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On this episode, Jason Hartman is joined by Jack Canfield, America’s #1 Success Coach, to talk about Jack’s journey to success as founder and CEO of Chicken Soup for the Soul Enterprises, founder and chairman of The Canfield Training Group, and his latest project, Bestseller Blueprint Training Program. As the beloved originator of the Chicken Soup for the Soul® series, Jack Canfield fostered the emergence of inspirational anthologies as a genre – and watched it grow to a billion dollar market. As the driving force behind the development and delivery of more than 123 million books sold through the Chicken Soup for the Soul® franchise (and over 500 million copies in print worldwide), Jack Canfield is uniquely qualified to talk about success. His proven formula for success reached global acclaim with his most recent National Bestseller, The Success Principles™: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be. For his fascinating story, listen at: www.SpeakingofWealth.com.
Jack is a multiple New York Times bestselling author, including titles such as The Power of Focus, The Aladdin Factor, Dare to Win, You’ve Got to Read This Book! and The Key to Living the Law of Attraction. He is the Founder and Chairman of The Canfield Training Group in Santa Barbara, California, which trains entrepreneurs, educators, corporate leaders and motivated individuals how to accelerate the achievement of their personal and professional goals. Jack is also the founder of The Foundation for Self-Esteem in Westlake Village, California, which provides self-esteem resources and trainings to social workers, welfare recipients and human resource professionals. Jack wrote and produced the Goals Program, a video training program for California welfare recipients. To date, the program has been responsible for helping 450,000 people get off welfare.
Jack is a featured teacher in the movie “The Secret”, “The Opus”, “The Cure”, “The Tapping Solution”, and “Yes IS the Destination…No is How You Get There.” He has recently been filmed for inclusion in two more films entitled “Discover the Gift” and “Awakening.”
Jack has also been a featured guest on more than 1,000 radio and television programs in nearly every major market worldwide – many of them on a repeat basis. A sample of these shows include Oprah, Montel, Larry King Live, 20/20, Inside Edition, The Today Show, Fox and Friends, The CBS Evening News, The NBC Nightly News, Eye to Eye, CNN’s Talk Back Live!, PBS, QVC and many others.
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ANNOUNCER: Welcome to the Solomon Success Show, where we explore the timeless wisdom of King Solomon and the Bible, as it relates to business and investing. False prophets and get-rich-quick schemes are everywhere; let’s not be distracted by these. Instead, let’s go to the source: the eternal principles that create a life of peace, power, and prosperity. Here’s our host, Jason Hartman.
JASON HARTMAN: Welcome to today’s show! This is Jason Hartman, your host, and as you may or may not know, every 10th show we kind of do a special tradition here that originated with my Creating Wealth Show, where we do a topic that is actually off topic on purpose. Something just to do with general life, and more successful living, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do today with our special guest! Again, 10th show is off topic, and it is very much intentional, just for personal enrichment, and I hope you enjoy today’s show. And we will be back with our guest in just a moment.
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ANNOUNCER: What’s great about the shows you’ll find on www.jasonhartman.com is that, if you want to learn about investing in and managing income properties for college students, there’s a show for that! If you want to learn how to get noticed online and in social media, there’s a show for that! If you want to know how to save on life’s largest expense, there’s a show for that! And if you’d like to know about America’s crime of the century, there’s even a show for that. Yep! There’s a show for just about anything. Only from www.jasonhartman.com. Or type in Jason Hartman in the iTunes store.
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JASON HARTMAN: It’s with great pleasure that I welcome Jack Canfield. I’m sure you’ve heard his name. He is the originator of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, which Time Magazine called the publishing phenomenon of the decade. He is an author of several works, including The Success Principles. He’s a widely recognized leader in peak performance strategies, a speaker, a coach, and an expert on maximizing your potential. His latest project, his best seller Blue Print Training Program, co-created with Steve Harrison, and he’s of course affectionately known as America’s #1 success coach. Jack, how are you today?
JACK CANFIELD: I’m fine, Jason.
JASON HARTMAN: Well good, it’s a pleasure to have you on the show. And I always like to ask, just to get a sense of geography—you are probably in Santa Barbara today, right?
JACK CANFIELD: I am. I’m in my home office in sunny Santa Barbara, California.
JASON HARTMAN: Fantastic. Well it’s great to have you on the show. Your career spans a long time, and really some great successes, and maybe just for a couple of minutes real quickly, give the listeners a little bit of your background, if you would.
JACK CANFIELD: Well, I started out in West Virginia. I was a normal kid, played sports and just was, you know, a typical kid in high school. I was fortunate enough to get a scholarship to go to Harvard University, I think more for my athletic prowess than my brilliance, but I enjoyed my four years and I majored in Chinese history, which I’ll often jokingly say has prepared me to do the work I do today.
JASON HARTMAN: Are you using your degree?
JACK CANFIELD: Well, you know what happened, my senior year I had an elective class, and someone said there was this really cool course called SOCREL10, which stood for Social Relations 10, and I thought, I’m going to take it. It was an easy A, everyone said, so I took it and I fell in love with psychology, because it was all about human interaction, and communication, and feelings, and motivation, and I just, I loved it. And I thought, wow, why didn’t I find this sooner? So I ended up going to graduate school in education, because I couldn’t get into psychology with no undergrad psych classes. And I taught history for one year, and I was in an all-black inner city school. And I became more interested in why kids weren’t motivated than I was in teaching history. And so I started to explore that, and I ran across a man named W. Clement Stone, who was a friend of Napoleon Hill, who wrote Think and Grow Rich. And they wrote a book together called The Success System That Never Fails.
And so, I ended up taking a course at his foundation, and because I was working in the inner city, and no one else was there—they were all doing some urban school training—I ended up getting a job there in the next year, and I ran around the Midwest for about ten years running self esteem and peak performance training for educators. And then one day this educator said, you know my husband’s company needs what you’re teaching us. And I said, well I’ve never worked in a company except as a floor sweeper at a General Electric plant between college and graduate school to make money for graduate school. And she said, they’re just big kids in suits. Now go talk to them. So, I went over and I did a self esteem seminar for them, focusing on success and so forth. And they loved it. And then the recession hit in ’93, and what happened there was that all the school money dried up, so we really refocused all our efforts on public seminars and corporate training. So, for the last 20 years, that’s mostly what I’ve been doing. And right about that same time, I was giving talks and I was—I noticed when I was teaching kids, that they were always more interested in stories than they were in facts.
If I tell a story about myself, or Martin Luther King, or the escaped slave that became the ambassador to Jamaica, they were on the edge of their seats. And so I began to realize, I could motivate kids by sharing stories of people like them who had made it out of the ghetto, they become successful. And so I started collecting them. And as I started teaching teachers, I would tell stories about my success with kids, and they would wake up. Then I started collecting stories in general that illustrated people overcoming obstacles. So, that turned into the first Chicken Soup for the Soul book, when somebody said, all those stories you told us today, are they in the book anywhere? My daughter needs to read them. And a week later somebody would say, my company needs to hear those stories.
And so, I put the first—I think I had 70 stories, so I put them in a book, and then Mark Victor Hansen came along right when I was about to finish it. We were having breakfast, and he asked me what I was doing, and I told him I was doing this book of inspirational stories. It kind of gives you goose bumps, it gets you standing ovations when you’re a speaker, and he said, I want to do it with you. I said Mark, that’s like telling a novelist that you want to finish the book with someone when they’re eight tenths done. Why would I let you do that? He said, well you only have 70 stories, and I have 30 more that are really good. 100’s a magical number. And I’m a really good marketer. And I went, okay. So, he came up with 30 stories, we did the book, and at the end of the book—and here’s something that was just, I don’t know, fate I guess. But books are published in folios. Like, they fold like 16 pages over and then they cut them, and we had three blank pages at the back of the book. The publisher said, would you like to put something there? And we said sure, why don’t we just say, if you have a story, send it in, maybe we’ll do another sequel. Well, we started getting 500 stories a day in the mail, Jason. And literally it was an avalanche. Everybody had a story to tell. Now they weren’t all good, but over the years, we’ve now done over 220 books. We have 500 million copies in print in 47 languages and it all resulted from that page in the back of that book.
JASON HARTMAN: That’s amazing. So, let’s just get a couple of questions for you.
JACK CANFIELD: Sure.
JASON HARTMAN: You said that you were very athletic in school. What sport?
JACK CANFIELD: I played football and track and swimming. And then I went off to Harvard and I played rugby.
JASON HARTMAN: Okay, fantastic. And what year was the first Chicken Soul book published?
JACK CANFIELD: 1993. We actually finished the book in late ’91. It took us a year. We had 144 rejections before we got the book published.
JASON HARTMAN: I thought—you know, I remember hearing that from Mark, but maybe that was just a part of it. I thought that was only like 38 rejections. 144? It was worse than I thought!
JACK CANFIELD: 144. I still have all the rejection letters in a file. It was everything in me in terms of being a good person, that I didn’t just staple the first New York Times bestseller list when we were #1 to the rejection letters and send them back to them.
JASON HARTMAN: I’m sure they found out without you telling them.
JACK CANFIELD: I’m sure they did, I’m sure they did.
JASON HARTMAN: So, that was the first book. Now, how many brand extensions of Chicken Soup are there? I mean, there’s Chicken Soup for the Prisoner’s Soul, the Dog Lover’s Soul, the Country Soul, you know?
JACK CANFIELD: Oh, gosh. Over 150. Pet lovers, golfers, NASCAR fans, sports lovers, baseball fans, basketball fans, mothers, mothers and daughters, Christian mothers, African American women. You know, people would come out of the woodwork after we did—the first six books, Mark and I did ourselves. And then someone came and said, you should do a book all for woman. And I said, that’s a great idea, and I started to walk away. And she said, wait! And I said, what? She said, you should do it with me! And I said, well why should I do it with you? She says well number one, it was my idea. And number two, I’m a woman. It will give you more credibility. So, we did. And then people started seeing we were doing books with third and fourth authors, and people started making suggestions, and most of them were good, and you know and we just continued.
JASON HARTMAN: And Jack, I mean, that business model has been so successful for you. What is the model under which other authors publish Chicken Soup books? Is it a franchise? Is it a joint venture? I’m just kind of curious.
JACK CANFIELD: Well, people have to—you know, we own the brand. People have to come to us and say, you know, I think you should do Chicken Soup for the abused child’s soul, or Chicken Soup for the, you know, parent of special needs kids. And they have to fill out a—we then send them back a form, so that they fill it out, so that they don’t sue us later for like stealing their idea or something. And then what we ask them then to do is, if they can come up with 15 stories to prove that they can in fact gather those stories—it’s one thing to have an idea. It’s another thing to be a good author. But what’s more important for a Chicken Soup collaborator, is someone that can go out and identify and solicit stories from other authors. I remember when we did African American soul, the woman that submitted the stories, Lisa Nichols, who has gone on to be in The Secret, and done two books herself. One’s called No Matter What, which is a great book.
And she said, I’m not a writer. And I’m—she was a speaker. But we needed somebody who was an African American who could go out and promote as well, and she submitted her first 15 stories, and I called her up, and I said Lisa, I’ve got good news and bad news. I said, six of your stories are phenomenal, the other nine are terrible. And she thought for sure that she was going to be the ones that were terrible, because you know, she didn’t get good grades in school in writing. I said the only six that really work are the ones you wrote, and they’re fabulous. I said, you’re a great writer. I said, but this isn’t a Lisa Nichols book. It has to be representing all African Americans. You’ve got to go out and find more stories. So, once people have proven they can do that, and we have a sense that they can, you know, promote the book and be on television and those kinds of things, then we’ll go ahead and form a contract with them.
JASON HARTMAN: Fantastic, fantastic. And—I mean, if you’re not at liberty to say, then feel free to not answer. But the contract, is it a joint venture agreement? Or, what’s the structure of that? Is it like, you just share the royalties?
JACK CANFIELD: Well, it used a totally shared royalty—a third, a third, a third. You know, my whole approach to business is fairness and justice. And if you do things that are fair and just with people, then people want to play with you. Now, a few years ago we actually sold the trademark and the publishing arm of the company to a group in New York called the Chicken Soup for the Soul Publishing LLC. So actually, I don’t make those decisions anymore. I’m still involved in a lot of the books, but what happens is that they now do an author-for-hire relationship, where they pay you a certain fee for working on the book, and that’s it. So, it’s just a different model.
JASON HARTMAN: Got it, got it, got it. I mean you’ve got a bunch of other books—the Power of Focus, I believe? I remember that one from years ago.
JACK CANFIELD: Yes.
JASON HARTMAN: And then your latest one is for authors, I assume—Bestseller Blueprint. But, how many different books do you have? Like, let’s go away from Chicken Soup for a moment.
JACK CANFIELD: Not Chicken Soup books, probably about 12. We did the Success Principles, the Power of Focus, The Aladdin Factory, which is all about how to ask for and get anything you want in life. We did a book called Hard at Work, which is about bringing self esteem and love into the workplace. We did a book called the Golden Motorcycle Gang, which is kind of autobiographical, where I talk about how I really discovered my life purpose. I was in graduate school doing a guided visualization. I was a student. Someone was leading it, a professor. And we had to go back to when we chose to become an educator. And I slipped back to before I was born, which freaked me out. I think freaked the professor out when I told him. And I literally saw myself floating through space with a lot of other spirits, and we looked down on earth in 1944, when I was born, and there was a World War going on, and I just saw—oh my God! It was like driving by an accident on the freeway. I said, I got to go down and help. And all the other spirits are going, no, you’re being codependent, come on, we’re on vacation. I said no, I gotta go help. So I literally have a clear memory of choosing to be born and choosing to be of service.
And I didn’t really remember that until I was in graduate school, but now it’s a great, clear—as clear as I’m looking at my desk while I’m talking to you. So I wrote about that, and it was pretty much an autobiographical book. I wrote a book called Tapping into Ultimate Success, which applies EFT tapping. It’s a technique, you tap on certain acupressure points in a certain order while you’re focusing on a fear or an anxiety or a traumatic experience. You actually disappear it usually in five minutes or less, I’d get rid of most people’s fears and phobias using that. So we applied each of those—or, that technique to each of the principles that are in the Success Principles book, which I consider my magnum opus. It’s the thing I feel most proud of. It took about a year and a half to write, and it’s a summary of like 30 years of being a trainer. I was a trainer long before I was an author and a speaker. So basically, this is going back to being a trainer again and saying okay, we can take these principles, and I’ve interviewed not just myself, but 75 of the most successful people on the planet and said, why are you so successful? And right now we’re working on a book called Living with Success Principles, that are all stories of amazing breakthroughs that have occurred for people since the book came out in 2005. I’ll share one quick story with you.
I was in the Philippines about five years ago. Did a workshop. A guy came and interviewed me the night before for a paper. He was interviewing like a series on success. At the end of the interview I said, that was a really good interview, John. I said, what—how long have you been doing these interviews? He said, you’re my first one. And he went on to tell me how he just lost his job, his wife had left him, he had no car, he was couchsurfing—meaning he was sleeping on people’s couches—and he had a dollar thirty eight cents. I felt so sorry for him. I gave him a copy of my book. I had to buy it from the bookstore because I was in Manila, and I gave him that. And I said, come to my seminar tomorrow for free. He came to my seminar. I came back two years later, he walks into my seminar, he’s in a wonderful, expensive Italian suit. He’s got 20 people around him all wearing these logo jackets with Caleb whatever his name is—company was, Caleb Consulting, something like that. He was now the number one motivational speaker in all of the Philippines. I said, John, in two years, how’d you do this? He had two cars, he had two homes, he had—you know, he had his own radio show. He said, I took everything in your book that you said to do, and I said, this guy’s successful, I’m not. For one year, I’m going to act as if everything he says is true. I did everything you said, and now I’m literally a millionaire two years later. So, we know this stuff works. Now we’re collecting stories like that to basically share with people to hopefully motivate them enough to read the books and take the seminars and listen to the audio programs and so forth, so that they too can have that kind of success. We’ve got 50 stories like that collected so far, so we’re really excited about that.
JASON HARTMAN: Fantastic. You know, if you had to sum it up, and you know, we’ve got a few more minutes here. I definitely want to get into some of the other stuff and talk about the Blueprint, the new product, but if you had to sum it up, Jack, what is the—you could probably distill it to several or maybe even a few general principles of success that can really—I mean, a lot of people out there are struggling nowadays. What are sort of the general—the Jack Canfield angle to success coaching?
JACK CANFIELD: Well, I’ll answer that but let me first say, there is no single bullet. You know, everyone always says, what’s the most important principle, or two, or three, or four.
JASON HARTMAN: Yeah.
JACK CANFIELD: And I think that’s the problem, Jason, with most people. They only have several principles they’re working with. And what I found in my own life, in working with—you know, interviewing these 75 people that were Olympic athletes, and, you know, multi-millionaires, and platinum record recorders, and so forth, that there’s about 25 fundamental principles. And it really is a system. They have to be done in a certain order, in a certain way, and if you do that, then what happens is, success is guaranteed. That’s why Stone called his book The Success System That Never Fails. And I define this system as something that always works, and gives you a predictable result. So you know, if you have a recipe for apple pie from your grandmother and you use it, it always produces the same pie. But you have to have the temperature, and the oven has to be pre-heated, the apples have to be the right kind, the sugar has to be the right kind, etcetera. So, what most people do—and I use this metaphor of a combination lock. Most people have some of the numbers, and if they have all the numbers, they often have them in the wrong order. And most people know a lot more than they’re actually doing. But to go to your question, that’s why I wrote the book, was because I felt most of the books were too shallow. It’s a big book. You know, I would call it my Success Bible because it’s got a white cover, and it’s thick.
JASON HARTMAN: And you’re talking about—when you say the book, you’re talking about the Success Principles?
JACK CANFIELD: The Success Principles. How to get from where you are to where you want to be. But the core, the essence of it, is number one, you have to take 100% responsibility for your life. Get off blaming and complaining and I teach E + R = O. There’s an event, there’s your response to the event, and that produces an outcome. The only thing you have any power over is your response to the events and how the world are. Most people want to blame the event, complain about the recession, ObamaCare, taxes, government, China, Iran, oil prices, whatever. That’s just what is. So, we have to learn to take control of our thoughts, learn to control our images, and learn to control our behavior. And we can study successful people, and see, what are the thoughts, what are the behaviors, and what are the images that successful people hold? So that’s the first thing. Second thing you have to think clear about, what is your purpose? For yourself, for your life, and for your business. And your goal should not be set until you’ve identified inwardly what your true purpose is—and there are exercises where we teach people how to do that—so that your goals are aligned with fulfilling your purpose.
Because too many people today, their goals aren’t fulfilling their purpose. Their goals are fulfilling their ego needs, and that comes from fear and greed. You know, look at Washington, D.C. They’re all just afraid of not getting reelected if they upset their base, instead of doing what needs to be done. The third thing is, you then decide what you want to achieve, and what you want to own and experience, based on what’s going to fulfill your purpose. Then you’ve got goals that you set that are measurable and specific, that will achieve that, and a lot of people never make measurable, specific goals. Then you’ve got to deal with your subconscious and conscious beliefs about whether it’s possible or not. There’s a whole body of work on that. And then I teach you how to visualize, and you have to use affirmations or ideal scenes. There’s a number of different techniques for turbo-charging your goals so that they are actualizing and aligned with the law of attraction, and that they are working with your subconscious brain to come up with solutions. We have this thing called a reticular system in our brain. Right now, most people listening to this are not thinking about their right foot, but as soon as I say right foot, you can feel your right foot.
So, the reticular system is filtering out messages going into the brain. The problem is, most of us are filtering out resources and solutions to our problems, because they don’t match our beliefs. And once you change your belief, like, I can double my income in one year, or I deserve to be wealthy, or I can be a millionaire quickly through the Internet—if you really end up believing that and visualizing that, what then happens is your subconscious mind starts to come up with solutions. You start seeing things in your environment that were always there that you never saw before, and you activate the law of attraction to attract resources and opportunities into your life. The last couple of pieces of this, is you have to act as if you’re already there. You have to take action—and there’s two kinds of action: there’s obvious action, you want to go to medical school, you have to study biochemistry and physiology and anatomy, but also there is inspired action, those things that you get in the shower, those things that you get when you’re golfing, walking on the beach, when your mind is still and you get these little inspirations. Most people never act on them, because they don’t make logical sense, but that’s where the greatest breakthroughs occur.
Bon Jovi, who I talk about in my seminars, great singer, he got this inspiration one night—he was a garage band, you know, most people didn’t know he existed, and he started writing his own music because he knew he had to do that if he wanted to be famous, but he didn’t know how to get his records played, his CDs played. So he had this inspiration in the middle of the night to take pizza and beer or coffee over to the DJs at the studios that are up at three in the morning when nobody’s guarding it and they’re probably doing their own engineering. He started doing that all over New Jersey and New York, and within a year, everyone knew his music, because the guys would start playing his music as a thank you for him bringing pizza.
JASON HARTMAN: That’s such a great idea. I never knew that.
JACK CANFIELD: Yeah.
JASON HARTMAN: That reminds me of how in the real estate business, you know, the title reps and the mortgage people and, you know, all those affiliates would come in and bring bagels into your office. You know, same idea. Yeah, it’s great.
JACK CANFIELD: Exactly, you know it’s called giving to get. Be a go-giver, and then you get to be a go-getter. You establish visibility, and then you get credibility, and then you get profitability, we always say. So, to finish this little model, you’ve got to feel the fear and do it anyway, or use some of the new techniques like tapping EFT to five minute phobias—so don‘t imagine to release fear, because fear’s what stops us from doing the final thing you have to do, which is taking action. And then you have to respond to feedback. Most people do not solicit feedback, because they’re afraid of what people are going to say. You can’t get better without feedback. So, you have to become a solicitor and a thank you, when you get feedback. Someone could give me a very nasty letter and I write them a thank you. Thank you for caring enough to share that with me. Then I look inside and see if it’s something I really need to address. And then lastly, reject rejection. Keep on keeping on, and perseverance. If you do that, those are the core basics, your life’s going to turn around amazingly. But that’s easy to say all those things. There’s a whole iceberg of stuff underneath the surface of the water to actually put that all into action, and that’s what’s in the book and the CDs and the videotapes we have, and all that.
JASON HARTMAN: Yeah, yeah. Fantastic, and so, this applies to anyone who wants any degree of success in life. You know, but, would it be fair to say that you sort of divide your time, maybe, into sort of two major areas? Number one is that you are a success coach, and all of the stuff we just talked about, and then also, you really have been very active and instrumental in sharing and giving and coaching other people that want to make it in your business! Other authors, other speakers, consultants. There are lots of—well, there are not lots, but there are many, I guess, bestselling authors out there. Depending on what time, what year, and what list, right?
JACK CANFIELD: Right.
JASON HARTMAN: None maybe as successful as you and Mark with your Chicken Soup series. But they’re not giving back. They’re just doing their thing, and practicing their trade, and doing a good job of it. But you guys are really out there helping create your own competition, in a way.
JACK CANFIELD: Well, I don’t see it as competition. I see it as—it’s like a multi-level marketing company. You know, if you get enough distributors, you can reach everyone in the world. So, I’m doing this out of a mission-driven, as opposed to making money. The money came as a secondary thing. I love money. Money’s great. It gives you a lot of freedom, it allows you to buy things, not have to make tough decisions, get your kids a good education, travel, live longer because you can afford good health care and so forth, but money was never my goal. My goal was to make a difference. So, my life purpose is stated as: to inspire and empower people and organizations to live their highest vision. Not mine, but their highest vision, in a context of love and joy. And after the meltdown on Wall Street a few years ago, I added, in harmony with the highest good of all concerned. And so, if people are living their highest vision, I believe then the whole world will work. So, if I go back to why I came down here, which was looking at the world in war, and the world in pain, and the idea of I have a gift—if we would all come from service instead of selfishness, what would happen is, all the needs would get met.
And what we find, and I’m now writing a book on leadership as well, with corporations. Corporations that try to serve their constituencies instead of making profit, are actually making higher profits than those that are only interested in maximizing profits. Because people are happier working there, people trust those companies, they’re sustainable in terms of the environmental impact, and you know, we could go down a whole list. So, if you come from service, which I—my whole life is dedicated to, I find the more I serve—like, I started the Transformation Leadership Council, which now has 120 members of people who run transformational training companies. People like John Gray, people like Lisa Nichols, people that you’ve heard of. And so, we meet twice a year, and because of that, one of our members is now inviting me to be on the board of directors of an investment firm. I’ll make hundreds of thousands of dollars. But he said, I want you on this board, because I only want people the general public trusts. And they trust you, because you’ve never done anything but try to help people.
So, I find that it all comes back to me. So we have a train the trainer program, which we just started three years ago. We’re training about a hundred people a year to do our work in the training room. And now with the Blueprint—Bestseller Blueprint program, we’re trying to help more authors. And again, it’s not because I want to make money; it’s because I know a lot of authors have wonderful messages that need to get out to people, and if they don’t know how to do it, those messages never reach the people who need to hear them.
JASON HARTMAN: Yeah, that’s fantastic. Well, I think that’s a good segue to just talk real quickly about the Bestseller Blueprint product. Now is that a book, or a whole course, or what is it?
JACK CANFIELD: It’s actually a whole course. It’s mostly delivered online. There are things that you can get in hard copy if you want, but most people prefer to just do it on their computer. There are tons of DVDs, of people like myself and Bill Harrison and Steve Harrison, who run Quantum Learning and do bestseller author retreats all year long. We got together—I was speaking to them for years and I said, my God, you know more than almost anyone we know. So we’d like to do this course with you. But we have videos and audios from Tim Ferriss, who wrote the 4-Hour Work Week, that’s been on the bestseller list now probably four years. Marci Shimoff, who’s a bestselling author. First with Chicken for the Soul, and now with Happy for No Reason, Love for No Reason, and so on. So, basically, we are teaching people how to write your book so that it has the potential of being a bestseller, how to imbed hooks in the book so that these hooks actually get you on radio and television shows, how to get media.
So, basically, how to structure the book and write the book so you have a book that can be a bestseller. Because if you have a lousy book, I don’t care what you do in terms of marketing, it’s not going to make it. And then once you’ve finished the book, how do you sell it to a publisher, or should you self publish, how do you get a literary agent, a lot of people have no idea how to do that, should it be an e-book, etcetera, and then once all that occurs, how do you promote the book? Online, with blogs, book tours, should you do them, shouldn’t you do them, virtual book tours where we have 8,000 people online being interviewed by someone like you about the book, but 8,000 people can come instead of having to go to 30 cities where maybe 200 people will show up at each book signing. So, there’s a lot of the latest information. We also have directories of PR people, publishers, literary agents so people can access their question and answer calls. There’s a—you can email questions in to us to get answered. It’s phenomenal. And we now have, I think in this last year, close to a thousand people that have taken that program. And we’re seeing people already on the bestseller list, just, you know, six, nine months into it.
JASON HARTMAN: Fantastic, wow. What great results. Well Jack, give out your website. And I don’t know if that bestseller has a different website than your main primary website, but give out whatever you like.
JACK CANFIELD: Sure. If you’re interested in the Bestseller Blueprint—if you are an author, and you really want your book to be a bestseller, you’re gonna work with the best people on the planet, go to bestseller—no dashes, just all one word—
www.bestsellerblueprint.com, and there’s a whole landing page there, it will answer all your questions. You can get access to three video trainings that we did. They’re about an hour long, just giving you a lot of information even if you decide not to take the course, you can just watch the videos. And so, www.bestsellerblueprint.com. And for my work it’s juts very simple, www.JackCanfield.com. And there’s information there on all of our programs. We do training programs, a five-day things in the summer, we [unintelligible] the train the trainer program. And we do these new things we’re doing called the High End Leap Retreats, where we do four-day trainings in places like Bali, the Virgin Islands, Hawaii, my home, etcetera, where people can come live with me for a week. We limit them to twenty people. So, there’s information about those as well. They’re very, very powerful and transformational. And then also all our books and audiotapes, all of that is there. So, www.JackCanfield.com.
JASON HARTMAN: Fantastic. Well Jack, thanks so much for joining us today, and thanks for all you do. And just keep up the good work. Which brings me to my last question for you. What’s next for you?
JACK CANFIELD: Well, interestingly enough, I’m working on about five books.
JASON HARTMAN: Why does that not surprise me?
JACK CANFIELD: I discovered a man named Dave Andrews who’s working on sobriety, and I’ve had three people in my family go down the alcoholism and drug addiction. They’re all sober now, but it was tough. And he’s figured out how to help people in 30 days get sober. Unless you really need to go through heavy detox. And what happened was, when I met him, it turns out he was using all of my success principles in his program. And we talked, and we decided to collaborate on this book called the 30-Day Sobriety Solution. So, we’re working on that. We’re working on a book on breakthrough coaching, how to use these principles in a coaching modality. We’re working on a book of affirmations. We’re collecting stories on networking right now. Some great stories of, you know, how when people network, miracles happen. And we’re doing a book on love and fear. Because I’ve come to the conclusion Jason, that there’s only two emotions. You’re either coming from love, or you’re coming from fear. And, a long time ago Jampolsky wrote a book—Gerry Jampolsky, called Love is Letting Go of Fear.
JASON HARTMAN: Love is Letting Go of Fear. I love that book. That is phenomenal, small, quick read, Love is Letting Go of Fear, it’s a great book.
JACK CANFIELD: Very transformative in my life.
JASON HARTMAN: Yeah, me too.
JACK CANFIELD: So, I’m writing a book now where I’m just unpacking that a whole lot more. So that’s kind of my next, I think, real super breakthrough book, the kind of book that gets you on Oprah. But just to end with, since we didn’t say it, the book, The Success Principles—if you haven’t read it, I would really encourage anyone to read this. I don’t need the money. My grandchildren don’t need the money. But I do know the book has transformed thousands of lives, and so I would really strongly encourage people, if you find this, call was uplifting for you, make sure to do that. But basically, I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing. I’m 69 in August, and I plan to be doing this until I can’t walk anymore.
JASON HARTMAN: Fantastic. Well Jack Canfield, thank you so much for joining us today. Just great talking to you.
JACK CANFIELD: My pleasure Jason, thanks for inviting me.
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ANNOUNCER: This show is produced by the Hartman Media Company. All rights reserved. For distribution or publication rights and media interviews, please visit www.HartmanMedia.com, or email [email protected]. Nothing on this show should be considered specific personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, or business professional for any individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own, and the host is acting on behalf of Empowered Investor Network, Inc. exclusively.
Transcribed by David
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