Jack Canfield: Absolutely.

John Lee Dumas: Yes. Jack is known as America’s number-one success coach, is a bestselling author, professional speaker, trainer, and entrepreneur. He is the founder and chairman of The Canfield Training Group, which trains entrepreneurs, educators, corporate leaders, sales professionals, and motivated individuals in how to expand their vision, and accelerate the achievement of their personal and professional goals.

Jack, I’ve given Fire Nation just a little insight, so share more about you personally, and expand upon your biz.

Jack Canfield: I’ve been doing this for almost 50 years. I started out when I was in my 20s. I’m 70 right now, and I’ve trained over a million people in live seminars. I’ve been in 47 countries running seminars. I’ve been doing a lot of work in the Gulf lately, and places like Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Iran, so it’s really been fun for me.

I think the thing that’s most present for me right now is I just finished the 10th anniversary edition of The Success Principles, a book I wrote in 2005. It’s all totally updated with all new stories of people who read the first book who went on to have amazing success, and we’re now in the process of training a million trainers.

We have a ridiculous goal, John, to train a million trainers to do this work by the year 2030. We’ve trained 500. Now we’re training trainers of trainers and creating regional coordinators and country coordinators.

And I just finished a book that’s coming out in August called The 30-Day-Sobreity Solution: How to Cut Back or Quit Drinking in the Privacy of Your Own Home, so I plan to keep going until I can’t breathe. I’m having a lot of fun.

John Lee Dumas: Well, we will be the beneficiaries of that, Jack, no doubt. Just a kind of quick side note, I’d love to maybe here why you’ve had some recent focus on the Middle East, specifically I spent some time in the Middle East in the military. I currently have two virtual assistants, one in Dubai, and one actually up in Pakistan, so southeast Asia, but in that area. I’d love to hear maybe why that’s your focus.

Jack Canfield: I always wanted to go to Dubai. It just seemed like a cool city, and I love Sheik Maktoum. He’s a really cool leader, so I went over there. When I went there, people from all the other countries came to see me speak, and so I got invited to all these places.

I think it’s really important. Most important, all these oil-rich countries have people who are getting free education, free housing, free medical care, so they’re not very motivated, so the country leaders have become really clear that they need to find out a way to motivate an entrepreneurial spirit rather than letting all the Indians, and Americans, and Europeans come in, and take over everything, and run all the businesses.

It’s a very exciting time over there. Very scary, obviously, because of ISIS and that stuff that’s going on, but basically it’s a very vibrant place. I think there’s so much oil money over there that they’ve created cities that work at a high level.

I was just in Qatar, in Doha, and they’re really creating a city that’s a destination for sporting events. When I was there, there was a tennis tournament going. I actually ran next to Rafael Nadal in the gym. Then there was a handball competition. They’re looking to have the 2020 World Cup there. It’s very exciting.

John Lee Dumas: It is. There’s actually a recent book – not that recent but fairly recent – called Antifragile. What I really loved about that book was it talks about how when you struggle, especially at a younger age in life, that makes you so resilient, so “antifragile.” That’s really what I’m seeing when I spent a lot of time over there in the Middle East is you are really looking at a generation of people that are antifragile. It’s really exciting what they could do if steered in the right direction, so, Jack, thank you for what you’re doing on that. That’s really important stuff, no doubt.

I want to take the time that we have left together today to focus on your journey. Jack, you mentioned you’ve been at this for 50 years, since you were 20, and you’re not stopping or slowing down any time soon, which is exciting.

As you know, as I know, as Fire Nation knows, the entrepreneur’s life is a roller coaster. I want you to take us to one of those dips, maybe what you would consider your worst entrepreneurial moment. Can you take us to that story, and tell us that?

Jack Canfield: There are many, but the worst one ever was – I do trainings, and we do these guest events for the general public. We scheduled one unknowingly the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, not realizing nobody would come because it was two days before Thanksgiving. They’re all traveling to go somewhere. We did all these mailings, and this was before the internet was really popular. We did mailings. We did radio interviews. I think six people showed up.

John Lee Dumas: Whoa.

Jack Canfield: I said to my staff, “Look. There are six people here. We’re going to give them the best event we can.” I think we signed them all up, but we were expecting 500 people to show up. It was like whoa.

The other worst one was we did a bulk mailing when mailing was the thing. Now it’s all email and on the internet. We did this bulk mailing, and we folded the paper in the wrong way, so the machine that would take these through the post office was eating them. We had the stamp on the wrong side. Basically, we now give very careful instructions to printers. I always say, “Inspect what you expect.” We didn’t do that, so we lost several thousand dollars.

There are times when you – things are changing, obviously. Everything is now moving to internet, and blog casts, and things like we’re doing here, so it took me a couple of years to catch up to that, being an old timer. Basically, we’ve done pretty well. Every once in a while, you’re going to make a big mistake. You learn from your mistakes, and you move on.

John Lee Dumas: Jack, you’re right. We’re definitely moving into the internet world. In fact, of course, we’re in the middle of it. We’re seeing some incredible opportunities that are coming up every single day. You mentioned just the disappointment of throwing a massive event, expecting 500 people, having six people show up, and saying, “You know what? I’m still going to buck up and give the best value that I can give.”

To kind of equate that to today’s world, a lot of people are doing webinars very successfully. We personally at “Entrepreneur on Fire” did 60 live webinars in 2014 alone, something I really love doing, but there’s always that fear when you’re holding a webinar. Is anybody going to show up? I know that stops a lot of people from ever starting.

Webinars are just this online forum where you can present, give great value, and potentially convert people into products, services, communities, whatever that might be. A lot of times that fear of nobody showing up stops people right in their tracks. Jack, talk to my listeners real quick about that experience you had when only six people showed up, but you made that resolve to give them the best training you could give. This was in person, so it was even more tense. I’m sure you had this kind of big, open, empty, cavernous arena with just these six people, expecting 500. Can you talk to my listeners about that?

Jack Canfield: Yeah, sure. You have to take your shot. You can’t win if you don’t play. Basically, I can remember when Chicken Soup for the Soul first came out. Out publisher thought we’d sell 20,000 copies. We told him we’d sell a million in a year and a half, which we did. We did our first book signing, and again, about six people signed up. I think two of them worked for the bookstore. We sold one book, and that was to the janitor of the bookstore.

Now when I show up – I just did a workshop in Chennai, India. We had 8,000 people in the audience. I’ve done dentist conventions where we have 20,000.

A friend of mine started something called the Pachamama Alliance that trains people to basically live in harmony with the ecology and not destroy it, and to take some of the indigenous wisdom of places like Ecuador, and Peru, and some of the Shamans, and bring it to the north. This woman started with six people in her living room. Then it went to 12 people. Then they had to get a hotel room. In the last 10 years, they’ve gone from six people to they’ve just finished training in China with 1,000 people.

Literally, you have to start, and it builds up. You have to build a reputation. You have to build a following. You have to build a fan base. You build your email list, etc., and so forth, YouTube followers, and Facebook, and LinkedIn, and all of that. But you’ve got to start. There’s this hockey stick curve. It’s like a plane taking off. It doesn’t seem like it’s going very high, and then all of a sudden you’re at 35,000 feet.

John Lee Dumas: Right.

Jack Canfield: I used to carry around my own wireless microphone and plug it into these crappy microphone systems in schools, and things like that. Now I show up, and there’s a whole sound team, and big screens, and all that. Basically, it’s a matter of you just have to begin. You have to trust. You have to learn.

Feedback is the most important thing. Most people are afraid to ask for feedback because they’re afraid of what they’re going to hear, but it’s only with feedback that you improve, so we get feedback on all our books.

The reason Chicken Soup took off is we had 40 people read every story for every book and give us feedback. The ones that didn’t score at nine points or above on a scale from 1 to 10, we took out, including stories I wrote. It’s that kind of commitment to discipline and never giving up that get you where you want to go.

John Lee Dumas: Fire Nation, you have to show up. If you ever want that snowball effect to start, if you want to get that momentum, show up. I love that, Jack.

We’re going to shift now, and we’re going to talk about another story in your journey, Jack. This one is an aha moment, an epiphany, a light bulb that went on at some point for you. Of course in 50 years, you’ve had countless of these stories, but which one really stands out to you right now when you know our listeners, entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs, which story can you tell us? Can you take us to that moment that you think will really have an impact on Fire Nation?

Jack Canfield: I’ll tell you two, and they’re both based on Chicken Soup for the Soul, which has sold over 500 million books, half a billion books sold. It started in 1993. When we wrote our first book, 144 publishers rejected our first book. It took us 18 months to get a publisher. Again, this idea of not giving up.

The inspiration that came through that is I started getting people coming up to me when I was doing workshops saying, “Is that story in a book anywhere? My daughter needs to read that. My staff needs to hear that,” etc. Literally, all of a sudden I’m coming home on a plane. I said, “How many stories do I know?” I started writing them down. It was about 70 stories. I’ll write two a week, and within a year, I’ll have a book.

Lots of rejection. Now we’re in 47 languages. I said half a billion sold, and 300 million sold in China. On the same token, about 20 years into it, I got tired of it.

I woke up one morning, and stories that should inspire me were no longer inspiring me. I said, “I’ve got to move on.” That’s a really tough thing for people. It’s hard to give up what’s been working. It was working really well. I was making $6 million a year just off the royalties of the books, plus all the speaking that came with it. All of a sudden, I said, “I’m just not happy doing this anymore.”

You have to leave what you know is working, and kind of jump off the cliff. Some people say you’ve got to build your wings on the way down. What happens is that I started to write The Success Principles. I was in bed one morning with my son, who was 6 at the time, and I was typing on my laptop.

I decided, “I’m going to write down every principle I know about success.” It was over 114 things I had used, principles I was operating on. Of course, that was way too many for a book, so we had to scale it down. Someday I’m going to publish the lost principles, like the unseen gospels or something.

John Lee Dumas: Dead Sea Scrolls. Yeah.

Jack Canfield: Exactly. It took me a year and a half to write that book. It’s kind of my magnum opus. Now I’ve revised it in this 10th anniversary edition. I really wanted to write a book where the goal was if you could read just one book, only one in your whole life, I could put enough in there that it would be guaranteed success in whatever you tried to do. Now you’d have to study things like internet marketing, and so forth, but the psychological side of success, and the action side of success, you would know.

It worked out. That book sold about a million copies in its first edition. We were No. 35 in all books sold, ranked order, last week. It’s on a roll now, and we’re talking to people like you, and so forth.

You have to be willing to follow your heart, and you also have to be willing to follow feedback because sometimes your heart can be a little ahead of the curve, so you have to make sure your in sync with your marketplace. Those are two stories of times I followed my inner guidance, and it turned out really well.

John Lee Dumas: Jack, twice now you’ve said to follow feedback. I want to pull that out and really highlight it for our listeners at Fire Nation because it’s so important. You just said it perfectly. Sometimes we’re scared to hear what we’re going to hear when we ask for that feedback, for that constructive criticism, so we never ask. That’s a massive lost opportunity. Can you speak to that for a second?

Jack Canfield: Sure. Feedback is critical. We talked earlier about people are afraid to take action, like start a webinar. Once you take action, you’re going to get feedback. Sometimes it’s internal called, “That sucked. I don’t feel good. I’ve got a headache,” or whatever. Then there’s external feedback called people don’t come to your website. People don’t buy your products. People return everything and say, “It wasn’t what I expected.” You have to listen.

A friend of mine, Roger Hamilton, who started XL over in Singapore, was doing really well. All of a sudden, his whole training company dried up, and no one was coming. He called up everyone and said, “Why aren’t you coming?” First, he said, “Are you still taking seminars?” They said yes. He said, “Why aren’t you coming to mine?”

They said, “We’ve done everything you did. You didn’t take it to a higher level. We know the basics. We want to know how to apply it to the shoe business, how to apply it to internet marketing business, how to apply it to selling eyeglasses. We want it delivered when we want it, not when you want to do it. We don’t want to have to fly to Singapore. Put it online. Let us access it when we want it.”

He did all that. He spent about six months taking everything, and modularizing it. Now his business is soaring, and it’s pretty much passive because he doesn’t have to do much because it’s all online. Otherwise, he could still have empty training rooms.

I always tell people to think about it in terms of your relationships. If my wife is not happy, and I don’t ask her for feedback, her mother knows what’s wrong with our relationship. The ladies at the nail salon know what’s wrong with our relationship. Her sister knows. I’m the only one who doesn’t know.

So we have a rule in my family. On the weekend, either Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, we ask each other, “On a scale from 1 to 10, how would you rate our relationship?” Anything less than a 10 gets a follow-up question. “What would it take to make it a 10?” We’re constantly working to make it a 10. We do the same with our clients. On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate this webinar? How would you rate this public seminar? How would you rate this book? Anything less than a 10 gets a follow-up. What would it take to make it a 10?

Here’s the thing about feedback. A lot of people give up when they get negative feedback. Some people get mad at the feedback. Some people ignore the feedback. The only response I teach people in my seminars is, “Thank you for caring enough to share that with me.” Because without feedback, you cannot get better. Feedback is the breakfast as champions, as Ken Blanchard likes to say, who wrote The One-Minute Manager.

John Lee Dumas: Thank you for caring enough to share that with me. I love that phrase. Fire Nation, start utilizing that. Don’t just go off into the depths when you get one piece of feedback. When you get multiple pieces of feedback that might be criticizing one specific part of your business, then you sit up and take notice, and see how you can improve.

Jack, your mind over these past 50 years, there’s just such a treasure trove in there, so I want to take the next five questions. I call them the one-minute mindset question. These are five insights into your mind, my friend. Take about a minute each to answer these questions, No. 1 being ideally, what do the first 60 minutes of your day look like?

Jack Canfield: I get up out of bed and go to the bathroom. Then I come back and mediate for about 20 minutes. I visualize at the end of the meditation. I visualize each of my 21 goals. I set three goals in seven areas of my life every year: financial, job and career, fun and recreation, health and fitness, personal, what I call what possession I want to get, what spiritual growth do I want to get, contributions, and so forth.

Basically, I visualize each of those goals as complete for maybe 30 seconds or something like that as I’m coming out of meditation. You’re in the alpha brainwave state, which means your subconscious is very programmable. I have an affirmation for each goal as well. I say that. Then I visualize it.

Then I do about a seven-minute gratitude exercise where I just write about all the things I’m grateful for. My goal is to get myself to where I feel like I’m almost going to cry because I’m so grateful.

Then I exercise. I do 20 to 30 minutes of aerobics and weightlifting. Then I make a blender drink with more ingredients than you’ll ever want to know. I take about 51 supplements. Everyone says I look about 20 years younger than I am. Then I take a shower and get to work. That’s my morning ritual.

John Lee Dumas: Love it. What’s your biggest weakness, Jack, as an entrepreneur?

Jack Canfield: I’d say several. I have a tendency toward perfectionism, which takes up too much time. Good enough is good enough I like to teach people and myself. Micromanaging some of my staff to the point where they say, “Leave me alone.” It’s that perfectionistic thing, and I sometimes forget to trust them. I don’t delegate enough. I would say too much attention to detail, the same thing about perfectionism. I’m learning to delegate more, trust more, and not have to take everything to where the person that’s the number-one expert in the world would say it’s good enough. I’m not writing for the experts. I’m writing for the general public.

John Lee Dumas: Good enough is good enough, Fire Nation. What’s your biggest strength?

Jack Canfield: I’d say my biggest strength is my willingness to act on my ideas. If I get an idea, I act on it. I act on really quickly because I think there’s a vortex of energy that supports something when the first idea comes in. The longer you wait, the less that’s there. I would say soliciting and responding to feedback, which we just talked about.

Hiring smarter people than me. A lot of times I think in the beginning I was afraid to do that. I’m willing to invest money in projects which – 10 years ago I was very scared to lose money. Now I’m not so much. Also, I would say profit sharing with my employees so that I have loyal dedicated people who don’t leave me.

John Lee Dumas: Jack, you have a lot of great habits. What’s one habit you wish you had?

Jack Canfield: I wish I had the habit of planning and taking off two months of the year, just literally going to Hawaii, or going on a safari, and just traveling around Africa for two months, or whatever. I’d like to just disappear off the face of the earth in the sense that nobody can get to me, no emails, no text, no phones.

We take a couple two-week vacations, but I’d really like to just disappear. I know some entrepreneurs who do that, and they come back so much more creative and so much more rested. It also allows their staff to become more empowered without needing to turn to them every second for a solution or decision.

John Lee Dumas: What’s one thing, Jack, of all these things you’re fired up about that has you most fired up?

Jack Canfield: Other than my new book, which I’m really excited to get out there, I’d say it’s this idea of training 1 million trainers. We just finished a train the trainer home study course where you can learn to teach the success principles. We now have about 5,000 people lined up. We’re releasing it on March 1st, and launching it. We have about 5,000 people who claim they’re going to buy it. I’m excited about that.

Reaching people in Sudan, and Somalia, and South Africa, and the Congo, and places that will never afford to come to the United States, people in Iran who can’t get visas because supposedly they’re our enemy, so taking these things which we’ve been doing live for years and now putting them online so they’re now downloadable, it’s a great profit level because there’s no expense really other than customer service, and we’ll do webinars to support them. I’m really excited about that.

Imagine 1 million people training this. We could literally reach the entire world in about 10 years.

John Lee Dumas: Truly. One thing I talk about all the time on “Entrepreneur on Fire” is the ripple effect. The emails I love the most don’t come from people who are inspired by “Entrepreneur on Fire.” I love those emails, but they come from people who say, “John, I was inspired by ‘Entrepreneur on Fire.’ I did something. Now look at this email I received from somebody that I inspired to take action.” That ripple effect, Fire Nation, is huge. Jack, training 1 million trainers, the ripple effect that’s going to have truly is going to reach the corners of the earth, so congratulations.

Jack Canfield: Thank you. Let me just tell you a quick story. I had a kid email me about a month ago. He said, “My mother bought your book The Success Principles. She never buys books, so I wanted to see why she bought a book, and I stayed up and read it for two days.” He said, “I was getting F’s in school. I was cutting all my classes. I was smoking dope. I was drinking alcohol. I was getting into trouble. I read your book. Now I’m going to all my classes. I’m getting A’s and B’s. I’ve stopped hanging out with the bad kids.”

You realize I wasn’t even targeting 15-year-olds when I wrote the book. Like you’re saying, this ripple effect is very exciting.

John Lee Dumas: It really gives me shivers. Jack, we’re about to enter the lightning round. Before we do, let’s take a minute to than our sponsors.

Jack, welcome to the lightning round where you get to share incredible resources and mind-blowing answers. Sound like a plan?

Jack Canfield: Sure. Let’s go.

John Lee Dumas: What was holding you back from becoming an entrepreneur?

Jack Canfield: Too much academic training and thinking. I had a Ph.D., three honorary doctorates, and an MA. I just was way too steeped in the academic thinking side, and not the doing side. I finally had to jump in. I borrowed $10,000.00 from my mother-in-law and started my company.

John Lee Dumas: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

Jack Canfield: That’d be Clement Stone, my first mentor, a friend of Napoleon Hill. They wrote a book together. He said, “Set a goal so big it will force you to grow and become someone worth becoming,” so I set a goal to make $100,000.00 in one year. It was 12 times more than I was making as a teacher in school at the time. I pulled it off, and it changed my life.

John Lee Dumas: What’s a personal habit that you do have that contributes to your success?

Jack Canfield: I would say a little phrase Tony Robbins invented called CANI, constant and never-ending improvement. I read. I listen. I watch one TED Talk every day, or a TEDx Talk. I used to read a book a day. Now I read a book a week because I realized that seminars and webinars are actually better for me. I attend those. One year I went to 38 weekend workshops.

John Lee Dumas: Do you have an internet resource you can share with our listeners?

Jack Canfield: For me, the biggest resource is I’m a TED Talk freak, so I just go to TED Talks every day. There’s a guy named Matt Weinstein who did one. He created this game called Ultimate Thumb Wrestling. I watched that and put it in my group. I loved that.

Then Wikipedia. My god, I couldn’t live without Wikipedia.

John Lee Dumas: Jack, we’re going to be featuring The Success Principles on our show notes page. If you could have one book join that on our show notes page, what would it be and why?

Jack Canfield: I would say The One Thing by Gary Keller, the guy that started Keller-Williams real estate. It talks about if you could change one thing in your life that would have the biggest impact on everything else, what would it be?

I read that book and started thinking about that. I started changing several things, delegation being the main one, and then hiring an internet technology director for our company which we didn’t have. We’re kind of coming into that age now.

The One Thing by Gary Keller. It’s a short book, real thin. Everybody should read it.

John Lee Dumas: It’s powerful, and it’s going to allow you, Jack, I have no doubt, to train a million trainers. Fire Nation, I know you love audio, so I teamed up with Audible. If you haven’t already, you can get an amazing audio book for free at www.EOFireBook.com.

Jack, this next question is the last of the lightning round, but it’s a doozy. Imagine you woke up tomorrow morning in a brand-new world identical to Earth, but you knew no one. You still have all the experience and knowledge you currently have. Your food and shelter are taken care of, but all you have is a laptop and $500.00. What would you do in the next seven days?

Jack Canfield: I would talk to as many people, preferably in person, about what they were trying to accomplish, and what would have to happen for them to feel satisfied with their progress in the next few years, and what obstacles, both internal and external, were stopping them. Then I would figure out how to build a business in helping them overcome those obstacles.

John Lee Dumas: I love that. Fire Nation, I love how it always comes back to dealing with people, to engaging with people, to building relationships with people. Jack, let’s end today the same way we started, on fire, with you sharing one parting piece of guidance, the best way we can connect with you, and then we’ll say goodbye.

Jack Canfield: I think my parting piece of guidance is everyone listening to this; you have within you everything you need to do anything you want. You may have to learn some new skills. You may need to partner up with some people. You may need to borrow some capital to get started, but if you have a dream, I totally believe this from working with over 1 million people. If you have a dream, you have everything within you to fulfill that dream. You’re not allowed to dream up a dream you can’t fulfill. I would suggest you just trust your heart and go for it.

If you want to get a hold of me, go to www.JackCanfield.com or www.TheSuccessPrinciplesBook.com where you can end up buying the new Success Principles book online through Amazon or Barnes & Noble, but you’ll get a whole bunch of free downloads, like the first chapter, or two chapters of the book, which you can start reading before you get the book. There’s an audio by me. There’s a video by me on goal setting. There are other benefits too from Janet Schweitzer, a friend of mine who helped me with the book, on instant cash. We all want instant cash.

John Lee Dumas: Fire Nation, you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with, and you have been hanging out with Jack Canfield and JLD today, so keep up that heat and head over to www.EOFire.com. Just type “Jack” in the search bar. His show notes page will pop right up with all the links, everything we’ve been talking about today. Grab his book, The Success Principles. You can go find out more at www.TheSuccessPrinciples.com and www.JackCanfield.com. It’s all right there.

Jack, thank you for sharing your journey with Fire Nation today. For that, my friend, we salute you, and we’ll catch you on the flip side.

Jack Canfield: Thanks, John.