YouSaid · the spoken record

Jack Canfield

lines on the record: 104
first: 2025-10-29
most recent: 2025-10-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“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 it'll be scary.”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“During that whole time, I was running seminars and, you know, like three, four, five, six hundred people seminars, sometimes 700, 800 people in a room. I did one seminar in India that had 7,000 herbalife people in it for three days. And 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 with a parallel track to my workshops and my seminars. And so basically, yeah, that was always there. So 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.”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 of millions of dollars. So yeah, it was a good offer. Happened at the right time. So that's how it happened.”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not on her, my mother died, and she loved blue birds, 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 that. I knew I was getting a bit jaded, you know?”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 wanted more because everything has an arc. And so what happened was the success was starting to dwindle. There was a little saturation in the market, perhaps. We're niching books now. Well, the first books had universal appeal across the board. When you start doing sports fan soul or golfer soul, you know, 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 Mount Everest story or one-legged, you know, blank. I mean, I should have been inspired. It was like, you know.”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I never write what I haven't spoken about a lot first for the exact same reason you're talking about because I get real feedback about what lands what doesn't land where do they confuse where did I give them enough information where was I redundant you know etc 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”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or something, they 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 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.”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 know you did back of 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, whatever. So then he was a Christian and he always led the Wednesday night.”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think 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 show, which didn't happen immediately. You start out local and you basically create some reels of someone that can talk and they'll consider you if they're a producer in the 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 there'd be a big sales and it would take like people a week or two to read the book. They'd tell everybody the word of mouth was crazy and it was like a chain letter. It just kept going and going and going and going geometric progressions. I think the other thing that was really big for us was a company called SkillPath and another one, am I forgetting the name of right now, but they were doing, sometimes you get these”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You guys were nuts, you know What happened was the first shipment he made was 800 books to, I think it was Barnes& Noble, might have been Borders. And they sold 80 books the first week. He said, when you sell one-tenth of your inventory the first week, that's a phenomenon. Next week, 92, the next week, 150. He said something was happening. It shocked him. And they started with those presses that do this kind of thing, you know. And now 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 to Seoul. And I remember one December, the guy who was in charge of the money, the CFO of that company, told his staff. I never noticed till 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.”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basically, that led to The 144 rejections, and you're right, we went to the American booksellers association boot the booth. We're both wearing backpacks full of these spiral bound, like 20 stories from the book, the best stories. Did you publish this book? Will you be interested in this book? And most people wouldn't even take one, let alone. And then Peter Vegzo, who's the guy who did publish it, you know, you're right. He said 20,000. And we said no. And he laughed. He laughed out loud at us. Later he said, yeah, you know, he took out an ad.”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you were sick, and I thought, but this is not a book on 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 are 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 for the soul, and I got goosebumps. Well, my wife, she got goosebumps. Told Mark, called Mark, what do you think it is? He got goosebumps. Called her agent. He got goosebumps. Went to New York, met with 21 publishers, seven a day for three days. Nobody got goosebumps.”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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, 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 best-selling tit”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 Ikigai, which comes from the Japanese, whereas if you'd love to do something, that's one thing. Are you good at it? Does the world need it? And are they willing to pay for it? So all four of those 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, and different colors and all that kind of stuff. I went through my Nouveau reef stage for sure.”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I do. We knew his wife, and she was a friend of ours. And 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.”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And 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 his daughter will tell her friends. So literally it was that level of nonstop activity. And it was interesting because we were pretty empt up in the beginning. And we talked to the psychic guy. He was in trance. He goes, it would be as if you would go to a tree with a very sharp axe and you would take five swipes at that tree every single day. Eventually even a redwood would have to come down. You know, we went, okay, rule of five. That's what we're going to do.”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was just covered with posters, and every day we'd take something off and either do it five times or take five post-its off and do each one time, call it church. Can we talk in your church? 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? Called book source. Are you stocking 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 toxic churches on Sunday morning, Wednesday night, you know, whatever. The ones that have bookstores, we do signings. We sign in the parking lot. I spoke at every damn conference there was. I didn't care where it was or how long it took to get there, if it was there.”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Blanchard, who wrote the one minute manager, we talked to Barbara De Angelis, who wrote the book on love, and then another book on TM 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 call 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 the wall. And if you went down the wall of our company at that time, self-esteem seminars.”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“12 weeks. 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 worked, let's do it. So Mark and I actually had gone to five best-selling authors and then read about Scott Peck. And we talked to John Gray, who wrote Menor from Mars. We talked to”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 years.”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 get engaged with the characters and really go 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.”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 the 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.”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It worked out really well. But you talked about rejection. We were turned down by 144 publishers once we had a manuscript that took us over a year to sell the book.”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 in B. Dawn 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 in to be 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 gasp, you know, like, you're the guy who was in the hall. But he could do that. I was too shy to do that.”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The book, how do you justify that? He says, Well, some of the stories you tell you stole from me. 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 if I had 70 at that time.”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I wrote down every story, the dog story, the Girl Scout story, the puppy story, the Maunevrea story, whatever. It was 70 stories. So I said, okay, that's a book. So I made an 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, 108, 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 with 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 he should be his co-author because he's five six of the way through.”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 out the window. If 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, the story you told about the Girl Scout who sold 3,328 boxes of Girl Scout cookies in one year. He said in the book anywhere. My daughter needs to hear that story. I went, no. And over a course of a two months, I must have had four people a day say that story in a book, that story in a book, this, story in a book. So I'm coming home on a plane from Boston to LA where I was living at the time. And I said, how many stories do I really know?”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I said, only one way to find out. So literally, we said a million dollar goal, and that happened with chicken soup for the soul 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?”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So she had done that. She said, why don't we sell other people's stuff? So we added other product. And I hired a high school kid to come in after school and to sell the books, ship them out and so forth. So long story short, I did not make $100,000. I made $92,328. But I went like, okay, this is a success.”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'd written a book called One Hundred Ways to Enhance Self 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 a half hour in that story, I literally started to sell more books. I started a bookstore. Literally a mail-owned 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 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 box?”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“God is my infinite supply and large sums of money come to it quickly and easily as I earn a hundred thousand dollars a year and about I'd say maybe a month or two into it I'm in the shower and I had a hundred thousand dollar idea”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He challenged me because I mean, $30,000 a year if I was lucky. Now people make 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. And he taught me to set goals, to believe in them, to visualize it as if it's already happening, have an affirmation. I'm so happy and grateful. I'm now whatever. 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 when existed at the time. Banks actually trade them back and forth. But I took a $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, same my affirmation, which went at that time.”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 that 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.”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was like a grant from the government or something. So I took all these workshops, you know, everything from Carnegie to Grishal 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. 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, to see yes or no, answer, son. Think.”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because Stone offered me a job. The stone said. We have this achievement motivation program, we're 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. And 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.”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The rents floor, 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 investment. And then he also produced Success Magazine started by W. Clemens. And he was a speaker. He had books he sold. The magazine Augmandino, who wrote the greatest salesman. So I'm working in the Stone Foundation at one point. So I quit teaching. I worked for Stone.”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 he ever did, if you go into Chicago on rails, that's a big area where they 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, the commissions for.”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Watch that. They go in, they do it again. Do that about three or four times in the morning, and 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'd go out and say, okay, you missed two things. We're going to go to the next one, watch me do those two things. Next one, he go, this is yours. By the end of the day, they knew how to sell.”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ways. Number one, he started an insurance company called Combined 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 ensure 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. Here's a training system. Tell them what to do, maybe a Monday 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. Lisa presentation. You watch what I did. And so 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 did this. Okay, but you missed that next time.”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 Jr. was at school. He was going to do a talk to the kids. He'd written a book called I Kim. And he was there when I got the award. They gave me the award the same day. 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.”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the fact that I was loving and kind and motivational and believed they could do everything made them, I think, just like me because I was on their side. And then they started the African American Club, 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 in Maine and teach kids to swim and all that kind of stuff. So I think the last part of that was that I was starting to do these human potential activities in my classes. You know, I get them into pairs and have them go back and forth say, I can't. Then I'd have them go replace the sentence with, I won't. Now, which feels stronger, which feels more true, which is, you know, and they go, yeah, cancer's really a victim word. So I was doing maybe...”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think what happened was it was this school probably five years earlier was all white and Jewish and then it was this black invasion they would call it into the community and it was this 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 a guy named Roan Bennett. And it was a book about African American history. It's a paperback. It goes like 395. I bought one for every one of my students and I would teach black history along with white history 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.”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 It 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.”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Deeply, I would say probably for a year, I almost wish I was black because I thought white people are noctoast. 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 in.”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know, as 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 another EZA. And someone said, take SOCREL 10, Sock Rail, social relations 10. It's an encounter group. You just sit in there and talk about your feelings and everybody gets an 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, you know, motivation. So I said, well, how do I get into that? They said, well, it's a little late to get into psychology 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 Jesse Jackson's church. I became friends with people in the jazz community. Really got...”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, whatever. And then I made. This is interesting. I majored in Chinese history, which is interesting why. Later, I learned that 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. I always say I graduated in the half of the class and made the top half possible, you know? So there were a lot of smart, smart kids there valedictorians from their school. And I said to my counselor, I need an easy A for my sophomore year. He 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 Chang Kai-Chek and Mao Zedung. 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.”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 honorable mentioned All State. 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. cut grass, I cleaned the dorms. I did up and serve food at six in the morning and then fell asleep immediately in French class. I was tired, you know? I remember one day I'm like this falling, I'm totally asleep in this class at nine in the morning. And this professor comes over and”
2025-10-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #833: Jack Canfield — Selling 600+ Million Books, Success Principles, and How He Made The 4-Hour Workweek Happen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT