From LSD to Chicken Soup - Jack Canfield : 551

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You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today's cool fact of the day affirms the power of affirmations. A study published in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience was able to capture the effect of affirmations using an MRI machine. So patients who gave positive self-affirmations had increased activity in different parts of the prefrontal cortex and in other parts of their brains. And participants with greater stimulation in those sections of the brain, which control processing and valuation, had less sedentary behavior afterwards than participants who didn't have self-affirmations. In other words, when your self-talk was good, you moved more, and when your self-talk was bad, you sat on your ass all the time, which is kind of interesting, but they could see it in the brain. And that research indicates that future behavior and even your thoughts can be improved just by affirmations. And all of this goes back to prove that the little engine that could, could because of neuroscience, right?

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If you liked that cool fact of the day, you are going to love my new book, Game Changers. One of the people that I learned from and that I mention in Game Changers is a profoundly interesting and cool and well-known human being who has done a lot more than just write a little book about chicken soup. That would be Chicken Soup for the Soul. We've got none other than Jack Canfield back on Bulletproof Radio. Jack, thank you for being here.

My pleasure, Dave. I'd always do anything you ask.

I genuinely appreciate our friendship and the chance to have had dinner with you a couple of times at your events and just getting to understand that when I first read Chicken Soup for the Soul back when I was in 8th grade— just kidding.

I do get people that tell me that. It's embarrassing. They're 35 years old and they go, Oh, I read Chicken Soup for the Soul when I was in the 8th grade. How to make a guy feel older.

I might have been out of 8th grade, but you always sort of get a picture of a human being from reading their work and all that. And then to meet you in person and sort of see that there's a lot more going on than just that. And to realize that you spent the last, I'd say almost half of your career, if I'm judging my timelines right, focusing on these principles of high success and high performance and looking at what some incredibly impactful people have done, including you, to the point that you're now teaching that stuff, the Breakthrough to Success training. That's just a part of what you're doing to give back to the world. I wanted to pick your brain on some of the stuff that you're doing, some of the stuff that I wrote about in Game Changers, but just kind of dig deeper on what are people who are changing the world, what are they doing, and what have you seen in your decades of working with people like that?

Well, I've worked with everything from presidents of countries to CEOs of corporations to people in prisons and people on welfare. So the broad spectrum of people all across the wide diversity of our planet, and I've taught in 57 countries around the world, and we see everything happening. I see people that are winning athletic events. I see people that are out there people that are creating schools in Africa, people that are building new high-tech interventions and making a real difference. Just very recently, I spoke at a conference where the guy was a CEO of a major travel company, and he literally decided he wanted to take a year and put some of the smartest people in the world on a boat, travel around the world with these entrepreneurs and inventors, and solve problems. So just to give you one example, they pulled into a port in Africa And they started realizing that a lot of kids couldn't hear. And so the problem with the normal hearing aids was that these people had no way to replace the batteries because they were poor. So these guys invented hearing aids you could wear that had little solar panels on them that recharged themselves as you walked around outside and basically then taught the people in that country to manufacture those earpieces so that basically they created a new industry. They made it so it was sustainable. And you see people I see people doing that just everywhere. And it's exciting to know that we all have the capacity not only to feel fulfilled, but to make a huge difference. One of my favorite stories is about a guy who was a co-owner of the Seattle Seahawks and he was miserable. And so he gave this talk I heard once called His Life Went Through 4 Stages. The first stage was called Stuff. He was worth $600 million. So he bought all the stuff he thought that would make him happy, the planes, the boats, the viewing room in his house, the exotic car collection, his wife's jewelry, et cetera. And he wasn't happy. So he said the second stage was called better stuff. And he bought a bigger plane, a bigger house, a bigger boat, all that. He said, I still wasn't happy. And then he said he went through a stage called different stuff. That's when he bought the Seattle Seahawks with a bunch of people thinking that that would make him happy. It'd be the owner's booth and go down on the field and all that and still wasn't happy. Then a friend of his called him up and said, I'm going to Bosnia-Herzegovina to give away wheelchairs. Would you like to join me? And he said, sure. So he got on this guy's private plane. They flew to Bosnia. They landed. They gave out 40 wheelchairs that day to kids who'd either lost their legs in landmines or congenitally born that way. And so what happened, he said, this one kid, about 11-year-old boy, he put him in a wheelchair and he started to walk away and the boy wouldn't let him walk away and he was holding onto his leg. And so he turned around and Ken said, through tears and an interpreter, Young boy said, "Please don't leave yet. I want to memorize your face so when we meet again in heaven, I can thank you one more time." And he said, "That was the first time in my life I felt pure joy." And I realized that the last stage of his life was called purpose. He said, "I'd found my purpose, which was to make a difference, to give something away rather than just accumulate more stuff." So he came home and started the Ken Behring Wheelchair Foundation. He's given away something like 40,000 wheelchairs. All around the world. And then he's also started digging wells in Africa because he realized wheelchairs don't help you if there's no water to drink that's not bad for you and going to kill you. So I think that we each go through our own stages of evolution where we go through survival and belonging, but we get to self-actualization where we want to make a difference. And I think for me, and I know for you, the truest joy we ever have is when we contribute to someone else's life. I mean, you get the feedback all the time that people are feeling healthier and happier and I do my work and people succeed more. And now you've got this book that's helping people succeed and the Game Changer book. So basically, I think that's the true essence of everything that we want to do. And then everyone finds their arena to do that in. And I've interviewed, God, hundreds of people, and ultimately they find that that's the most fulfilling aspect of their life.

One of the 46 laws that emerged in this book was around money doesn't make you happy. After talking to these hundreds of people and I said, "What are the 3 most important things that you found?" None of them said money or power. None of them. They all care to the point that you got to get your needs met, but it's not the focus. It's not why they do what they do. What I found is that the largest buckets after analyzing with statistics what people said, is they want to be smarter, they want to be faster, but they want to be happier. Happier people perform better. And what makes you happy is doing what you're here to do. And your friend there is such a prime example of that, where he realized, oh, this is what gives me energy. This is what makes me feel good.

Well, I think that everything that anyone does is because it'll make them feel better. Even being smarter, even being faster, is all the things you want is because you think it's going to give you some experience of joy Reality is that things can give you a certain experience of joy for a short period of time. We've all bought that thing we thought was going to make us happy, the pool table, the new computer, and after a few days— I bought a pool table thinking I've got recreation handled and now it's where we fold the laundry.

Yeah, my first universal machine at home was definitely a good clothes rack. I know what you're saying. One of the laws in the book is around money doesn't buy happiness. So stop thinking it will. And I talk about some of the research there. One group of research says about $74,000 of income on average in the US, probably higher in California, New York. Above that, another dollar of income doesn't equal more happiness. Below that, the safety it provides actually does. So there are people who can be happy with nothing. And I've seen that in Cambodia and very, very poor parts of the world. There are people who are genuinely happy who have vanishingly little, but probably if they had a little more money, it probably would increase happiness. So I was in that trap as a young man. I had made $6 million when I was 26. And if I would've just stepped back, I was set for life. And what did I do? I told a friend, "I'll be happy when I have $10 million." Which is just the most egotistical, just wrong-headed statement I could ever think of, but I did make it. And I wasn't alone in that kind of thinking at this company where everyone suddenly had become wealthy. And I lost that money 2 years later. In part because instead of walking away with what I had, I had to stay in. And that sort of thing is one of those 46 pieces of knowledge that if I could go back and tell myself when I was 20, "Hey, you need to know these things." And instead of just believing what I say, like, why don't we listen to what Jack Canfield says? Why don't we listen to what hundreds of other people who've done something noteworthy do? Because instead of emulating one of us, maybe you could just look at what mattered to most of us. And from there, start just prioritizing what you're going to do first. Hopefully, whatever makes you happiest fastest is going to reduce drag in the rest of your life. In your own evolution, Jack, when did you stumble across that knowledge around stuff doesn't make you happy?

I think I learned it really quickly, probably with the aid of some psychotropic drugs. I was probably around 29 or 30. Someone introduced me to LSD and I took it and I really got very clear that the things outside me were not going to make me happy, but the relationships I had with people, my ability to meditate and get in touch with my own inner peace and joy were the things that really mattered. Obviously, I always wanted enough money to pursue my travel, my education, to have good education and medical care for my children and so forth. I mean, I still have a kid who's 28 in college. A graduate school. And so not having that money would have been, you know, uncomfortable not to be able to provide him with the opportunities I want him to have. But like you said, you know, I made $6 million one year as well, and I bought all the stuff you're supposed to buy. You know, I bought 4 cashmere sweaters in different colors and all that kind of stuff. And then you realize you have everything you need and beyond what you need. I mean, people live with one sweater all over the world, but But I just really got that for me, it was about relationships. And I remember being with my wife and thinking, if we were poor and we were living in a hut raising pigs in Mexico, it would still be your body, your sense of humor, your eyes, your love, your compassion, your joy. It wouldn't matter if we were living in a hut or we're living in a castle. That that's what really matters. And as you said, we've seen people all over the world, in Africa when I've been there several times, who are extremely happy. I think the biggest problem for a lot of people is when TV came along and you started watching shows and you saw that other people had things you didn't have. Like you see these kids in the ghetto that don't have Air Jordans, then they think Air Jordans make you cool. And before, when I grew up in the '50s, if you didn't have stuff, you didn't know anyone else had it because you lived in your neighborhood, which was pretty much the same socioeconomic level. Now every millionaire and billionaire is being reviewed and we see the homes of the rich and famous and Cribs and shows like that. And a lot of people grow up thinking they have to have that to be cool. And there's another statistic that shows that no matter what people have, if you ask them how much is enough, it's always more than they have. People making $100,000 will say $300,000. People with $300,000 will say $1 million. People with $1 million will say $2 million. I have many friends who want to be a billionaire. When I ask people in my seminars to set a goal for financial, because I have 7 areas I have set goals in, no one ever says $673,000. They always go millionaire. It's just a round number that people pick out of the air and then they beat themselves up because they haven't achieved that yet. It's kind of crazy. But for me, as I said, I was probably in my late 20s, early 30s when I got it.

You said something I didn't expect you to say. You said that sometime in your mid-20s, you had an awareness come to you on LSD. Yes. Much like Steve Jobs and the founders of Google and and Elon Musk. And it turns out one of the laws in Game Changers is get out of your own head. And it doesn't have to be with LSD or mushrooms or ayahuasca, which is something that I, I used with a shaman in Peru. But I had a dinner in New York that I write about in the book with about 25 very influential people who'd been invited to this dinner, and It was set up as a Jeffersonian dialogue where only one person would say something at a table at a time and sort of set the topic, and then we'd all talk about it for a while, but not all talk in little groups, but just talk so everyone could hear what one person said. And when I had a chance, it just came to me. I said, "How many people in the room, if you're willing to acknowledge this, have used a hallucinogenic substance for personal development?" And every single hand in the room went up, people from 25 to 70. Hedge fund managers, CEOs, actors, people doing charitable work. I was surprised there was no one in the room who hadn't tried it. It seems like that's a change from what we would have seen 20 years ago. I mean, certainly 25 years ago, I wouldn't have been able to say I've done ayahuasca or anything like that. I didn't do any of that until I was in my mid to late 20s. Certainly, you could do vipassana. You can meditate. You can do holotropic breathing. This isn't an appeal for people to go out and do legal or illegal stuff. But how often do you see the high performers that you work with have some practice, whether it's pharmaceutical or not, to just get far outside themselves so they can look back on themselves?

Well, first of all, I will just tell you, I won't name names because I'm not sure they would want to be public, but I—

please don't—

I was flying in a plane over Dubai, a little, you know, twin-engine plane. We were guests of a person there and they were bringing together 5 of the top success gurus and coaches of the world. And we were up in a plane and we started talking. Every one of us had done psychedelics at some point in our careers. And I thought, everywhere I go and I meet people, most people that are super successful either have a meditation practice or they have engaged in what I would call safe psychotropic experiments, plant medicine. And not like recreational, let's get high and go to Disneyland, but let's get together with a shaman or let's get together with someone that's conscious or let's just go in our home and make it clean and wonderful and get some fruit and then fast for a day and then do a psychotropic. And there was a time where I was working with a shaman. He came up to my house in Santa Barbara twice a year for, I think, 5 years, January and July. And we would do mushrooms and ayahuasca and all kinds of things. And every time I would have some major breakthrough. Something Ram Dass said, which I think is true, is that the psychedelic drug can give you a glimpse of the mountaintop, but it won't keep you there. And so now that you know what's possible in terms of awareness and insight and peace and joy, that's when the spiritual practices come into practice, whether it's qigong or tai chi or meditation or other kinds of sacred practices. And that's why I've been meditating since I was about 26, I think, when I learned to meditate. And I'd be lying if I said it every day, but I do it most days. And it's been critical. What people often ask me, I have a book called The Success Principle, 67 Principles of Success. And in that book, people will often ask me, "Well, what's the most important principle? If you could only pick one?" And I always answer, "If you could only pick one organ in your body, which one would you keep?" The point is it wouldn't work. But the 3 I always say, You got to meditate, you have to have a mastermind group, and you have to take action. And these are 3 things I think that if I had to boil it down to 3, and there's other things, be clear about your goal, be in touch with your life purpose, et cetera. We can go into that. But the point being that meditation is where Chicken Soup for the Soul, the title for that came from in a meditation. That brand is now worth probably $100 million. It's generated over $1 billion of book sales around the world. And that came in a meditation. So, I can't overrate the value of it in addition to the inner peace I have, I think the anti-aging that comes from it, all of that.

It's amazing what can come to you during those deep states. And, if you've never experienced it, it's really hard to put words to it. It's ineffable, one of my favorite words, which means it cannot be described by words, which is cool that you have a word to do that. I came out of one of those weird states and wrote the entire outline for my very first book around fertility, around having children who are healthier and smarter than they would be if you did nothing. And that whole thing, I just came from somewhere, but the whole world was buzzing when I wrote it down. And that was without substances. That was just from tapping into something that was already in there. Do you have advice for people listening who've never tapped into that, the rational people, you know, the engineers, the skeptics, people who say, well, you know, I'm a human robot, I'm gonna upload my consciousness to the internet someday, and, you know, kind of that's not logical. How do they tap into seeing that there's something?

Well, it's not logical. That's the whole point. You know, the reality is you have two sides of your brain. You know, one is the unlogical side that's more intuitive, more, holistic, more gestalt, and the other is a rational side. And so it's like, you know, you have the male and female aspects of you. So why would you cut off one part of yourself? You know, then you become a halfwit, as one of my friends likes to say. You know, so it's the combination of intuition and spiritual awareness and, you know, inner knowing and inner sensing, tapping into higher consciousness, etc. But then using your rational brain as the servant of that so that you can do all the things that, you know, the engineers and those people do to create wonderful products to manifest your dreams and goals because you can set goals and use your rational mind to figure out the steps to get there, to do the research that you do so well, that people like Dawson Church does so well, and I like to do neuroscience. I love that new statistic you shared at the beginning of the show. So it's both. It's not an either or, it's a both and. And so I often feel bad for people who are missing that part. Maybe it takes that to overdevelop one side and have these rational breakthroughs, but I don't think that's the way to play the game. I think you want both parts of yourself. There's a reason the corpus callosum exists connecting the two sides of the brain. They're supposed to interact with each other.

One of my favorite quotes I've ever heard in all the Bulletproof stuff I've done was very early on, I was coaching people on cognitive function. I had an engineer in Silicon Valley somewhere in his mid-40s, and I asked him to do heart rate variability training, which trains you to breathe in a certain way. I know that you're connected with Debbie and the HeartMath Institute. I've been an advisor for a while. So I said, "Look, every day for a month, I want you to spend 20 minutes just doing this weird computer-driven breathing exercise that's going to teach you how to control the spacing of your heartbeats." He says, "All right, this is quantitative. I can do that." He calls me after about 20 days and he goes, "Dave, I think I experienced bliss." These are words you do not hear out of a computer programmer's mouth. It's very unusual, especially 8 years ago or something. But it still sticks with me to this day because it was one of those unaccessed states of performance that was there. In my own life, I don't know how to do the rational stuff without having the irrational stuff coexist at the same time. I worked in Game Changers to try and explain to people, not just through my own experience, but through those of people who have been on the show, look, there is some way to tap into this. Whether it's going to Burning Man, whether it's fasting for a week in a cave, trying plant medicines, whatever it is, it doesn't really matter. But you've got to achieve that ability to get outside yourself so that you can see that stuff that you try to think doesn't exist. But it's one of the most challenging and scary things that I've ever done. And it seems to be that way for most people the first time they do it.

What has to happen in order to be successful in that journey is you have to give up control at some point. Like if you take a pill, that you know is going to alter your consciousness, you're not in control anymore. Something else takes over. And when you meditate deeply, often other things kind of— you surrender into memories coming up, trauma being revisited, consciousnesses that you're not aware of becoming present, like angelic forces, whatever you want to call them. And I think for a lot of people, giving up that control is very scary. Especially if you had a childhood where you got wounded when you gave up control in some way. And so then—

which happens to most of us between bullying and parents.

And then if you don't heal those wounds and reconnect with the— let's call it the inner child or whatever you want to call it, and it's very difficult for adults to do that. And so they will develop careers around protecting themselves from feeling those feelings, feeling out of control, You know, whatever.

What is the single most impactful, we'll call it healing technology, that you've worked with or that you know about to help people heal those old traumas that are leading to those behaviors?

Well, I'm actually writing a book about it with a woman named Lise Janelle, who I think you know. She's a member of the Transformational Leadership Council. And I think there are many, many healing modalities. I mean, there are some shamans who can muscle test you. And like, someone just removed 52 relationships of my wife. My wife's an empath. She feels everything very, very strongly. And she went in to see this shaman, and he basically said, you have 52 people hanging out inside you. They're not like possessions, but they're just people that you've taken on too much of their energy. And so he worked with her for an hour and a half, and she came home. She looked like 10 years younger. She was lighter. She was joyful. She was more compassionate, less judgmental. I was going, holy mackerel. I'll see that guy again. This is good. But for my own work, and I think something easily learnable and doable for most people without having to study shamanism for 20 years like this guy did, is what Lise calls the Heart Freedom Method. But the general idea is you look at any place in your life where you feel blocked. So you've got an unconscious limiting belief or you wouldn't be blocked there, or an unhealed wound. And so then you basically close your eyes, you get in touch with your— you scan your body. What do you feel in relationship to that? And then where is there a sensation of numbness or of pain or of tension? Because numbness is numbing out the pain or the tension. And then you imagine what feeling is in there. And then you basically go back to the earliest time you can remember feeling that same sensation and that same feeling. Everyone I've done this with, and I've done it with literally 8,000 people at a time in a seminar in India, we're at 8,000 Herbalife people in a room, all speaking Tamil. We did this with a translator. And everybody goes back to somewhere between 3 and 8 years old where they had a traumatic event and they made a limiting decision. That will never happen again. I will never tell a joke. I will never be sexual. It's not okay to want money. It's not okay to be smarter than your father. It's not okay to outperform your sister. You know, whatever it is that's blocking them. And then it comes into consciousness. And then through a series of a couple of simple questions, You can basically let that go, reframe it, come up with a new decision. I have them go into the future and have the wise being, could be Jesus or Muhammad or their own higher self or their own 83-year-old wise enlightened being, it's them, give advice to the current person. Everybody gets value. Nobody gets stuck that I've ever worked with. And they literally, they often look younger, they report 2 months later, they finished their book. They finally started asking for what they were worth in terms of their business. On and on and on it goes. So that's really powerful. Tapping, I think, is really powerful to get rid of negative feelings and limiting beliefs. EFT tapping, I use that a lot. Those are my 2 go-to things.

It's really powerful that you just described that. It's got a lot of overlap with the process that I use at 40 Years of Zen, the neurofeedback thing in what I've done where I've got electrodes showing my brain when I'm running it through a similar process. Like, when's the first time I felt that way? Am I really feeling that? How do I flip into another state to break the mental connection that you have that you set up back then? Man, when you sit down with someone who doesn't come from a tradition of meditation, whose parents are atheists or devout religious with one belief set, and sort of say you can do all this stuff, it just, it sounds, frankly, it sounds like crazy pants. At least it did until I was about 30. I'm like, what is going on with these wacky people? But I love that you're sitting here and it's hard to deny the impact you've had and the success you've had. And you can straight-faced say, my wife saw a shaman and I saw a difference. And like, that's the core observational part of the scientific method. And it takes a lot of mental gymnastics to hear you say that, or I would say similar things. I've seen shamans had profound effects on me, on family members, and I can't tell you exactly how it works. They could tell you how they believe it works, whether that's the real story or not, it doesn't really matter because you got the results you wanted. And there's that resistance, the cognitive resistance of this being possible. And I'm hoping by, by you sharing it, by other people who've done meaningful things, who are not crazy, you know, who are highly functioning human beings, to say this matters, that maybe we get people who would never consider that this is even possible to at least have an inkling. Because damn it, if someone had done this for me when I was 20— you know that 10 years between I was 20 and 30 when I suffered a lot? I didn't have to do that if I would have done this earlier. How early can people start doing that kind of work?

Oh, really early. Just to give you an example, I visited Fairfield, Iowa, where the Transcendental Meditation Center is, and they have a school there. It starts in kindergarten, goes through high school. And I was fortunate enough to spend a day in the school, and I was watching these little preschoolers sitting in meditation for 20 minutes in the morning, all cross-legged, just looking blissed out. And when I knew it was really powerful, I was in the hallway in the high school section or middle school, I don't know, one of those. And these kids were passing between classes and this one boy went up and started teasing this girl. And she just looked at him and said, Marvin, I know you're trying to tease me. I know you're just wanting to have fun. I'm having a very difficult day today. I would appreciate if you wouldn't do it. He went, oh, I'm sorry. Now that would not happen in a normal middle school, right? But the kids have developed this both personal power, which she was demonstrating, and the personal empathy and sensitivity which he was demonstrating. And it came from learning to meditate. They start teaching these kids when they're 3, 4, 5 years old to meditate. And you look at the temples in Tibet and Nepal and India where they have the Buddhists and they give away their kids to the monastery and they start meditating when they're 5 and 6 years old. So I don't think it's ever too early to start teaching that.

Well, I, I think those are such powerful skills. And I know my, my kids' school doesn't teach meditation. They teach a lot of emotional development and kindness and things like that. But it may be harder for parents to teach kids to meditate just because you're the parents. Did you teach your son to meditate?

I did, I did, I did, I did. And, and I also taught him how to do EFT tapping and all kinds of stuff. I remember as a Christmas present when he was about about, I'm gonna say, 14, 15 years old. I took him into my office and I said, I want to give you another gift. I'd just given him a bunch of clothes and stuff. He's really into clothes. And I think I gave him a couple hundred bucks to buy what he wanted. And I took him into my office and I said, I want to teach you a really important tool. You can use it whenever you're stressed out and if you're about to take a test, whatever. And so I taught him how to tap when he was feeling anxiety. He, the next day, he said, Dad, You know the best present you gave me? I said, no. He says, you taught me how to get rid of stress. Because he stressed himself out a lot, it seemed. And so we can teach kids. I mean, I taught kids how to do heart talks where we sit around in the family and everyone, we pass around like a talking stick like they do in the Hopi tradition. And we did that every week at some point, like usually toward the weekend, so the kids could talk about their feelings, which I think is important. And yes, we meditated as a group sometimes. And I took him to a workshop with Hale Dwoskin learning the Sedona Method when he was 16. And, you know, he loved it. And so basically, it's just kids love things that make them feel better. It's just that simple. You know, sometimes they're a little weird about it. If you wait too long, then it's not what all their friends are doing. But if you start young, And it's never too late to at least try. One thing I did with my kids, I would find a book I thought they should read and I would pay them to read the book. I mean, you pay them to wash the car. What's more important? So basically I'd say, here's how you can earn $20 or whatever, and you've got to give me a book review report. And I got to ask you a few questions, make sure you really read it. And that was an easier way to get an allowance than doing chores, which I know I don't think it's that critical.

Jack, man, that is huge advice for parents. I give my kids a couple bucks a day. They get a dollar if they clear or set the table and another dollar if they do it without whining.

I love it.

And that second dollar was the best investment I've ever made in my mental health.

Yeah, there you go.

But the idea of paying them to read a book is really smart.

Yeah, or listen to audio tapes too. Well, now it's CDs. I say tapes because I'm of that generation, but yeah, same thing.

Okay. You just upgraded my parenting. What a fantastic idea. All right. I'm borrowing that one. Something else that did make it into the book, in fact, it's law number 3 in the book, is something that I do with my kids. And the law number 3 in the book is when you say you'll try, you're lying. And it's just 2 sentences kind of describe the law. And the main law goes like this: the words you choose matter more than you think, not just to the people you speak to, but also to your own nervous system. Your language sets your limits and to a great extent shapes your destiny. When you unconsciously use words that make you weak, you stop trusting yourself and lead others to question your integrity. Game changers deliberately choose truthful words to build trust and break free from self-imposed limitations. So stop trying and start doing. And I actually tell your story from your last interview as one of the examples in that law about how it works, because you talk about how in your office you keep empty fishbowls. And if someone on your team uses one of these words that are not truthful, that take away their power, they put $2 in the bowl, not to punish them for it, but just to make it visceral that there's a cost to using the words. What are the words that you teach your staff not to use?

Well, the first one is can't. Basically, you either choose to or you choose not to. And so that's one of the big words. The word try. Often I'll demonstrate in a seminar, I'll say, I have people put something on their lap they can pick up. I say, pick it up, put it down, pick it up, hold as high as you can, Pick it up, put it down. Now try to pick it up. And the whole room just freezes. Nobody knows what to do. And as soon as you say, try to pick it up, they think, what does he want? And I'll see some people going like this where they're pushing their hand up slowly, like they're efforting. But the point is, as soon as I say to my son, since we talked about parenting, try to keep your room clean, there's an assumption in that that he might not be able to. So why would you try? You just do it. It. So keep your room clean, be home by 12 o'clock. Don't try to be home by 12 o'clock. That gives him permission to not do it because the word try. Another phrase is have to. There's nothing you have to do. They're all choices. You don't have to pay your taxes. You might go to jail, but you don't have to. You choose to. So these are all what we call victim language. Should is another thing that people say. Well, I should. Well, do you want to or not? Basically, But those are the big ones. Can't, have to, try, should. There's probably some others if I were to—

Need.

Oh yeah. You don't need anything other than air and water and heat and a little bit of food. But a lot of times people say, I need something. And then when you don't get it, you feel really bad because you feel like you— And it's also a way to manipulate people. I need you to do this for me if you really love me. If you really love me, you'd do this. As opposed to, "I want you to," this is my request. And because need comes from a powerless place, they all are reinforcing your powerlessness. And so basically we want to eliminate those.

Have you succeeded in eliminating those from the way you communicate with your employees, with your family, with your friends?

When I'm consciously intending to get a result, yes. I will sometimes say try when I'm not really thinking too hard about it.

When you're not really driving.

No, I go unconscious sometimes. And it's a habit that I had for years before I learned that that was a word that I shouldn't be using, or I choose not to because it— see, already we catch ourselves not twice in one sentence. But exactly. But it is, it's a habit. It's definitely nothing that goes away instantly. That's why the $2 fine, you know, new employees will get $100 out of them in the first month. But after that, they stop. And then we give the money to charity. We're not trying to punish them, as we said. See, we're trying again. We're not intending to punish them. And I do it at my seminars too. We'll have it in the front of the stage. $2 for any of those words, $20 if your phone goes off, and $20 if you're late. And people, it's amazing how much better they behave when they know there's a consequence.

How do you handle people like me? Because when that happens, I always set my phone alarm to be a ring, and I put my phone in someone else's bag and have it go go off and—

Just for fun?

Yeah. I'm still that guy. I haven't gotten around that before. But it's amazing how flustered someone will get when they're like, "It's not me, it's not me." And then they just completely lose it and you're like, "Oh yeah, it was me." And then I'll pay the $20, I don't care. It's just worth it for a laugh.

I like humor, so I probably would just enjoy it.

People do that. I do the same thing sometimes. It's fine if you need to look at something, but just for God's sake, turn off that.

I did a seminar once where about 5 minutes into it, 200 cell phones all rang at the same time. And because what we were doing was, if your cell phone was $20, and there's a woman that was our singer, a woman named Janis Stanfield, and she was starting an orphanage in Thailand. And so this was a way that they wanted to raise as much money as possible for her orphanage and screw with me at the same time. Basically, that's what happened. Everyone had their cell phone go off at the same time somehow. They had people call them or something. It was hysterical.

That's perfect when you can kind of turn it around. And it's also good when it's for a good cause.

Yeah.

Now, you've built that thinking around those words into your life. And the challenge that I ran into in working on Game Changers is similar to the book that you wrote on success. It was The Success Principles. And you went through a similar and maybe more exhaustive effort, to be honest, where you interviewed a bunch of people. What was your process for boiling it down into the 67 things you came up with? How'd you do that?

Well, I started out by making a list one morning in bed. I was with my computer in bed and I made a list of 114 principles. I was saying, why have I been so successful? I was just really curious because here I was, I'd made $6 million a year before. I was a little kid from Wheeling, West Virginia, whose father made $8,000 a year. So for me, it was like, yo, this is a big-time success. How did I do that? So I started looking at all the principles I live my life by, and I had 114, which is way too many for a book. And so I basically scaled it down to about 60, 70. And then I said, okay, are these just idiosyncratic to me or are they principles that other people live by? So I made a list of the principles and I did like a little paragraph explanation of each one, what I meant by it. And I picked 75 really successful people, generals in the military, movie stars, Olympic athletes, top salespeople, whatever. And I sent out the list and I said, "If you've used any of these principles, if they're the principles you've lived your life by, would you be willing to have me interview you?" And I got about 75 responses and I interviewed every one of them. And then I basically edited, cut out all the extraneous material until I had a lot of stuff. And then I used their stories to illustrate all of the principles. It took— it was a better part of 6 months to do all that. It was worth it. The weird thing is though, Dave, that a lot of people that read the first book would say to me, "Well, those principles are great if you're John Gray, if you're the general in the military, if you're Steve Jobs. These people are all different." And so, when I wrote the 10th anniversary edition, which came out in 2015, I replaced most of the Steve Jobs-type stories, which I thought would tell people, "Wow, these guys were successful. They use these principles. You should too." But a lot of people basically said, "No, I'm not like them." So I replaced all those stories with people who'd read the first book and were normal people and had gone on to accomplish extraordinary things. So the second book, I think, is even more believable, if you will, because we've got homeless people who literally were living in a halfway house and then all of a sudden, a year later after reading my book, they'd started two businesses and were doing very, very successfully. People that were never supposed to walk again walking, those kind of things. But they were just ordinary everyday people. So that's how that came about.

So you, you had your, your 10 years of field testing to show that, that the stuff that worked for Steve Jobs works for the rest of us as well.

Exactly.

It's interesting, you started with your, uh, your own success principles. And in my case, I, I definitely think I know some of them, but I wanted to I wanted to get the data from people without putting my own spin on it other than just this question and sort of see what the data came up with. But I will admit that there were some, I'll call it blind spots, either people didn't feel safe talking about it largely around sex and around hallucinogenic substances where I had a few experts on about those things, but everyone else just isn't going to mention it. And I love it that you hit on one of those big areas where A lot of people, unless I chose an expert on that, they weren't going to talk about hallucinogens because there's still some fear of either legal implications or, you know, will people think something ill of me? And I believe that their use is way more common among high performers than on average, but it's not the Disneyland use. So I included some laws about that and got some data outside of my official survey. And then I interviewed a few experts on sex and relationships like Esther a Perel, even a professional dominatrix, and ancient Taoist practices on things like that because that matters for people. And certainly, our mutual friend John Gray would be the first to tell you, if you don't have things right in your relationships at home, including in the bedroom, you're probably not going to have things right at work and in the rest of your life. So I also padded it with some of my own experiences. But I also didn't, I think, have the benefit of as much work in the field as you had when you wrote your first one. So I like that process. I think that your book, both the first edition and the new one, is very noteworthy research in the field and worth reading and has the effect that what you've now shown it has, which is one of the reasons I wanted to interview you for Game Changers because let's face it, it's a lot less work to ask someone who's done it for 20 years longer than you how to do it than it is to figure it all out yourself.

Now, one of the great advice I got when I was younger was study with the masters. Your life will, you know, evolution will occur faster if you study with a master. And then someone recently said every master was once a disaster, which is also true. But, you know, if you're going to study boxing, you know, study with someone who really knows what they're doing. The same thing is true with meditation, your life, you know, relationships, sex, the whole deal.

When I was young, and not just a teenager, even in my 20s, I was really egotistical. I also thought, "If I can't do it by myself, it's probably because I'm not good enough or I'm a bad person, so I'm just going to pretend that I can do it by myself." It leads to resistance to learning and unwillingness to ask and unwillingness to take advice. I finally got over that. What's your advice for people who are advice resistant?

I forget the guy's name. He was a worker on a dock in San Francisco and he became like this everyday philosopher. I just can't think of his name right now, but he said, "Learners will inherit the Earth." And basically, if you're willing to learn, because everything's changing so fast, and that's even more so now than it was like 30 years ago when he made that statement, that you have to be willing to learn. Another phrase I learned early on when I was running trainings with a company called Insight Training Seminars was, "I'd rather be right than happy," is where a lot of people live their life from. And I'd rather be happy than right. And so I'm always open to learning, that you listen to people's experience. My first mentor was a man named W. Clement Stone. He was worth $600 million. He was extremely successful. He was a good friend of Napoleon Hill who wrote Think and Grow Rich. In fact, they wrote two books together that are not as famous, but he did do that. And he basically said, learn from OPE, other people's experience. There's no reason you have to reinvent the wheel every time. Find out someone who's done what you want to do and ask them how they did it. Read their books, take their seminars, go to their workshops. Now it's listen to their TED Talks, listen to their videos on YouTube. YouTube. There's so much information out there that you can learn to become better. I'm not sure why people become so resistant. I think maybe they've been made wrong so much in their youth that they feel like they have to stand up against their father or some teacher who put them down or whatever, and it's not okay to be wrong. And I think men, they never ask for directions because they don't want to be wrong. We need to overcome that maybe as part of the masculine conditioning that we all go through, but it's basically not a good way to go through the world. You've heard the phrase, I'm sure, maybe you wrote about it called suffering is optional. And a lot of suffering is because we're not willing to listen to the advice that people have. People that have gone before us in Africa, they're called guides and that you don't want to be eaten by a crocodile in the wrong river. And I think the same thing is true for every area of life. There's people that just have spent their life studying like you have, like I have, like John Gray has, like all the people we've mentioned have. And so there's just so much value there. So basically, I just invite people to be open.

Thank you for that advice. And I sure wish I'd have heard that a lot earlier in my life, but I'm playing catch-up now at this point.

Well, you're catching up very fast from what I can tell.

Well, thanks, Jack. Coming from you, that's an incredible compliment. I really enjoyed interviewing you today. Thank you for being on Bulletproof Radio. Thank you for your work in particular, uh, your Breakthrough to Success book, the, the training program you have behind it, uh, is, uh, it's, it's meaningful work on solving this problem that I think a lot of listeners— and we're going to cross 100 million downloads this year, so it's, it's a lot of people, uh, who they're, they're saying, you know, what, what do I do next? And I think that you've, uh, you've spent a lot of time codifying those things. I've definitely taken my take on these things and put it in on this book. And as you said, it's a huge amount of work to do it, but I think these are the things where you get to learn from other people's mistakes instead of the expensive cost of making it yourself. So thanks for making all your mistakes and learning from them and sharing it.

That's a good thing. I've never heard anyone thank me for making all my mistakes before, but I— it's a good way of framing it. That's a good way of framing it. No, people could just go to my website jackcamfield.com and find out about all the stuff we do. I'd love to be of service to any of your students.

Yeah, I want people listening, if you still think Jack Canfield is chicken soup for the soul and kind of that's it, there's a lot of incredible, incredible value around the sorts of things that are Bulletproof and Jack is one of the great thinkers in the field. So it's a super honor to be able to interview you, to be able to call you a friend and to even be able to include you in Game Changers as one of the of luminaries I had a chance to interview. So Jack, thanks again, man.

You've written a great book and I encourage all my students to read it as well. So thanks for the opportunity to play together. I look forward to the next time, Dave.

If you enjoyed today's interview, you know what to do. Pick up your copy of Game Changers wherever you like to buy books. You can preorder it if it's not available yet by the time this podcast comes out. And when you do it, if you go to aspreygamechangers.com, you can check out 175,000 $10,000 in gifts and prizes that you can get, including some pretty big-ticket items that could actually change your life. So I'm really doing my best to pay it forward. And if you like the show, share the show with a friend. And if you like the book or you like Jack's books, go to Amazon, take 10 seconds to leave a 5-star review to tell people what you think, because authors like us, we pay attention to that stuff, and so do other people who are looking for what they should read next. Next. Both Jack's books, my books, they are worth your time, and hopefully the show is worth your time as well. Thanks for listening.

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