Success is fulfilling your soul's purpose: Jack Canfield

Jack Canfield's own example of where a person can be after a disciplined pursuit of what he desires makes him a worthy claimant to the title of America's #1 success coach. With 112 million copies of the Chicken Soup For The Soul series he co-authored in print in more than 40 languages, Canfield has touched innumerable lives with each serving of 101 stories at a time. DNA caught up with the motivational speaker to find out the secrets of success, including his own. Excerpts:

Since 1993, Chicken Soup For The Soul has become a publishing phenomenon, in the US and internationally. Why have the masses embraced it?
A couple of reasons. One, the stories are short so they are easy to read. You could sit down and, in a few minutes, gain something valuable. The stories are about universal themes like love and family, overcoming obstacles.

The other reason is that we have a very specific process how we determine what stories will end up in the books. Let’s say we are doing Chicken Soup For The Woman's Soul. We will solicit 500 stories. We will take them and have our staff read and then people read those stories and grade them on a scale of 1 to 10. Then we take the top stories from that — maybe 200 — and send those out to a panel of readers who are friends, students of mine, people who want to contribute, and they will grade them. We put those scores on an Excel spreadsheet and take averages. And the panel of readers includes liberals, conservatives, different religions, people who live in the suburbs, people who live in the ciry. So we are looking at something that appeals to the masses. And I think that because the stories deal with the heart, they have feelings and don’t deal with facts, they appeal to people.

Is it true that you came up with the title?
We didn’t have a title and the literary agent wanted to take the book to New York to sell it. So my co-author and I said let’s meditate and ask for a title. On the third day of meditating for an hour a day, I saw this hand come out and write CSFS on a chalkboard like in school and I kind of assumed it was God’s hand and went, "What the heck does chicken soup have to do with this book?" And a voice said, "When you were sick as a child, your grandmother gave you chicken soup." But this was not a book about sick people, and the voice said, "People’s spirits are sick. They are living in resignation, in fear." This was during the first Gulf war when Iraq invaded Kuwait. We got into that war, there was a huge recession. People were losing their jobs, kind of what is happening now. What happened was it was Chicken Soup For The Spirit and that morphed into Chicken Soup For The Soul.

I got goosebumps. I called my wife, she got goosebumps. I told my co-author Mark Victor Hansen and agent and they got goosebumps. We took it to New York, 22 publishers didn’t get goosebumps. They didn’t like the title, they thought it was stupid. It took 144 presentations with publishers before we got a Yes.

When did you realise it was your calling to be a motivational speaker?
It was when I was a high-school teacher in Chicago. I was teaching in an all-black inner-city school that had gang members and things and I was always excited about learning, but my students weren’t. And I was like, how can I motivate my students to learn. So I ended up going to a seminar led by a guy who was a multi-millionaire, about motivation, and I started applying his principles and it started to work.

My students started getting good grades. I had one student who was suspended. He would sneak in, attend my class, and sneak out again. He didn’t want to miss a class, so that’s where it really started.

That was also when my understanding began of how powerful stories are. When I was teaching history, students weren’t really interested. When I told them a story about a black person who grew up like they did and got out of the ghetto, got a job and became a minister, a businessman, they were at the edge of their seats. If you tell stories, you get people's attention. If you tell a motivational story, then people get motivated.

How does a motivational speaker motivate himself?
I am at a point where I don’t need to [motivate myself] much. I kinda am just “there”, but in the beginning, I would listen to motivational cassette tapes. I would go to maybe 6-7 seminars a year.

Your inspirations?
Jesse Jackson, influential minister. I used to attend his church when I was in Chicago. Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Mandela, Walt Disney, JFK, Steve Jobs. People who are passionate about what they do and go for their dream, no matter what; people who don’t take no for an answer.

As someone described as America’s success coach, how do you define success?
I used to define success as being able to produce any result you want to produce. I changed my definition in the last three years to fulfilling your soul’s purpose. I believe everyone was born with a unique purpose they are here to fulfil in their lifetime. If you fufil your purpose, then you are going to be successful. If you get what society calls successful and you aren’t happy, then I don’t think you are successful.

You have laid out 64 success principles. How does one embody all of them?
I can't remember all 64; if you asked me to write them down, I couldn’t. That’s why there is a table of contents in the book. However, I live all these principles and it took me years to master them, so what I tell people is that it takes three years to master the principles in that book. They ask me what are the five most important principles. It's like me saying, if you can keep only five organs in your body, which would you keep?

The reality is to learn the basics like goal-setting, visualisation, never giving up, etc.

What is being an ‘inverse paranoid’ and what’s the meaning of ‘99% a bitch, 100% is a breeze’?
Being an inverse paranoid is believing that the world is out to do you good instead of believing that the world is out to get you and do bad [things] to you.

If you make a commitment to do a thing 99%, you are always wondering, ‘is today the day I'm not going to do it?’ It's like saying to your wife I'll be faithful 99% of the time. Everyday she is wondering, is today the day he's not going to do it? So when you make a commitment, make it 100%; no exceptions. When people do that, they always do the things they need to do. There are certain disciplines required to be successful. If you are a writer, for example, if you want to write a book, you need to write an hour a day to produce a book. When I'm working on a book, I give it 4-5 hours a day, seven days a week, and that’s what allows me to get the book out. When I exercise, I exercise five days a week no matter where I am. If I miss one day, it’s so much easier to miss the next day and the next day and the next day.

What if you can’t? Say circumstances come in the way of you going where you want to and break the flow and you feel guilty?
I don’t believe in feeling guilty. I feel guilt is a waste of time. I believe if you are about to do something and you feel guilty because your conscience tells you it’s a bad thing to do, then don’t do it. But if you have done something and spend the rest of your life feeling guilty about it, it doesn’t get you anything. So just get back on the horse. Nobody’s perfect. I do my best to meditate everyday. There are times where I fall asleep; there are times when I have to be up at 3am to catch a plane. Action is what produces results.

What difference would you pinpoint that separates winners from losers?
I would say one is people take 100% responsibility for changing their behaviour as necessary to produce the right results. They don’t blame other people, the government, the weather, the economy. No matter what's going on in the world, they seem to be successful. They don’t believe the outside changes their life.

The second thing is an orientation towards action. The third thing is feedback. A lot of people are so convinced that they know what they are doing that they don’t solicit feedback from people and the result is that they don’t really improve. I was working between semesters as a floor janitor for a company that made refrigerator motors. There was a rainstorm coming. I saw it because I was taking stuff out to throw out. I told the manager, we have motors sitting out and there is a rainstorm coming, and the manager told me, don’t tell me how to run the company! Ten minutes later it started to rain and he lost $10,000 worth of motors.

The reality was that his ego got in the way of him being successful. The key is to be open. You should always be improving. We were coming to the airport here today. A man said, there is so much in the airport to be improved. There were systems that worked 25 years ago, but things have changed, the system has to change to match it, but no one in the airport asked, on a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate the airport? If it were run by a business, and people had a choice to go to another airport, you’d want to know the answer to that question because you’d want people to come to your airport.

What we see in government jobs is, people don’t care much because they are going to have their jobs no matter what. I’ve been in places like Singapore, Dubai, where the airports are like [snaps fingers twice] because they constantly want to improve. I come from a culture which seeks improvement. Other cultures are happy with things being the way they are and I’m not judging that, but if someone wants to be successful, they have to transcend the norms of culture to meet the norms and standards so you can stand out and give more value to people and get more value back.

Ever since The Secret was published, the law of attraction has met with scepticism. How do you react to this?
I have been living assuming that it was true since 1983 and since then it has worked for me. It worked for my life, my students. I have received hundreds of hundreds of stories from people who used the law before The Secret was published and thousands of e-mails after it was released where people said... I’ll give you an example. There was a yoga teacher who used to earn $5,000 a year. After working with me, using the law of attraction, she was earning that in two months. If someone is sceptical, it's their problem, not mine, because being sceptical is going to stop them from trying new things. I live life as an experiment. I don’t know if something will work or not until I try it. If something works, it works. To say I’m going to be sceptical, to me, is illogical.

This is your third coming to India. Has the country left any impression on you?
I love India for many reasons. The multi-culturalism, the many religions... I’ve  been influenced by Buddhism and Hinduism. I meditate and practise Kundalini yoga. It influenced my eating habits — I eat more fruits and vegetables and learned to love curry. The vibrancy, there is so much going on here. India is a wonderful place.

Canfield will conduct a seminar today at the Nehru Centre, Worli, and another at Christ University auditorium (Bangalore) on Saturday. Contact Amanpreet on 9619264505/022-61713215 or e-mail vaishali.joshi@ideas-exchange.in for details about the Worli event. Contact Sneha on 9341233694 or e-mail sneham@scionmasterminds.com for details about the Bangalore event.