real useful advice for people with big dreams. I understand big dreams. I turned an investment of$200 and a lot of great advice from some really successful people into my big dream proforma. That today is a half billion dollar company. I am excited to introduce our guest today, a teacher a truth seeker, a storyteller, a life-changer, and so much more Jack Canfield from his earliest days, teaching inner-city high school students, how to discover their potential and succeed no matter what their circumstances to becoming a world-renowned transformational speaker and trainer who has conducted more than 2,500 workshops and events all over the world, Jack Canfield has devoted his life and career to helping others achieve their personal definition of success and create lives of greater joy, meaning and fulfillment. He is the founder of the billion. That's with a B billion dollar chicken soup for the soul publishing empire. Jack has authored many New York Times best-selling books and has sold over 500 million books. He has two and a half million subscribers and followers on social media and has been a featured guest on a thousand plus television and radio shows. Jack has trained almost 3000 Canfield success principle trainers in over a hundred countries. He founded the transformational leadership council. Jack was inducted into the speakers hall of fame by the national speakers association, and he is a Harvard graduate with a master's degree in psychological education. Jack Canfield. Thank you very much for joining me for Million Dollar Monday. My pleasure, Greg. Glad to be with you. Thanks for inviting me. All right. So, you know, as we discussed Million Dollar Monday is for people with big dreams and aspiring entrepreneurs. And I always like to start at the beginning. So would you please tell us just a little bit about your childhood, your youth growing up, and through that, what were some of the earliest big dreams maybe you can recall?

Jack Canfield:

Well, I grew up in West Virginia, which at that time had the 48th worst education system when there are only 48 States. So it was a challenge to even have big dreams. But fortunately when my aunt had, she was rich, she had a son who died. We were not, she had a son who died named Jack. She kind of adopted me. I lived at home, but she kind of took over my education and sent me to a private school in town from fifth grade to high school. So I did get a good education. My dad was an alcoholic and a workaholic. My mother was an alcoholic. So a lot of dysfunctional family stuff, I managed, I played football and I was really good at it. So I got a scholarship to go to Harvard and I guess they needed an end on a football team, played rugby there and some other things and majored in Chinese history, which has nothing to do with what I do now. But my senior year, I took an elective class in psychology and I fell in love with it. I thought, this is really cool. I like this human behavior stuff. So I couldn't get into graduate school in psychology because I had no undergraduate work in it really. And so I got into education teaching history, since I studied history, University of Chicago master's degree, then I went and taught in an inner city high school in Chicago, as you mentioned. And that's when I became interested in motivation. What happened was I was teaching history, but my students were more interested in, or I was more interested in why they weren't motivated to learn. Then they were interested in history. And so literally I started studying and this, and I met a man named W Clement Stone who was worth about$600 million back then. So that'd be a billionaire by today's standards in terms of inflation. And he was running this achievement motivation program at his foundation. So I took that program, started teaching them in my classes. Kids really loved it. Teachers loved it. The principal asked me to teach other teachers I did. And the County in Chicago asked me to teach other teachers. So I got into teacher education and I'll just, I'll just end with this, that, the big thing that shifted it for me, I was doing this workshop for this teacher principal of a school. And she said, you should meet my cousin. My, my husband's company needs what you're teaching us. I said, but I'm teaching self-esteem and all this kind of stuff. And you know how the kids set their goals. And she said, look, I thought I'd never worked in a company except as a floor sweeper in a general electric plant between college and graduate school. And she said, they're just big kids in suits. Now you go over and you basically work with them. And I did and discovered, you know, adults have the same issues that kids have and that we all want to be loved. We want to be competent. We want to be, you know, of significant. We all want to be happy. We want to get better at what we do. And so that's how all that happened. And along the way wrote the first chicken soup for the soul book that transformed my life, but really just normal kid from a lower middle-class family in West Virginia. And fortunately had some nice breaks along the way.

Greg Muzzillo:

All right. So you just very casually mentioned. And then along the way I wrote the first chicken soup for the soul book. Tell us a little bit more about where the idea came from, how it all got started. And then it surely as younger people say today blew up in a big way for you.

Jack Canfield:

Well, unconsciously, it started when I was teaching high school back in 1969-70. And what happened was I noticed whenever I was telling a story, the kids were paying attention. If I told a story about myself, if I told a story about Martin Luther King, I told a story about anything. It was like real. They were on the edge of their seat. But if I was teaching historical facts and concepts, the five causes of civil war, they were looking out the window. And so I really started bringing in stories into the school to show kids that, Hey, there are, African-Americans like you, who got out of the ghetto, they started businesses. They became congressmen, et cetera. And so that's how it all began. And then all along the way, as I was teaching adults, I would find these stories that I thought were inspirational motivational that had a principle in them that I was trying to teach. And, so one day it started about, I would say five weeks in a row, every talk I would give someone come up and say this story about the girl scout who sold 3000 boxes of girl scout cookies. Is that in the book anywhere my daughter needs to read it. No. That story about the kid with one leg who climb Mount Kilimanjaro? Is that in a book anywhere my son needs, no, I kept saying no, no, no, no. And I realized, Hey, the world's telling me, put these stories in a book. You know? So I remember coming home on the plane from Boston to LA and I've said, I'm going to make a list of all the stories I know. And I just made up names, you know, the cookie story, the dog and the shop story, whatever. And I realize I had 70 stories. So I thought if I write two a week, by the end of the year, I'll have a book. And so that's what I did. And basically what happened then was I was having breakfast with Mark Victor Hansen, who ended up being the coauthor of the books. And he said, what are you doing? I said, I'm writing this book. He said, I want to write it with you. And I said, that's like telling a famous novelist, do you want to finish his novel with him after he's wrote three quarters of the book? Why would I let you do that? And he said, number one, I've got 30 stories you don't have, and you should have 101 stories. It's a spiritual number of completion. And number two, at least 10 of the story, you tell you stole from me anyway. So like, you know, give me some credit. So anyway, we ended up doing it and he became a great partner. He was a great marketer sales guy, real gung ho. I was much more of the in-depth get it done, guy. And they the partnership was fabulous. And I will say one thing, what made that book so successful were two things. Number one, they were stories that I collected and perfected. And so had Mark over 20 years. So they had been, we'd learned how to tell those stories and more stories that move people, they were emotional, but they also had principles of overcoming obstacles, sharing your heart things that everybody wanted to do. Secondly, we had a panel of 21 readers just accidentally said, let's pick all these friends of ours and ask them to read it. We had 120 stories. We only wanted 101. So we had to cut out 19 or 20. And so, that became a system that no story that scored less than a nine out of, you know, on a scale of one to 10 out of all the readers got in that book. And I teach feedback, you know, one of the things that all entrepreneurs need to do, I'm sure you found this in your business, which you grew to such a wonderful extent, given what you said in your introduction that you have to get feedback from people what's working, are these products, what you need, can we improve upon them? Can we deliver it better? You know, what are you needing we don't have. And I think that was the secret was continually improving, improving, improving, improving, all throughout the, I think there's over 270 books in the series now around the world.

Greg Muzzillo:

And that's what I was going to ask you is how many, 270 different is that all of the different variations of the chicken soup for there's lots of different variations of that, right?

Jack Canfield:

Yeah., I sold the company about 10 years ago and to a group in, in Connecticut. And, we had about 210 books, and I think they've done like, you know, five or 10 books a year since then. And chicken soup for the Indian soul, the country, NBA chicken soup for the sports fan soul chicken soup for the women's soul chicken soup for the teenage soul. We have, we have nine books in the teenage soul series, sold millions and millions and millions of books. I used to teasingly tell people when you see chicken soup for the Rhode Island soul, you know, we're getting close to the end of the series, but pretty much everything you can think of. You know, we've done a book because people identify themselves in those ways. And there's great stories. You know, whether it's teachers, soul grieving soul, a pet lover, soul dog lover, soul NBA, lover, soul, whatever it might be. It was a lot of fun, a lot of fun.

Greg Muzzillo:

So I've read some of them. I can't claim that I've read all of them and I enjoyed it. It is fun to hear stories. But my favorite book that you wrote is the success principles, right? Tell our viewers a little bit of the highlights, the highest high of what are the guiding success principles to success?

Jack Canfield:

Well, basically I would say there's a, I say that there's a system of success, which I teach and there's 67 principles in the book. You don't need to know all of them to be successful by any means. However, they're all the principles that I used in my life and that I've taught my students, but there are about 10 that are critical and they really need to be done in a certain order in a certain way. And I say that success is like knowing the combination to a lock. If you know that combination, you can open the lock. Doesn't matter if you're smart or not. It doesn't matter how old you are, went to college, not the problem is some people are missing a number or two, or they have them in the wrong order. I don't care how hard you work. That lock will never open. So the combination basically is first of all, starting with a hundred percent responsibility, no blaming, no complaining, no excuse, making most people. And we see it in our politics right now in our country. We see it among a lot of people is that we blame and complain about other people. If it wasn't for those guys, the Democrats blame the Republicans, Republicans, blame the Democrats. We complain about everything. COVID 19. You know, the fact that we're sequestered, that we have to wear a mask, whatever it might be. But the fact is those are responses to an event that don't produce a better outcome. So I teach this formula E plus R equals O. What does that stand for? There's an event in your life. You then respond to it by either thinking imagining or doing something, and then you get an outcome. And what happens is most people do not have all of the responses. They need to be effective in responding to the events that are happening in their life. You know, if you study successful people, whether you define success as wealthy, healthy, impactful, winning the Superbowl, whatever it might be. There's a certain set of principles that almost all of them are using. And so I was able to tease out through 75 interviews with the most successful people on the planet. What is it that you do? What are the thoughts you think, the daily behaviors and so forth. So taking a hundred percent responsibility is what successful people do. They don't blame. They don't complain. They simply say, well, what do I prefer? What do I need to do? This isn't working. Where can I find what works? Let's go do it. The second thing is you have to get clear about what is your purpose? What is your, why many entrepreneurs who are watching this go into business with a goal to make money, but they don't have a deeper why behind it. What's the problem you're solving. Why do you want that money? What are you trying to do in the world? That makes a difference, et cetera. So what is your, why? What motivates you? And once you can understand that, and then you build your vision and your purpose and your goals and all that around your why. So you now know this is why I'm running this business. You know, my purpose is to inspire and empower people to live their highest vision in the context of love and joy. And when I do that, like just doing this I'm inspiring, hopefully some people to do that when I'm running my seminars, when I'm training trainers, when I'm coaching people, when I'm writing. So whenever I'm doing that, I am fulfilled. Stephen Covey, who wrote the habit, the seven habits of highly effective people had a wonderful concept. He said, you don't want to get to the top of the ladder and realize it's leaning against the wrong wall. You know, he spent 30 years chasing this thing. You call success to find out I'm not fulfilled. I'm overweight, I'm unhealthy. You know, my kids don't talk to me, my wife's thinking about leaving, you know, all that stuff. Isn't really what you'd call success. And so you really got to sit down and figure out your purpose, and the purpose of your business. You know, I was working with a pizza company not too long ago. And literally you could go into any of their franchises and ask the kid that was cleaning the table. What is your purpose? What is the mission? What is the goal of this franchise? He said, the goal is franchise is to reach this number, expand our, our income by 20%. My purpose is to make sure I wipe these tables down really quickly so we can have the highest turnover possible to achieve that goal. Most employees will not be able to tell you that. So when you have clear purpose and it turns into a clear vision, and then you turn that into clear, specific goals, which is how much by when you have to be able to measure a goal. I want to be rich is not a goal. I want to have a house on the ocean is not a goal. I want to have a best-selling book is not a goal, but I will have a$1 million net profit income for me personally, by the end of the year, December 31st, 2020 5:00 PM. That's measurable. I want a 5,000 square foot house on Pacific Palisades Drive in Pacific Palisades, California by 2020, December 1st, uh, you know, 5:00 PM. That's a goal. So we have to be very, very specific. Most people don't do that. The second thing is you have to believe in it. Most people have all these limiting beliefs, Greg, mostly created between the ages of three and eight years old. You know, I always say, if you were getting on an airplane and you saw a six year old getting on the plane, wearing a captain's uniform, that the three stripes on the sleeves got the cap walks into the cabin, sits in the CA in the captain seat. Most people would go, I don't know, this is a little iffy, got the six year old driving, a 747, but most of us are walking around with a six year old and eight year old running our life. You know, with beliefs like this is not possible. I can't have what I want money doesn't grow on trees. Money's evil, you know, it'll corrupt me. you know, it's not, it's, it's a bad thing to ask people for things. Cause you'll be an imposition, you know, on and on. It goes. So we have to identify these limiting beliefs about what's possible for us. And then we have to release them and replace them with positive beliefs. There's a whole field of work that I've studied and other people have as well about how do you do that with guided imagery, with hypnosis, with affirmations, you know, et cetera. So all of that's important because imagine this I'll use a pizza metaphor again, if I call up Domino's pizza and I asked them to send me a pizza and I tell them exactly what I want, you know, pepperoni with, um, you know what I want pineapple on it. And you know, this met. Now, if I call them back five minutes later and say, this is Jack Canfield, again, I'm just wondering, are you really working on my pizza? I'm not sure you're actually going to deliver it. I'm a little worried about that. And they said, no, we got you covered. Now, if I call them back every five minutes, basically, they're going to put me on the Don't take his call list because they don't want me to be ordering pizza anymore. And so basically I'm undermining my confidence in the delivery system of the universe to deliver my pizza and the same. Thing's true when you've got all these doubts and limiting beliefs that get in your way of taking action. The next thing you have to do is you have to create, I believe in affirmation that declares, I am so happy and grateful that I'm now earning a million dollars a year. I'm so happy and grateful that my book is number one in the New York Times bestseller list, and then close your eyes and visualize that as if it's already true. Every Olympic athlete has an Olympic coach that teaches them visualization. I have a couple of people that have won medals in the Olympics because they learned how to visualize in my workshops. And so we've gotta be able to visualize if you can't hold it in your mind, you can't hold it in your hand. And so it's really critical to learn to do that. Then you've got to take action. And the thing is that most people don't take enough. Action. They're afraid of failure. They don't know what to do, and they don't reach out to find out what to do, go to, you know, you can learn anything you need. Now it's all in a book. It's all in a franchise manual. It's all on YouTube. It's all on Google. It's out there, but you have to ask, you have to become a student. You have to be teachable and coachable. And then when you take action, the biggest action I see most people falling down on is asking. Most people are afraid of rejection. So you have to ask ask, ask, ask, ask for support for the sale, for the order, you know, for whatever it is. I remember reading about Sara Blakely who started Spanx first female billionaire that never had investors. And it was on the cover of Forbes recently. And this one guy she's going in to try to get her Spanx in the store. And he says, I'll tell you, lady you'd have to come in here with a bikini, before I'd carry Spanx in my store. Well, what does she do? She comes back a week later in a bikini. And she says, okay, you made a deal. Let's get these in here. You know, she was willing to ask, ask, ask, and stick with it. Be perseverant, not take no for an answer. And then you've got to respond to feedback as we talked about. Cause all actions don't work. Feedback is do people buy my products? Which ones are selling, which ones aren't how much money is coming in. When's it coming in? Uh, people give me feedback on line, you know, five star, four star, bad reviews on Yelp, et cetera. But you got to ask for feedback and respond to it. And then I think the next big thing is perseverance and never, ever give up on your dream. Many people give up too soon. I always say most success is like a triathlon. It's not a sprint. There's going to be some failures. It's going to take some time and you're going to learn along the way. You know, I, I make millions of dollars a year that wasn't happening when I was in my twenties and early thirties, it's happening now. And I learned a lot, very few overnight successes. You know, all these country, Western stars played crappy bars for 20 years. Usually before they got a record contract. So we have to be willing to put in the price, pay the price, pay the price. And I, I would say finally, have an accountability partner, a mentor, a coach, someone that's going to hold you accountable because when you're an entrepreneur, you're a one year at the top of the pyramid. You don't have a boss telling you what to do. Now, if you're a corporation, you have a board of directors, but the reality is you're on your own. And we tend to shy away from the difficult things. We do, the easy things. First, we put the hard things off and the hard things are usually the things that get us where we want to go stepping out of our comfort zone during the difficult. So I would say, you know, you need someone that you can basically say, here's my five action steps for today. And then tomorrow you get on the phone with them again, or Skype or zoom. And they say, did you do those five? And if not, are you willing to recommit? Cause if I know I have to call you tomorrow, Greg at 7:30 in the morning and tell you, I didn't do two of the things I might say up until 10:30, 11 at night to get to them. Cause I don't want to tell you I didn't do them. And so having that accountability is really, really critical because anyway, that's a lot, but those are the highlights of the main principles. They all can be drilled down into deeper. But that's the general, the general formula.

Greg Muzzillo:

It's a great book. And I enjoyed reading it and rereading it. And I enjoyed having, you joined us a couple years ago and spoke a lot about the success principles in our organization. Love hearing it. All right. So Jack, you sound like a guy that's got it all together and all of your advice and it sounds so wise and you're making millions of dollars a year. So tell us if you would please, about some of the struggles, what were some of the lows that you went through and what were some of the hard struggles that you had to get through to get to where you are today?

Jack Canfield:

Well, first of all, I didn't start out with a lot of money. You know, here I was, I was just a young 20 year old starting my mid twenties. I started a retreat center and I was able to borrow$40,000 from a relative. And the last thing I wanted to do is not pay back my father-in-law and that was not a good idea, right. So basically I really had to make it work and it was like, I didn't have a lot of testing time. I had to be successful right off the bat. So I remember going around, I was in a university town and I remember going around literally with a stapler stapling posters to the bulletin boards and dormitories standing outside the supermarket, handing out brochures to people, you know, literally doing whatever it took. Cause I knew if I didn't put people in that seminar and make it profitable, I was toast. And so, you know, just doing everything myself in the beginning, you know, going to the post office, I had to IBM selectric typewriter typing everything up, designing my own brochures, you know, yada yada. So that was a lot of work. And um, I think also another difficult challenge for me was when I moved to California and started over, I didn't know anybody really. And so fortunately I came up with this idea that if I could get 30 people to pay me, uh, if I can get a hundred people to pay me$30 a month, then every$3,000 a month and I could basically, you know, establish myself. So I got a hundred teachers to pay me$30 a month to be part of a monthly teacher support group where I would teach them principles and bring in guests, leaders, pay them a couple of hundred dollars, et cetera. And I pulled that off, but I had to go to a lot of schools and do free presentations to get them to sign up and all that. But once that took off, I kind of had a base. Uh, another thing was my first book. You know, you do a book, it doesn't sell immediately, you got to go do a lot of promotion. That was very difficult. I was very shy, becoming a speaker that kind of a dumb, stupid job when you're shy, you know, and I'm what they call a situational extrovert. I can stand up and be extroverted when I need to. I had to learn how to, I was very serious. My, my sister took a workshop with me once instead of growing up and having high self-esteem means becoming like you, I'm not interested. And I said, what do you mean? She said, you're no fun. You're so serious and heavy. And, you know, now I've developed a lot of humor. I use a lot of jokes. I had literally listened... I went out and bought eight back in the days of cassettes, eight cassettes of comedians. I'd listened to them in my car, started to think with a humorous mind, I memorized jokes. I made overheads now slides with cartoons and things. So I was constantly learning and overcoming those obstacles. I can remember, Greg, doing a guest event for one of my seminars in LA. When I first moved there and we put out, now we're doing mailings to thousands of people to come to the center, to do an evening of experiencing the kind of things I do to hopefully they'd sign up. And it was on a Tuesday before Thanksgiving, which I learned later was the worst day to ever do anything because no one's thinking about anything other than getting to their parents' house or kids' house. So we had six people sign up after mailing out 6,000 brochures. And, I realized we'll never do that again. So sometimes you have to make a big mistake to realize you're never going to do it again. However Stone used to tell me, W Clement Stone. You can learn from OPE, other people's experiences. That's why it's so valuable to ask somebody what's the best day of the week to mail. What's the best day of the week to do a podcast. What's the best time when everyone's going to be listening, et cetera. So those were difficult. I would say the hardest thing for me was when I got divorced, uh, I was, I had about$8 million in assets and including my house, my business and all that. And, the forensic accountants that got involved, determined that everything, my business was 8 million and my wife should get everything else. So I got to keep my job and she got all the assets. So now I have literally no money. I'm wearing my shirts four days in a row and not, you know, like before I would send them to the cleaners because I was trying to save money. I'm eating like, you know, someone on a pilgrimage, you know, to India like a Buddhist. And I literally had to rebuild my company after that. And that was very, very challenging. Fortunately, I was able to have some people that were by then ardent students who are willing to help me and support me and bring me to their cities and promote workshops and so forth. But that was hard to go from a very abundant lifestyle to literally realizing, you know, I could lose my house month a month if I don't pay my mortgage. So that was 21 years ago. And since then now the last thing that's been amazingly difficult for all of us has been COVID-19 because when you run seminars and give speeches at live events and that's your living, you can't do that. You know, all of a sudden in mid-March the governor says, no, no meetings over 10 people. I was literally running a seminar in a hotel in Santa Barbara for 30 people on how to be a best-selling author. And the police came in and said, this meeting is over. And so fortunately we reconvened that in a person's home, finished the seminar, but from then on, it was all online. And so I had about$500,000 in deposits that we would have had to return for live seminars if we couldn't pivot everybody to online courses. So we were up like, you know, 18 hours a day, developing online courses, figuring out how to take our live courses and turn them into live. Because a lot of things we did live were very difficult on zoom or, you know, whatever platform you want to use. We managed to pivot about 90% of those people. We now found what I call we're in the new, better, not the new normal, because now I can give a keynote talk to 4,000 people and they don't have to fly me to Bermuda. I don't lose a day of travel on both sides. I still get my fee. I did a thing with Bacardi, the Rum people. They were going to have me speak to 400 managers in Bermuda, their headquarters. And what happens is they realize with me delivering it virtually that they could bring their whole company. Everyone was at home 4,000 employees. We're all working from home. So I got to speak to 4,400 people. Didn't have to leave my property, got my same fee. And so tons of books. And, you know, they still want me to come back and do a live seminar once we can do that. And now we just did a workshop a couple of weeks ago, 483 people from 47 countries participated. I couldn't get those people to come to LA for a three-day seminar. Wouldn't happen ever, but to do it online, we lost some stuff, but we gained in volume. So we pivoted, but that was, that was challenging. If I had to give back, you know, this too, if I'd had to pay back$500,000 in deposits, I'd probably spent 200 of it already, you know, because we'd rented hotel rooms, we bought plane tickets. I paid my staff, their salaries. So that was challenging, but it worked out and we're doing very well now.

Greg Muzzillo:

Wow. That's great, Jack. And I will tell you, I can't imagine, I'm sure you're very successful, online in zoom meetings and whatever, but when you came and joined us, not only was your presentation extraordinarily well received by our people. But the thing that our people will never forget was the evening before your presentation was going to be like about, I think, eight o'clock in the morning or whatever. And you agreed to come to dinner with some of our top people. I think maybe we had 20 people there, 15 people, right. And you gave and gave and gave you, weren't looking at your watch. Wondering, when do I get to get out of here? You spent hours with those people and you answered all of questions until everybody had been able to engage with you, and my wife and I Vera who says hi, by the way, we'll never forget the wonderful time you gave our people and our organization. All right, Jack. So here you are today. Very successful guy. You pivoted surely more than once in your career, successfully married, family guy, five children, one grandchild, uh, onto some new businesses. Tell us now with all of your success, personally, financially, and family-wise, what big dreams do you have now?

Jack Canfield:

Well, a couple of I'm still writing a couple of books that I don't write them as fast as I used to anymore. Cause I don't need to. I said, I'm not doing any contracts where I have to deliver it by a certain date. I don't want that pressure anymore, but I'm working on a couple of really good books. One's called living the success principles. So it's all stories of people who either read the Success Principles book or took a seminar with me and literally totally transformed their life. And so as people read it, my hope is they'll go, wow, I want that for me. And so I'm finishing that up and want that to be a best-selling book. I'm training trainers. This is my most exciting thing right now because I know there's a limit to my life. I'm 76. I have a goal to live to 105. I'm doing all the right things in terms of diet and health. And to do that, we'll see what happens, but I want to leave a legacy and I also want to help the world be a better place. There's a lot of suffering and pain in the world, not just because of COVID-19, but because people don't know the principles of how to create a successful life. And so we've now trained about 4,000 people in 117 countries to teach this work. And they're doing that online in person and so forth. And my goal is to have a million trainers trained by the year 2030, there'll be 8 billion people on the planet by then, according to all the statisticians. And if we have 8 billion people on the planet and each of my billion trainers, trains a thousand people a year for eight years, that will reach a billion people. Now, do I realistically expect every little kid in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nigeria, and Rwanda is going to be exposed to these principles by 2038. I don't think so. However, by having that goal and having all these people being trained, and now we're starting to train trainers of trainers to, you know, get the multiplier effect out there. Um, so I want to leave a huge legacy and have everyone learn these principles. We're now developing a school project and working with, um, a person who just donated a hundred thousand dollars to this project who is, he runs a franchise operation of a food franchises. And he says, my goal bigger than the food is, I want to train these young people how to be successful because so many people, that's an entry level job, and I want to learn these principles. So he put up the money and we're also taking that. And we're working with a university to do the testing, to test this in a school system. And then basically we'll roll it out and start training teachers all across North America. And then eventually the world that teach these principles in the schools. So kids won't grow up functionally illiterate about success.

Greg Muzzillo:

Great stuff, Jack. Jack, thank you so much for joining us today. You truly are a wonderful teacher, wonderful truth seeker, a wonderful storyteller and a life changer. Thank you for joining us and to all of you that joined us today. I hope you were able to get some great advice from the great Jack Canfield to help you achieve whatever big dreams you have in your life and in your business. Thank you all very much.

All About Jack
In the Beginning
Chicken Soup for the Soul
The Success Principles
Some of the Lows
Big Dreams for Future