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

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1. “Of your own arm. There will be no more gifts coming from me, okay? So I learned early on, you know, I worked my way through high school. I was a lifeguard of the country club pool. I had this thing I was in but not of. I was in the country club meeting girls whose parents were, but I wasn't of that. And I went to a private military school for the fifth grade till I graduated high school. My rich aunt had a son named Jack who died. If I was talking about kismet and fate, if my name was Bob, we'd not be talking right now. But because I was Jack.”

   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

2. “I was born in 1944. My father was in the Air Force. World War II was going on. He trained bomber pilots, actually. So from the time I was born until the time I was six, we lived in three different states with a military basis. I don't remember much of it at all. But when I was six, we moved to West Virginia, which is why I mostly grew up in Wheeling, West Virginia, Steel Town, coal mining, all that kind of stuff. And my father was an alcoholic, and he got violent when he was drunk. And my mother decided to divorce him when I was six and who went to live with my grandmother. And I actually lived in the attic of her house for years. And then eventually she met my stepfather who would just come out of the Navy. And I grew up poor. You know, we were not wealthy at all. And so my father was one of these people. When I went off to college, I stepfather. He said to me, he gave me $20. He looked over me in the eye and he said, no, there's that. He says, if you need any helping hand, look at the end.”

   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

3. “So I learned how to write better contracts in the future. But the fact is a lot of Chinese people have had major transformations because of the books have taken off and they have sold them in the general public as a result of kids learning about them in school, showing it to their parents, so on and so forth. So it all works out, all paid off. But that was a major lesson for us. You know, you got to be really, really careful when you're interacting with the Chinese and making deals. They're very, very clever.”

   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

4. “But what happened is a company called Enui Publishing and they decided to publish the book. And what's interesting is we had a contract that they would pay us 10 cents for every book sold in China. But enui was half owned by the government and half owned by private equity. So they decided to make it a textbook to teach English to kids in high school with Chinese on one side, English on the other. And they printed millions and millions of books because it was in the schools, which was the government side. We didn't see one penny of millions of books sold.”

   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