The Resilient Mind - How To Achieve Massive Success - Jack Canfield

Episode Date: September 10, 2023

Jack Canfield is an American author, motivational speaker, corporate trainer, and entrepreneur. He is the co-author of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, which has more than 250 titles and 500 million copies in print in over 40 languages.Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Download Now⁠⁠ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind Podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to How to Achieve Massive Success with Jack Canfield. Get access to the Mental Mastery Program and other exclusive episodes by becoming a subscriber. Enjoy. It's a pleasure to be here and to share these ideas with you and really help you take your life to the next level, which is what we all want to do. We wouldn't come out to these kind of events. I'm going to start by sharing with you, a number of very important critical ideas. And the first one is this one.

There's a friend of mine, his name is Orrin Hudson, and he was the Alabama State chess champion. And he grew up in the ghettos of Birmingham and became a chess champion. Then he was the number one Cadillac dealer and became a professional speaker. And I was talking to him, we were having lunch together down to New Orleans,

and it was at a professional speakers convention. And we were talking about my new book, The Success Principles, was about to come out. He said, you know, to me, success is like knowing the combination to a lock. He said, if you know the combination to a lock, it doesn't matter if you're male or female, white or black, Hispanic or Asian, you're 55 or you're 16, your IQ is 150 or your IQ is 93. If you know the combination, the lock has to open. And the problem is, most of us are going through life, and we don't know the combination.

We maybe have three of the four numbers we need, but we don't have them all. And so the idea is that what I'm about, what I've spent 30 years of my life doing, was researching what is the combination to the lock, interviewing people at the top of their careers, whether they were athletes, politicians, people in business, et cetera, and saying, what is this combination? What is the system? And if you know a system, a system always produces a predictable result. You know, if you use my Aunt Betty's apple pie recipe, it always comes out really good if you do what it says, because it's a system that's proven. And so I want to share with you the basics of a system that works, no matter what you're starting out at, wherever you are, it will work for you. And you may remember oilman Jay Paul Getty. He was at one time the richest guy in the United States. And he said there are three seekers to success. It's very simple.

He said, you have to get up early. You have to work hard. And he said, find oil. It's that simple. Now, obviously, it's not that simple. If it were, we'd all just go do that. I wrote this book called the success principles, and in it there are 64 principles of success. 64.

Now, that's a lot. A lot of people go, you know, that's like too much to learn. So what I've done for you today, we're going to cover about eight, nine of those principles, the core essence, the necessary building blocks, that if you do them, they'll take you to the next level. Now, the promise I always make people is threefold. If you do this work and you apply it to your life, and the key is apply it, not just listen to it.

but put it into practice. Number one, you can double your income. And number two, you can double your time off. And you can create more balance in between your work life and your family life and have a lot more fun. And you can do that in three years or less. Now, how many people here

if you could double your income and double your time off in three years or less will be interested in learning how to do that? Okay, good response. We're talking to the right crowd. So basically, how do we do that? And I first of all want to tell you that it is possible because a lot of times people go, well, how do I know I can really trust you?

Well, I've done it in my own life and I've taught hundreds of thousands of people to do this around the world. Just a couple of quick little stories here. We work with a company called Remax of Indiana. It's a real estate company. And we taught them these principles. And in the first year, 65% of the people doubled their income. By the end of the second year, over 85% of the people had doubled their income. And the company had doubled its total revenues.

and went on many people tripled and quadrupled their income in two years or less. Okay? In my own life, here's one of my students, Scott Schilling, he said, I took your training and I learned these principles. And literally, he said, I made 22% of my 365-day salary in just two days after working with you. Now, think about that. That's a fifth of his yearly income in two years.

I mean, two days, rather. Look at my own life. I have a Guinness Book of World Records. I had seven books appearing on the New York Times bestseller list on the same day. Stephen King was the only guy that had six before that, and he had done that book, The Green Mile, and it came out in six chapters. No one's ever done that since. Here's a check written to me for $1,130,328 and 35 cents.

The first check our publisher had ever written for a million dollars. He actually put a smiley face in his signature, if he can look real. He was so happy to have to write that kind of check. And that represented three months of book royalties for the first chicken soup for the Soul Books. And that year, Mark and I both made $6 million. $6 million is my co-author, and I split a $12 million royalty on that. Now I share that with you not to impress you about me, but to impress upon you of little Jack Campfield who grew up in Wheeling, West Virginia, and who graduated from the

half of the class that made the top half possible can do this. And literally, anybody can do it. It's not about brain power. It's about knowing the principles. Gravity always works. If I drop this, it always falls. It's never floated. Never had that happen in my life.

And so if you know the principles, you can use the principles. like we can make water flow downhill. All the drainage systems in your house take advantage of that. Gravity works. So what are the principles, again, that work for us? Now, Jim Rohn says you can't hire other people to do your push-ups for you. I love that quote. I can't hire, what's your name?

I can't hire Robin to go to the gym and work out for me and have my muscles get more toned. I can't hire you to meditate for me and I'm going to get a higher consciousness. I can't hire you to do my planning for me at night so my day is more organized the next day. All the things I'm going to teach you are things that you have to do. There are things that no one else can do for you. There are things. You can delegate certain things in your life, but not your health care, not your meditation, not your exercise, not these principles and strategies we're going to be learning here today.

So the first principle building on that says you must take 100% responsibility for your life and your results. And what that means is you have to give up all blaming, all complaining, all excuse making, all looking out at the world and saying, well, if the world we're different, then I would be better off. Right now, we're all upset about the Chinese and the Indians are using more oil, which is sending the oil prices up, and we wish that wasn't happening. Some of you may love the president we have. Some of you may not. We go through all these things where we say, if it wasn't for that, if it wasn't for the war, if it wasn't for him, if it wasn't for her,

if it wasn't for the economy, then my life would be working perfectly. But there's a little formula I learned that's very, very powerful, and it really is the basis of everything I teach. It says E plus R equals O. And what that stands for are the events in your life. you have a response to them, and that creates outcomes. And everything in your life that you experience, whether you love it or you complain about it, is an outcome of how you've responded to earlier events. For example, if I put $200 in front of you and you go out and party with it,

a month later, your net worth hasn't increased. But if I put that $200 in front of you, that's the event, your response is you invested, and then year later maybe it went up to $250. So now your net worth went up. Same event, different responses. What's your name? Valerie. Let's say I say to Valerie, of all the people I've ever met Valerie, you have to be the biggest idiot I've ever met in my life. Now, how many people think that would raise her self-esteem?

No hands go. How many people think that make her self-esteem go down a little bit? Yeah. See, everyone that just raised your hand was not listening to the lecture called E plus R equals O. It's not what Jack says to Valerie. It's what Valerie says to Valerie when Jack stops talking. She might have said, oh my God, the man's only known me a few minutes. How'd you figure it out so fast? her self-esteem would go down. Or she might say, Campfield's only known me for a few minutes. He can't really know what I'm like. I'm sitting in the front row.

People to sit in the front row are really willing to participate. I've got a good ego structure. He's seen me smiling at my jokes. Beside him, one of the more attractive women in the room, probably can't keep his eyes off of me anyway. Now, if he said that, which way would her self-esteem go? It would go up, see? So if she says that.

So basically, it's not what people say to you. It's not what they do to you. The world's just out there, worlding. It's not personal. And if you want a different outcome, because E plus R equals O is like 2 plus 2 equals 4, and if you're not happy with 4, you've got to change your response. The word responsibility means you have the ability to change your response to something other than what you're currently doing. And if you would do that, you would get a different outcome.

Does that make sense? Yeah. So basically, we are responsible to change our behavior until we get the outcomes we want. And that's kind of an experiment. You never know if something's going to work or not. Maybe you're distant from your spouse and you try a new communication technique. You learn in a workshop and it works. You go, ah, great.

Or maybe you try it and it doesn't work. Well, there's just about 500 more you can try. You know, you can read men are from Mars, women are from Venus, children are from hell, one of those books. And just kidding. But, you know, there's so much out there, so many good techniques. And unfortunately, most people don't experiment with trying on new ones. Life should be approached as a huge experiment. And you just keep experimenting until you get it right, okay?

All right, we talked about that. So we'll go to this. E plus R equals O again. I want to give you a business example. A friend of mine during the first Gulf War was a Lexus dealer, and people stopped coming in to buy Lexuses. They were all watching CNN and CNBC and watching the war on TV. And plus we were having a minor recession,

so people were holding on to their discretionary income. So what happens was he said to his staff, E plus R equals O. There's a war, people are watching TV, our responses. We've been doing the same thing. Ads on the radio, ads in the newspaper, waiting for people. to come in. Well, they're not coming in. We better do something different. We're not going to go out of business, but we're going to take a huge economic kid if we don't. So they tried four things, one of which worked. I'll tell you what that was. They said, if the people aren't coming to us, let's take cars to where they are. Okay? So they would go out with five or six Lexuses and they'd go to a party. What's your name, sir? Tom. They goes up and say, Tom, what do you do for a living? You're an investment banker. How's the investment banking business doing these days? Doing great. What's he eventually going to ask me? What do I do?

And I'm going to say I'm an Lexus dealer. And then I would say, have you ever driven a Lexus? Yes. Yes. Did you like it? Loved it. You know, we have a new LS 400 outside, never been ridden by it.

It's got the new Nakamichi sound system, quadifonic sounds, it's got the tilt back mirrors, got the new seats that have the air that comes out that can keep your warm or keep you hot depending on what you need. Would you like take a little spin with me? See what it's like? Great. So we go and we take a little spin in the Lexus. Now you come back in. Let me ask you a question.

How many of you have ever test driven a new luxury car and then got back in your old car. You know that feeling? You were really satisfied until then. Well, they ended up selling over 60% of the people they did that with a new car within two weeks. Because they didn't wait. They tried something different.

And if you keep experimenting like that, you'll find the R that works, but you have to be willing to take a risk. And the reason most of us don't do that is we don't want to feel uncomfortable because all new things require discomfort. Like y'all to do this with me real quick. Fold your hands like this, and you can do this watching at home.

in your hotel room wherever you might be if you're watching this on a TV set. And notice which thumb is on top, your right or your left. And whatever that is, I'm going to ask you to unfold all your fingers and have the other thumb show up on top. Okay, don't just move a thumb, but all the fingers are moving. Now, how does that feel? Uncomfortable, awkward, strange, yucky, wrong, not me, right? Now what does your body want to do? Go back.

It wants to go back. So let it go back. How's that feel? Most of you said better Tom over here went, oh, like, I'm me again, right? What happens is literally in life, this is what stops most people from being successful. One of the things is that they would rather be comfortable than do what's required. Anytime you do something different, it's uncomfortable by its very nature. Now, most of you remember learning to drive a car.

You were probably awkward. You know, you forgot to hit the clutch when you hit the brake. But after a couple months, you're there driving with your knee. You've got a big Mac in your left hand. You're breaking up a fight in the backseat with the kids with your right in. No big deal. But you have to be willing to go through that awkward, uncomfortable stage. And most people, unfortunately, won't do that.

And so they get locked in what we call their comfort zone. So what I want you to do is to realize that life is an experiment. You have lots of responses that are possible. And I'm going to teach you some of those new ones, perhaps, that you can apply to your success. So there's three kinds of responses. Number one is your behavior, what you do and say out loud. number two is your thoughts. Number three is the images you hold in your head.

Those are the only three things you have any control over in your life. What you say and do, the thoughts you think, and the imageries that you hold inside your head. So we're going to look at this whole area of thoughts for a minute. And I'm going to ask somebody to come up here and volunteer to do a little exercise with me. It'll take about one minute. So, okay, great. What's your name? Marianne.

Mary Ann. Very good. Come on up, Marianne. And I'd like you to turn around and face the group. Now, are you right-handed or left-handed? Right-handed. Right-handed. hand. Is your left arm okay? Any injuries going on here? Very good. So what I'm going to do is push down on

your arm. I want you to push up, okay? So we'll see how strong you are. Very good. Now you said your name is Marianne. So say my name is Marianne out loud. My name is Mary Ann. And then resist. And then resist. That's a very funny last name. So my name is Marianne. And resist, good and strong. Now I want you to make up a name. It's not yours. My name is Margaret. My name is Joe. Any name name at all. And just say it. And then I'll test your arm. My name is Kathy. Say it one more time. My name is Kathy.

And resist. What happened to your arm? It went down. Was it as strong? No. No. My name is Marianne. Say that.

My name is Mary Ann. And then say, my name is Kathy. My name is Kathy. And without any effort, it goes down. Now, see, when you lie, this whole set of muscles goes weak. Okay? Literally, the whole Michael Jackson trial could have taken about one minute, all right? And we would have known one way or the other.

But see, the reality here is that your thoughts affect your physiology. We just saw that. The brain wasn't designed to lie. It was designed to perceive truth and organized truth and express truth. Then things work. Otherwise, you're called psychotic or you're called a liar and gets in trouble and so forth. So let's look at one of the lies we tell ourselves. I'd like you to think of something you always wanted to do, Marianne, that you didn't think you could.

Like, I can't sing, I can't bowl, I can't skydive, I can't start a business and run a family. You know, anything at all that feels true for you. Okay. Take me a minute. That's okay. Kind of confident. Okay. You got one?

Okay, can you say it out loud? I can't swim in the ocean out too far. I can't swim in the ocean out too far. So say it again. I can't swim in the ocean out too far. And notice what happens to your arm. Now say I can swim out in the ocean as far as I want. I can swim out in the ocean as far as I want.

One more time. I can swim out in the ocean as far as I want. And resist. Notice what happens now. You're twice as strong. So what happens is when you say I can't, you actually weaken yourself. You weaken your resolve.

You actually change your physiology, become less resourceful. you're less capable to actually do the thing you're saying I can't. So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Do two more quick things with me. Close your eyes and remember a failure experience in your life. You're not going to have to share it with anybody, just to yourself. But you set a goal and somehow it didn't work out.

When you can remember such a time, just nod your head. You got one? Okay. So I want you to visualize what you saw at the moment you knew it wasn't going to work. There's the pink slip, person slamming the door, whatever it is. And when you have that image, just imagine, just nod your head. Okay. and notice what happens to your arm.

Now open your eyes. Did you eat any meals today? Yes. Name one thing you ate. Chicken sandwich. Chicken sandwich. Okay, good. You brought your agent with you.

A friend. All right. So now close your eyes. And remember a time when you had a success experience. You set a goal and you achieved it and you were really proud of yourself. You remember such a time? And vision, what you saw then. Make a real clear picture.

and you had of what you saw when you knew it was a success. And resist? No, it's really good and strong. I want you to do one last thing with me, then we'll talk about what all this means. I want you all to look up at her, look at Miriam, and I want you to think a negative judgmental thought about her. Just make one up.

I don't like you, you're an idiot, whatever. And give her that look. Parents give their kids when they're disappointed in them, and I want you to resist with all your strength, and notice what happens to your arm. Can't do it. Now smile at her and send a positive thought, wow, she volunteered in front of all these people to go up there with Jack and resist.

Can you feel the difference? Yes. So what happens here is when you say, I can't, when you lie, when you focus on your failures instead of your successes, and when you surround yourself with people who are judgmental, rather than encouraging and empowering, it actually has a physical effect on you. So that's how powerful thoughts are. We see that our thoughts affect us and other people's thoughts affect us. So we have to be very careful where we place ourselves and who,

who we hang out with and who we surround ourselves with. Give Marianne a hand for coming up here. Thank you very much. So, partly here, we've just done this thing. This is called a kinesiology demonstration. Kinesiology is a fancy term for muscle testing. And one of the principles here is you have to eliminate the phrase I can't from your vocabulary. I can't.

I wish I were able to. I'll try. Those are all ways of saying I'm not capable. And they're very insidious, and it's part of our culture. I actually teach people to wear a rubber band, and if they say something negative about themselves, they just snap themselves when they're aware of it. Not like to really hurt yourself, but just to raise your awareness. In my company, if anyone says I can't or we're not able to, we can't get that done by Friday.

You know, they'd say something like, well, we'd need eight people to do that. Well, great, call the temporary agency. It can be done by Friday. And if they'd say something negative, it costs them a dollar. We'd find them. We'd put it in a jar. And at the end of the month, we'd give it to charity. Well, we stopped doing that after a couple years because no one was doing it anymore,

because the culture shifted because of that focus. Henry Ford said whether you think you can or think you can't either way you're right Why is that because if you think you can you will try and if you try you're probably going to pull it off and if you think you can't you won't and if you don't try then you're not going to get it done at all makes sense Okay Maddie Christensen was a kid I interviewed for our book Imagine this picture. He has no leg from the knee down on this leg no leg from the knee down here two prosthetic devices that he's got His right arm is just a normal prosthetic device and his left arm from the elbow down is a prosthetic device with a lacrosstick appended to the end.

He is the pitcher on his Little League baseball team, and he could use that to catch the ball. His team, with him as the pitcher, went to the New York State finals in Little League. He wrestles. He plays basketball. How many of you, if you'd been born with no arms past the elbow and no legs past the knees, would have thought that baseball was your career? But Maddie went for it. I can tell you story after story.

I met a kid named Kyle Maynard last year. He wrote a book called No Excuses. We were over in Ireland together. He has no legs past the knees. He was the number two wrestler in the state of Georgia, his senior year in high school, and now wrestles for the Georgia State University Wrestling Club, wrote a book on Oprah. He can type 150 words a minute with the stubs of his arms. He can eat with a spoon.

I mean, he's the most amazing guy. And we say that, when I hear that and I look at these people, I think, what's my excuse? What story am I telling me that I can't do something when these people can do that? And I tell you that, hopefully to inspire you to realize you can do anything. There's nothing you can't do. And all those people that are out there that are doing anything that you go, wow, that's great, is just a model for you that says this is possible. And if they can do it, I can do it.

He said to me when I was interviewing me, he said, you have to give up all of your excuses. He said, you have to become solution-oriented. You have to move in such a way that you're always solving a problem. He said it was just a problem to be solved because he was so passionate about what it is that he wanted to do. Some of you have seen Tony Robbins on television, and he tells a wonderful, story that we put in our first chicken soup for the soul book of being in New York. He sent his staff out. He said, I want you to go find a van because I want to take some food, put it in some baskets, about 30 baskets of food, and we'll go give it to the homeless

people up in Harlem. So they went out to rent a van. He came back a couple hours later from some radio interviews. There's no van. He said, where's the van? He said, Tony, there are no vans for rent in New York. They're all being used. It was Thanksgiving weekend. They'd all been rented up. He says, well, why didn't you just go get one from someone else? He said, Tony, people owned them. They're using him. He says, come on. And they went out on the street, The first van that came by, Tony jumped out in front of it like this, and started going like that. Now, Tony must be, I don't know, 7 foot, 8, 10, whatever.

He's big. And he said, I learned something about New Yorkers that day. He says, they don't stop. They speed up. So he said, that strategy wasn't working. E plus R equals O, we need a different response. So he went to where the cars had to stop, called a traffic light.

And then he'd knock on the window, and they'd roll it down, and he'd say, hi, I'm Tony Robbins. You may know me from TV. But even if you don't, what we're trying to do is rent a van. And, you know, find a van. We're glad to pay you to rent it. And we'd like to just get some food and drive it up to Harlem and give it to some homeless people.

And they would all say, you know, I don't want to go to Harlem. It might not be safe up there. And so this went on for a half hour. And finally, Tony staff said, Tony, give it up. It's never going to happen. We're not going to get a van. Let's go eat dinner. And Tony said, that's a terrible attitude.

We are going to get a van. It's just a numbers game. Well, another half hour went by. And Tony knocked on a window of this one band, and the window went down and told him a story. And the guy said, jump in. And as he jumped in, the driver reached over and picked the hat up off the seat.

that Tony was about to sit in, the passenger seat, put it on his head. It said Salvation Army. Turns out the guy was the head of the Salvation Army, Captain John Runnin, for all of New York City. And they went and they bought the food, and he said, look, there's a worse place even than harmless, called the South Bronx. Let's go there. And so they went and took 30 baskets of food to people living in these, you know, literally abandoned houses. And he said, we lifted a lot of lives. He said, but more importantly, I raised the consciousness from my staff that day, and they realized there's always a van in New York City.

But let's look at what some of the principles are of success that are containing that story. Number one, Tony had a clear intention. You must know exactly what it is you want. You have to have a goal. You have to have a vision. Number two, he had a positive expectation. He fully expected to get it. Pete Rose, the great baseball player, said, he was interviewed once.

He said, when you go up to bat, how often do you expect to get a hit? He said, every time. He said, if I'm not expecting to get a hit, I shouldn't be standing there. And you don't always hit it, but you're going to come from that expectation level. He never gave up because he fully expected the result was going to happen. It was just a matter of time. Number three, he took action because a lot of times you have great ideas. I was just here today.

A guy was talking about, oh, we were talking about horseback riding. And he said, you know, they'd be neat if they made those gel things. They put in the feet to put on the saddle of horses because your butt gets sore when you ride a horse. And I said, that's a great idea. And he just passed it off. I said, no, you ought to do something about that. How many times have you had a great idea, didn't do anything about it? And then a year later, someone did something about it, made a lot of money, got the promotion, et cetera.

So when you have the idea, the inspiration to act, it's time. Act, and you don't have to know it perfectly. You know, you can drive from here to California, wherever you might be, assuming you're not in Hawaii, by going west. And what happens is that you don't have to see the whole route. You only need to see 200 yards ahead of you. At night you can drive just with your headlights, and the headlights keep moving with you. And your goal in life is to, like, get in the game. You don't have to see the whole blueprint.

You just have to see the next steps, the next steps, the next steps. And if you keep taking the next steps, eventually you get to a world. where you want to go. Does that make sense? And then he persevered. He never gave up. Some people give up too soon. You know, we were rejected by 144 publishers when we did chicken soup for the soul. Most people don't know that. What if we'd have stopped after 100? Said, well, this isn't going to happen. I wouldn't be standing here talking to you today. We just kept on going until we got the result. Took us a year and a half to sell that book, but we sold it. Now, the last thing is called Law of Attraction. We believe that when you are

vibrating at the level of 100% expectancy that you're going to get something, it's already a done deal, you know, piece of cake, no big deal, we're going to win this thing, we're going to get that contract, you know, I'm going to make this thing happen, then what happens is the universe literally responds. We're going to talk about this a little more later. Now, who is the most perfect guy to come in a van for Tony? Could anyone be more perfect than the head of the Salvation Army, who knew all the places in New York and was committed to doing this? Well, they had to wait for an hour because he wasn't there yet. So sometimes when you're doing this,

you're putting on the vision of this should happen by this date. It's okay to set goals like that, but sometimes it takes a week longer, a year longer, whatever. But law of attraction says if you'll just hold the expectancy, like attracts like, if you say, I want to be a millionaire, but I don't know anyone that would ever teach me how to do that, or I want to buy a car, but I don't have any money,

then what you're doing is saying, it's like calling up Domino's Pizza and saying, send me a pizza, Then calling him up a minute later and saying, never mind. It's like, you know, you've got to create the space mentally to hold this vision that you've got. And that requires expectation and then knowing that the perfect thing is on its way, just as it was in that situation for Tony. In the success principles, I write about a woman named Catherine Lonigan. Catherine Loningen went off to college.

She wanted to be a writer, and she took her first writing class, and she got an F. And she went to see the teacher and said, why did I get an F? It says, because you can't write. She says, well, I'm on a scholarship here to be a writer. I came to be in the creative writing program. I was the editor of my yearbook, editor of my school newspaper. I wrote a plate. It was performed in high school.

They told me I was gifted. He said, well, you're not. He said, you know, if you stay in my class, you're going to flunk it. If you flunk my class, you'll lose your scholarship. And she said, well, what do I do? He said, I'll make a deal with you. If you promise never to write again, just, you know, history paper and stuff, but you're not going to try to be a writer.

I'll give you a passing grade. You'll keep your scholarship, change your major. So she did. I called it, she made the deal with the devil. Fifteen years later, she's down in Texas. They're making a movie at the next town over, and down where she lived in Texas, people would show up at the gas station after it rain

just to see the oil slick. It was kind of boring there. So she said, wow, they're making the movie, let's go. So everyone drives over, and everyone's talking to the movie stars. She's talking to the writers, saying, you know, what's going on? What's happening? And why are you interested in us? Why not the movie stars?

Well, I always wanted to be a writer. And the guy said, BS, if you wanted to be a writer, you would have written. She said, I was told on good authority I couldn't write. He was a Harvard professor visiting our campus that year. He said, that's BS. He said, what I want you to do is go write something, send it to me. I'll tell you if you can write.

I do it for a living, I know. So she goes and writes a book, sends it in to him. He sends it to an agent in New York, and they publish it. Her next book was called Romancing the Stone. The book after that, Jewel of the Now. Both made into movies with Michael Douglas and Catherine Turner. So what's the deal here? 14, 15 years of her talent wasted because she,

bought someone else's evaluation of her. My friend Terry Cole Whitaker says, she wrote a book called What You Think of Me is None of My Business. Do not let other people's evaluations of you control you. Okay? It's just an E. Your responses, thank you very much. You keep pursuing your passionate dream, okay? Now, in other principles, you've got to drop out of the Ain't It Offal Club. What does that mean? It means you have to surround yourself with positive people. We saw when Mary Ann's arm went down up here when you all did negative thoughts about her. And How many of you think about this? Where do you spend your time?

Is it with positive people or is it with negative people? It's to be very careful about where you put yourself. Jim Rohn said, again, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Who do you spend the most time with? There are a mirror back to you at what level your life is actualizing at. If your friends are victims and their lives aren't working and their marriages don't work and they're not making money, that's a reflection back. If you're working out with people and hanging out with people that are at a higher level,

then that's a reflection back. And what I teach people is always try to get with the people that are the next level up. You're making 50,000 a year. You want to make 100,000. Find some people making 100,000, spend some time with them. However, you have to do that. You know, if you want to be more spiritual, go to some spiritual retreats where spiritual people hang out. Get in their space.

Learn what they do, how they think, et cetera. We had a story in the second helping of chicken soup for DeSoul. Carl Coleman's driving to work when his car collides with another woman's car, and they get out and she's crying, and he's like relieved. This is a minor fender better. Why are you crying? She said, you don't understand. This is a brand new car three days from the showroom.

How am I going to explain this to my husband? He said, well, I'm really sorry about that, but we need to get your registration, your driver's license, your insurance record, so we can, you know, exchange that data so we can follow our accident reports. So she goes into the glove compartment of her car, opens up the manila envelope and everything's in. And on top of that, there's a message written in handwriting by her husband. And it said, in case of accident, remember, honey, it's you, I love, not the car. See, the women all go, oh. And men are thinking, yeah, right, I don't know about that. But why do we all go, oh?

We all go, oh, because that's what we want in life. We want someone to love us more than anything else, especially things, vases that have been in the family for three generations, the white carpet, your special sweater or whatever. And when we know that we're loved unconditionally, then you feel safe. And when you feel safe, you get creative. And when you get creative, you come up with ideas that can quantum leap your success. That's why it's so important. Number two, success principle, that's really the core principle here, is decide what you want.

You can't get from here to there unless you know where here is and there is. If you have a GPS system in your car, all you have to do is type in the address, it knows where you are from the satellites in the sky, and it plots a course. Your brain works the same way. The problem is, according to the research, less than 10% of Americans have written measurable goals for the year. In some cases, I've been in the companies where less than 3% of the people did. than 10% of high school students were ever taught

how to set a measurable goal. This is a failure in our education system. You know anyone that got divorced because they didn't know the seven exports of Brazil or the five causes of the Civil War? No, but they didn't know the communication skills. They didn't know how to set goals for their relationship. So many things we're not learning in our education that we now need to learn in these kind of courses.

General Wesley Clark, who I interviewed, said, it doesn't take any more effort to dream a big dream than it takes to dream a small dream. So if you're going to decide what you want, go for what you want, not what you think is possible. Most people hone down their dream because they can't see how they can do it. And I'm saying to you, dream as big as you want. In fact, big dreams are exciting.

Big dreams attract big people. If Martin Luther King said, I'm going over to the supermarket in Mississippi, I don't think a whole lot of people would have gone down there with him. But when he said, I want to end racism in America, that was a big dream and inspired a lot of people to want to play, a great personal sacrifice to themselves because it was big enough and worth doing. Walt Disney said, if you can dream it, you can do it, which means that you're never given a dream

that comes out of your own desire place that isn't something you have the capacity to fulfill. You may have to learn some new skills, you may have to partner up with some people, you may need to learn how to access some new resources along the way. But all of that is possible if you'll simply dream the big dream, because the dream doesn't come unless the capacity to achieve it comes with it. Does that make sense?

Okay, so trust your dreams. Now, there are seven dream categories or vision categories that you need to focus on to create a balanced and fulfilling life. Success means having all of this stuff, and I want to walk you through these. Number one is financial. What are your goals for your money? How much money do you want to make? How much net worth do you want to achieve? How much money do you want to have when you retire?

If you own a business, you have cash flow goals, you have money and reserve goals, you have profit goals, etc. And so we need to have goals clearly set in that arena. Number two, business and career. What's my ideal vision for my business or my career or my job? You know, I was a high school teacher. And at a certain point, I realized I wanted to teach teachers because I just thought I could impact more people. Then I became a teacher-trainer trainer.

I trained people how to train teachers. And now I'm teaching, you know, on television, around the world. So it kept growing. The goal changed. But it was always like, you know, what is it that I want to be doing with my life in relation to my business and career? Number three, fun time and recreation goals. One year our fun time goals, my wife and I was learned salsa dancing.

This past two years I've been learning to play the piano. My goal is to play J-Su Joy of Man's Desiring as well as Bach could have played it when he wrote it. I'm not there yet, but I'm working on it. And so, you know, one year was to go to the Eiffel Tower. We took our kids and we walked up as far as they let you walk, which is about two-thirds of the way up there. Number four, health and fitness goals. These are things like weight you want to achieve, cholesterol levels. Maybe you want to run a 10K or a marathon.

There's just so many possibilities in that. arena. Maybe you want to, you know, have your waist come in by a couple inches. You want to grow some hair back. I mean, there's just a number of things you can decide about in that arena of health and fitness. Number five, relationships. What would your ideal relationships look like? One year I decided I didn't have enough male friends. So I created this thing called Boys Day Out. I'd read this article about Kenny Rogers, the singer, and he brought all these athletes down to his ranch in Virginia, and they would spend a week playing all these different games, tennis and soccer and basketball. and I thought, well, I can't do that, but a day, a month would be cool.

So I asked a bunch of guys that had controlled or schedule, lawyers, and psychiatrists, and people like that, and we created this day, and we would do guy things. We'd pitch pennies, throw baseball cards, play soccer, go to the racetrack, do ice hockey, broomball. I mean, you name it, we attempted to do it. And it was really a lot of fun, and all of a sudden I had the guy energy that I needed in my life. Instead of just complaining about not having it, I said, what's my goal? I want this many men, friends, and I have set out to create it. Number six is personal.

And this is just things you want to do because you want to do them. You want to write a letter and get it published in the newspaper. You always wanted to act in a play just because you thought it would be cool or record a song. Or this could be where your personal growth goals, your spiritual growth goals are. You know, you want to reach enlightenment before you die, learn to meditate, you know, get to know a closer walk with God. Whatever it is for you, that's that arena. And finally, contribution and legacy. What is it that you want to leave to the world?

What's your vision of your contribution that you leave behind? You know, we've planted over a million trees through our work we do. We've given over $3.5 million in the last couple years to all kinds of charities, limbs for kids that have lost them, child abuse, prevention, so forth and so on. So we picked five or six areas. We said we want to make a difference there. Habitat for humanity. We built some houses and so forth.

So what is it you want to do? Pick one thing in your vision and go for it. Now, if you had success in all these arenas of your life, your life would be balanced. your life will be fulfilling. And here's the neat thing. Nobody can tell you what you should want in any of those areas. It's what you want, not what your mother, your wife, your pastor, or anyone else says you ought to have. But what do you really want to achieve in your vision?

And I usually ask people to look five, six years out about that. You can look farther if you want. And then to write down, you know, all the details, like you're putting in a purchase order to God. Okay? All right. Create a breakthrough goal. This is a thing you want to do where you create a goal. that's going to quantum leap your career.

So something that if you wrote a best-selling book, that would be a quantum leap goal. Had your own radio show, that would be a quantum leap goal. Opened up China as a market, that would be a quantum leap goal. And it's a goal that would not be like a five-yard play, but like a 50-yard pass play on the first down. And so what you're going to do is set that goal. Here's some examples of past clients of mine.

Create a $10 million revenue stream through Internet sales, create my own 30-minute talk show, get our products sold on QVC, secure a $10 million line of credit for their company, teach a weekly holistic health class for the public and become a wellness coach for a major corporation instead of continuing being a doctor on call all day. And what you do is with your breakthrough goal,

once you've decided what that is, you do something we call the Rule of Five. Write your goal on your business card and carry it like I carry mine in my wall at all times. And then once you've done that, every day, you're going to do, this is my, this for this year. It says, I'm joyfully celebrating 15,000 people having completed the Canfield Success Principles.

coaching programs. What that allows me to do is have you all give value without me having to leave my house, see? And that's a breakthrough for me so I could travel less, be home more, etc. And with the breakthrough goal, we say the rule of five. That means every day you do five specific concrete actions to move that goal forward. You're not going to do that in all seven arenas of your life. It's just too time consuming. But if it wanted to be a bestselling author, then maybe I write for so many minutes. I do some interviews each day. When we brought out chicken soup for the soul, we sent out five free books every day to people that could promote that book. One day we couldn't think of anyone to send it to. We sent it to the O.J. Simpson jury,

and we gave them each a book. And about five days later, they're all walking into court carrying chicken soup for the soul. And the cameras were all going, made national news. And so if you just do something every day toward that goal, there's something called the law of probabilities, which says the more things you try, the more likely one of them will work. They may not all work, but if you only try two things, the law of probabilities is not on your side. Try a hundred things. One of them is likely to hit. Does that make sense? Okay, good. Mentioned we did that. And this book, which was rejected by what, I told you, over 144 publishers went on to sell 10 million copies in 41 languages because we did five things every day.

We did not hit a bestseller list until 14 months after the book came out. 14 months. And most people would never sustain it that long. And it was kind of like the universe tests us, I think. How committed are you? How badly do you really want this? And if you go for it and do that rule of five. Bill Bradley was a great basketball player played for the Knicks. It was All-American at Princeton, and high school he was an All-American. Every day he'd find five spots on the basketball court, and he would have to shoot 15 in a row before he would go in. And sometimes he'd be out there two hours after everyone else had showered and gone home.

He did that all through college, all through his professional career. What happens? He goes on, becomes NBA Hall of Famer later, Senator from New Jersey, because he was willing to prepare. You have to be willing to do the work as well as dream the dream. The third thing says, Unleash the Power of Goal Setting. So now we got this vision, things we want, but we have to get and turn them into objectives. And they have to become measurable in time and space. And the key words here are how much, by when?

I want a big house. Well, what's big? For some people, it's 4,000 square feet. For Bill Gates is 35,000 square feet. It's a real different definition of what big is. And by when do you want it? Well, I would like it by June 3rd, 19, you know, or 20. 2007 or I want it by January 5th, 2010. Be very specific. Now we said it may not show up exactly

them, but the more specific you are, your brain will figure out what has to happen to get it to happen in that time frame. So here a person says I'd like to increase my income. They're better off if they say I will earn $200,000 by 5 p.m. December 31st. I'd like to spend more time with my husband. Well, I will take three long weekend vacations and one two-week vacation with my husband by November 30th at 5 p.m. Much more specific. Now, the brain knows what to do. I'd like to spend more time with my wife. I'll take ballroom dancing lessons with my wife for 12 weeks from September 21st to

December 21st. As soon as we get specific, there's a part of your brain that starts calculating what to do. If you call a travel agent and say, want to go on a trip, what's the first thing they ask you, where do you want to go and when do you want to go there? And until you tell them that, you're stuck. And your brain works the exact same way, that little GPS system. I'm going to lose weight and get fit.

It needs to be I'll weigh 190 pounds or 140 pounds by certain date. Make sense? Again, less than 10% of Americans do this. And guess what? 10% of Americans own 90% of America. And guess what? They're the same people because they're clear about what they wanted, clear intention. All right. Next area is images. We now know that your body cannot tell the difference between a real event and an imagined event. Okay? If I were to have you close your eyes and imagine you were standing in the middle of a very small terrace on top of the tallest skyscraper in the world, you'd start to have queasy stomach and your hands would sweat because your body would really think it was there, even though you were safe in this room.

Now, we can use that principle to our advantage to create success by using this power of visualization. And here's an example. One basketball team at Ohio State University, they took and they said, we want one third of you, they all had equal foul shooting records, to not touch a basketball for 30 days. The other third, we want you to go out and practice basketball every day for a minimum of a half hour, preferably an hour, shooting foul shots for 30 days. And the third group, they said, we just want you to close your eyes and visualize shooting foul shots.

Don't touch a basketball for 30 days. And guess what? First group, as you'd imagine, showed no improvement. Second group, practicing for 30 days, they get 24% improvement. And the third group that only did it in their mind got 23% improvement when they brought them back to the court and had them practice. So what happens here? I wish there would have been a fourth group, right?

Practice and visualized. we'd have probably got up in the 30 or 40% improvement level. But what this tells us is simply by visualizing your goal is already completed, by seeing it nothing but net every time the body starts to respond and adjust itself to create the result. So one of the great success techniques is people that are super successful are often called visionaries, and the reason is they close their eyes and they see the future. You create your future by envisioning it, okay? And I recommend you do that every day at least twice, once in the morning when you get up,

and once before you go to bed. They did a study at NASA where they took astronauts, and they had them wear concave lens goggles, which meant you see the world upside down. Imagine trying to negotiate relationship with me, and I'm hanging from the ceiling, and my right to my left. It'd be pretty complicated.

These goggles had no peripheral vision, and they had to wear them 24 hours a day for 30 days. What they were expecting was to see if they'd get nauseous, become hostile, lose sleep, to see how they'd handle disorientation out of space. What they hadn't predicted was that about 25 to 30 days into it, every one of the astronauts there, brain flipped the image right side up again. They're still getting upside down input, but they

created new neural pathways. And they came out of this, the psychologist came up with something they called a 30-day principle. What the 30-day principle says is that if you want to change a behavior, change a habit, anything at all, you must, in fact, do it for 30 days, uninterrupted because they tried a subsequent experiment where they had half the astronauts take their goggles off on day 15, keep them off for one day, put them back on again, took another 25 to 30, days before they flipped them right side up again. So we know that it's current, contiguous, everyday repetition. This is why most New Year's resolutions don't work. It's why most corporate change programs don't work. It's why most of our school programs don't work.

There's not that 30-day uninterrupted. This is why basic training in the Marine Corps does work, because they got you down there for six weeks, and they're not letting you out of their sites, and you're in a context that's held tight for, you know, that six-week period. So if you want to visualize, your goal has already achieved minimum of 30 days, that makes sense? Okay, good. Let's see here. I'm going to skip over that real quick and get to this. Now, the reason this works where your vision becomes real when you visualize what it is you want is there's two things that go on in your brain. You have a vision of what you want, you have the current reality that don't match, okay? And what we want to do is purposely create that.

It's what advertisers do. Imagine yourself in the new car. It's like the guy getting out of the Lexus we talked about earlier, getting in his old car. car, the vision of what's possible no longer matches the reality, and that creates a little dissonance or structural tension in the head, which we call motivation, which says, I want that. Until we had that, there was no motivation to do anything different. Any of you women ever experienced visiting a friend with a new kitchen, and then you come home to your old kitchen, and they've got all the new granite and the new appliances and everything's cool. Your kitchen was fine until them. So we want to purposely do that to your brain

to motivate you. So you've visioned the thing you want, your goals, and your vision. You hold that in your mind every day for about 10 minutes in the morning, 10 minutes at night. If you have 10 goals, you can cycle through them. I put mine on 3 by 5 cards, read them, and I close my eyes, see the vision as if it's already accomplished, see the car I want, the program happening in Singapore or we're doing, whatever. Then I go to the next one. I just keep cycling through the cards until I go through all of them. What happens then is you get a perceptual shift. You start to see things in your environment that we're always there that can help you you never saw before.

You get expanded creativity. You start noticing that the things that you want, you wake up in the middle of the night, you're in a shower, you start going, oh, that's how we can do it, that's how we can do it, that's how we can do it, that's how we can do it. And unfortunately, most people aren't having those kind of breakthrough ideas because they're not holding the vision. The third thing it happens is you have increased motivation. You'll find yourself doing things just out of nowhere, boom, you know, you get up and you do something, like volunteering. You know, sometimes people do, that's not like me, but you just do it because you've been holding this, it creates it. Now, what happens is that then creates the action that you need to have for the result to occur. Now, I want to show you how this perception shift occurs, because this is

magical. There's a sentence up here, and we're all going to read this on a count of three out loud, if you would. One, two, three. Finished files are the result of years of scientific study combined with the experience of many years. Very good. Now, I'm going to put that back up, and we're going to time 10 seconds on my clock here. I want you to count the number of times the letter F appears. How many Fs are there in that sentence? Okay? And when you do this, keep it to yourself, don't say anything out loud, all right? So here we go. Okay. How many counted by show of hands now, it's real important to you participate. How many counted three Fs? Hold your hands up. We got about half the audience more. How many count of four Fs? About five people. How many count of

five Fs? About the same amount, seven maybe. How many counted six Fs? One, two, three, four, five, six, about eight people. Anyone count seven Fs? All right. Now, we're, we're going to be. We're Were we all looking at the same sentence? Go like this. And yet some people saw three F, some people saw four, some people saw five, and some people saw six. Let's look to see what the real objective reality is up there. There are three Fs that I'm sure most of you saw, correct?

But there's also three more. There are six Fs in that sentence. Now, do you think that Bill Gates and Michael Dell and Steven Spielberg and George Lucas see more Fs out in the world than most of us do? Yeah, these are resources, these are possibilities, These are options. These are people that can invest. These are people that can give a good hug. When you visualize what it is you want, it opens up your perceptual filter to let in more information. Right now, you're not aware of what you're feeling in your right foot, but as soon as I say it, you can all feel it.

It was getting filtered out by a part of your brain called a particular system. You are filtering out resources and solutions to your problems all day long. And the only reason you're filtering them out is because you've not had an image in your head that you are going to solve those problems and get those results. Once you do that, it programs as part of your brain called the reticular activating system to open up and let in more resources, to let you see. You'll only see enough to match your vision. If you think you're $100,000 of your person, you're going to see just enough to make you $100,000 a year. If you think you're a $300,000 of your person, you're going to see just enough to do that. Your perception is controlled by your beliefs and your goals, okay?

So it's critical that we change all that. Now, let me give you just a couple more principles. I'm going to kind of speed through these like the last 500 years of European history, you know, in the last lecture you got in college. But I want you to get the whole model here because it's important. So we've got a vision. We've taken 100% responsibility. We've got some goals now.

We've made them measurable. Okay? We're now visualizing those goals every day. The next thing that needs to happen, I'm going to demonstrate by giving away something here. So if I can find it right here. Okay. I have a book here. It's my book.

It's called The Success. principles, and I've sweetened this by put in as a bookmark a $100 bill. Okay? That's real money. And I'm going to give this away to someone here in the audience to illustrate the next principal. Who would like this? Okay.

Marianne, good job. Now, what did only five people in this whole room do that no one else did? They got off their butt and they took action. And so the next principle is you must take action. When you start visualizing your goals, and this GPS system comes in, you're going to start getting little roadmaps, and we call them inspired actions. You're going to start getting inspirations to act. You must act on them.

I've had people sometimes nobody gets out of the audience. And then I'll ask them, how many of you thought maybe what you ought to do is get out of the audience? And half the hands go up. I'll say, what stopped you? I didn't want to look like I needed it that much. I didn't want to get up there and have me be wrong and look foolish, you know? I didn't want to get there second. I thought maybe you weren't really going to do it.

I'd look like an idiot. you know, you know, whatever. They have all kinds of excuses. Those are the same excuses they use in their life not to take action on their dreams. So you must take action. But here's the problem, or the challenge. Not every action is going to work. It goes back to E plus R equals O.

We have to experiment, right? So if not every action is going to work, you have to take action, and then you have to assess, did it work? And here's the next principle. Ask for and respond to feedback. Ask for and respond to feedback. Let's say that I was married here. What's your name again?

Valerie, yeah. So Valerie and I were married, right? And what I would do every week if we were husband and wife is I would ask her, on a scale of one to ten, how would you rate the quality of our relationship? Anything less than a 10 gets a follow-up question. What would it take to make it a 10? If we were in business and I was a vendor and you were a client, I'd say on a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate the quality of our product or the quality of our service or the quality of our delivery? And anything less than a 10 gets a follow-up question. What would it take to make it a 10?

That gives me directive feedback on how to improve. Why don't most people ask that question in life? Anyone know? They're afraid of the answer they're going to get. Here's what I want you to get. Everybody in your life, if I'm married to Valerie, her mother knows, her sister knows, the women down at the shop where she shops know, the women in the salon know that she's not happy with me. I'm the only one not in on it.

And I'm the only one that can make it better. Isn't that absurd? So asking for feedback is a really critical thing. Asking is a critical principle, period. If I want more, I have to ask other people, participate, support me, be my mentor, be my coach, buy my product, whatever it is. And again, most people don't ask for what they want. And the fear there is fear of rejection.

I want to talk about rejection. If I ask Valerie to have dinner with me afterwards and she says no. Most people go, woo, Jack got rejected in front of all those people and on television and oh my God. But see, let's look at it. Did I have anyone to eat dinner with before I asked Valerie? No. Did I have anyone to eat dinner with after I asked Valerie?

No. Did my life really get worse? No, it stayed the same. See, if I apply to Harvard and don't get in, I wasn't in Harvard before I applied, I'm not in Harvard after I applied. And as one of my friends pointed out recently, you spent your whole life not going to Harvard. You know how to handle that.

It's not that difficult. So you have to be willing to ask. You have to reject rejection. And then the other key, after you respond to the feedback and give the feedback, is you've got to persevere. You never, ever, ever, ever give up. 144 publishers said, no, we're not interested in chicken soup for the soul. We didn't give up. I had a friend who wanted to be a chiropractor up near Pebble Beach, California, and he

knocked, he went to the Chiropractic Association and said, you know, would you help me open my office here? And they said, no, we really don't want any more chiropractors here. We're going to recommend you go somewhere else. We have one chiropractor for every eight people. He said, well, I really want to be here. So he ignored them. Remember what you think of me is none of my business? And he went out and he literally knocked on doors for six months,

knocked on 12,500 doors, talked to 6,500 people and asked four questions. You know, should I name my office this or this or this? Should I put it over in this side of town or that side of town? If I wanted people to come in before or after work if they had a 9 to 5 job, would I be better open 7 to 9 or 5 to 7? And finally, he said, what newspaper should I advertise in? And lastly, he said, if I do an open house, would you like an invitation? Six months later he opened his office.

His first month in practice, young kids still in his 20s, out of of chiropractic school made $72,500 net profit. He netted over $1 million that year. Now, what did he do different than most people? He went out and he engaged people. He asked them, would you like to come? Would you get involved with me? I was giving his talk and a guy came up to me and said,

you know, I've been doing, he said, I've been coming to this church where I was talking to. He said for 15 years. And now you're telling me about this guy. You know, he came and he knocked on my house. And I talked to him. And I didn't need a chiropractor for five years. And then once I had an accident at church, I mean at the work.

And he said, I still let his card on my bulletin board in the kitchen. And I went to him because you know him. See, we do business with people we know. Okay. So never, ever, ever give up. Ever, ever, ever. Now, other principle, we'll start to wrap this up here. It's never too late to start.

Some of you are sitting here or you're viewing this and you're going, but I'm too old. I want to tell you two quick stories. Helen Klein, at the age of 55, her husband comes to her and says, I want to train to run a 10K race. That's about six miles. She said, are you crazy? We're in our 50s. He said, no, I want to do it.

Why don't we just run around the backyard? Not our backyard was about three times bigger than most of our backyards, but it wasn't a ranch, I think. They ran around, and they just dropped dead almost at the porch in the back. And she said, I was so disgusted with myself. I decided the next day I would either walk or run around twice, the next day three, the next time, four times. She just kept adding one lap every day. Then she started doing it around the block, and she would add a lap every day. Well, in six months, she got to the point where she could run a 10-mile race, and she entered it.

Now, I met her when she was 83. She was getting an award at the same place I was in California. And she had just finished running a 100-mile marathon. She's run several 24-mile marathons, 5-75-mile ultramarathons, including one all the way around Lake Tahoe. She started when she was 55. Cliff Young shows up, Australian 61, Sheep heard her. a race that goes from Sydney to Melbourne. It's about 800 kilometers.

He's not wearing Nike. He doesn't have on Pumas. He's not wearing the latest running gear. All these world-class athletes are there. He's wearing Oshkosh overalls over a T-shirt with a baseball cap, work boots, and galoshes. And they're all laughing at him. Like, you're crazy? Is this some kind of a business?

He says, no. He says, what running experience do you have? He says, well, I chase the sheep around. We don't have a horse or anything. So, you know, anyway, they take off. And they're going crazy. And they're running and running and run and run and running. And he just kind of starts shuffling off like this. That night, all the other runners went to sleep. You're supposed to run 18 hours and sleep six.

Well, no one told Cliff you were supposed to sleep. So he didn't know. So because he didn't know, he didn't do it. He said, I've stayed up many nights chasing my sheep around and make sure they didn't get in trouble. He's running, and he runs right by him. And because he runs right by him, no one tells him to stop because they're all asleep.

He cut five and a half hours off the world record for that race. Okay? So here's the deal. it doesn't matter how old you are. And the other thing important in that story is the less you know about how you should be and they just go for what you want. See, most of us, we have all these beliefs that are limiting us. Find the stories that inspire you and start believing that.

Believe you can. Talk to yourself in a positive way. And if you do that, you can create miracles in your life. And I'll end with this story. One of my favorite stories, a minister gets a call from his parishioner. Her name is Aunt Haddy. They call her in the church, and he's Reverend Jim. And she says, I just went to the doctor, and they called me and said that I've got terminal cancer.

And they said I got six months to live at the max. And I'd like you to come over and help plan my funeral with me. He said, well, he started to try to comfort her. He said, no, don't comfort me. I'm really old and lived my life and achieved all my goals. I'm very happy. But I don't trust my kids to do the funeral, right. So please come over and we'll plan it.

So he goes over and they start planning a funeral. She said, I want this, you know, I want to wear this dress, and I want this psalm red, and I want this hymn sung, and I want this open casket. I want these kind of flowers. I want this poem on a card, a memory card with my picture that people can think away. Then she said, I want to be buried, and I want to have my Bible in my left hand and a fork in my right hand. And a minister said, well, I understand the Bible in Hattie, but why the fork? She says, you know, whenever we have those church socials and we're down in the basement and they come by

and they say, you know, if it's going to be a really good dessert, they always say keep your fork. It's not going to be something like jello or pudding. It's going to be apple pie or cherry cobbler or chocolate cake. And whenever they say keep your fork, I know the best is still yet to come. So when people come by my coffin and they look in and they go, Reverend Jim, why the fork? I understand the Bible. She was very religious, but why the fork? You just look them right in the eye and say, Ann Hattie knew the best was still yet to come.

And so for all of you, if you'll put these principles into action and not think about them, but actually do them. And if you really want to go deeper, get the book or go to one of my seminars or whatever, you can go to my website and download things. It's just jackcampfield.com and take the forms there and use them. I promise you, for you, the best is still indeed yet to come. Thank you for tuning into this episode. If you're enjoying the content, you can access exclusive material by becoming a subscriber. Continue strengthening your mind by listening to our other episodes.