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

Episode Date: October 29, 2025

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

Hello, everybody. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. My guest today, I'm so happy to finally have on this podcast. He effectively made my career. Certainly, the four-hour work week would not have happened without him, which is a backstory a lot of folks don't have. Jack Canfield. You can find him online. Jack Canfield.com. That's Canfield, C-A-N-F-E-L-D. He is a best-selling author, speaker, trainer, and entrepreneur. He's the founder and CEO of the Canfield, training group, which trains entrepreneurs, corporate leaders, and more how to accelerate the achievement of their personal and professional goals. Jack is the co-author of more than 200 books, including the success principles, how to get from where you are to where you want to be, and perhaps most famously, Chicken Soup for the Soul, as a series, which includes 4040, New York Times bestsellers, and which has sold more than 600 million copies in 50-plus languages around the world. He has conducted live trainings for more than a million people in more than 50 countries, holds two Guinness World Records, we'll talk about that, and is a member

of the National Speakers Association's Speakers Hall of Fame. I love Jack. He's so kind, so generous. He's been so patient with me, even when I was a very boisterous chest puffing, early 20-something, way back in the day. And you can find all things, Jack at jack-canfield.com. Without further ado, please enjoy a very wide-ranging, very practical, very tactical, conversational. with none other than Jack Canfield. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I answer your personal question? Now we'll have seen an appropriate time.

What if I get the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal and skeletal. Me, Tim Ferriss Show. Jack, Jack, it is so good to see you. glad you see you my friend yeah this is fun and i'm so thrilled that you're here and that we're seeing each other again it has been a long time and as i warned you before we started recording i said i really doubt people in my audience have the full context or even partial context so i want to give them some of the backstory because one could make a compelling argument that i owe my career

as such to you because you made the introduction to stephen handsome and who became my book agent. At the time, he was a supposed former superstar editor on his way to becoming an agent. So we were both starting out in a sense. And you made that introduction. But there's even more backstory that I have to share with folks.

That would have been 2005, 2006. I was around 27, 28 at the time. Much earlier, this would have been when I just moved to Silicon Valley, I was riding around in my mom's hand-me-down, POS minivan, which was broken in every way imaginable, listening to Personal Power 2 on cassette tape to and from my job as I commuted on 101. I was eating at Jack in the Box in the parking lot of a safe way a couple of nights a week because that's what I could afford. And I was volunteering

for a group called the Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs, which is a mouthful, but SVACE. And I had volunteered, which I still recommend to folks, because I knew nobody. Nobody knew me. And I always tried to do extra jobs as a volunteer. And eventually they said, wow, this kid really likes working for free. Let's give him more responsibility. Hey, would you like to organize some speakers for a main event? And I thought to myself, absolutely, this is a great way for me to meet some of my heroes. And I invited Tripp Hawkins of Electronic Arts. I invited you because of the phenom. Of course, we'll talk about it. But chicken soup for the soul, I invited all sorts of folks. And that was the first time that we met. You graciously agreed to come to that.

And here we are more than 20 years later. And I'm so happy to have you on the podcast. So thank you for all of that. These are these sliding door moments where there's no way I could play the alternative, but the what if certainly looms large. What if you hadn't said yes to come to that event? What if I hadn't reached out and said, Jack, all these notes I have from this lecture I've been giving to this high-tech entrepreneurship class. Is there anything here? And frankly, I hope you would say no because I didn't want to write a book. And you're like, actually, I think there's something here.

And before I could say anything, you started making introductions. And here we are. So thank you for everything, Jack. I really appreciate it. Let me just say you're someone who knows how to take advantage of an opportunity. You've done really well. You know, you've got to take your shot when you can take your shot. That's right.

And it's been one hell of a ride. So I'm thrilled to have you on. And I was looking through some of the materials beforehand. We're going to run out of time before we run out of topics. But ultimately we will rewind the clock and go back to some of the beginning chapters. But I have to ask because there is a bullet here. The story behind more than 300 million copies sold in China. How does that happen? Because I'm imagining chicken soup does not have the same connotation over there. So I don't even if the title's the same. Well, what happened is a company called On Wee Publishing, and they decided to publish the book. And what's interesting is we had a contract that they would pay us 10 cents for every book sold in China. But On We was half owned by the government and half owned by private equity. So they decided to make it a textbook to teach English to kids in high school with Chinese on one side, English on the other. And they printed millions and millions of books because it was in the school. which was the government side, we didn't see one penny, of millions of books sold. So I learned how to write better contracts in the future.

But the fact is, a lot of Chinese people have had major transformations because of the books have taken off. And they have sold in the general public as a result of kids learning about them in school, showing it to their parents, so on and so forth. So it all works out. It all paid off. But that was a major lesson for us. You've got to be really, really careful when you're in it.

When you're acting with the Chinese making deals, they're very, very clever. You've got to be careful. There is an expression. I'm not going to say that everyone uses this, but in Chinese, which is Nang Pien, which is if you can trick them, then you should trick them. And not saying everyone subscribes to that, but you got to have your wits about you for sure. Part of the reason I love doing this podcast is it gives me a pretext for doing a bunch of internet sleuthing on my friends without seeming like a stalker or a crazy person.

And I really had no understanding or grasp of your childhood, your upbringing, anything like that. Could you speak to a bit for folks, just the basics of where you grew up, what you learned or didn't learn from parents or household, things of that type? Well, I was born in 1944. My father was in the Air Force. World War II was going on. He trained bomber pilots, actually. So from the time I was born until the time I was six,

we lived in three different states with military bases. I don't remember much of it at all. But when I was six, we moved to West Virginia, which is where I mostly grew up in Wheeling, West Virginia, steel town, coal mining, all that kind of stuff. And my father was an alcoholic, and he got violent when he was drunk. And my mother decided to divorce him when I was six

and we went to live with my grandmother. And I actually lived in the attic of her house for years. And then eventually she met my stepfather. who would just come out of the Navy. And I grew poor. You know, we were not wealthy at all. And so my father was one of these people. When I went off to college, I said, Father, he said to me, he gave me $20.

He looked to where you in the eye and he said, now, there's that. He says, if you need a helping hand, look at the end of your own arm. There will be no more gifts coming from me. Okay. So I learned early on, you know, I worked my way through high school. I was a lifeguard of the country club pool. I had this thing I was in but not of. I was in the country club meeting girls whose parents were, but I wasn't of that.

And I went to a private military school from a fifth grade until I graduate high school. My rich aunt had a son named Jack who died. If I was, you talk about Kismet and Fate, if my name was Bob, we'd not be talking right now. But because I was Jack, she adopted me after his death and sent me to a private school in town. So I got a much better education than my brother or anyone else. But again, I was in, but I wasn't of, I wasn't a doctor's son. I didn't, you know, the president of the guy who owned the Cadillac dealership, that was not my crowd.

Yet I got to hang out with those kids and eventually got into Harvard on a scholarship, play football. I was a football player. I was an honorable mention in Allstate. I was an end, all that kind of stuff. I grew up thinking, you know, you got to work really, really hard, which I did. I worked my way through Harvard. I cut grass.

I cleaned the dorms. I got up and served food at six in the morning and then, Fell asleep immediately in French class. I was so tired, you know. I remember when they, I'm like this falling, I'm totally asleep in this class at 9 in the morning, and his professor comes over, and he shakes me awake, and he says, you can leave now, the class is over.

That's a very understanding comment from his teacher. I know, I know, well, whatever. And then I made, this is interesting. I majored in Chinese history, which is interesting why. later I learned I had past lives in China and Tibet and so it made sense to me but at that time my freshman year I got all C's and everything here I was a student high school get to Harvard and I always say I graduated in the half of the class that made the top half possible you know so there were a lot of smart smart kids there valedictorians from their schools and I said to my counselor I need an easy A for

my sophomore year says well this guy he used to be the ambassador to China he gives everyone an A why don't you take his class? And he knew Chonkai Czech and Mautza Dung. He had slides of everything, you know, and I got the A. But I fell in love with Chinese history for some weird reason. So that was my major. You know, so I always tell people, prepare me really well to do the work I do. It had nothing to do with it.

My senior year, I took an elective class. I said, I need a letter EZA. And someone said, take Sochrel 10, Social Relations 10. It's an encounter group. You just sit in there and talk about your feelings. and everybody gets in A. So I went over there and I took the class and I fell in love with human potential.

Oh, my God. There's this thing called psychology and people and human behavior and feelings and motivation. So I said, well, how do I get into that? They said, well, it was a little late. It would have to get into psychology. He had a study as an undergraduate, and I hadn't. They said, well, you could sneak into psychology through education.

So I went to the University of Chicago, got a master's degree in education, taught in an all-black inner city high school for two years and got teacher of the year, my first year. I went to get to Jesse Jackson's Church. I became friends with people in the jazz community. Really got deeply. I would say probably for a year I almost wished I was black

because I thought white people were noctose. And these black guys, they got energy and the poetry and the songs and the music and the dancing and the anger and the fear and all that. So then basically I started realizing my students were not motivated. They didn't believe they could learn because they were black in the inner city

and they didn't have role models. And that became my passion. How do I motivate them to achieve? And I met W. Clement Stone, my mentor, he was a self-made. He was worth $600 million in 1968, which is when I was there. Yeah, his best friend was Napoleon Hill who wrote Think and Grow Rich.

And together they wrote a book together. And then also he wrote a book called The Success System and never failed. And that's why I learned about motivation. and setting goals and having vision and values and working hard and using affirmations and visualization and all of that. I want to come back to W. Clement's Stone.

I had 600 million. We'll come back to that because that's a mind-boggling number, especially at that point in time, but any time even now. But if we back up for a second, teacher of the year, first year in Chicago, what made that possible? What do you think contributed to that?

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

And the other thing is nobody was teaching African American history. I was teaching history, you know, American history and world history. And I found a book called Before the Mayflower, and it was by God of Rone Bennett, and it was a book about African-American history, which is a paperback. It goes like $3.95. I bought one for every one of my students, and I would teach black history along with white history. You know, history is always written by the victors, so basically white history is our history.

And they didn't know any of this stuff. And the fact that I would do this, and the fact that I was loving and kind and motivational and believe they could do everything. It made them, I think, just like me because I was on their side. And then they started the African American Club, the African American Studies Club. They asked me if I'd be a sponsor. I said yes. So that was another thing. I ended up coaching the swimming team because the guy who was supposed to do it had majored in basketball. He was a phys ed teacher. He didn't know that much about swimming. I had swum competitively in high school and it was a waterfront instructor in summer camps and Maine and teach kids to swim and all that kind

stuff. So, and I think the last part of that was that I was starting to do these human potential activities in my classes. You know, I'd get them into pairs and have them do, go back and forth, say, I can't. Then I'd have them go, replace the sentence with, I won't. And which feels stronger, which feels more true, which is, you know, and they go, yeah, can't's really a victim word. So I was doing maybe 10 minutes of that every day along with teaching my history. And I think that's kind of why and the big moment for me this is so cool you know you have these little moments in life where you get affirmation from outside so sammy davis junior was at school he was going to do a talk to the kids he'd written a book called i can and he was there when i got the award they gave me the

award the same day and i'm walking off stage and he looked at me and he said you must be really cool to have gotten that award from those kids i think i lived on that for days i mean that's a hell of a compliment from a hell of a person and a hell of an entertainment. Yeah, and you're like 22 years old or something, you know, it's a big deal. Yeah, the right words at the right time. I mean, just like you were probably offering the right words at the right time to a lot of those students. Just a quick thanks to our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. I don't know about you, but with so many options for banking and investing these days, also

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fast free shipping, and a 15-year warranty. So check it all out. And now you can get 27% off anything on their website, so site-wide. So just go to helixleep.com slash tim. One more time, helixleep.com slash tim. With Helix, better sleep, start. So if we flash forward to W. Clementstone, how did he make $600 million? That's just not to fixate on that, but that's a non-trivial sum of money. Three ways. Number one, he started an insurance company called Combining Insurance, and it was really low premiums. In other words, the price you paid for it. And he believed everybody could afford something. And he wanted to insure the people that often wouldn't be insured by the big companies.

And because of that, and he also hired people that were not college graduates to be salespeople. He had a training system. This is so cool. Think about this. So here's the training system. He told them what to do, maybe a one-day class. He said, now we're going to go tomorrow, and I'm going to go in. He's teaching these kids who never graduated college to sell to CEOs of banks and companies.

It was intimidating for them. He said, we're going to go in. I'm going to make a sale, at least a presentation. You watch what I did. And so it goes in, they do the presentation, either sold or didn't. They go out for coffee afterwards. What did you notice I did? You did this, you did this, you do this.

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

But afterwards, they go out and say, okay, you miss two things. We're going to go to the next one to watch me do those two things. Next one, he'd go, this is yours. By the end of the day, they knew how to sell. That's incredible. It was amazing. So he had salespeople all over the country selling these low-price insurance things. Second thing he did, he was a genius when it came to real estate.

He invested in a lot of real estate. The coolest thing you ever did, if you go into Chicago on rails, that's a big area where they, you know, bring beef in, and they were processing beef all those days, and it's also a big central, distribution point for everything there's a place it's just huge wide like six rails wide going into the main station and there was no more real estate to buy and so he said to the guys who own the railroad land he said can i buy the air rights over the railroad tracks and they said sure so if you go to that part of chicago there are all these buildings over the tracks which he got a hundred-year lease on the air rights and they built these huge skyscrapers

which he then got the royalties for or the commissions for or the rents for or whatever. So he was just very creative. And the third thing he did, he invested well in everything else as well. So a lot of it was an investment. And then he also produced Success Magazine, started by W. Clement Stone. And he was a speaker. He had books he sold, the magazine Ogmandino, who wrote The Greatest Salesman. So I'm working in the Stone Foundation at one point.

So I quit teaching. I worked for Stone. Why did you quit teaching? Because Stone offered me a job. Okay. The Stone said, we have this achievement motivation program where teaching teachers to do it, to go into the schools. We don't have anyone's inner city experience. You do.

Would you come work for me? And it was like more than I was making as a teacher. And I went, yeah, okay. And it's him, right? Working for him was amazing. And he just took everybody under his wing, loved them. Imagine you're young. You're 23.

maybe he says to you working my foundation go teach this stuff if there's any training you ever want to take anywhere it's on me go for it i took 37 weekend workshops that year you're the you're the edge case he has to budget for yeah it's like a grant from the government or something so i took all these workshops you know everything from carnegie to gestalt therapy and body work and meditation and so he funded all that which was great but he really was an amazing being that just, I learned so much by being in his presence. You know, I'll tell you a story. I got an intake interview first day. And he says to me, do you take 100% responsibility for your life? And I said, I don't know. He said, is he yes or no answer,

son? Think. I said, well, based on, I don't even understand it, probably no. He says, do you ever blame anybody for anything? Yeah. Do you complain about anything? Yeah. Do you ever make excuses why you didn't achieve something? Yeah, you don't take 100% responsibility. So he introduced me to the whole concept of 100% responsibility. And then he said to me, do you watch television? I said, yeah. He said, how many hours a day? I said, I don't know, good morning, America, the news, maybe a movie at night, you know, 11 o'clock or something like that. So that's three hours a day. Just cut out an hour a day. I said, why? He said, because that'll give you 365 additional hours a year to be productive, divide up by a 40-hour work week. That's nine and a half

weeks. I'll give you a 14-month year. You'll be much more competitive than all the people in your field if you do that. So I did that. He was teaching me in the freaking interview, like, you know, so it was cool. What were some of the things that really stuck with you after you got the job, whether it was through osmosis, whether it was through direct teaching? Like, why did that job and that mentorship had the impact that it did. Were there any other examples for stories that come to mind? He challenged me because I mean as an educator I was probably making back then 30,000 a year if I was lucky. You know, that was like now people like a lot more inflation. But what happens is he said, I want to challenge you to make $100,000 a year. And if you do it, it's only

because of what I taught you. He taught me to set goals, to believe in them. to visualize it, you know, as if it's already happening, have an affirmation, I'm so happy and grateful, I'm now, whatever. And I started doing that, and I took the goal of $100,000 seriously. And every morning I'd wake up and I'd put $100,000 bill on the ceiling. I didn't even know one existed at a time. Banks actually trade them back and forth. But I took $100 bill.

I projected it with a member overhead projectors. I projected it onto a piece of like flip chart paper, traced it, added some extra zeros, and then I put that on the ceiling. Every morning I wake up, I see that, say my affirmation, which went at that time, God is my instant supply, and large sums of money coming in quickly and easily as I earn $100,000 a year. And about, I'd say, maybe a month or two into it, I'm in the shower, and I had a $100,000 idea.

Because I'd written a book called 100 Ways to Enhanced Self-C Concept in the classroom. And I used to get a quarter, 25 cents, for every book. that got sold. And I said, wow, sell 400,000 books. I get $100,000. That was the first $100,000 idea. And so to make a long story short, because I could do it half hour in that story, I literally started to sell more books. I started a bookstore, literally, a mail-order bookstore, where you could buy my book, had one product. And then my wife at the time said, you know, we're selling that book. I didn't know what happened. She had ordered something in the mail. Have you ever ordered something in the mail and it comes? And then there's like five flyers for other products they have in the

in the box. Yeah, sure. So she had done that. She said, why don't we sell other people's stuff? So we'd added other product. And I hired a high school kid to come in after school and to sell the books, you know, ship them out and so forth. So long story short, I did not make $100,000. I made $92,000, but I went like, okay, this is a success. Then my wife says, you think it would work for a million? I said, only one way to find out. So literally we set a million dollar goal, and that happened with Chicken Soup for the second year.

I got four checks, Tim. You know this because of your success with the books. The first time you get a check for a million dollars for three months royalties, you go like, are you kidding me? It changed my life, you know? Yeah, I mean, that's a juggernaut of a success. but people probably don't realize quite how much rejection went into that, but maybe we could start at the beginning, at least the Genesis story. Where did chicken soup for this all come from?

Everyone listening has seen this book at some point, chances are, unless they're 18 perhaps and have never been into a dentist's office or a physician's office or an airport or fill in the blank, right? I mean, it's ubiquitous. How did it start? So I was going around doing workshops for teachers on self-esteem, motivation, that kind of thing. And I was always telling stories just because I noticed when I was a high school teacher, if I was talking historical facts, kids were looking at the window. I was telling a story about an escaped slave who became an ambassador or my own story or something from Jet Magazine or Ebony Magazine.

The kids would pay attention. So stories capture us. And all the great teachers, Buddha, Jesus. we know they told stories and parables and so forth. So one day, somebody said, that story you told about the Girl Scout who sold 3,328 boxes of Girl Scout cookies in one year?

He's had in a book anywhere. My daughter needs to hear that story. I went, no. And over course of two months, I must have had four people a day say, that's story in a book, that story in a book, that's story in a book.

So I'm coming home on a plane from Boston to L.A. Where I was living at the time. And I said, how many stories do I really know? So I wrote down every story, the dog story, the Girl Scout story, the puppy story. the Mount Everest story, whatever.

There was 70 stories. So I said, okay, that's a book. So I made a commitment that every night I would write, work on a story, and at the end of the week, I would have two stories. And if I did that for a year, I'd have 101 stories, you know, 1008, whatever. So I did that. And when I was about, I don't know, five, six through, I had breakfast with Mark Victor Hansen, who became my co-author.

and we were having breakfast in Beverly Hills at this place. All these human potential leaders would come to this breakfast. The Inside Edge was called. So Mark said, what are you working on? I said, I'm writing this book. And he said, you should let me finish it with you. And I went, that's like telling Stephen King you should be his co-author because he's five, six of the way through the book.

How do you justify that? He says, well, some of the stories you tell you stole from me. I said, maybe three, Mark. Come on. And he said, but I'm a much better salesperson than you. You can be, I'll be the upfront voice person. I said, well, give me 30 more stories and we'll talk. So I had 70 at that time. He said, okay, came back, he did it. So basically, it was a marriage made in heaven because he really was good at getting the word up. We were in a mall once, believe this, Tim. We're in a mall, I think it was B. Dalton bookstores. They were in a lot of the malls. Yeah, I remember B. Dalton. Yeah.

And so we're doing a book signing and there's nobody there. So Mark goes out into the mall and he just starts walking up and down the mall yelling, are you guys crazy? There's a book signing and B. Doen right now with these two amazing authors about the best book in the world, you all should be in there. And so he's doing that. And about 40 people came into B. Dalton.

And then Mark walks up to the front of the room where I am ready to do the little talk before the signing. They all like gasped, you know, like, you're the guy who was in the hall. But he would do that. I was too shy to do that. So it worked out really well. But, you know, you talked about rejection. We were turned down by 144 publishers once we had a manuscript and took us over a year to sell the book.

You know, when I think about that story and I think about, you know, the 4-Hour Workweek, which was also turned down, Steve and I got front-ro seats, obviously, to this, by 37, 39 publishers, something like that, imprints within the publishers. Maybe tell me if this resonates or not, but you can have a bad idea that gets rejected, right? Just because something gets rejected a lot doesn't mean it's a good idea. But in this case, I had tested everything in the classes, so I knew what worked. I knew that the material stuck, so to speak. And you had been testing these stories also in front of audiences, and people have been asking you, where can I read this in a book? But was there anything else that contributed to the perseverance to go through that many

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

Sure. So basically, when you come along with something radically new, like your idea was and our idea was, up until then, no collections of short stories had ever worked, because they were all fictional, and they were too short to, like, get engaged with the characters and really, like, go, you know, get involved. Whereas all these stories were in categories, like, on love, on overcoming obstacles, you know, grief and so forth, that are the human things that everybody lives with, which is why they're so touched by it. And we just knew to stick with it. We would have self-published eventually, and I would have made a lot more money, but I would have

been, I didn't really want to be a publisher. I wanted to be a speaker and a writer. So I'm going to read something here. You can tell me if this needs some fact-checking, but this is from Thrive Global. This is a Q&A with you. So here we go. It's just a paragraph. Eventually went to ABA, the American Booksellers Association, and went booth to booth for two or three days. And on the final day, this one new publisher employee said, we'll read the manuscript. Some people wouldn't even take it. And they read it in this case and loved it. And they said, they published it. We said, how many books do you think you'll sell? And this is their response. Oh, 20,000 if you're lucky. And then your response, I think this is you. Well, we want to sell a million and a half in a year and a half. I say, said, his employee laughed, and then a year and a half later, we'd sold 1.3 million copies. To sell 1.3 or 1.5 million copies is so hard. I mean, it is so hard to do unless you happen to be very, very lucky somehow in capturing a lightning in a bottle, but usually there's a lot of elbow grease behind it. So two things. Well, actually, it's just really one thing.

what went into selling that many copies over a year and a half? And were you still using affirmations? Was that still one of the ingredients in the cocktail? Yeah, and we were doing the mindset work. I always say it's mindset, skill set and ready set go. The set go, I wanted another set. It's action. So someone had told us that the book, The Road Last Traveled, the author of that book

had done five interviews a day for the first year, five interviews a day. Scott Peck. And that book was on the New York Times list for 12 years, 500 and 18. Twelve weeks long. Yeah. You know, I think it's a record. I mean, you were really close, I think. Maybe you still are. I don't know. But the reality was, I thought, well, if that's what works, let's do it. So Mark and I actually had gone to five bestselling authors and then read about Scott Peck. And we talked to John Gray, who wrote Manor from Mars. We talked to Ken Blanchard, who wrote the One Minute Manager, we talked to Barbara DeAngelis who wrote a book on love. And then another book on PM that someone had written that was successful.

And we said, what should we do? And they all said, do as many interviews as possible, get in front of everybody. I know you did the blogger thing, which was brilliant. We did the radio thing. Now it's, I think podcasts are better than radio. I always tell new authors because the people listening to them, they're your audience. There's a focus. Whereas radio may have a bigger reach, but not everybody's your audience.

So five a day, every day, for a year. So we created what we called the Rule of Five. It's a book by John Kramer called How to Sell a Million Book, something like that. It's a great book. We bought the book, and we took every idea that was in that book, and we made a Post-it, two-by-three post-it, put it on a wall. And if you went down the wall of our company at that time, self-esteem seminars, it was just covered with post-ists. And every day we'd take something off and either do it five times or take five post-stits off and do each one time. call a church. Can we talk in your church? Can we call five PXs in the military? And we say,

are you carrying our book? Can I send you one? If you like it, will you carry it? Call bookstores. Are you stalking it? Can we send you one? If you like it, will you carry it? Call them back two weeks later. Did you get it? It was like nonstop. We were giving talks at churches on Sunday morning, Wednesday night, you know, whatever. They're the ones that have bookstores. We do signings. We signed in the parking lot. I spoke at every damn conference there was. You know, I didn't care where it was or how long it took to get there if it was there. We did radio shows that were like at two in the morning. Maybe a trucker driving through Montana will hear it, but maybe he'll like it.

Maybe he'll buy it. Maybe he'll tell his daughter, and a daughter will tell her friends. So literally, it was that level of non-stop activity. And it was interesting because we were pretty amped up in the beginning, and we talked to the psychic guy. He was in trance. He'd go, it would be as if you would go to a tree with a very short, sharp axe, and you would take five swipes at that tree every single day. Eventually, even a redwood would have to come down. We went, okay, rule of five, that's what we're going to do.

What prompted the trip to the psychic? Do you remember? Yeah, I do. We knew his wife, and she was a friend of ours, and then he kind of turned psychic, if you will. He was doing these readings, and they were awesome. So we just thought, well, why not? Let's ask him what we should do. And how old were you or what date was this, either one, roughly when the first chicken suit for the soul came out? 93. And I was born in 44, so what is that? 49 years old, something like it. Yeah. Yeah. And when it hit, right, when you sold the 1.3 million copies in a year and a half or whatever it added up to be, how did that change your life? Or in what ways did that affect your life?

Well, it allowed me to move out of a very small house. It allowed me to get a better car, all that kind of stuff. I think more so it was an affirmation from the world that the work I was passionate about was needed. And so it wasn't just the money. It was the confirmation that my intuition, that my passion was correct. You're probably familiar with the concept of Iggy Guy, which comes from the Japanese, Japanese. Where is it, if you love to do something, I was one thing, are you good at it? Does the world need it? And are they willing to pay for it? So all four does have to come together

for this thing that you're passionate about to actually work. In this case, it did. So I thought, okay, my purpose is needed. It's going to work. I can make a living at it. So that was a big confirmation of that, I think, more than anything. And yeah, I bought three sweaters, you know, in different colors and all that kind of stuff. I went through my Nouveau re-staged, for sure. I mean, if the sweaters were the extent of the Nouveau-Riche, then I feel like you have very good restraint. The title itself, chicken soup for the soul, because that ended up to be such an incredible

format also for extending that into a million different verticals, right? Chicken soup for the fill in the blanks soul. Where did that, this I suppose is a nod to the intuition or unorthodox approaches, but how How did that title come to be? Well, we had an agent who was going to take us to New York and meet with publishers, and we didn't have a title. So Mark and I said, well, we're both meditators. So we said, well, let's just meditate and ask the universe, source, God, whatever you want

to call that energy, for a title. So Mark would go to bed. Mark's really hyper. He'd go to bed chanting, mega bestselling title, mega bestselling title, mega bestselling title, mega best selling title. I would just go and I would, every morning, I'd sit for an hour, and I'd say, okay, God, give me a title. And on Wednesday, two days, nothing happened.

Third day, I'm sitting there. And all of a sudden, this chalkboard appears, green chalkboard, like in school. And a hand comes out and writes chicken soup and script on it. And I said to the hand, what the hell does chicken soup have to do with this book? And the voice said back, when you were a kid, your grandmother gave you a chicken soup when you were sick. And I thought, but this is not a book, sick people. And the voice answered back, people's spirits are sick.

They're in resignation, hopelessness and fear. We were in the first big recession, 1993, the Gulf War was going on, downside. A lot of things that were happening now were happening then. The economy was tanking, and people were losing jobs. So timing was good in terms of people needing inspiration. That played out well. So I went chicken soup for the spirit, chicken soup for the soul, and I got goosebumps. Oh, my wife, she got goosebumps, told Mark, called Mark, what do you think of this?

He got goosebumps. Called her agent. He got goosebumps. Went to New York, there with 21 publishers, seven a day for three days. Nobody got goosebumps. So basically that led to the 144 rejections. And you're right, we went to the American Booksellers Association, boot to booth.

We're both wearing backpacks full of these spiral-bound of the 20 stories from the book, the best stories. Would you publish this book? Will you be interested in this book? And most people wouldn't even take one alone. And then Peter Vexo, who's the guy who did. publish it, you know, and you're right. He said 20,000, and we said no. And he laughed. He laughed out loud at us. And later he said, yeah, you know, he took out an ad in New York on a billboard,

thanking all the publishers that rejected chicken soup for the soul. He may have just laughed. Was it laugh as in I don't believe her? Or was he like, that's some chutzpah? No, he laughed because he thought. thought we were freaking crazy. He thought we were insane. You guys were nuts, you know. What happened was the first shipment he made was 800 books to, I think it was Barnes and Noble, might have been borders. And they sold 80 books the first week. He said, when you sell one-tenth of your inventory to first week, that's a phenomenon. Next week, 92, the next week, 150. He said, something was happening. It just shocked him. And they started with those presses that do this kind of thing.

you know. And then they had to go to a rotary press like you see in the movies when the newspaper is getting printed. And they had three shifts just doing nothing but printing chicken soup for the soul. And I remember one December, the guy who was in charge of the money, the CFO of that company, told his staff. I never knew this until later. He said, don't take any more orders for delivery in December. I don't want any more revenue for tax purposes this year. and meanwhile right you're following the rule of five you're calling the churches you're speaking in on sundays you're calling the pxes you're doing all of the things were there any particular

breakthrough moments or interviews looking back at these hundreds of things that you tried were there any that really seemed to help the book breakthrough i think you know as far As far as interviews go, being on Good Morning America definitely made a big difference, being on Fox and Friends, in other words, major national TV shows, which didn't happen immediately. You start out local and you basically create some reels of, you know, you're someone that can talk and they'll consider you if they're a producer on a big shows. But those big shows, we'd be on them and then sales would just, boom, you know. But the word of mouth, more than anything, I think, Tim, what we noticed was we'd have these

big sales and then nothing would happen for a week or two and then it'd be a big sales and it would take like people a week or two to read the book they tell everybody the word of mouth it was crazy and it was like a chain letter it just kept going and going on going geometric progressions i think the other thing that was really big for us was a company called skill path and another one i'm forgetting the name of right now but they were doing sometimes you get these marketing things and say, you know, we're going to be doing a workshop on AI, and we're going to do it in Davenport, Iowa on Monday, and it will be in the middle of Iowa on Tuesday. So there are these people running around doing seminars everywhere.

Is it like Learning Annex back in the day, similar or different? Learning Annex, and I spoke at those places as well, it's similar, but here's the value of this. What happened is, let's say you're a trainer for this company. you're going to five cities in Iowa in a week, and you're going to teach the same course. And there's someone else teaching how to communicate with your boss, someone else teaching how to use Excel, whatever. And what happens is that those are places we never would have gone.

And in the back of the room, they were selling our books. We got a lot, a lot of book sales in places. And then that word of mouth thing would take over, and it would just keep exploding, exploding, exploding, exploding, exploding, and what's fascinating is I had sent the book to the guy who runs that company, and said, you know, would you sell this book as part of your back of the room? Because I knew they did back in the room, mostly audio programs back then.

They were like $60 for six cassettes. And so he said, well, I don't know. There's no money in a book, you know, and whatever. So then he was a Christian, and he always led the Wednesday night men's group or something. He always like to start with a Bible story. And he gets to the group, and he doesn't have a Bible story in his mind. He opens up his briefcase. There's a chicken soup book.

He reads the story. It makes him cry. He goes in. He reads the story to his book. Bible group, they go, can you read any more stories? That night he read seven stories from the book to his Bible group. He went, maybe I should reconsider. So they did. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. Many of you know how deeply I love Japan and its culture of unwavering dedication to craft,

refinement, commitment to continuous improvement. But why do I bring this all up? Well, the same focus on improving one thing over the span of years is found in today's sponsor, AG1. They are now unveiling AG1 NextGen, the same single scoop, once a day product that I use myself, but now with more vitamins, more minerals, and five new clinically studied probiotic strains shown to support digestive and immune health. AG1 is also NSF certified for sport, one of the most rigorous, independent quality and safety certification programs in the supplement industry. So check them out.

Subscribe today to try the next gen of AG1. Listeners will also get a free bottle of D3K2, an AG1 welcome kit, and AG1 travel packs with your first order. So start your journey with AG1's next gen and experience the difference firsthand. Simply go to drinkag1.com slash tim. That's drinkag1.com slash Tim. I want to emphasize something for folks. is through my own lens and bias, of course, but part of how you can improve the likelihood of word of mouth with a book like that, or any book, really, if you're dealing with especially

I think nonfiction stories, is practice it in front of live audiences. If you just get such valuable feedback, it is not the same. Speaking as someone who's done 800 plus podcast episodes, it's not the same as virtual feedback. Being able to see faces, see, when people are getting distracted, see when they're taking notes, to hear what they ask you after you're done teaching or presenting. It allows you to refine your materials so well. I have thought, actually, I'm sitting here in Austin, Texas right now, and I've an idea for a short book, which, of course, I've been trying to write a short book for 20 years. I haven't yet succeeded, but I have this idea for a short book. And I've thought about maybe reaching out to

U.T. Austin here to teach a class just to work on the material and try to present it because it worked so well for particularly the first book. And for people listening who might think, well, times have changed. Now it's all about TikTok and this and this and this. Yes, certain things have changed, but a lot is still the same. So I just wanted to speak to the live audience piece of it because I think it's so powerful. I never write what I haven't spoken about a lot first, for the exact same reason you're talking about. get real feedback about what lands, what does in the end, where did I confuse, where didn't I give them enough information, where was I redundant, you know, et cetera.

And people now, they get a book and they instantly go to create an online course, which they haven't taught live, at least teach it online live before you just record it, you know, and put it online. So, yeah, it's crazy what people don't do that they should. To maybe just put a bow on the chapter of Chicken Soup for the Soul. I mean, you've got some crazy accolades related to this, right? The Guinness Book World Record with seven chicken soup books on the New York Times bestseller list simultaneously. That was in 1999. There are so many bullet points that I could list off that are just completely nuts, right? When you think back to somebody saying, hey, if you sell 20,000 copies, you'd be lucky. And then flashing forward to some of

these, you ended up selling the name, the backlist, so 220 plus titles, all future royalties, the trademarts, et cetera. How did that happen? How did that come to pass? And why did that happen? I think two things. We got kind of burned out on the process. When we first started, we were doing a book or two a year. And by the end, we were doing like eight or nine books a year because the publisher won and more because everything has an arc, you know. And so what happened was the success was starting to dwindle. There was a little saturation in the market, perhaps. We're nicheing books now. The first books had universal appeal across the board. When you start doing, sports fan soul or golfer soul

you start to limit the size of the audience so we're doing all these books and we kind of got tired and I kind of got burned out at the level of not another one arm guy climb onto Everest or one legate you know blank I mean I should have been inspired and it was like oh yeah not a letter my

mother died and she loved bluebirds and a bluebird landed on her windowsill so I knew it was my mom and it probably was but after a while I'm tired of hearing it you know I knew I was getting a bit jaded you know is it not the thing, you know? And also, I think I was tired.

So the guy who was the CEO of our company at the time kind of noticed all that and said, would you like to sell it? And I said, well, for the right price, you know, so we sold it for tens and tens and tens and tens and tens and tens and millions of dollars. So, yeah, it was a good offer. Happened at the right time. So that's how it happened. As you're noticing the saturation and the niching down,

and when you're checking in with yourself, you don't have a full body, yes, right? You're like, oh, my God, another bluebird storage. I don't know if I can do it. Were you doing things in parallel that you then kept doing after you sold things off? Because for a lot of people, that could become their identity. And once they sell it, they're like, oh, my God, what do I do now? And they have this void that could be really terrifying. And I'm just wondering how you thought about what you did after that.

and if you already had something in the hopper or if there was another plan. During that whole time, I was running seminars and, you know, like three, four, five, six hundred people seminar, sometimes 700, 800 people in a room. I did one seminar in India that had 7,000 herbal life people in it for three days. They only spoke Tamil. The whole thing was translated, you know. And so I had that going. That was always happening.

And the chicken soup was kind of like, was a parallel track to my workshops and my seminars. And so basically, yeah, that was always there. I knew I could go back to that and not go back to that, but just shift my energy over to that. And I did. That's when Patty, my business partner, said, you really should consider putting all these success ideas into a book. And that's what led to the success principles, which is the second kind of chapter of my life, if you will, in terms of that being. But I was always teaching success ever since W. Clement Stone. So yeah, it wasn't Like I was like, oh, I'm going to quit being a corporate person and I have no other idea what I'm going to do, which is, I can't see how to be scary.

And I have a first edition copy of the success principles, how to get from where you are to where you want to be. Because before the four, I think when was the pub date on the success principles? 2005. 2005, right. So it came out two years before the four-hour work week. And I think I have a brief cameo in there, probably because of the kickboxing stuff. or something else.

I tell that story. And so I'm a signed copy at home at my parents' house, actually. I keep it right where I can see it. So I've had that ever since. And what was it like stepping into the success principles? Were you nervous about that because the bar had been set so high with chicken soup for the soul? Were you able to let go of that?

What was that experience like? Well, there is a little bit of an identity thing. I became known as the chicken soup guy. You know, and I had to like let go of that. Some people still see me that way, which is fine. but no I think for me it was a very natural transition it was a book I know how to sell books people would say how long to take you to write that book I'd say 20 years because I was clicking all that all that data about what works in terms of success you know and the actual writing

took about a year and a half I would write from about seven at night sometimes I'd all of a sudden I'd hear birds singing and it would be getting gray out oh my god I've been up all night typing you know I had the regular bluebird again Well, I had a regular job, you know, which was to run my seminars. Fortunately, most of them are on weekends and evenings, but basically I would go to bed at seven in the morning and sleep till noon, 1 o'clock, then get up and do my business again and then write. So thank God my wife could put up with all that, but she did, and it worked out really well. But it was not that hard.

I like writing. I like wordsmithing. I'll give you an example. So I have a chapter in there about the guy who wrote Sleepless in Seattle, the movie. And the next chapter is about a guy who had, it's a coffee roaster. It's all about perseverance, not giving up. And he's up in Seattle, and he's sleeping on these coffee bean bags because he couldn't afford an apartment.

Now he's Uber rich, no. But what happened was one of his major clients was a coffee shop down in Long Beach, California, and he would ship the beans through UPS. And UPS had a strike. and I was able to go, wow, blah, blah, blah, I was writing sleepless in Seattle. In Seattle, this guy was also sleepless. You know, I love that being able to make those kind of segways and stuff, you know?

Yeah. And then his chapter is called Going the Extra Mile. Basically, I said he, when the strike happened, he said, I can't let this guy flounder and not have the beans he needs. And he drove them himself, 1,250 miles from Seattle to Long Beach. I said he was willing to go more than one extra mile. He went 1,250. Playing with words like that is really fun for me.

What was the reason for continuing to do the seminars? Because presumably you've done very well financially from, as you mentioned, some of the royalties from Chicken Soup for the Soul. Was there something you got personally from doing the seminars? Was it kind of an insurance policy of sorts to have an additional revenue stream? Like, why did you keep doing so many in-person events? I love doing it. It's like, I don't know if you, I know you participate in a lot of sports and you get really

good at them fast because the way you play. But whatever your favorite sport is, you play it because you love it when you're playing it, you know. And for me, nothing turns me on more than being up in front of a group, sharing ideas and stories and experiential exercises where people are interacting and watching their lights come on, their eyes get bright. Their awareness has happened, the breakthroughs happen, you know, all of a sudden they're coming up and I think, oh my God, you know. And then watching them name their children after me and write their

first book and leave shitty marriages and stop letting them, husbands abuse them. And that just, I love it. I'm kind of sort of retiring right now. And literally, that was the hardest part of that decision. So I had to get my wife to agree that I could do X number of workshops a year. But it's now like, and other people are doing all the work. I'm not renting hotels and filling them and doing all that kind of crap I used to do. They used to have 12 staff, and I have two. And how, what is your age now, Jack? 81.

All right. You are sharp as a razor's edge, and I have to ask two questions. Number one, what do you think contributes to that? Maybe you also have some fantastic genetics, I don't know, but you're very, very sharp, you have a lot of energy, and then the related question is, and I'm not questioning the decision, but why retire? Why change what you're doing? I realize there are things I want to do that I haven't done. I want to become a really good chef cook. I want to learn how to oil paint. I play a guitar, mediocrely. I want to learn to play the piano. All these kind of hobby things

that most people do as they go along in life, I've kind of pout them up at the end. I have a 12-year-old grandson who I absolutely adore, who's the coolest damn kid. He's an old soul kind of kid. and amazingly talented. I want to spend more time with him. I want to spend more time with my wife. I think I owe her that after all the time she's put up with me being on the road. And I enjoy being with her.

And I want to just explore things because they're fun, not because I need to. So I want to read a book because it interests me, not because I'm getting ready to write something or I'm getting ready to, you know, whatever. And it's funny, I never thought I would retire. I told everyone for years I'd never retire.

And then I was doing an ayahuasca experience done in Costa Rica, I'll tell the story real quick. So the intention that we were to hold that night was forgive the unforgivable. And I thought, I've forgiven my parents, I've forgiven people who embezzled from me, I've forgiven people who stole from me, I've forgiven the guy who bullied me in school, forgiven both my ex-wives, their lawyers. You know, I've forgiven everybody. What's left to forgive?

But I'll do it. So I take the medicine, and I'm lying there on my mattress, and all of a sudden, Vladimir Putin's face comes up. I thought, oh, God. I got to forgive Vladimir Putin, who I think is one of the more evil guys on the planet. So I literally started to see his childhood. I saw what motivated him. He wants to be seen as majorly significant that he did something outrageously huge,

like put the Soviet Union back together. How does he do that? You start bringing all these countries back that they gave away, like the Ukraine and Poland and, you know, all those places. So I finally forgave him, and I felt this. energy just like leave my body who i didn't know i had such the animosity toward him and then the next thing i see is my door to my office and the office opens and the first three feet of my office is like a shrine to how significant i am it's like the guinness book world record magazine covers awards

honorary doctorates uh you know people that made me honorary sheriff of this town i've got more damn stuff, you know. And I realized, oh my God, part of my motivation has been to feel like I was worthy of being here. You know, I made a difference. I'm significant, you know. Now, there's a huge philanthropic, loving, service-oriented heart in my body, but I realized, like, how many honorary doctors do you need? You know, I'm doctor, doctor, doctor, doctor, Campfield, you know, it's like, I would go away for four days on a trip to give a commencement speech to get another doctorate, and I leave my wife and my kids, you know, it was crazy.

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

but the road warrior you know the three weeks in Asia the three weeks yeah all that I'm not doing that anymore I love a four books is the retirement plan that's Jack's version of lazy so I'm going to come back to the I was in a second but before we get to that what do you think has contributed to you being as vibrant full of energy and as sharp as you are I think several things I'm passionate about what I do I follow my joy, follow my passion. So there's not a lot of resistance between what was coming through

and what I want to do. I can't say I'm fearless totally, but I'm very few fears in my life anymore. Just, you know, if I'm going to do it, we'll do it. And so that's, that inner struggle is mostly gone. That uses up a lot of energy and causes disease in the body. I don't have a lot of limiting beliefs anymore.

One of the books I'm writing is a belief change process that I go-developed with somebody that literally works. So I've cleared just tons of that stuff. I'm a big fan of Byron Katie. Do you know her work? Yeah. Yeah.

Her work is amazing. People can find PDFs online also of the work, which are super helpful, the turnarounds and so on. I did that work for years. I've not ever been with her, but I did her work. I don't get upset about anything.

It just is what it is, you know, that whole idea. It is what it is. My desire to change it can also be what it is, but it's not out of anger or out of upset, or it shouldn't be that way. It's all just called, you know, whatever. So that is a big piece of it. I meditate regularly. I cleanse. I told you before we came on that I'm in the eighth day of a 10-day

cleanse. So, you know, all this stuff coming out of my body, detoxing. I do saunas regularly. I won't say I exercise every single day because I'd be a lie, but I exercise enough to keep things moving. I only listen to comedy channels on my XM radio. I laugh a lot. I think laughter is very healing. I love your digital detox concept, which I actually put in the 10th anniversary edition of the success principles. Amazing. Amazing. I didn't know that. Yeah, I have to send you a copy. I can't believe I didn't do that. So I think that organic food, when I was in graduate school at UMass in Amherst, probably it was 23, 4, something like that. My best friend, we played racquetball every night. He was the owner of a health food store. So I got into the organic thing,

the supplement thing, the cleansing thing, all of that really, really early on. And then doing the ayahuasca, the plant medicine, anything that's not clear, comes up and out, you know, so that's all good. And I'm very loving. I get massages regularly. All the things people tell you to do, I'm mostly doing, you know. For longevity. That's a good list.

I'm taking some notes for myself. I need to add a few more in the rotation. So you mentioned the ayahuasca, so let's talk about that. I was surprised, not because I would expect anything otherwise, but I wasn't aware that you had these experiences. Is that something that goes back many decades, or is there something that prompted you to engage with plant medicine? No, it doesn't go back many decades.

I mean, I did not smoke pot in high school and college. It made me fall asleep. So my drug of choice on weekends was a couple beers or, you know, Bocatonic or whatever. and that's another thing I stopped drinking quite a bit ago. But the reality was, I think I, in graduate school, this is so funny, because the guy who eventually became the head of drug education for New Hampshire is a person who introduced me to mescaline and feely and things like that. But I only did a few journeys.

I did LSD once, I think. I never did cocaine. I was afraid of all that. I didn't want to get addicted and I'd seen people who had. So none of that for years and years and years and years. And then Lynn Twist, who runs the Pachamom Alliance, was taking people down to the rainforest in Ecuador to help raise consciousness about let's save the rainforest.

And I went on one of those trips, and one of the journeys, one of the things you do is take ayahuasca in the jungle with a real shaman that's there. And I did that, and I had an amazing breakthrough experiences. And so I became interested in it. How old were you when you had that first experience, you say?

I'm thinking 20 years ago, maybe, with Lynn. Yeah, something like that. And then when I learned about Rhythmia, and I thought, well, I want to do that. And the thing I like about Rhythmia, for those who don't know, it's a center in Costa Rica. And it was founded by a guy who was, in his own words, a total asshole. He was a womanizer, a drug addict, a drinker,

got to the fights in bars all the time. And so eventually he was going to commit suicide because he couldn't get his life together. He'd been out of rehab so many times. And he was worth about $60 million, I think. But he was miserable. So he said he was going to commit suicide. And someone said, don't commit suicide.

So he go to the rainforest and work at this guy named Uganda. So he looks him up and looks like a resort. And he signs up to go there and gets down there. And the whole thing was a, I mean, the resort images were bullshit. It was an old house, dirty mattresses, cockroaches, you know, all this stuff. Hotel Paradise. And it was funny because when he got there, he tells the story. He got there.

And he buys down, you know, private jet, that whole thing. and gets there, and Maganda meets him at the airport, he says, give my bags, man. And Magana's this African guy, and he says, look at your own, man, I don't carry your bags. He was just used to being treated like a king, right? So they get to this place that doesn't look anything like the brochure, and he's about to leave, and he says, come on, man, lie down.

And he gets in about eight people lying head-to-head in the middle of a circle in the garage on mattresses, and they do ibogaine, which is an African thing. Hell of a introduction, yeah. Yeah. But it totally rocked his world because what happened was he ended up going back to his grandfather and he realized his grandfather had been sexually violating him his whole youth. And he totally repressed all that.

That's why he was so angry. He was he was repressing. And then finally, I love this last line. He's lying there and Maganda just taps him on the head and goes, happy birthday, man. You were reborn. And he was. And so he decided what he wanted to do is help people have his experience. And the second time he did Oveigaine said,

you're supposed to open the center, but don't do it with Ibogaine, do with ayahuasca. So he started that center. So I've been down there five times, do four journeys every time you're there, so 20 journeys. They've been life-changing for me. It's literally life-changing.

And I think that's another reason I'm so light and just, you know, it's all good. Yeah, the pharmacology of ayahuasca in and of itself, super, super fascinating for people who might be interested But also outside of the DMT, which is found in the chakruna, that leaves of this shrub actually related to the coffee plant. But the actual vine itself contains a lot of interesting properties. And there's, I think it's ESPD-50, this like ethnobotanical search for psychoactive drugs.

There's a compendium that goes into, there's a presentation from that that goes into some of the potential properties around neurogenesis and so on. from the beta carb blades and so on themselves in the vine. So even the vine has some very, very interesting properties. What have you observed as someone who's been a practitioner, a student, a teacher in the, for lack of a better term, self-development space for many decades now? What do you think is often missed or undertaught? I mean, you've seen lots of different waves of different things that have become popular, or fallen out of popularity.

Is there anything you wish folks paid more attention to? I think several things come to mind. I don't think about that very often, but several things come to mind as you ask the question. Number one, I think most people don't understand the impact of unconscious limiting beliefs. They watch the secret, they visualize, they affirm, and then somehow it's not working, they don't know why.

And so it's always like either fear or limiting beliefs or just lack of willingness to take action. you know, that basically corrupts the process. And I think for me, why I'm writing a book about this limiting belief process is I've just worked with literally thousands of people. Twice a year, I've been doing these free sessions where I'll get like 700 people sign up and I'll do this belief process with them. And I'd say 99% of the people have a major breakthrough.

Had a woman got rid of arthritis in like 20 minutes, you know. I mean, ridiculous stuff. So these beliefs we're holding on to that usually got formed between the age of three and eight somewhere in that range because of some experience we had usually a traumatic experience you make a decision that's never going to happen again it's not safe to say what i want it's not safe to ask for things not safe to be sexy make noise whatever what happens is that we don't realize we have that belief and so we do all the things we're supposed to do and it doesn't happen and it's very frustrating and sometimes people give up on the whole human potential movement because they're

doing all these things that the gurus are teaching them but they're not dealing with this block it's kind of like, I'll tell people, it's like calling up Domino's Pizza to order a pizza and then having this other voice call them and say, forget the order. And you wonder, why isn't this showing up, you know? And so all this work that so many of us taught in the secret and so forth,

that seems to be a missing piece for a lot of people, I would say. And fear, which is based on limiting beliefs, is my experience, We imagine bad things happening in the future as a visualization process usually or thought process, which we can intervene on as well. But I think those are the two big things that people don't understand very well. And then I think what we're seeing today that I'm more aware is the power of community, the power of support, the power of not being alone, that there are people there to hold

you back in lying when you go off, you know. My sister just called a couple hours ago. and was having a really tough time. And just spending 10 minutes with her, she was back where she needed to be. But if she didn't have anyone to call, which is increasingly true for her, as she gets older and doesn't have a lot of friends

who've died and so forth, I think that's really critical. And I think more and more people are becoming aware of that. So you're seeing all these communities evolving. And I think one of the reasons that plant medicine is taken off is because it deals with all those limiting beliefs. They come up.

And as we say, arrhythmia, what's coming up is coming out. So don't resist it. that's a good one you get to clear it i want to come back to something that we spoke about or you spoke about early on with w clementstone in his intake interview when he asked you do you take a hundred percent responsibility for your life and the reason i want to revisit that is that i grew up in a family where there was a lot of complaining there's a lot of finger pointing a lot blaming and the villain would change depending on the context. And I've worked very hard to

try to correct that training for myself. And most of the time I would say I do pretty well, but there are certainly times when I seem to revert back to that early experience and find myself complaining about, maybe I don't complain, but I blame. Maybe it's just internally. Maybe I don't give voice to it, but there could be some blaming. How do you encourage people to take more or 100% responsibility? What are the steps for people who recognize that's what they want to do, but perhaps have the habits of blaming, pointing fingers, complaining? Well, I'll start with a story. A couple therapist told me once. She was working with a couple, and they were arguing about whose fault it was that something had happened. And a therapist said, well, I'm glad to see you agree.

on something they said what well you obviously agree that if you can figure out whose fault it is somehow that's going to make your life better that's really that's outstanding yeah so basically I teach you a little formula equation if you call it like a plus r equals oh event plus response equals the outcome so when there's an event and you blame somebody or something the government the bank, the economy, your mother, your sister, your neighbor, the boss, whatever you're blaming for this experience you've just had, that event, plus you're blaming, does not produce a better outcome. So we all want a better outcome. We want to experience joy, freedom, peace, love, success, abundance, you know, whatever the outcome we want, health, longevity, whatever.

And certain behaviors do not do that. So I've never found a place where blaming, produced a better result. You don't feel better. You don't solve the problem in a way that really gets you anywhere because you've just blamed somebody. And it's amazing how much our culture supports blaming and complaining. I used to call bars ain't at awful clubs. You know, every profession has their own bar. They go to. The firemen go here. The police go there. The lawyers go there. The doctors go there. And he bitch and moan about everything had happened that day. Like, you know, the economy, the president, the minister of the hospital, whatever. So the reality is it lets off steam and you get agreement, but you don't get resolution, you don't get

breakthrough, you don't get better results. So if you look at E plus R equals O, there's only three responses you have any control over, your thoughts, your images, and your behavior. That's it. You can't manage time. You can manage your thoughts in relation to time. You can manage your visualizations in relation to time and your behavior. You think we can control things outside of us. we can only control our response to things outside of us and notice what kind of outcome that produces. And what you've done magnificently and what I've done a lot as well is look at who are the people that are succeeding, what are their responses to certain events, how do they relate to this situation, which ones produce the better results? I mean, your book, the Titans book

is just amazing, all these people telling you what worked. And such amazing, if you haven't read that, by the way, guys, please do. It's incredible. So what happened, is blaming, we just discovered. We talked about it. And it's incredible what people blame. I mean, look at our president right now. He's blaming everybody for everything. You know, it's just, it's unfortunate, but he does. But it's not producing particularly great results as a result of it. In order to complain, you have to have a reference point of something better you prefer. So I can't complain about my girlfriend if I don't have an image of some woman who's better than my girlfriend. now the reality is nobody ever complains about gravity you've never seen a little person walking through

the mall all bent over on gravity i hate gravity wasn't for gravity i'll be all bent over gravity sucks you know never seen that why not because you can't change gravity everyone knows gravity just is so we don't complain about it so anything you're complaining about you have to have a reference point in your mind of something better better job better country better president better whatever and what happens then is we when we become aware of that, we have this better option that we're not willing to risk creating. So therefore, we complain about it. It lets off steam. It gets people to go together. Yeah, I know. My wife's the same way. You know, whatever it is. But we don't get a better result. So, you know, I always say, imagine a situation where every woman in the world dies except my wife.

Big thing comes down from outer space. Zaps yours with some energy field. My wife happens to be in a lead mine that day. She's the only one to survive. Would I come to work and complain about my wife? No. Why not? It's the only one.

There is no option, right? So we wouldn't complain about it. Right? So basically, if you're complaining, my response to that is, what would you prefer? What would you have to do to create that? One of my friends runs a workshop he does over in Europe.

he's a European corporate consultant and one of the questions he asked people even when they're pissed off at the company they work for he says on a scale of 1 to 10 how would you rate your quality of life working here and they go three he go why so high it's not a zero something's going on there right so why so high

which floors them that kind of breaks the chain of their thought and then he goes so what would be an 8 for you never goes to 10 that's too big a leap for people what would be an 8 for you well this would be happening this would be happening. What could you do to help generate that result? What could you do to help make that happen in your company? Because that's really what you have to do. You can't just sit there and bitch and moan. Nothing's going to change, you know? Yeah. So you mentioned Tools of Titans,

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

is taken from Jocko Willink, who's a famous Navy SEAL commander, he's done a million things since. His first public interview ever was on this podcast ages ago. And he has this, people can find videos of this too, but it's just called Good.

And so if you'll indulge me for a second, I was about to read just a minute or two of this. So, good. This is the title. And Jocko has a great video of this for people who want, but it's also in the book. So good. This is something that one of my direct subordinates, one of the guys who worked for me, a guy who became one of my best friends pointed out, he would pull me aside with some major problem or issue. This is when Jocko was in the military that was going on. And he'd say, boss, we've got this thing, the situation. It's going terribly wrong. I would look at him and say, good. And finally one day, he was telling you

about something that was going off the rails. And as soon as he finished explaining to me, he said, I already know what you're going to say. And I asked, what am I going to say? He said, you're going to say, good. He continued, that's what you always say. When something is going wrong or going bad, you look at me and say, good. And I said, well, I mean it because that's how I operate. So I explained to him that when things are going badly, there's going to be some good that will come for it.

Oh, the mission got canceled. Good. We can focus on another one. Didn't get the new high speed gear we wanted? Good. We can keep it simple. Didn't get promoted? Good.

More time to get better. Didn't get funded? Good. We own more of the company. Didn't get the job you wanted? Good. Go out, gain more experience and build a better resume. Got injured?

Good. Need a break from training. It just goes on and on. And then he says, just to put a pin in it, he says, Now, I don't mean to say something trite. I'm not saying to sound like Mr. Smiley, positive guy. That guy ignores the hard truth. That guy thinks a positive attitude will solve problems.

It won't, but neither will dwelling on the problem. No, except reality, but focus on the solution. Take that issue, take that setback, take that problem, and turn it into something good. Go forward. If you're part of a team, that attitude will spread throughout. And I feel like you reflect that. and certainly jocko is sort of an archetype of many types and it's also for me at least

makes it clear that it's something you train yourself to do right if it doesn't come naturally all the time just like an exercise habit or anything else like this is something that you have to condition yourself to do with reminders and practices are there any reminders or practices that you have for yourself to stay on the rails, so to speak, with the 100% responsibility? You know, I've always got something I'm working on, and you have to have like something that keeps it in your focus, you know. So if I'm engaging in some kind of negative self-talk, then I take and I create an opposite affirmation.

I'll put that on some post-its and put on the refrigerator door and on my bathroom mirror and stuff like that. Because, you know, we know it normally, you probably have other data than I do on this, but neuroscience tends to tell us that it takes about 66 days to change belief. And it can take longer depending on who it is and how badly that belief is crowned into you through the trauma of its creation. But generally, it requires repetition. There's a guy, I forget his name right now.

He's the head of peak performance at West Point. He wrote a book about it. And one of the things, when I read the book, that he does is when the students are wanting a behavioral change they create an affirmation and he teaches them every time you walk through a door reach up and touch the door gym and say your affirmation now i have a repetitive system that's built in that tells me to do that they think about how many doors you go in and out of every day into the bathroom in the kitchen out of the kitchen into your car back out of you know whatever and so it's that level of repetition until it becomes you know ground in they don't have to repeat it i mean i know my phone

number i don't have to repeat it when i first got it you know and you want to get your new ideas like that. I always say if you can build in four new behavioral shifts a year. Think about it in 10 years, you've got 40 new shifts. That's a lot. So for me, for example, when we read the what was the book, Shaman from Mexico? Oh, it's Carlos Castaneda? A different one.

Different Shaman from Mexico. Yeah, this is me being sharp at anyone. Anyway, he had these, the four agreements. That's the guy, the book. Oh, this is Don Miguel Ruiz. Don Miguel Ruiz, yeah. So my wife and I decided we'll take the four agreements and we'll work on each agreement for three months. And so for three months, that was the agreement, you know, of not making other people wrong, thinking positive, et cetera.

And we had to, like, reinforce that. And we had little signs that told us what the, focus on and so forth. So I think it's important to do that because, as you know, we are so distracted today now with AI and scrolling through Instagram and, I mean, I even get caught in that occasionally. I'll go looking for something on YouTube and the next thing I know I'm watching old reruns of Jay Leno. But I think that, yeah, reminders are important. Yeah, I'm going to use the doorway. That is a great cue. It's actually. something. If people want to read exploring the world of lucid dreaming doorways are also really

helpful for some of that. People can check out Stephen LaBerge if you want to go into really weird town. And also for people who might be wagging a finger at me, I know that Carlos Castaneda was not a shaman, but it was the teachings of Don Juan, I think, a yaki way of knowledge. That was the book that I was thinking of. Yeah, he was one of the first books I read. It was a great book. It's a compelling book. I mean, whether it's real or not, it's a fun read. So I'm looking at a blog post. This is from jack canfield.com. Productivity tips. And you like me, I'm sure, have quite a few blog posts. But you've got, I'll just read the headlines here for a second. There's clean up your messes. Two, focus. Three, just say no. Four, practice the rule of five,

which we've talked about a bit. Five, meditate. And this is going to seem so mundane, but I'm very curious if you could expand a bit on clean up your messes and how you go about doing it. Because I have a few Achilles heels, as I suppose we all do. And one of them is I collect so much goddamn paper. I am a hypographic note-taking maniac. And I just have paper. It metastasizes to cover every flat surface that I have. And I try to take photos here and there and digitize. But it's messy and it really agitates me. And I'm not saying that that's ideal. Maybe it shouldn't bother me. how do you think about why is number one of five on productivity tips clean up your messes and how do you do it well you're talking to a fellow person and needs the same rehab just so you know

i take more notes at a conference than almost anybody and i've got literally books full of notes and taking notes when i'm listening to stuff and podcast things i think the problem is that every time you look at all that it's taking your attention and so the recent that I've read says we have the ability to hold about seven attention units at a time. And so what happens is that you'll notice the research also, like if a waitress, if you haven't paid the bill yet, any good waiter or waitress can tell you what you had. As soon as you pay the bill, you ask them 10 minutes later, they don't remember anymore. They don't need to. So what happens is all those attention units are being taken up by things that are incomplete.

So messes in my world are incompletions. So I think it's incomplete. Now, that can be that thing you started, you didn't finish. It could be that letter you were writing, the book you're not finished up, the notes you have over here. But what I've learned to do is find a place for those things. You know, like if I have lots of filing systems, I have filing systems in my computer. I have filing systems, about 10 drawers in my office that are file drawers.

And so things go in those places. And if I need to remember something to do it, I have what's called a come-up file. So let's say I need to do something March 28th. I have a folder called March. So on the first of March, I go through that folder, the very thing I put in there, and then I put it into my counter for those days.

Or I can put it in now, you know, called all of Steve on March 28th. But for his papers related to that, things we're going to talk about, whatever, it goes in my March file. So it's there. It's not in my visual cue. So what happens is whether it's a relationship,

and we've all had that experience of walking through a grocery store and seeing someone down in the aisle and we don't want to talk to us, so we go out on the Under Island and hope we evade him, because it's incomplete. So all that energy is taken up because it's not complete.

All the things you've never said, the upsets, the thank yous, the acknowledgments, the wanting acknowledgments and not having got them, they're taking up space in your head. So everything you can close up, it's almost like you're taking a piece of paper off the desk and pretty soon you have a clean desk. Do you know Dan Sullivan's work, the strategic coach? Yeah, yeah, he's got some great stuff. Well, one of the things I learned from him, he doesn't have a desk. he's got three or four offices with conference tables

and he'll go into one and say bring over that stuff and he'll work with one of his people they do all the things they need to do they walk out with all the papers he's done doesn't have that pile up shit that I deal with and you deal with but the reality is that everything is incomplete

you're walking through the hall of your house you see a little crack in the wall and you go oh it needs to get fixed pretty soon you won't see that crack because you have to block it out of your awareness to pay potential other things So now things are not getting handled that need to get handled. And also, if you do keep paying attention to it, that's time you could have spent writing your book or thinking about your project or loving your mother or giving good feedback to your girlfriend or whatever.

So the reality is it's really important to clean that up. And there's financial messes, there's garage messes, there's, you know, the attic, the tool drawer, the door that has the leashes. Oh my gosh. I can feel my cortisol piling up as you're listening. It sounds like you're in my house on my nanny camp. I'm going to send you. I have a sheet of like 21 things you need to clean up. I used to work for a company called Insight Training Seminars, and if you were a trainer, you had to clean all that up because you had to be living, you were complete.

You couldn't teach it if you weren't living it. Think about it. Financial records, your checkbook, not balance, stuff in your car, you know, clothes that don't fit anymore. I mean, people go down a list of all that stuff. I literally had to go through my car. clothes at one point. I'm a shirt whore. I love shorts, you know. This is another thing we have in common. No, I have so many t-shirts. It's just unacceptable.

It's indefensible. I know. I know. But I had to go through and kind of clean it out, you know, because it got to a point where it couldn't even put anything in the closet. So the rule is if I haven't worn it in the last 60 days and it's not a tuxedo or something like that, it's gone. I love all the decluttering books that are out there and, you know, all that kind of stuff. One person said go through your house take everything you haven't used in the last 30 days put it in a box label the box what's in it and if another 120 days go by and you haven't used it just throw it out because you're never going to use it again well well i'll tell you a dirty little secret which is you know i moved eight years ago from san francisco to austin and i moved all my stuff from

california into storage because there was a gap where i was shopping for a place and i didn't have anywhere to put all this stuff It has been sitting in storage all that stuff for eight years. I get a bill for it every month and I'm like, I should go down and take a look at that. And I'm like, I cannot allow myself to look at that stuff because I'm going to want to keep all this junk that I haven't needed in eight years. So it's my ignorance is bliss approach.

It's a small tax to pay at this point. Oh, yeah. George Carlin does a really good routine on stuff. If you can find it, it's really amazing. Oh, I will find it. George Carlin, what a genius. Also, his late-night bit on heaven and hell, people can look that up. In heaven, the French of the cooks, the Japanese, the lovers, and this and this,

and then in hell, X, Y, and C, it's also worth checking out. But decluttering, the 21 things that I need to clean up, please do send that to me. Yeah, I will. I will. Is that something we could share in the show notes for this episode? Oh, yeah, sure, sure, sure. Yeah, I think it's even a page in my book. If not, I'll get it for you. All right. Perfect. Jack, we've covered a ton of ground. I don't want to take up your entire afternoon on a Friday. But is there anything else that I'm not in any rush whatsoever, but is there anything else that you'd like to talk about that we haven't covered anything like to say, request of my audience, anything at all that you'd like to bring up that I haven't already prompted?

I would just say, you know, kind of self-servingly, that if you would like to know more about my work, the book that Tim talked about, it's found as 20th anniversary edition, the success principles, how to get from where you are to where you want to be. It's really the basis of everything I do. If you haven't read a chicken soup book, start with the first one. It's really brilliant. One thing I did, Tim, I haven't done it for all my books, but I did with that book. I literally, after we probably edited every story five or six times, went out to Colorado, a ski resort in the summer, took three days, read every story out loud. Because what I know is when most people read, they're sub vocalizing in their brain, they're not speed reading. And if it

didn't sound, as one of my actors says, coming trippingly off the tongue, I would rewrite it. And that book went on to sell 105 million copies. So basically, I think that was a good thing to do. So I always tell people, like you said, you know, get feedback, but also read it out loud. How does it sound to you? You know, and then make sure you get, I always say get feedback from at least 20 people. First teenage soul book, we had an entire high school, so spend classes for a day, over 1,000 kids read all the stories. So we had an Excel spreadsheet. They all graded every story to scale of 1 to 10.

That book went on a cell, I think, 6 million copies or something like that, you know. So feedback, I love what Jim Lanser says. Feedback is the Breakfast of Champions, you know? Feedback is the breakfast. of your champions. And most people avoid feedback because they're afraid of what they're going to hear. And you've got to know that, we call it constructive, feed forward, you know, constructive feedback. But anyway, I would read that book. Go to my website, jack camfield.com. There's all kinds of things there. You might be interesting. And it's interesting. I hadn't, I normally say

this, but last night, for some reason, I was looking up something and I couldn't remember it. And I thought it was, there's a guy named Nick Nanton. He did a documentary of my life called The Soul of Success. And I went in there to find one little thing, and I don't know, called egotistical, whatever. I watched the whole damn hour on YouTube. It's free. Just go, The Soul of Success on YouTube, and you'll see one of the most amazing documentaries he's ever made, I think, because he's an Emmy-winning documentarian. So that'll give you some information about some of the stuff Tim and I talked about

that maybe we didn't go deep enough on. And that's about it, I would say, you know. And we'll link to everything we've discussed in the show knows. Jack Canfield also just to reiterate. spelling, C-A-N-F-I-E-L-D, Jack Canfield.com. You can find all of that. Well, of course, link to everything as per usual in the show notes at tim.blog slash podcast for everybody, including the 21 things to clean up, which is going to ride hard on my OCD, which is properly diagnosed. I'm not just making that up as a swipe against OCD folks. Big shocker to anyone who actually

knows me. I'm kidding. But what I will say as we wind to a close, Jack, is that you've had a huge impact in my life. Your work is at an impact. You personally have had an impact. You've been so gracious, so patient. I don't know if you remember this, but I remember when I was volunteering at that event, S-Face, and I had all the speakers. I had some type of waiver because I wanted to record everything. And the waiver was, I'm sure, all sweeping and full encompassing of everything because I had probably gotten it online somehow. And I remember you had your glasses on and you sort of pulled down the glasses. like a very patient parent. And you're like, Timothy, I have some questions about this release. And then you scratched everything out. You scratched a bunch of nonsense out and you signed it. You've had an incredible impact on my career. And I just want to thank you for all of that and for what you offer to the world as an eternal student and as a teacher. Well, thank you. And I really appreciate taking the time. Well, I've enjoyed this. One of the best podcasts ever been on. So thank you.

yeah my pleasure at least i can do and i'll say it one more time everybody who's listening we will link to everything in the show notes tim dot blog slash podcast just search canfield c-an-f-i-el-d and it will pop right up and until next time be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others but also to yourself and thanks for tuning in hey guys this is tim again just one more thing before you take off and that is five bullet Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter, called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel.

It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gas, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about.

If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser, tim.blog slash Friday. drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. As many of you know, for the last few years, I've been sleeping on a midnight lux mattress from today's sponsor, Helix Sleep. I also have one in the guest bedroom downstairs

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