The School of Greatness - 143 The 10 Success Principles to Create an Abundant Life with Jack Canfield

Episode Date: February 25, 2015

"The only beliefs that make any sense are the ones that will take you from where you are to where you want to go." - Jack Canfield If you enjoyed this episode, check out the videos, show notes, links, and more at www.lewishowes.com/143.

This is episode number 143 with America's number one success coach, Jack Canfield. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Welcome everyone to the School of Greatness podcast. I'm your host, Lewis Howes, and we've got a legend on today. His name is Mr. Jack Canfield, and the bio is long. I'm going to go over a few key points right now.

If you don't know who Jack is, he holds the Guinness Book of World Records for having seven books simultaneously on the New York Times bestseller list. He is also the founder and former CEO of the Chicken Soup for the Soul Enterprise, which is a billion-dollar empire that encompasses licensing, merchandising, and publishing activities around the globe. He is also the author of The Success Principles, How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be, which is what we'll be covering today mostly, is his book, The Success Principles, which has been around for 10 years now and sold over a million copies.

And again, as the founder and author of Chicken Soup for the Soul, that series, he's affectionately known as America's number one success coach. He's studied and reported on what makes successful people different. He knows what motivates them, what drives them, and what inspires them. He brings this critical insight to countless audiences internationally, sharing his success strategies in the media with companies, universities, and professional associations. Jack is a Harvard graduate with a master's degree in psychological education and one of the earliest champions of peak performance, developing specific methodologies and results-oriented activities to help people take on greater challenges and produce breakthrough results. This guy is an incredible human being.

I could go on and on about him. I had an incredible time connecting with Jack in his home in Santa Barbara, and we did a great interview that you're about to hear right now, talking all about the success principles, his life, his journey to getting to where he is, and a lot of other great things as well. Make sure to check out lewishouse.com slash 143. his life, his journey to getting to where he is, and a lot of other great things as well. Make sure to check out lewishouse.com slash 143. You're going to be able to watch the full video interview there. Check out all the show notes, get his book, all that other great stuff. After the interview, we actually play a game of pool. I challenge Jack to a game of pool in his

pool room. We actually continued the interview. For another 30 to 40 minutes, you're going to hear some of the juiciest stories you've ever heard from Jack Canfield, probably where you've never heard them ever before. Make sure to check out lewishouse.com slash 143 to check out this full interview, the additional interview, and make sure to share it all with your friends and pick up a copy of this book. Without further ado, let me introduce you to the man, the myth, the legend, the one and only Jack Canfield. Welcome, everyone, to the School of Greatness show. I'm with Jack Canfield. Thanks so much for coming on. My pleasure. I appreciate it. I'm very excited about this. I read the book, The Success Principles, How to Get From Where You Are

to Where You Want to Be, I think eight years ago, a couple years after it came out. And now it's in the 10-year anniversary. It's incredible. How many copies have you sold so far in this book? I think in the first book, we're just under a million copies in America and around the world, probably. We're in 27 languages, so somewhere over a million plus. Amazing. Yeah. But it's small time compared to Chicken Soup for the Soul, right?

You sold like hundreds of millions. Chicken Soup for the Soul has sold 500 million copies. Oh my goodness. That's half a billion copies. But you have to realize that's 200 plus books in that series. Yeah. This book, what's fun about this book, even though it's not as well known yet, there was a town in Russia.

We're in Russian. There's a town in Russia where the mayor bought this book for everybody in town. Wow. Small town. And- So you're a celebrity there. Yeah, I'm a big celebrity in some little small town in Russia. But the point is that, you know, even though it's not as big as Chicken Soup, it was a

phenomenon. The reason I wrote this book, chicken soup was inspiring people. Everyone got inspired. I can do that. I want to do that. But they didn't know how to do that. They didn't know how to overcome obstacles, set goals, become a millionaire. This was the how-to book.

Taught them how to do it. Exactly. Interesting. So how long was chicken soup for the soul around until this came out? I would say close to, well, let's see, 12, 15 years, something like that. I remember reading, my first introduction to you was reading one of the stories I remember in Chicken Soup for the Soul. I believe it was the original copy, was about how someone was on a toll booth on the highway and paid for three or four people behind them or something like that,

that story. And I can't remember if it was the first one or if it was a different one. It was the first book. Right? And I remember thinking, what an amazing concept. I was probably 12 or 13 or 14 at the time. And I was like, giving back to make others feel great. Yeah. What an inspiring concept.

Yeah. I met a guy recently who, when he's walking down the street, if he sees an expired sign on the parking meter, he puts a quarter in it. That's cool. You know, it's just like paying it forward. Yeah. And I love that random acts of kindness idea because people speed up to see who you are after you paid their toll booth. Sure, sure.

And one of your principles in the book is about being in service. I think that's one of the last chapters, I think. So I want to talk about that in a second. But, again, I'm so impressed with just what you've created in your entire, you know, your legacy is incredible. I mean, 500 million books and a million books here and you've got programs and everything else that you've done. PBS specials, coaching trainers, events. You've been a movie star, obviously, right? What do you think has been the thing that people know about you the most?

What thing have you done that kind of like brought the most awareness about you? Well, I think the Chicken Soup for the Soul series plus the movie The Secret. There was a Chicken Soup for the Soul. Everyone knew that name. Not that many people knew Jack Canfield. So I'd meet people and they'd say, what's your name? Jack Canfield. And we'd be sitting on the plane and I'd say, well, I co-authored a Chicken Soup for the Soul. We have that all over our family. My dad gives them away for Christmas. So that brand was huge. But with The Secret, all of a sudden, there's Jack Canfield, there's my face. And now when I walk through an airport, I'll have someone come and go, you were in that movie.

Right, right. Literally, I was just in Dubai in the airport, and someone walked up to me and said, are you Jack Canfield? It wasn't a secret. So basically, that has really taken my personal brand to a higher level. In China, it's still the number one bestselling DVD. I'm actually going to go to China next year. I was just in Iran, our enemy Iran. And I was talking in Tehran and found out that our movie, The Secret, has been shown

on national television in Iran six times. Who would ever imagine the secret would be shown on Iranian television? Amazing. And so I had like almost a thousand people come to hear me talk. That's incredible. Yeah, blew me away. Wow. What is the thing that you've done that you've been most proud of through all the different projects that you've been a part of? I think raising my children would be first. But in the professional world, I would have to say again, probably the fact that Chicken Soup for the Soul is now being used in China to teach English. So they put Chinese on one page and English on the other.

They've published over 315 million books just in China. And a large portion of that is textbooks teaching English to kids in China. Because, you know, if you remember back to school, we were reading, you know, all these Wuthering Heights Wuthering Heights and Shakespeare, and I wasn't that much into that stuff. But these stories are things that anybody can relate to and get excited about. So they said, hey, let's use this to teach English, because the kids will pay attention to that. That's brilliant. So I'm really proud of that. That's really cool. I want to talk about this book and the success principles. And first, I want to ask you, has anything changed in the last 10 years with the principles or these principles last forever?

Well, the principles that were in the first book are universal and timeless. And they're the same things that Plato and Aristotle and people were talking about back in ancient Rome and Greece. But what's new in this book that I love is we've got three or four chapters in a whole section called Success in a Digital Age. So when this book came out in 2005, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, the blogosphere. Instagram. Instagram, Tumblr. None of that was around.

None of that was around. If it was around, it was very nascent. around it was very nascent and the other thing is you know people didn't have YouTube channels and we didn't have crowdsourcing and crowdfunding and you know gofundit.com and Indiegogo and all that so we have a whole section that was a friend of mine named Moses Ma who's a techno genius who literally graduated from college in the Stanford group of all the people in Silicon Valley and made ten million dollars his first year on a video game he invented, you know, that kind of world. And so he took all that money, went to India,

meditated for a couple of years, came back, and now he's doing consciousness work through media. And so he helped me write those chapters, which is really very, very updated and new. And then we have a chapter on leadership that wasn't in there before, because people used to think of leaders as the president of the company, the supervisor, the politician. But now we all need to be leaders. There's social causes we have to care about, like sustainability and all of that. We need leaders in our communities, leaders in our neighborhood. Our families need leaders. So we all need to step up. And we talk about how to do that. And then there's a chapter in there. I don't know if you've ever met or heard of Ivan Meisner, who started BNI, Business Network International. He has 6,500 chapters of that around the world that he's created just in the last, I don't

know, 20, 30 years. Incredible. And he has a whole chapter, I asked, this is the first time I've had guest chapter, where on how to network effectively. For instance, most people, when they go to a networking event, start trying to promote themselves. And he says it's absolutely, totally wrong. You have to go from what he calls visibility to credibility to profitability. And so if I come to a networking meeting and I say, hi, what do you do? Well,

I clean rugs. Here's my card. If you ever need rugs clean, you know, call me. He's just like, the wrong way. But if I come in and say, hey, what are you up to? And you tell me some project you're working on. And I say, how can I help you? And then I actually do the thing I said I was going to do. Now I have credibility as someone who follows through. Now that I've done some contribution, I can come to you and say, hey, you know any friends who need their carpets cleaned? I'd love to be the guy that does that since I've helped you. And you can do that. And the other thing I learned from Ivan that was cool is we're sitting here in what's called an open two. In other words, we're not face to face. We've got 45 degree angle. So most

people at a networking party or networking event or networking just in general, a cocktail party, they're like this. There's no room for anyone to get in. So if we have this open space always, then someone walks in, we can go like this and invite them in. Now we've expanded our network. And the other thing he taught, and I love it, is that when you go to a networking event, a lot of people are shy. They don't know how to introduce themselves. Pretend it's your party. If you were throwing a party at your home, you just welcome people and say, hi, how are you doing? What's going on in your life? So stand near the doors. People come in and say, hi, my name's Jack Canfield.

What's yours? You tell me. I say, what business are you in? And we start talking. And then I kind of usher you into the room and wait for the next person. Now I'm the host instead of somebody who's sitting there trying to do business. So act like it's your party. Act like it's your party that gets you over. That really has helped me because I've even been invited to speak places. And then there's a cocktail party before. And I remember for years, I would be standing around calling, like, well, what do I do now?

And now I act like I'm the host. And it's made it so much easier. Introduce people. Exactly. Connect them. Yeah. That's cool. I like that.

Let's go into some of the principles, the fundamentals of success. Sure. And I think you talk about being clear is one of the first things and having a clear vision. Right. Because you can't be successful without a vision and being clear. Well, you have to first take 100% responsibility for your life, give up being a victim. Then you have to get clear about what is my purpose. I believe each person has a purpose they were born with,

whether it's to be a mechanic or a chef or to be a doctor or to do what we do, which is empower and enlighten people through the work we do. And so once you've got that, you have to have a clear vision of what would you like your life to look like, both in the business world, in your social world, in your relationships, your health and fitness, your travel and fun, all of that. So we have seven areas of your life, which we say, let's pretend that you can have anything you want. No holds barred. You know, God comes down and says, you're chosen. You won the lottery. You get the life you want. What would you do? And you go, oh, I'd like to live in this house in Malibu. I'd like to live on the ocean. I want to have three kids. I want to be able to travel to Europe five times a year. You know, whatever it is, write it down.

And then using things like visualization and affirmations, you can start turbocharging that vision with intention and then some of the tools that come out of the law of attraction work and so forth. But you first have to know where you're going. I liken it to a GPS system in a car. Here we are in Santa Barbara. You live in LA somewhere. Windy roads to get back here. Yeah.

But if you have a GPS that says 929 via Frutaria or whatever, your GPS system will tell you how to get there. Now, when you left LA, you did not know exactly where you were going. You just trusted a GPS to say, turn left, turn right, turn left. Your subconscious mind works the exact same way. It is a programmable GPS system that will figure out the path if you program it correctly, which is putting in a vision of the destination. That's all you have to do. Interesting. But a lot of people feel a lot of fear because they're of the unknown of what's going to happen or that they might fail. They have a big dream, right? So what is fear to you and how does someone overcome that fear?

Well, here's the deal. You know, basically fear is, I love this word, the guy who wrote the book Dune said, fear is the mind killer. Fear takes you back into the amygdala, which is in the limbic system of your brain. You want to be in the prefrontal cortex, which is where the executive functions, where spiritual insights, where wisdom occurs, where rational, logical thinking occurs. So basically, as soon as I get into fear, I go back into this primal fight or flight or freeze place. And so I want to be up here. So basically, we now have technology called EFT tapping. I'm sure you've heard of it. Of course, Nick.

Nick Ordner and all those guys. And literally, nine acupuncture points, you tap on those in a sequence for maybe five minutes, seven minutes, and the fear disappears. It literally dissolves. There's absolutely no reason for anyone to be in fear. Now, the value of setting a goal is to watch all these fears come up. I refer to it as a, you ever play the game whack-a-mole at the mall? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You got your heads coming, you got to whack them before they go back down. So we want to surface those fears so we can whack them using EFT and other technologies that are out there, neuro-linguistic programming and so forth. But now we have this science that just literally you don't have to be stopped.

The other thing, a friend of mine just wrote a book called The Fear Cure, or The Cure for Fear, one of those. And she talked about one of the biggest fears is of the unknown and uncertainty of the future. But everything's uncertain. We're trying to create certainty in an uncertain world and stop being afraid of uncertainty. Uncertainty is what's uncertain. We're trying to create certainty in an uncertain world and stop being afraid of uncertainty. Uncertainty is what's exciting.

If you go to Africa on a vacation, a safari, you have no idea what's going to happen. That's part of the adventure. It's fun. That's part of the fun, exactly. If you knew, oh, there's going to be a zebra that pops out right here, this is going to be next, it might get boring, right? Or if you go river rafting, you don't know where the rapids are

and how you're going to do it. And if you go surfing, you don't know exactly how the wave's going to break and all that and how big it's going to be. And so that adventure is really what life's about. And so we need to be excited. Fear is created by imagining bad things that haven't happened yet. So fantasized experiences appearing real. Everyone always says that. Someone else recently said, forget everything and run. But I think that if you realize that you're creating your own fear by imagining a bad thing, oh, if there's a recession, I'll lose my house. Why not go, if there was a recession, I'm going to make more money because there's going

to be opportunities and we're going to be able to pay our house off faster. Zig Ziglar said, worrying is negative goal setting. And all you have to do is use that same power to think and visualize to create a positive outcome instead of a negative, and then the fear disappears. Yeah. And a quote of yours, I believe, is in the book. As you say, everything you want is on the other side of fear. Absolutely. We all live in our comfort zone. We want to be comfortable. When I was down in the rainforest a couple of years ago with the Ochoa Indians, I always wanted to go to the rainforest

ever since I heard- How was it? It was so cool. It was really cool. We got to live with the Ochoa Indians, which is an indigenous tribe, which is, you know, had not had any connection with white people from the outer world until about 10 years ago, 15 years ago. And friends of mine are down now working with them to help preserve the rainforest. And I always wanted to go. And the trees are unbelievably huge. Roots are as tall as this building and go out like that. You can build a house inside the root system.

Oh, my goodness. There's army ants that are about that big, these leaf cutter ants. And you can see them just going across with all these little leaves waving. We got to swim in this river that was full of piranha, they told us later. But piranha don't eat you. They don't. They have a rule in the river. Nothing attacks anything six times bigger than it is.

And so if you are in a tide pool where there's no food and it's flooded and now it's stuck over there and you step in there, a piranha will bite you. But the river they're not going to. Not at all. We had so much fun. It was so delightful to be in that nature. So the point is everything is an adventure and we have to think of it that way or we're going to be victims. And one of the other principles you talk about is how to transform yourself for success. So tell me about the people we surround ourselves with

and how do people influence us in a positive way of achieving our goals or keeping us back into victim mode? I don't know if your parents ever said this to you, but mine did. They always said, I don't want you hanging out with those kids that are a bad influence. So that doesn't stop when you're 18. So there are certain people who are negative, curmudgeonly, whiners, complainers, and blamers that if you hang out with them, that's who you become. And you look at any bar, all bars have a personality to them. There's bars on Lower State Street in Santa Barbara here where the lower economic class hangs out and they just bitch and moan about how bad everything is. Right.

There's bars further up the street where the people that are more successful hang out and they're just doing deals and talking about all the great things that happened that day. And having fun. Having fun. They're networking and brainstorming with each other, introducing each other to opportunities. So basically, you become the average of the five people you spend the most time with. I remember Mark asked this one guy who owns Evergreen Airlines if he could give him an idea that he thought might work for him. And he said, well, if I take it, how much money do you think I might make? He says, well, a couple million. He says, Mark, I can't even consider an idea that won't make me $100 million.

Oh, my gosh. It's just below my threshold to play. It's not worth it. Yeah. So now most of us, that's a very rarefied atmosphere. Most people listening to this aren't there. But just to give you an example, there's a friend of mine who, now a friend, just died recently. But I didn't know him at the time. His name was Lou Tice. And he ran the Pacific Institute and teaches a lot of stuff we do. And he was making, again, like, you know, a lot of money. And he was, his clients included the Navy, you know, the government of Denmark, you know, that kind of stuff. And I said, I want to learn what he's doing. He's playing at a bigger level than I am.

So I called him up and I said to him, Lou, if you're ever in LA, could I, this was when I was in my 30s, I said, could I be your chauffeur? Don't hire a limo. Let me chauffeur you for free. All I ask is I can pump you with questions for the 20, 30 minutes. Sure, sure. He said, sure. So about three months later, I get a call. He says, hi, I'm coming to LA. Going to do a talk at a country club.

Pick me up at LAX. Take me to the hotel. Take me to the country club. Back me up. So I did. And I just, I peppered him with like, what'd you do? How'd you do this? How'd you do that?

And he told me. So about a year later, we both bid for a contract. It was $875,000 contract to educate people on welfare in California based on these success principles to get them off welfare. And we were the final two competitors, Pacifica student, and we won. Oh, wow. And so he was very gracious. He sent me a nice note. He said, you're a good student. That's great. He should have held back some of his secrets. Well, he didn't really need to. I mean, his bigger goal was to get all this out to the world and the part of the student is part of that as well. But he is, I mean, most people, it'd be surprising if people say yes, if you ask them to spend some time with you. Yeah, of course. I want to speak into the mastermind part because when I did my first

mastermind probably five, six years ago, when I had no clue what was going on, I think in our company, I was just starting out in business. We did around, I think, $250,000 in sales for like the first six months of our business. And then it was the end of the year, we went to this mastermind of these online marketers and a lot of them were making five to 10 million. And within the next month, the relationships we built from that mastermind, we did 250,000 in sales in that next month, just from five relationships in the mastermind. And that year we broke a million dollars. And it was just like all accelerated after being around people who were at that next level. So I can definitely speak into that. Yeah. I mean, you're a living proof of it. Exactly.

Extremely powerful. And if you're not a mastermind, make sure to join one and find one and become a part of it. Or get a mentor. Find somebody who's done what you want to do. And whether it's being in person with them or reading their book or listening to their home study course or their podcast. But whatever it is, people have already done. Tony Robbins says success leaves clues. I love that. And so everyone who's ever been successful has left some kind of clue.

There's a manual, a franchise operation manual, a workbook they wrote, a seminar they're leading, a boot camp. Go. Get educated. And I have a chapter in a book called Learn More to Earn More. Brian Tracy always talks about the idea that if you want to make more money, become more valuable. Have more impact that you can give somebody that will affect their life in a positive way. Whether it's your employer or people like us to our clients, the more I know, the more I can support people.

I mean, I have people now who are making, they own companies worth $600 million and they'll come to a retreat with me just so they can do tapping with me to overcome some fear they have. Some stress or whatever, yeah. Yeah. One guy, he was from Czechoslovakia, Pavel, And he had this huge company, and he was totally miserable. And he basically, as a result of all this work we did, he sold two of his companies. He hired some people to run his other companies.

He always wanted to be a cyclist, hired Lance Armstrong, cycling coach. Now he's won two cycling races in the Pyrenees in Europe. And he's in his 60s. So why not have a balanced life? Sure. Now, who were your mentors growing up or in your early career? Well, my first mentor was a man named W. Clement Stone. He was a friend of Napoleon Hill. And they wrote a book together, actually, called The Success System Never Fails. And Napoleon Hill, we all know from Think and Grow Rich. And so he mentored me for about two years when I worked

at his foundation. I was teaching teachers how to teach this stuff to kids to raise their self-esteem and teach them how to be successful. His big phrase was success is not a four-letter word. You know, it's like most people think success is bad. Money is bad and success is bad. Yeah, especially back in the 60s and 70s when everyone was a hippie and the counterculture and all that going on. So another mentor of mine was Jesse Jackson, who was a contemporary of Martin Luther King. I used to go to his church when I lived in Chicago. I was teaching in an all-black inner city school

because I was part of the civil rights movement, wanted to make a difference. And I remember one day I watched him. He always had people like Sidney Poitier and Bill Cosby would come in, all these stars. And I remember standing on the edge of the church because I got there late, so I didn't have a seat. And I'm looking over, and the band is playing. And all of a sudden, Jesse looks over and he goes like that, just a little nod.

The band stops, you know. Wow. And this room must have had 1,000 people in this church. And I went, oh, that's cool. I want to learn how to do that, you know. And so now I run groups of like, you know, 500 to 800 people at a time and thousands. The largest group I ever talked to was 20,000 people, you know? And so like learning how to manage the energy of a large group of people like that is a skill. And I wanted to learn to do that. So I

used to go to church every Sunday and just watch a master do that work. And then I've had masters along the way that I've worked with in terms of, I used to be a psychotherapist, people that have taught me, you know, marketing, people that have been gurus for me in terms of relationships, John Gray, for instance. And I think you should always have somebody who knows more than you do about something teaching you that so you can keep expanding your capacity in life. Well, I mean, you teach so many people, millions of people now look up to you and are inspired by your work. So who is now your inspiration or do you have a mentor still? I don't have a mentor as such, but I have a lot of people. Mastermind group. I learned from everybody. I mean, Gary Vaynerchuk, you know, jab, jab, right? And I go, that's very cool. I learned from that. So I started changing how I

did social media. That's cool. So, you know, it's like, I don't have one mentor that I look to, So, you know, it's like I don't have one mentor that I look to, but I have a lot of people. And I think what's fun is that people in their 30s and early 40s, and I'm 70 today, these are my mentors now. Because they grew up in a different mindset with the digital age, and I love learning. Yeah, that's awesome. Really inspiring. In the transform yourself for success part, you talk about completing the past and embrace the future. What do you mean by that, completing the past? Well, we all have a lot of past experiences that we haven't let go of.

Usually we're carrying resentment or guilt and anger, irritation, whatever. And so in order to be free to move forward, think of it like this. Imagine if you were walking down the beach and you had a belt around you and behind that was like 17 anchors. And you're trying to walk down the beach pulling all these anchors. We want to cut those cords. And so all of your resentments, all the people you're still upset with, your parents, people that might have even raped you, whatever. It's not that we condone their behavior, but we need to let go. Forgive, right? And just forgive.

And the big problem is for most people, they don't know how to forgive. And forgiving is actually there's a steps to forgiveness. What are those? Well, you first have to own your anger. So a lot of times, women especially aren't supposed to get angry. So they can just get hurt. Men aren't allowed to feel their hurt and their fear. That's not macho. So we get angry. So someone cuts us off on the freeways and we're like, you know, that kind of thing. Whereas a woman will be, ah, scream kind of thing.

So there's these levels called anger, hurt, fear, remorse and regret, where I have to own my accountability. And then there's the part where I say, well, what I really wanted was, or what I still want from you is, and then I can forgive. So if I say to you, you know, you have a fight with your brother, let's say, and I said, go tell your brother you're sorry. You're not sorry, you're still kicked off, you know?

So you first have to go, I'm really angry that you stole my candy bar. You know, it really hurts me that you don't trust, I can't put my stuff out and trust you not to take it. I'm really, that I have to not trust my own brother in my bedroom kind of thing. I want to take responsibility for the fact that I left it out. I should know I shouldn't leave my candy on the top of my desk when you're around. That's stupid on my part. I'm going to hide it next time. What I want is for you to leave my stuff alone and I

forgive you because you are my brother. I love you. And I always tell the story about my father when I was about 14, really hit me hard one day. And for a long time, I was telling him the story about my father abused me, you know, and all that kind of stuff. But the fact is I'd lied to my father and I lied to him about something. And when he found out, he lost it. And when he lost it, he came across the threshold into my room to tell me how upset he was. And he broke his toe. And when he broke his toe and he was angry at me, he just went like that. And so I can't be, I'm not a total victim there.

If I hadn't lied, I wouldn't have got hit. Now, do I condone parents hitting their children when they lie? No. But the point is, I can't play total victim. You got to take responsibility. Got to take responsibility. Now I can say, I want you to not hit me any again. I want to trust my dad to take care of me.

I forgive you. I understand you are in pain. I can let it go. So we have to go through those steps. It's not just as easy as saying, let it go. Sure, sure, yeah. You know, I believe that the key to success is relationships and being an effective communicator

and learning how to develop relationships with every personality type. Learning how to meet people where they're at, not just where you're at and what you want, but really connecting and understanding where their come from is. Yes. You talk about learning how to speak with impeccability. Can you talk about that? Yes. This is actually a concept taken from Don Miguel Ruiz, who wrote the book The Four Agreements, who's actually become a friend of mine over the last couple of years. And speaking with impeccability means you don't put yourself down, for starters,

and you don't put anyone else down. You don't gossip. You don't spread rumors. You don't be sarcastic, because sarcasm is veiled anger. And so basically, it's like speaking from a place of integrity and a place of love and a place where all my words are intended to uplift myself, for starters. So no negative self-talk. Replace that with positive self-talk. And then to uplift in the environment, to say positive things to you, the crew who's filming this, et cetera, instead of getting upset. And we've seen people, I mean, I've been on TV shows where the star treats the people

on the crew like crap. And then everyone hates it. I remember talking about this at CNN. And after the interviewer left, all the staff came up and said, boy, we need you at CNN. So basically, you want to be in a place where everything you say and do is contributing to the upliftment of people, not putting them down. So many people email me who listen to the podcast, and they come from a place of negative self-talk. What does that actually do when we start talking, either on internal dialogue or we verbally express it? What does that actually do for where we want to be in the future?

Well, we've actually seen studies done where when somebody yells at themselves, you know, gosh, darn it, why are you so stupid, Jack? You know, I can't find my keys. It actually affects the brain in a negative way. It actually creates a vibration that almost, I won't say it destroys brain cells, but John Assaraf in a recent video he put on actually showed some brain cells dying

when people were thinking negative thoughts. No way. Yeah. So some of the new neuroscience out there. But more interestingly, Dr. Masaru Omoto, who did all this work with water, he actually- Yeah, I've seen that. He puts the negative words on them. Yeah, puts negative words on the bottle.

But his first experiment was to put a bottle of water, like, you know, a little avion bottle of water on a thing, have all of his students send negative energy, I hate you, you're stupid, you're a fool, took that water, froze it in little Petri dishes, bring it out, stick it under a microscope with a camera on top, and as the water starts to melt, I mean, the crystal starts to melt, it forms these big, ugly black blobs. Take the same kind of water, another bottle bottle on a different day, send positive energy to the water, freeze it, put it under the petri dish when it's melting, forms beautiful snow crystals. So we know that two things were fascinating. Water has memory and 85% of your body is made up of water. Your brain is made up of even more water, a higher percentage. So when you're saying

negative things to yourself, you're affecting yourself in a physiological way. If you say, I am sick, you're actually creating sick in the future. Oh my gosh. See, a lot of people think when they're describing the present, they're just, well, I'm sick, you know, but the fact is you're prescribing the future by describing the present as it is. And most people never get that. So this is why the people that live the most effective lives are always acting as if they're in the future and the future is perfect. You know, not waiting to get there. Right. I do this demonstration on stage when I teach this and I say,

you know, someone walks out and says, I feel bad today. Then the body goes, oh, you want to feel bad? We'll give you a bad hunch over. Now I feel worse. Oh, you want worse? We'll give you worse. And then pretty soon I'm crawling across the stage, you know, but it all started with, I don't feel good. Instead of saying, you know, and you know, we've all learned to say things like I'm having a healing crisis. I'm cleansing. Instead of saying I'm sick. I said, basically anything you say with the words I am your subconscious will then take that as a command. And so we're, we're constantly programming our subconscious. We think we're describing. And so we're constantly programming our subconscious. We think we're describing it, but we're actually prescribing it.

Are there studies of people that are constantly saying self-negative talk or expressing negative things against people who are positive constantly, who die at earlier ages or who have more cancer? Are there any studies about that, about the actual lifespan of someone when they would suffer? I don't know of studies about negative self-talk, but I do know that negative self-talk creates people being unhappy. And there are tons of studies that happy people live longer, they recover from diseases faster, they don't get as many diseases, their marriages last longer, Marriages last longer. They live longer. People that are in a positive space.

Everything, every statistic, every statistic is better. Sure. No matter what it is. How does someone be positive when they're broke and they're, you know, people are cheating on them and they're coming from a bad family or they're in a bad neighborhood? How does someone come from that place of the future is great or the future is perfect or I am healthy when they're not? It's a choice. You simply have to choose it. See, once I learned early on, I was in graduate school and I read a book called Seth Speaks. And it was about all this stuff we're talking about. And it was a book channeled by this woman named Jane Roberts. And I said, it just rung true as truth. I just said, this feels right. And what she was teaching is that your

beliefs are a choice. We think our beliefs are the result of seeing something outside of us. We say, oh, I believe if a spider bites you, your skin turns red because that's what I saw happen. But we can hypnotize people, tell them my thumb is a poker, hit them on the hand and their hand will form a blister. We can tell people that this is poison ivy and give them maple leaves, and they'll do that, and their skin will break out in a rash. Sure. Tell people the poison ivy is a maple leaf, run the poison ivy on it, nobody breaks out in a rash.

Right. So we know that so much of our internal behavior and our feel good is created by beliefs. Now, then the question I had was, well, what should I believe? What if I believe the wrong thing and I'm going to get myself in trouble? I was afraid to believe anything for a while. And then I realized the only beliefs that make any sense are the beliefs that will take you from where you are to where you want to go. So what are the beliefs that successful people believe? You know, look at Oprah Winfrey, born into poverty, you know, sexually abused as a child, but she believed

that she could get to where she wanted to go. Someone else without that belief didn't try. So simply the belief, and it's a choice. Everything is a binary choice. You're either believing something that takes you where you want to go, or something that takes you away from where you want to go. You're choosing love, or you're choosing the opposite, which is fear. It's like, it's a computer code, zero or one, which do you want to choose? Now you have to become become conscious because most people around you are unconscious and they're just agreeing with everything that's negative. That's why you want to hang out with positive people. But if you read books like this, if you go to seminars and you meditate and you listen

to podcasts, surround yourself with positive energy, pretty soon you get engulfed in this positive thinking and then all of a sudden your life transforms. Right. How does someone practice uncommon appreciation and what does that exactly mean? Well, uncommon appreciation, most people don't appreciate anybody. Most people are always focused on what they don't have. You know, I mean, I took my son to Africa when he was 16 and we went to Cameroon and we spent 12 days traveling around the country. And this is a kid who grew up in the house that we're filming this in. It's a pretty nice place. And he had everything he could possibly want, which I'm now not sure was the best idea.

And we get to Africa. And he realizes, I mean, he's always going like, I don't have the latest designer shirt. My jeans aren't cool. Get to Africa. He says, Dad, these people are happier than me. They have nothing. They don't even have t-shirts. I complain about the stain on my shirt.

They don't have shirts. And it changed his life. I mean, it really transitioned him. And so we have to realize that we have so much to be grateful for, so much. And so uncommon appreciation in relationship means, for me, at least five times a day, verbally appreciating somebody for something, you know? And whether it's by phone, in person, and if I can't do that, then send an email. So I used to walk around with a three by five card, these daily disciplines of success, appreciate five people, meditate, drink 12 glasses of water, go to bed by 11 o'clock, whatever. And I had to check everything off before I go to bed. And sometimes

I get to my five appreciations and I hadn't done it. So I'd send emails to people because it was like one in the morning. But you get into the attitude of appreciating. And also then you can just have an attitude of gratitude about everything. If you look around this room, everything in here was created by somebody else. That painting was painted by a Vietnamese artist. That statue was carved by someone in Malaysia or Tibet. You know, this fireplace was painted by a faux finisher. Somebody put this carpet down, somebody wove it, somebody grew the sheep for it. You know,

there's so much to be grateful for. And you go to, I was just in India and, you know, wood floors, tin roofs, people sleeping on the streets, you know, and you go, oh, thank God. But we forget. And so if you express gratitude for what you have, then you get more to be grateful for. That's the law of attraction. It's amazing. Yeah. How does someone practice gratitude when they feel like they have nothing still though? Like how does someone come from that place? Well, my favorite story about that is Joe Vitale, who was in the movie The Secret. And he said he was in somewhere in Texas. I think Austin might've been Dallas, Fort Worth.

He was down the bottom of the bottom. He was living in one of those like $79 a month apartments with like one table that was like plastic with plastic chairs and light bulb hangouts, a mattress on the floor with two sheets. I mean, you know, just the worst. Yeah, yeah. And he said, he borrowed a book from the library and it said, be grateful. He said, what the hell do I have to be grateful for?

I got a pencil and a piece of paper. That's about it. And then he said, well, if there was something to be grateful for, what would it be? He says, well, I got a pencil. I can write down my goals. I can send a love letter. With an eraser, I could erase my limiting beliefs. And that was the shifting moment of his life when he realized, I've got these two things.

I can create my future by writing down what I want. Sure. And so, you know, if you're in America and you're in a, even if you're on welfare, you're better than, you know, most of the world, I forget the exact figure, but like half the world lives on $2 a day or less. Incredible. Someone in America on welfare is getting several hundred dollars a month. Sure.

You know, and they got radio they can listen to. More likely they have TV. Cell phones. They got a cell phone. Yeah. You know, so, and here's another statistic. If you're making $100,000 a year, which you are and I am, you're in the top one-tenth of 1% of earners in the planet.

Wow. One-tenth of 1%. That's incredible. A lot to be grateful for. A lot to be grateful for. There's a lot of people who make money who are very ungrateful and unhappy. Yeah. They're comparing themselves to something they don't have.

So start focusing on what you do have and feel great joy for that. And then the weird law is you get more. Yeah. And when you're focusing on what you don't have, even when you have a lot, well, I don't have that latest Ferrari. I don't have that $52,000 watch. All you have to do is walk through the airport in Dubai and you could get very depressed if you were in that latest Ferrari. I don't have that $52,000 watch. All you have to do is walk through the airport in Dubai and you could get very depressed if you were in that mental state.

I saw a bottle of wine in the Dubai airport. It was being sold for $196,000. A bottle of wine. Oh my goodness. It's like a 1954 Chateau Lafitte, whatever it was. Something, yeah. And it was like, oh my God, I'd like to taste that wine. Yeah. But I'm not going to take my money and spend it for that. For $50,000 a sip.

No, really. So when we are ungrateful, what are we saying to others and to... Well, what we're saying is I don't have enough. And that is your mantra. I don't have enough. And guess what? Whatever you're affirming, you're going to get more of. You're going to get more of not enough.

So abundance is focusing on what you do have. Just go walk down the street. There's trees and air and birds and people and people that you could literally ask people for a dollar and most people would give it to you. And so by focusing on what you do have, it's saying to the world, I have enough. And then the reality is you're going to get more. It's just so bizarre how that works. Do you have an exercise or an example or homework for people about creating abundance in their life? Yeah, there's a number of things. Double Comestone told me, always carry a $100 bill in your pocket.

I have several in my pocket at the moment. So the reality is every time you go in, even if you don't have it to spend, you've got it in your pocket. Interesting. So you go and you go, oh, yeah, I'm rich. I got $100. Wow. As opposed to you going, I've only got $12.

So you don't ever want to be that I've only got mentality. Just opening it up and you see nothing. Exactly. Interesting. So that was one thing. Another thing he told us to do was go down to the Chicago Stock Exchange when all these billionaires were coming out getting their limos, say, thank you for being a model of abundance. Thank you for modeling that it's possible to be wealthy. So we all did that one day. It was a little embarrassing. But it worked. But the most

important thing is to do what I call a rampage of appreciation, something I learned from the Abraham work of Esther and Jerry Hicks, where you take five minutes and just walk around your house, the hotel you're in, wherever you might be, and just start appreciating everything. You know, the people who made those wax candles over there that I get to romantically light this room with, the people that made that television where I just watched the Super Bowl the other day, even though my team lost. And who cares they lost? It was a great game. It was very exciting. And there's flowers over there that I didn't plant the seeds of, and the woman comes in and waters them. And even if you're living in the ghetto, you have a roof over your head. There's people in the world sleeping on the streets,

sleeping in the jungle, sleeping out there. You have fresh water. People in Africa are dying because of lack of water that doesn't have disease in it. More likely you have clothes on. You have food to eat. It may not be gourmet food, but it's food. You have medical care. So just look at everything and just a rampage of appreciation. Every single thing, I appreciate that. We have indoor plumbing. You know how many people don't have indoor plumbing? Yeah, exactly. We turn on the lights. We turn on the lights and the electricity comes on. In India, I saw this movie recently about in India, people don't have phone service. If you don't have phone service, you can't play in today's world.

There's a guy, I forget his name right now, but he actually goes up and he cuts a little wire in a phone, puts a clip and puts phone service into people's homes in the ghetto. That's interesting. And he's a Robin Hood. He's a hero. Yeah, yeah. You know? So just, God, there's so much we have to be grateful for.

One of the principles about money you talk about is to pay yourself first. Yes. Now, does that always mean financially or is that something else as well? Well, I think financially for sure. You know, in other words, if I make $100, $10, then that goes into savings. So I've always been a 10% tither to yourself first. And then you want to be a tither at some percentage to the rest of the world. Why pay your, sorry to interrupt world. Why pay yourself first?

Because if you don't pay yourself first, you're paying everyone else. You're going to work all week long, month long. You get your paycheck. And then it all goes out in bills. And you go, damn, I didn't get anything for net. More importantly is you have to build up capital that makes money, either interest in an investment or it has money you can invest in starting your own company. In other words, if great opportunities come along, like I remember when Apple stock came

out and I went, I think this is a good thing. Go into any Apple store and you have to wait to get waited on. That's like Starbucks. You have to wait to get a cup of coffee. Any place where people are waiting. All day long. All day long. That's a good investment, right? And I had to convince this guy that I buy stock from to do it, you know, and it's doubled and it's, you know, split and all that kind of stuff. But basically, I forgot the question. What was your question? Oh, pay yourself first. So paying yourself first is you have to have money to build up money so eventually you can live off the money rather than living off your labor, you know? And so, you know, I talk about Sir John Templeton, who used to take 50% of every dollar he made and put it into savings. He's now a billionaire, 50%. John Demartini,

who's in this book, who's another guy who was in The Secret, he said to his staff, every month I get paid this. I'm not paying your salaries if we don't make enough money. So you got to be watching the bottom line. And if we're not getting enough clients, he's a chiropractor, you need to go out and advertise and bring in the people because I'm paying me first. And his staff go, whoa. But they took responsibility. And as a result of that, he's made millions of dollars. He's a millionaire. And so- Is that a self-fit? Would someone say, well, that sounds selfish. Why not support your team first or give back first? What do you say to that?

He was teaching his team one of the most powerful principles ever, take care of yourself. What do they tell you on the airline? Put your mask on first. Put your mask on first so you can help take care of others. Everyone else. So it's like you want to take care of others. You want to be in service.

You and I, whatever we do is in service. We're having fun and getting paid for it, but it's serving people. Not every profession is that. But in general, we're not saying take all the money for yourself. We're saying take 10% and invest that over time. And if that grows and it creates 6%, 8% interest if you're a good investor, what's the guy who wrote The Automatic Millionaire? You become an automatic millionaire. That's it. Is that David? David Bach. David Bach. And so that's what I did. W.E. Clements Stone taught me to do that. He gave me a book called The Greatest Secret Ever, I think it was, and then another book about this guy who

was in a fable in Iran or someplace, and he always put his 10% aside. There's a book in Canada called The Wealthy Barber. He had all this money. He was only a barber. Why? Because he put money aside to work for him. And you want your money making money. Sure. And if you're not taking care of yourself, you can't serve on a bigger level. It's true. Bob Proctor has a wonderful quote. I was watching him once. We were at a secret conference. And we were both teaching at this conference where they put on. And he said, if you don't have a lot of money, the good you can do is limited to where you are. That means called your physical actions. But if you have a lot of money, you can build a school in Africa. You can do cataract operations in India. You can fund microloans in Africa, whatever. So I tithe. I remember the hardest thing I ever did. One year, I made $6 million.

And I had to give away $600,000. It's easy to say tithe when it's not that big. Yeah, yeah. It was like, oh, write your checks for like $100,000. Yeah. But then I remembered, you are so lucky to be able to write a check that big. Sure. So let's change how this is going here.

Right, 5.4 million more. Yeah, exactly. And everything you send out comes back multiplied. We know that. It's a principle that seems to work in universe. That's amazing. Why do some people think you need to spend more to make more? Well, I think basically you have to invest in your own business. You have to invest in yourself. You have to invest in new supplies, new technology. I mean, I just invested in a lot of new cameras and lights and put a home studio in here so we can do this kind of thing here without having to travel down to the studio in Camarillo, where we used to work all the time. I've hired three new amazing people at very high salaries because they have expertise that I want.

We just invested $300,000 to develop a home study program for our train the trainer course. Sure. And if we didn't invest that, then we don't have this leverage to get it out to all the world. Now that it's in the can and it's all digitally downloadable, most of our expense has been spent. Yeah. And so a lot of people are so afraid to risk that money.

And Tony Robbins says, you want to have a big success, you got to have massive action and massive input, you know? So the more you're willing to invest, the more you can win. I take people to Las Vegas sometimes as part of our personal development trainings and watch how they gamble. $5, you know, what can you win? $5. Maybe $10. Yeah. You know, $100. Well, you can win $100. They can lose, but you can't win $100 if you don't invest $100, unless you make stupid bets on the craps table, which very rarely come true. How much do you gamble? I don't gamble a lot, but I do. I usually give myself $600 or $700 just to play with. It's kind of entertainment money.

Sure. And the most I've ever won in the night was about $3,500. And that was fun. Yeah. And have I lost the whole $600? Yes, I've done that as well. But again, it's like going out to, you know, you can spend five friends with a dinner at a good restaurant.

You could have a sip of that wine for 600 bucks. There you go. Very cool. I want to transition into investing into the digital age. Yeah. Because this is the last chapter, the newest chapter, I should say, in the book. Yeah. Is the digital age.

And you talk about embracing change. And do you feel like people should embrace change when it comes to technology? Absolutely. Absolutely. You have to embrace all change or it's going to wash over you in a bad way. It's like being on a surfboard out in the ocean. If the big wave comes and you're not paddling soon enough, you're just going to get either bounced around a lot or you're going to get tumbled over in the surf and it doesn't feel

good. I was just in Hawaii watching that Jaws. Oh, I've been there, yeah. Six feet high, six story high waves. I mean, that can kill you. Yeah. We're talking about tons of water coming down. So basically you want to be able to see the trends coming. So that's why pay attention, read things like Wired Magazine and Inc Magazine and Fast Company and things like that. So you know what's happening in the world.

And then when you see the trend coming, you want to get ahead of it so you can surf it rather than being overwhelmed by it. And you've got to, you know, there's so much now with all the digital stuff that's out there, LinkedIn, Facebook, you know, YouTube, et cetera, TED Talks. I mean, if you're in our business and you haven't done a TEDx talk by now, you're not taken very seriously. And so you just have to learn how to play that game. Crowdfunding, crowdsourcing.

I write in the book about this coolest cooler that this guy developed. My friend did the design on that product. Did he? Yeah, he did the redesign for it. I love that. I was researching. I was researching this when I was writing it. And I started watching the final weeks of this.

Every day it was going up by another 100, 300,000. I ended up buying two of them. Some of them I have two skills. And so here was a guy, his first time out, he couldn't even raise $50,000 to make a prototype. The next time, what was it, like $10 million or something? Yeah, it's crazy. It was like 100,000 the first time and then it was 13.3 or 4. 13.1 million by the end, yeah. Yeah. And I can tell you story after story of friends of mine who've raised money for their cancer treatment on youfundit.com.

Sure. People on Indiegogo who've, it was a thing. They now are making solar panels to put on the highway. So that basically, where is the sun all the time? On the highways. There's no trees over the superhighways. And they're photovoltaic cells that they can create energy with. And they have little computers in them so you can, the traffic, so if it's an accident,

you can basically tell people detour back there, slow down, whatever. Wow. And they raised $2 million to fund that project. Robert Kiyosaki, in his last book, he crowdsourced all the chapters. He would put a chapter up. Almost a million people would respond to it and say, this sucks, or this is good, or you ought to add this. And so not only did he have all these people excited because they were part of the book process, but the book was 20 times better because of crowdsourcing the information. Give the feedback. Yeah. And we have a story about a guy on eBay.

eBay is, they have this thing called eBay Millionaires. They have a conference for all these guys. He started out, his grandfather said, I don't want my pool table anymore. Would you like to sell it for me? He said, sure, I'll sell it for you. Goes on eBay, gets $600 for the pool table, gives his grandfather 300, keeps 300. He said, that was the easiest $300 I ever made. So he puts an ad in the local paper. If you have a pool table, I'll sell it. And so he sold like 12 or 15 more of them and then no more pool tables. So he starts importing them from China and he's selling pool tables. Makes over a million dollars a year selling pool tables imported from China on eBay instead of having to go to a pool table store. Amazing.

And there's story after story about the leverage of the internet and crowdsourcing and affiliate marketing and internet marketing. And if you're not paying attention to that, you're getting left behind. Yeah. So we're talking about change right now. And in the book, you say there are two types of change. Can you speak into those changes and what those are? Well, there's cyclical change, which just occurs over and over. The seasons change, that kind of thing. And then there's totally disruptive change where everything changes. Like the internet changed everything. Everything, the game. The advent of the automobile changed everything. The development of the computer changed everything.

Cell phones have changed everything. Airplane, yeah. Airplanes changed everything. So there are certain changes that we can plan for. We can plan for the change in the seasons. We now have research that shows about every five years we get some kind of recession. Doesn't have to be huge like the recent one. But if you know that's coming, you can kind of plan for that. So investors, they see these cycles

and they think about that. But then there's disruptive change, which sometimes you can't see coming. Sometimes you can. If you can, you work with that. If you can't see it, you have to adapt as quickly as possible and know that it's not the same game anymore. I mean, when television happened, it changed the game. Everything.

You know, everything is like now, the fact that on-demand television, that changed advertising. The internet changed advertising. So you have to keep paying attention. The problem with us, we are kind of built to resist change. Why is that? Well, change used to signal danger. So if you were a caveman and you were walking on your normal path back to your cave and you saw some rustling in the leaves over there that never was rustling before, that's probably a scary animal that could eat you. And so you had to be really careful animal that could eat you, you know?

And so you had to be really careful. Anything that was different, you had to pay attention to. Sure. Well, that kind of stuff doesn't happen much anymore unless a hurricane comes through and wipes you out or a tsunami or something. But basically, we still resist it. And it just, like if you fold your hands like this, and then I ask people in my seminars to just move all the fingers up a notch so the other thumb's on top, how does that feel? Feels weird. Feels weird. Feels

uncomfortable. What does your body want to do? Put it back. It wants to put it back. So do that. How does that feel? Natural. Natural. Yeah. People go better, relief, whatever. So that's what changes. Yeah. Just that little bit of change is so uncomfortable, we don't want to do it. Sure. So we go back to the old ways ways and I remember when I was growing up They were going from rotary dial telephones, which some people can't even remember to push-button phones Yeah, I remember and people resist it. Oh, yeah, they used to have to go with the county fairs and say okay Dial this number, you know Then dial, you know with a to do and they would time you. You go, oh my God, that's, you know, 10 times faster.

Just to try to get people to accept that, let alone internet and email and, you know. Now there's no buttons. That's right. That's exactly right. And pretty soon we'll just think the number and it'll go. Exactly, exactly.

We have Siri. We just say, call home, you know, and it does. Or call Patty, cell phone or home phone. So it's all very, the thing I like about having, I have stepchildren who are in their 20s, and they keep me hip on everything, you know, the coolest apps. I just saw a great cartoon. It said, if you're planning on conquering Rome, there's a great app for that. A great app for that?

Alps. Alps for that, yeah, yeah. Because they went over the mountains. Sure, sure, sure. But anyway, there's a great app for that. A great app for that? Alps. Alps for that, yeah, yeah. Because they went over the mountains. Sure, sure, sure. But anyway, there's apps for everything. I forget how many, like 6,000 new apps a day come online. It's insane. It's insane.

You're developing an app right now. Yeah. It's incredible. This is an interesting question about the digital age. Yes. You talked about how you went from, you know, when email came around, we all started getting tons of emails. Right. from when email came around, we all started getting tons of emails. And I think you said, either in the book or somewhere, you said how you used to spend three, four, five hours a day

just responding to emails. And I believe you said you bring it down to now you just receive five emails a day. Your team kind of manages it, and you only get a certain amount of emails. Maybe it's more. Well, what is, you know, talk about that. Several things.

I have a really good spam filter. And I am able to, talk several things. I have a really good spam filter and I am able to unsubscribe to things, but my staff gets my emails first. Now this isn't possible for people who don't have staff, but let's start with me. So my staff goes through the emails that they can answer and the ones they can't, they forward to me. Or if it's someone they think needs a personal response from me to have a list of my top friends or whatever. But I was spending, God, two, three, four hours just with emails. And sometimes you start opening them and then it leads you to a website. Then all of a sudden you're reading the seven things you should do as an entrepreneur.

And you read videos. And so literally, and it all happened because I was writing this book 10 years ago. I didn't have time to write it if I was answering my email. So I said to my secretary, don't give me any emails except what's important. And now we've kept that up, which is, thank God. But literally with a spam filter and with just very quickly going, what am I focused on? What am I focused on? I'm only going to answer emails that do with this.

Answer all your emails in one block of time. Don't every time it pings, look over to see who Skyped you or who emailed you or whatever. You won't get anything done. Constantly distracted. And there's some wonderful work on multitasking that proves that multitasking doesn't work. There was a guy who was in a seminar. He had us write out a long sentence and then numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, up to 50. It was 50 letters, 50 numbers. So write the sentence as fast as you can. Write one to 50 as fast as you can. We all did it pretty fast.

He said, now I want you to go first letter, one. Second letter, two. Third letter, three. Fourth letter, four. It took five times longer. Oh, my goodness. To write that. And that's what we're doing all day long when we stop, focus on that, come back to this,

focus on that. So my staff and I have learned if we can do three to five hours of uninterrupted time focused either individually or together as a team on some specific goal or result, we get a lot done. And the other thing I write about in the book that I learned a couple years ago, I had a coach for a while. He just offered me free coaching. And I thought, well, I'll take it. He just wanted to be my friend. And so I did it for a couple months.

And what he said was, every morning when you come in, take your number one goal and spend the first hour and a half working on that. Don't open your emails. Don't do anything. Don't answer phone calls. Don't look at anything other than your number one goal. And at that time, it was to get into the sphere of influence of some people like Arianna Huffington, the Post, and so forth. So I would call these people, talk to them, write emails to them. And then it was finished, this book and so forth. So for me, that changed my life because most of us put off the hard things, which are our most important projects, till later in the morning. Then it's lunch.

And then it's the afternoon. And then, oh my God, it's four o'clock and I haven't worked on it yet. Sure. You know, and then we're tired. We're tired. Our creativity's not there. And also we learn, and this is some research from the university of london where if you have a new goal or a new habit new habit you're trying to form always do that

first thing in the morning if it's exercise if it's yoga if it's meditation if it's reading for an hour whatever it is do it first thing because if you don't it gets pushed off pushed off pushed off and then it's seven o'clock at night and you never did it. So what are your daily rituals in the morning and at night then? I'm always interested in that. In the morning I get up and after I've gone to the bathroom and brushed my teeth, I sit down and meditate for 20 minutes. I visualize for about another five minutes, all my goals. I have one cards and on the back is a picture of the goal manifested. So it's like my little movable vision board, if you will. Interesting. Do you draw it or is it like a cut out or something? Mostly I go to Google Images and I download an image and then I size it and then I print

it and then I cut it and stick it on the back. I like this. So if it's Bali, a couple years ago I wanted to go to Bali, so I ended up cutting that out and last year we ran a workshop in Bali. There you go. You know? And so whatever it is, I read the affirmation. I'm so happy and proud that I'm now finishing a course in Bali for 20 people having earned

$300,000 profit because I was charged for that. Turn it over, see the Bali picture, close my eyes, visualize being in Bali, looking out over the ocean at the end of the day, maybe drinking a gin and tonic or a glass of wine or something. And then after I've done that, I do about a three or four minute gratitude exercise where I may just list what I'm grateful for. I may do the rampage of appreciation I talked about. And then I will go and I'll exercise.

I have a gym in my house. It's an old garage we rehabbed into a gym at the end of the house. I do about 30 minutes of aerobics and about 20 minutes of weights. And then I take a shower. I have a blender drink with protein and God knows how many weights. And then I take a shower. I have a blender drink with protein and God knows how many supplements. And then I go to work. And then I do what I said, an hour and a half of no interrupted, focusing on my main project. Then I check my emails to see what's been sent to me from the previous day by my staff. And at night, what's the ritual when

you go into bed? Well, at the end of the day, I do two things. I also will review my goals because I believe right before you go to sleep and when you first wake up is the best time to do that because you're in this relaxed state. I also do a technique called the daily review, which is so powerful and very few people have ever heard of it or done it. But whether you're working on a goal or whether you're working on bringing a new quality into your life, I'm going to be more loving, more patient, more kind, whatever. I close my eyes and I ask my higher self, show me places today where I could have been more loving or I could have been more efficient. Whatever the goal is I'm working on. And invariably, oh, you yelled at the bank. I don't

yell, but you got impatient with the bank person. You, uh, you know, got the, you forgot to feed the cat and then you kind of blamed your wife for it, you know, whatever it is. And then what you do, and this is the key part, you recreate that movie. So whatever you did do, you now create a movie of doing it right. And what that does, it puts a blueprint into your subconscious mind for when you're faced with that situation again, how to do it the way you intentionally want to do it rather than being reactive. That is a powerful ritual.

And then the last thing I do is my wife and I go back and forth with five appreciations. I appreciate this about you. She appreciates that about me. So we always end the day appreciating each other. And that's a nice foreplay, by the way. I like that, yeah. I usually like the end of the day with three things I'm most grateful for. And I express that to some of them.

But I like the appreciation part. I'm going to add that now. Yeah, it's really powerful. That's a good one. What are you most grateful for recently? Oh, God. I'm grateful for my grandson. I have a new grandson.

Congratulations. Thank you. His name's Ozzy. He's half Japanese, and he looks like a little Japanese rock star because they let his hair grow long. Really cool kid. And I'm really happy that we finished our home study program for our train-the-trainer program.

That's going to go around the world and help a lot of people. I'm happy that we've redesigned a couple of our trainings and that was a lot of work. And so I'm happy about that. We're starting a seminar in a couple of days in Las Vegas for a couple hundred people and people coming from 20 countries. So again, I'm grateful for the internet. That never would have happened 10, 15 years ago. And this book? I'm grateful that this book is done and out. And I just finished another book that'll be out in August called The 30-Day Sobriety Solution, How to Get Sober or Cut Back Tricking in the Privacy of Your Own Home. And Steve is working on that, right? All right. Steve Hanselman was my agent on that.

And I worked with a guy named David Andrews, who read the first Success Principles book, said, why don't they teach this in rehab? Because he had relapsed three times between me and a couple of Tony Robbins tapes he listened to. He said, this is the stuff that we really need. So he developed this coaching program, online coaching program called the 30 Day Sobriety Solution. And I said to him, when he told me what he'd done, I said, we got to get this into a book and get it out to more people and I can help you do that. So we spent a good three and a half months writing that book and that just went to bed. Literally yesterday, we finished the final edits of the edits that were given to us by

the editor at the publisher and got that back to them. Nice. Congrats. Thank you very much. So I'm happy about that. There's so many things to be happy about. Of course. What is the one, I got a couple of questions left.

Something that just came up for me. I'm wondering what is the one lesson that you learned from your parents growing up that stands out the most right now? Don't whine about things. Go change them. If you're not happy with your life. My father said to me when I went to college, he said, if you need a helping hand, look at the end of your own arm.

I mean, at the time, I thought it was really harsh. I thought he's going to bring me aside, give me a couple hundred bucks. And he basically said, don't call home, figure it out, get a job, you know, do what you need to do. And as much as I didn't like that at the time, it was a great lesson because I worked my way through college and I learned whatever it is I want, if I apply energy and intention, I can get it. And I think the other thing my mother taught me was always be kind to strangers. She was the, you know, if the Mormons were knocking on the door talking about we should all become Mormons, she would invite them in for dinner. Everyone else would send them on their

way, you know? And so I really love people and I learned that everybody's unique and different and you never know who's in there until you ask. Sure. What are the three books that you would leave behind to your family at the end of the day? You said there's three books I want you to read. And that was your last message. What would those be? Well, one would be this book because most of my family hasn't even read it. My wife is not a big self-help person. She loves novels, but I'd love to have her read that book. She had to be without me. So that would be one book. I would probably leave a book on meditation. I don't know which one, but something that would teach people to meditate. And maybe Byron Katie's book, which is called Loving What Is, which is a book

about how to accept what is, and then you can work to change it, but that all pain and misery comes from thinking something shouldn't be the way it is. So we resist reality. And it's our thought that this shouldn't be the creates. You shouldn't do that. My husband should have done this instead of that's what they did. And when I realized that most of my anger is me being upset with how other people just are. And normally when I'm upset with you, there's some part of me I'm not looking at. And so her book, Loving What Is, is just a treasure. And among the people who know her work, she walks on water, but everybody should know about that book. Loving What Is. Loving What Is. What's something small that you've done

that maybe a lot of people don't know about or you haven't really talked about that you've been really proud of? Something small you've done in the world. Well, when I went to the rainforest, the trip was put on by the Pachamama Alliance. In the rainforest, Pachamama means the earth, the sky, and all time. So it's everything, the universe. Everything, the universe. And when I got down there and we met with the shamans that were there and we found out that they just needed a lot of information. We needed a lot of their wisdom.

They needed a lot of our information. But I remember sending about 40 books on leadership to the tribal leaders living in the rainforest so that they could resist the government trying to come in and take over their land for oil exploration. And then I contributed over $ hundred thousand dollars to that organization Which was the largest check I think I've written I had written up until that point in time I remember walking around for two weeks going did I really do that? Give that much away exactly that much away But I did and I'm proud of what they've done as a result of that.

If you saw the movie The Avatar, the people in that Avatar world, the blue people, they were like the people living in the rainforest. And they have this beautiful culture that's being destroyed by modernization. And we need to preserve the rainforest. So behind the scenes, I do a lot of work like that. I do work here in town. I emcee things for child abuse mediation. And I do a lot of pro bono work, which I don't brag about. But I figure we should give not only away 10% of our money, but 10% of our time. Interesting. That's great. Thank you for sharing that.

You're welcome. One more question. But before I ask you the final question, I want to share my appreciation for you and practice what you preach. Thank you. And just tell you thanks for all that you've done, and thanks for allowing me to come and share your wisdom to my audience. It means a lot to me, and I really appreciate what you stand for. And I also want to acknowledge you, Jack, for the incredible gift that you are to the world, because you are consistently giving of your time and your information and putting it in great content for people like myself to be inspired, to think out of the box. So I want to acknowledge you for your energy, your efforts over the years. And it's amazing and it's inspiring and you're inspiring

millions of people around the world. So I acknowledge you for that. Well, I appreciate that. I have to say too, I acknowledge you back. I really like you. Oh, thanks. Yeah, you've got a great persona and you're very present and you've done your homework and you've got a nice energy about you. And so, you know, I have to say I wasn't that aware of you before, but now that I am, I really enjoy knowing you. So I'm going to feed that back to you as well. Thank you. I appreciate it. You're welcome. Final question, which is what I ask all my guests at the end of the show is what is your definition of greatness? I think greatness is totally fulfilling your purpose in life, whatever that is. I mean, I've met great restaurant owners. I've met great

teachers teaching in the inner city. I met great volunteers in the rainforest. And I've met sheikhs who were billionaires in Dubai and Qatar and Oman when I was over in the Middle East, I have met presidents of the country and so forth. So I think it's when you fully manifest your full potential, whatever that is, then you're great. And it doesn't matter about the level of impact, how much money, whether you're famous or not. There was a guy in West Virginia, my dad and I used to talk about him. He was one of these guys that when there was a road construction going on, he would stand out there and go like this. And he was this African-American guy.

He was so cool. And we'd come down and you have to stop. And then he would go like that. And I mean, he made that job, which was a crap job, into an amazing thing. And so I think if you do what you do and you do it so well that people actually want to tell their people about it, you have done something great. So it's fulfill whatever wants to be expressed through you, do that to your best ability and then you'll be great. Sure. Great answer. I want to make sure everyone goes and picks up the success

principles, how to get from where you are to where you want to be. When I read this eight years ago, it changed the game for me. It really opened me up to a lot of possibilities. There's really only a couple of books. When I met Tony Robbins and went to his conference when I was 16, opened up a world of possibilities. And he walked up next to me and just like his energy, I was like, I want to have that. Whatever it is, I want to have it. Right, right.

I read this book and I was obsessed with it. And I was a really slow reader at the time. And I was able to get through the whole thing for me pretty quickly, which was inspiring. The third book was Tim Ferriss' For Our Work, which we both know. And so make sure to pick up this book. And if there's anything you want to say about it. Well, what I want to say about it, you can normally go to amazon.com or Barnes & Noble or your local bookstore. But if you go to thesuccessprinciplesbook.com, not only will you then be able to buy the book from Amazon, but you're going to go through this little portal called thesuccessprinciplesbook.com. You'll also be able to download an hour-long audio tape of me answering the most commonly asked questions that come up for people when they read the book. people when they read the book. An hour-long video that is me teaching about goal setting and how to achieve your goals. You'll get a poster of the five daily disciplines of success you need

to do. You'll get the first two chapters of the book. You can download them immediately. So while you're waiting for the book to come, you can start. And the first two chapters are very powerful. Very powerful. And you'll get a free instant cash guide from my co-author, Janet Schweitzer, who helps me with some of the chapters on the book. She's a really good writer. And she wrote a book called Instant Income. And so basically, if you're an entrepreneur, you want to get that as well. And you'll get enrolled in our 10-week course where once a week we send you a video, about four minutes long.

And if you do what's on that video for those 10 weeks, it literally is a transformative course, and it's free. Sure. And if you do what's on that video for those 10 weeks, it literally is a transformative course and it's free. So all of those things come with the book if you go to thesuccessprinciplesbook.com. Make sure to check it out. Get the book. Tell your friends. Share this video or podcast with a friend. Jack, thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate you.

This was so fun. I really enjoyed it. Thank you for coming up. Thank you. And there you have it, guys. I hope you enjoyed this interview as much as I loved connecting with Jack. If you did like this, make sure to check out lewishouse.com slash 143. Leave a comment.

Let me know what you learned the most from this interview with Jack, what you got out of it the most. And also share it with your friends. Please post this over on Facebook, over on Twitter, tag a picture where you're listening to this on Instagram and all over the place online, and send an email to a friend who you think might enjoy learning more about these success principles. Again, that's lewishouse.com slash 143. Make sure to check out the show notes and watch both videos, the video where I interview

Jack in his home, but then also where I play pool. So you'll get to find out some of the most interesting stories and lessons that Jack shared after the interview. And also you'll get to see who is a better pool player at the end and see who wins because it comes down to the last shot. So thanks again, guys, so much for joining me again. I had a pleasure with Jack, an amazing human being, such a warm heart, and just so

warm to be around. So if you ever get a chance to be at one of his events, make sure to go up and say hi, give him a big hug because he has a huge heart and he's an incredible human being. Thanks again to Jack. Thank you guys all for coming on and listening to this episode and supporting the School of Greatness podcast. We continue to bring you some of the most inspiring, incredible human beings in the world.

And because of you, because you keep sharing this message, because you keep listening, because you keep posting it online and telling your friends about it, I'm able to get access to people like Jack Canfield and Tony Robbins and other influencers and

celebrities that we're having on. It's because of you that the platform is so big now that these influencers want to get on and share their message because they hear great things about the results you're getting. So keep taking action. Keep getting results in your life. Keep spreading the message of greatness. You guys know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great. Thank you. Bye.