This isn't your average business podcast and he's not your average host.

This is the James Alteter Show on the Stansbury Radio Network.

I am so happy today to have Jack Canfield, one of my heroes on the podcast. Jack, how are you doing?

I'm fine, James. How are you? Good. Good. Jack, I understand. You're on this podcast for a lot of reasons, but one of them is you know your book, The Success Principles, is having its tenth anniversary edition after selling millions of copies.

You've also sold about 500 million copies of you know, the your chicken soup for the soul series.

You also have all sorts of books about people should you know publish and sell their own books and you have your own business set up to help people do that.

But I really want to talk about you first and then the success principles. But first, and I know this is a big intro.

I just want to say when your initial book came out 10 years ago, it practically saved my life. I was going through a hard time and this book, which was kind of like a collection of inspirational stories and tactics from many authors and branches of life, was so incredibly useful to me.

It was it was incredible. So I have to thank you for that. I really appreciate you writing that book.

Well, you're very welcome, I'm glad to know that it helped you. It did. Now now 10th anniversary, well actually before I get into the 10th anniversary edition, I want to know about you. Why did why did you get into the whole success thing?

I started out as a high school teacher in Chicago. I was a 1968 if you can go back that far. I was I can go back that far because I was born in January 1968.

Well, very good, very good. While you were being born, I was teaching high school. And basically I was in an all black inner city high school and I was doing a great job, but I became more interested in why my kids weren't motivated to learn the way I was. I mean, I always wanted to learn to achieve and a lot of these kids were gang members and grown up in poverty and they just didn't have that motivation.

So I met a man named W of climate stone who was a friend of Napoleon Hill who wrote thinking grow rich and I took some workshops at his foundation and started applying these principles of success that I was learning in my classroom with my students and they all got gung ho.

And so I.

What principles specifically did they get gung ho on and again, these are like inner city kids. So they're coming out of a very different environment than you probably grew up in and so on.

But what did you what what touched them the most?

Well, just having a conversation about what they wanted to be when they grew up. No one had ever asked them that neither their parents nor the school system.

And then looking at basically what are the principles of how you get from where you are to where you want to be because no one the schools never taught that they still don't for the most part.

And so I started teaching things like goal setting. We now know that only one out of 10 graduates of high school has ever been taught how to set a goal.

How to set it correctly in terms of being measurable in time and space. I started teaching them about the importance of taking action.

The willingness to fail and learn from your failures. The willingness to ask for what you want. How to visualize your dreams. How to affirm.

These affirmations of visualization what we now call a law of attraction taught them how to manage their minds. How to not be afraid of rejection. How to recover from sadness or anger.

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