BILL HARRIS:  Hello. I want to welcome you to the Masters of the Secret Series.  Tonight’s guest is my good friend Jack Canfield.

In  addition to being one of the stars of the hit DVD movie, The Secret... Jack is the originator and co-creator of the  New York Times #1 best-selling book series Chicken Soup for the Soul, which has sold over 100 million copies in 39 languages, the last I heard, but Jack is certainly a lot more than that. 

He is one of the top self-esteem and success trainers in the world.  His new book, The Success Principles, is a runaway best-seller.

He does a lot of speaking for corporations and other groups, and the list of major corporations that have had him as a consultant or a speaker is really too long to list here.  He has been on Oprah and Fox & Friends, and CNN and countless other  television shows and if we gave his whole bio we wouldn’t have time to have a conversation. 

So, Jack, welcome... I  am really happy that you are here today. 

JACK CANFIELD:  It is always fun to be with you Bill. 

BILL HARRIS:  Well, thank you for saying that.  You know, the first thing that occurs to me as I introduce you, as I have a few times and I just told a few of the things that you have done; the thing that always occurs to me is, and I don’t want to embarrass you by this, but there is something so human and warm about you and so approachable, that it’s almost hard for people to believe that you have had this mega success that you have had.  

How have you managed to maintain so much humanness in the face of all this success?

JACK CANFIELD:  Well, I always say that success or money amplifies who you already are, so if you are someone who is an idiot and you make a lot of money, you can be a really big idiot, but what happened for me was that I spent a lot of time before I was successful working on myself, taking lots of seminars. 

I think, one year, I think I went to 38 weekend workshops from Gestalt therapy to Transactional Analysis, meditation, yoga, Tai-Chi, you name it and literally did a lot of clearing out of as much of my ego and as much of my self-defeating behaviors, etc., that I could.  

So, by the time I was successful, I don’t feel like I am any different now than I was when I became successful, other than I have a lot more money and a lot more influence.

BILL HARRIS:  Exactly, and you know, that is the same thing that has occurred to me as I have become more successful, is the influence it gives me really gives me an opportunity to do something good for the world and I like being in that position, and I am sure you do too.  

JACK CANFIELD:  I love it.  I mean we give away some years millions, some years hundreds of thousands of dollars to causes that we care about.  I am able to open  doors and get audiences with people. 

I remember one year I was invited to speak to all the women members of congress and the state legislatures, and the women governors over in Hawaii.  They had a big convention and I said “What do you want me to talk about?”  And they said “Whatever you would like us to know.” 

So I got to give my agenda for the nation to all the female legislators.  I mean, what a kick. 

BILL HARRIS:  Yeah, I know.  That reminds me of when I was asked to speak at the United Nations and got to speak to a lot of influential people there.  It’s really, and I am amazed, I would imagine you would feel that way too.  I don’t feel any different now then when I was making $30,000 a year. 

JACK CANFIELD:  No, I don’t. I mean, I have a bigger house and more clothes and a nice car and I can take my kids anywhere in the world that I want to take them. 

We were just talking before we got on this call about how I just spent two weeks in Hawaii in a house on the beach and the year before that we were in Bali and next year we are going to India, and so forth. 

So, I get to do that kind of thing, which I think is neat.  I get to get really great medical care and eat organic foods, and all that. 

But other than that, life goes on.  You have to have some kind of driving vision or purpose that makes you get up in the morning and for me it has always been about empowering other people to live their dreams and then teaching other people how to teach that to others. 

So, one of my big initiatives is educating educators, teachers, in the high schools and middle schools of America to teach kids to believe in themselves. 

There is such low self-esteem in so many parts of our country. 

We have been watching the whole thing that’s been going in Louisiana with the hurricanes and you see so many people at the bottom end of the economic ladder who just don’t feel very empowered and my goal is to continue to help people become empowered so that they can have a future they want. 

BILL HARRIS:  You know, there have been a number of times in my teaching where I will give an example of some successful person and I get letters back from people saying  “Well, yeah, it is okay for you to talk about Napoleon Hill or JACK CANFIELD, or some other super successful person,” but they don’t relate to it somehow. 

It is like someone that’s really successful is so far away from where they are that it seems unreal to them.  So, it’s sort of occurring to me as I say this, that maybe we can do something as we talk here to help bridge that gap for people. 

JACK CANFIELD:  I know for me that there is a concept in psychology about gradients and if you go too far above gradient, people can’t relate. 

The example would be if you are making $50,000 a year and someone says I can  teach you how to make $100,000, that seems real, but if someone says I can teach you how to make a million, that seems so far away it is hard to believe, but if you  are making $500,000 and someone says you can make a million, then it feels real. 

For me, only 20 years ago, I was making $50,000 a year and then the next year I  might have made $60,000 and then $75,000 and then $100,000 and then $140,000 and then $300,000 and $400,000, so it is kind of like watching your own children  grow. 

They do not look like they are getting bigger, but if you see someone you haven’t seen for three years and they go from 11 to 14, they have gained like 2 feet and  you can hardly believe they have grown that much. 

So, what you have to do, is keep looking at what’s in front of you and doing that. 

When I set out to write a best-selling book, Chicken Soup for the Soul, I didn’t think it was going to sell 8 million copies around the world. 

I  thought it might sell a million, which was our goal, and as a result of that, we sold a million and we thought about, What about making 4 million? 

Then, one day we were sitting there and we had sold about 50 million books, and  we said let’s sell a billion books. 

Well, if you had told me let’s sell a billion books when I did the first Chicken Soup  book, I would have told you that you were crazy. 

So, I think the main thing is to keep the horizon ahead of you always a little higher than what you are and keep looking toward that which you want to create and eventually, you find yourself standing on top of a mountain because you took one step at a time.

 

 

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