How to Manifest So Fast It Feels ILLEGAL (No Meditating Needed) | Jack Canfield

Practice faithful persistence. It means never, ever, ever give up. I mean, how many of you have ever had a great idea, talked about it, thought about it, didn't do it, and then someone else did it and was successful, and you went, darn, I should have done that? You know, one of the greatest myths that's pervasive in our culture today is that you're entitled to a great life. If you're not experiencing joy as you, as you think about doing something and as you pursue doing it, then it's off course for you.

He's an American author, motivational speaker, corporate trainer, and entrepreneur. He's the co-author of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series that has sold sold over 500 million copies in 40 languages. In 2005, he co-authored The Success Principles: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be. He's Jack Canfield, and here's my take on his top 10 rules for success. Rule number 1 is my personal favorite. I'm curious to find out which one you guys like the best. Also, as you're watching the video, if you hear something that Jack says that really resonates with you, add it to the comments with quotes so we can keep track of what you find most relevant.

Practice faithful persistence. It means never, ever, ever give up. Chicken Soup for the Soul was rejected by 144 publishers. 144 publishers said, we don't want to publish a collection of short stories. The title's stupid. Chicken Soup for the Soul, what does that mean? People don't buy collections of short stories. There's never been, you know, successful chain of doing that. So literally, we spent 14 months trying to find a publisher. And we'd go to New York with our agent, and eventually our agent gave us the book back and said, I can't sell this. So we went to the National Booksellers Association convention down in Anaheim. We went from booth to booth to booth for 3 days, and there were 4,000 publishers represented there. And we go, would you publish our book? Would you publish our book? Would you publish our book? And we got no, no, no, no, no. It was late on the 3rd day that a little publisher from Florida, after we'd gotten over 144 rejections, said, we'll read it. And then they said, we said, well, how many copies do you think we'll sell? After they said, yeah, we'll buy it, a couple weeks later they said, we'll publish it. And they said, well, maybe 20,000 if we're lucky. And we said, our goal is to sell 1.5 million in a year and a half. Now, have you ever told someone your dream and had them laugh out loud at you? He laughed out loud. Now, if we had given up after 100 publishers had said no, I wouldn't be standing here today. You know, wouldn't have happened. And so you've got to be willing to persevere. Because we didn't take no— see, when the world says no, you say next. Let's practice that. If I say no, you say yes. Absolutely. There's only 5 or 6 billion people out there you can go and ask, right? There's over 4,000 publishers just here in the state of California. So what we have is this endless possibility, but you have to persevere. It's as if the universe tests our commitment. And so today we have 147 titles in print. We sold over 115 million copies. Copies were in 47 languages, and over $1 billion worth of Chicken Soup for the Soul books have been sold worldwide. So if you're willing to decide what you want, believe it's possible, consciously envision the future, feel the feelings of what it would feel like if you'd achieved this goal, you can have anything, and then you take action, both obvious actions and inspired actions, you can do anything. One of the functions of belief is taking action. We did a survey of about 2,000 top entrepreneurs, and we noticed that one of the things that people who win in that world have is a bias for action. If they have an inspiration, they act on it. I mean, how many of you have ever had a great idea, talked about it, thought about it, didn't do it, and then someone else did it and was successful, and you went, darn, I should have done that? Maybe it was buy that piece of property. You know, all that— we all have that piece of property we wish we'd bought, you know. Anyway, so we're going to be looking at the idea that taking action is part of law of attraction. See, a lot of people think you can just sit in your room Meditate, visualize having the perfect car, the perfect house, the perfect relationship, and then it'll kind of just come to you. And I always say, unless you live at the bottom of a hill where there's a road, it's probably not going to be a Cadillac show up in your living room, right? So think about this. The last 6 letters of the word attraction spell what? A-C-T-I-O-N. Action. Now there's 2 kinds of actions that are critical. There's obvious action. If you want a certain kind of car, you should go down and test drive it. You should find out how much it costs. You should see what it costs to maintain it. You should go, you know, spend— I like to test drive a car 3 or 4 times, go down to the dealer, take a camera, stick my head out the window, say, "Take a picture of me. I'll be back to buy it." You know? Put it up on my refrigerator, look at it every day. Eventually, you know, those kind of things produce car, right? Saving for it and so forth. But there are also things called inspired actions. All of a sudden you get an inspiration to do something and you didn't know what it was. You don't have the sense of like, "How is this rationally gonna make sense for me to move forward in my life?" I'll give you an example. A friend of mine, Dr. Ignatius Piazza, graduates chiropractic school. He wants to move to Monterey near Pebble Beach where the golf course is. And he gets there and he says to the local chiropractic association, "I'd like to join you. I'd like you to help me get my practice started." And they said, "We don't need any more chiropractors." We have 1 chiropractor for every 8 people in this area. It's too many. Now he could have said, okay, let the external reality control his internal experience, but he didn't do that. He said, I'm going to think about this and visualize it and believe in it and something will come that I will do. And what came to him to do was to take 6 months before he opened his office and put a pin where he wanted his office and then concentric circles, knock on every door in every neighborhood saying, hi, I'm a new doctor in town, could I ask you a few questions? You know, I'm starting this practice. Should I open from 5 till 9 in the morning, or should I be open from 5 until 9 at night for people who have 9-to-5 jobs? Which would be better? Should I advertise in this paper or that paper? Should I call it Ignatius Piazza Chiropractic or Chiropractic West? Then his last question was, if I have an open house, would you like to receive an invitation? They said yes. He wrote it down. Now, over 6 months, he knocked on 12,500 doors, talked to 6,500 people, and gathered over 4,000 names of people who said, "Yes, I'd like an invitation to your open house." Now when he opened his office 6 months later in a town that did not need another chiropractor according to the professionals, his first month in practice he netted $72,000. In his first year in practice, his gross income was over $1 million. I was giving a talk and mentioned this story just about 5 years ago, and this happened about 25 years ago. Someone said, "He knocked on my door and he left his card, and 2 years later I needed the chiropractor and I called him." Because we work with people we know, we've had an experience with, right? So he trusted his intuition, he took action on it. Other people would say, "Oh, guess I can't have what I want." You got to be willing to take the action. If you're going to be successful in creating the life of your dreams, you have to believe that you are capable of making it happen. You have to believe that you have the right stuff and that you're able to pull it off. Now, whether you call it self-esteem, self-confidence, or self-assurance, it's a deep-seated belief that you have what it takes, the abilities, the inner resources, the talents, and the skills to create your desired results. Now, believing in yourself is simply an attitude. Believing in yourself is a choice. You have to choose to believe that you can do anything you set your mind to. Anything at all, because in fact you can. It might help you to know that the latest brain research now indicates with enough positive self-talk and positive visualization combined with proper training, coaching, and practice, anyone can learn to do almost anything. Now, I've interviewed thousands of successful people, and almost every one of them has told me, I was not the most gifted or the most talented person in my field, but I chose to believe that anything was possible. And because of that, I studied, I practiced, and I worked harder than the others, and that's how I got to where I am. You know, if Ruben Gonzalez, a 20-year-old living in Texas, hot Texas, can take up the luge, which is a winter sport, and become an Olympic athlete, if Bill Gates, who was a college dropout, can become a multi-billionaire, and Stephen J. Cannell, who was a dyslexic student who failed 3 grades in school, can become a bestselling author and a television producer, then you too can accomplish anything if you'll simply believe it's possible. So make the decision right now to believe that you create all of your experiences because you do. Let's start creating the ones you want by believing you can. Sounds a little strange, but accepting this level of responsibility is uniquely and inevitably empowering. It means you can do change, and become anything at all. You may think that something as small as being optimistic won't change much about your life. Have you ever heard this line? "Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean the world isn't out to get me." Now that may be a joke, but many people believe the deck is stacked against them. People who are reverse paranoids, otherwise known as optimists, use the same consistent thinking, but they believe that the world is plotting to do them good. Everything that happens is pushing them in the right direction. This attitude breeds more good thoughts, so why not practice to become a reverse paranoid? Start seeing obstacles as opportunities to grow and change. When your presentation doesn't get the sale, see it as an opportunity to create a better presentation and become better at your job. See the task that gives you some power to change rather than the failure that makes you feel powerless. Look for the seed of something better when everything is going wrong. Almost everyone sees getting laid off as a bad thing. But even if you want your job to be over, the end always feels sad and uninspiring. The end of one job, however, always holds the promise of the new beginning of the next job. If you look at it that way, you're focusing on what a reverse paranoid thinks about. Identify the great benefit in every event. Soon you'll start to see that good is not an accident, but something you create with your attitudes. Walk through your home, your business, your apartment, your condo, anything you're in charge of, and make a list of all the things that aren't exactly the way you want it. There's never a stapler by the Xerox machine. Someone always leaves that cabinet open. My kid never picks up after himself. Those pictures are always slanted, they never stay straight. The screen door slams, there's a hole in the window. You know, whatever it is, write it down. And then go back, and here's the key part. Remember in law of attraction, we always focus on what you want, not what you don't want. You don't want to be going, I don't want a man who smokes. I don't want a man who watches TV all weekend. I don't want a man who, you know, 'cause that's what you're gonna get. 'Cause what you focus on is what you attract. So you want to focus on the opposite. So what you want to focus on is the opposite of your irritation list. There'll always be a stapler by the Xerox machine. We solved it in our office with a little chain and some glue. It doesn't leave, okay? But the key is there's always solutions. The pictures that won't stay straight, Velcro right to the wall on the bottom. It works, you know? But the point is you want to get a list of what's the outcome you want, and then take a day, hire a person or bring a friend over and go through the list and get as many done as you can. You know, all the easy ones. Build some momentum. Clean the garage, develop a new filing system, that might be something you, you know, set off to another weekend. And we say all the big ones that are really big, do one a quarter. Every 3 months, solve one of those. Now you're getting rid of all the stuff in your life, and why is this so important? We're talking mostly about being wealthy, having great relationships, great health, world peace, ending hunger, and you're talking about the screen door. When you don't fix the screen door, you settle. And when you settle consistently, you develop a habit of settling for what you don't want. And most people go through life in resignation. They have resigned themselves to not having it the way they want it. It's take no less than 100% responsibility for your life. You know, one of the greatest myths that's pervasive in our culture today is that you're entitled to a great life and that somehow, somewhere, someone is responsible for filling our lives with continual happiness and exciting career options, a nurturing family, and blissful personal relationships simply because we exist. But the real truth is that there's only one person responsible for the quality of your life, and that person is you. You see, everything about you is a result of your doing or not doing. Your income, your debt, your relationships, your health, your fitness level, your attitudes and behaviors. Everything. That person you see when you look in the mirror is the chief architect in your life. You know, I think everybody knows this in their heart of hearts, but the mind can play games, tricking us into thinking that there are external factors that are the source of our failures, our disappointments, and our unhappiness. But the truth of the matter is that external factors don't determine how you live. You You and only you are in complete control of the quality of your life experience. Successful people take full responsibility for the thoughts they think, the images they visualize, and the actions they take. They don't waste their time and energy on blaming and complaining. They evaluate their experiences and decide if they need to change them or not. They face the uncomfortable and they take risks in order to create the life that they want to live. How many of you have ever complained in your life? Yeah. You know, here's what I've learned about complaining. In order to complain, I have to have a reference point of something better that I want that I'm not willing to risk creating. Now let me explain that again. I have to have a reference point in my mind of something I want that's better than what I have that I'm not willing to risk creating. So what I do is complain about it instead. See, if I was complaining about my wife, it would mean that I would have to believe that somewhere out there in the world there's a better woman than my wife. See, if every woman on the planet died except my wife, do you think I'd go to work the next day and complain about her? No. She's the only one. And I'd be going, hey, and I got her. This is really cool, right? Do you ever hear anyone complain about gravity? Very rarely. Gravity makes us all bend over. Do you ever see an old person walking down the street going, gravity? They have a little walker. I hate gravity. If it weren't for gravity, I wouldn't be all bent over like this. Gravity sucks. Now, have you ever heard an older person doing it? No. The reason they don't complain about gravity is because there's no alternative to it. You know, gravity just is. So if someone's complaining about something, it means they know there's something they can do about it, because we don't complain about the things we can't change. So as soon as you hear yourself complaining, I want you to stop and say, okay, what would I rather have? Remember, law of attraction always says focus on what you want, not what you don't want. Because when you're talking about what you don't want, when you're complaining and blaming, you're focusing on that which you don't want, and you're accelerating its expression out into the universe with those negative feelings. And yet we'll spend a majority of our time complaining about so many things. And usually we complain about them to people who can't do anything about it. Make a list of 101 things you want to achieve before you die. Now, I was sharing this with someone last night. They said, God, that just seems like a really big task. I'm a single mom. I don't have any time. When am I going to do that? We know that one of the things about high achievers, they all have goals. Only 10% of Americans set goals every year. 10%. I can go to sales conferences, people that are, that learn this stuff, hear it over and over. How many? 10%. We also know the same 3 to 10% control 90% of the resources of the world. So literally, without goals, you're directionless. You will be used. See, people without goals get used by other people who have them. People that don't have goals work for people who do. And so you want to be someone who picks up and gets clear about what you want. Make a list, 101 goals. I want to go to Paris, I want to, you know, skydive, I want to bungee cord jump, I want to play the guitar, I want to learn to juggle, I want to learn 2 magic tricks for the kids, I want to go to the Olympics in Beijing. Whatever it is, make the list. And you'll see there's a lot of stuff under there that you've kind of put down that you want, and you can have anything you want. If you want to know how to decide if a career opportunity is a good one, there are several things you have to take into consideration. Number 1, does it make your heart sing? The number one feedback system that you were given at birth is joy. If you're not experiencing joy as you, as you think about doing something and as you pursue doing it, then it's off course for you. You also want to put your rational mind to work. You want to do some due diligence. Ask other people who've gone down that road before. What was it like? What did they have to do? What were some of the costs of that path? What were some of the payoffs and the benefits? And really get a sense of what it would be like to do that. Sometimes you can go and do an internship or you can work for a friend in their restaurant just to see if you like it, because often the fantasy doesn't match the reality. And the other thing is to simply trust yourself. You know deep inside what's true for you. And if you'll take a few minutes and go inside, we call it meditation, and just ask and sit with the question and see what kind of feelings come up. Does this feel right? So do all the rational research, but then ultimately bring it back into your heart and decide Does this feel good for me? And if it makes sense up here and it feels good, then step into it. Just lean into it and see what happens. Pursue it. No decision is forever. You can always change if it's not what you want. When you're a kid, you have an impulse to act, you act. You want to touch the cat, you want to throw the cat out the window. You want to stick your hand into the VCR and put peanut butter in there, you do. The problem is, as we're growing up, we get conditioned by our parents and our caretakers and our siblings and our teachers and coaches and nuns and all these different people that come into our life. Don't do that. Stop. That's bad. You know, we get slapped and told we're not okay. And so after a while, when we go to do something, we're looking, so is it okay if I do this? You know, instead of just doing it. All my sons and my stepson and my stepdaughter have been great risk-takers. They're, they're all artists. One's a drummer, one's a a hip-hop singer. One is a— he's in high school, but he's in the school play. He just had a lead in the school play, so he sings. And then my daughter's a singer, and my other son is very athletic. He's a surfer. He snowboards as well. And he's always inventing games and trying out new things. Always on the edge, you know, always coming in with cuts and scrapes, which I love because they're out there on the edge of their potential, exploring how they can and keep pushing it. And it's not that they never get scared or they never feel rejected and have to go through things, but they seem to rebound very quickly.

Thank you guys so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed. I made this video because Nirup Malkani asked me to. So if there's a famous entrepreneur you want me to profile next, leave it in the comments below and I'll see what I can do. I'd also love to know which of Jack's 10 messages had the biggest impact on you and why, what change you're gonna make in your life or business. After watching this video, leave it in the comments and I will join the discussion. Also, if you see some of the quotes that people have left from Jack from these clips and you really resonate with them, make sure to give them a thumbs up and show some love. Finally, I want to give a quick shout out to Farbod from pawcharge.com. Farbod, thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book. It really means a lot to me. For those of you watching, if you want your chains out of shadow in a future video, make sure to grab a copy of the book and then email in your receipt so we can keep track. Thank you guys so much for watching. Continue to believe, or whatever your one word is, and I'll see you soon.

The other thing, a friend of mine just wrote a book called The Fear Cure, and— or The Cure for Fear, one of those. And she talked about one of the biggest fears is of the unknown and uncertainty of the future. But everything's uncertain. We're trying to create certainty in an uncertain world and stop being afraid of uncertainty. Uncertainty is what's exciting. If you go to Africa on a vacation, a safari, you have no idea what's gonna happen. That's part of the adventure. It's fun. That's part of the fun, exactly. If you knew, oh, there's gonna be a zebra that pops out right here, this is gonna be next, it might get boring, right? Or if you go river rafting, you don't know where the rapids are and how you're gonna do it. And if you go surfing, you don't know exactly how the wave's gonna break and all that and how big it's gonna be. So that adventure, is really what life's about. And so we need to be excited. Fear is created by imagining bad things that haven't happened yet. So fantasized experiences appearing real, everyone always says that. Someone else recently said, forget everything and run. But I think that if you realize that you're creating your own fear by imagining a bad thing, oh, if there's a recession, I'll lose my house. Why not go, if there was a recession, I'm gonna make more money 'cause there's gonna be opportunities and we're gonna be able to pay our house off Faster. Zig Ziglar said worrying is negative goal setting, and all you have to do is use that same power to think and visualize to create a positive outcome instead of a negative, and then the fear disappears. Let's look at this idea of specificity for a minute. Like a winter home in Hawaii, very nice. But if I say I will own a 2-bedroom beachfront villa on the west coast of Maui, Hawaii, by June 1st, 2003. Does that sound a little more clear? Yeah. And until you get specific like that, the creative part of your brain won't jump in and decide how to help you get there. And that's why a lot of people never get their dreams, because they don't make them specific enough. You gotta get real nitty-gritty, break it down. How much by when? I want a better relationship with my husband. Well, what does that mean? But if I say, "I want to spend an hour a week sitting opposite my husband talking about real things that matter, no TV on, eye-to-eye communication." Now that we can measure. Did you do it for an hour? "Want to have more fun." What does that mean? But what if I say, "I'm going to listen to comedy albums twice a week for a minimum of an hour." You're probably going to have more fun. So make it specific. It's not real. Some people say, you know, I want our business to increase. Well, how much? By when? I want the reading scores to go up in a school. How much? By when? Until you have that, you're not going to make progress. And so many people's dreams never get completed because they're not clear about the specific number of how much by when. I told you earlier in the program, we said we're going to sell 1.5 million books in a year and a half, and that directed our behavior. Recently we just said we're going to sell 1 million books in one day. We had 101 bookstores involved in a book signing. We're going to try to be in the Guinness Book of World Records for the largest book signing ever done. Now, I don't think we sold a million books. Maybe we sold a couple hundred thousand. But by holding that question and trying to figure out how to do it, it moved us toward that goal. Now, maybe it'll take us 2 years to figure out how to sell a million books in one day, but it gets the thinking to expand out into that arena. Is this making sense? Okay. So you want to have those goals. Now, the other thing you want to do is break your goals down. Many of you have big goals. End hunger in the world. That's a pretty big goal. You know, have world peace. Achieve a certain level of spiritual oneness with God or life. Big goals. When you first look at it, it's kind of overwhelming. But what if we were to break that down into little steps? It says, okay, I want to go to college and get a PhD. Gosh, I'm only a high school student. But the next step would be finish the math class, get an A in this, write for a brochure from a college, get a catalog, pick 1 or 5 colleges that I want to apply to. You know, just keep breaking it down to little steps and then figure out how to get all those steps done and put a date by each step and then start doing the plan. Someone said if you fail to plan, you're planning to fail. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. Someone, one of my friends said Success by the yard is hard, by the inch it's a cinch. We just break it down into small pieces. I was reading the Guinness Book of World Records because we were thinking about being in there, and this guy set a goal to eat an entire bicycle, tires and all. Now, how do you do that, right? Well, it took him 17 days, but what he did is he kept cutting the bicycle up and then melting it down into little little swallowable pieces, and he ate them. I don't know how much stayed in, but he ate them, right? But the point being, anything can be done if you break it down small enough. Make sense? So don't let the bigness of a goal overwhelm you. Now, I was over in Bangkok. How many of you have been to Bangkok, Thailand? How many of you have seen the Golden Buddha? It's one of the 3 tourist attractions. You always see the Jade Buddha, the Golden Buddha, and the Reclining Buddha, and that kind of thing. And this Buddha is 10.5 feet tall. Of solid gold. The gold value alone is about $196 million. That doesn't even count the artistic and the historical value. And when my wife was taking that picture, I was over next to the— I'd say about 5 feet away. There was a big glass case, and in that case there was a piece of clay about a foot wide, 2 feet tall, 2 feet thick. And it said that in 1953 they did not know there was such a thing as a Golden Buddha. They were moving this large clay Buddha from one side of Bangkok to the other to make room for a road that was coming through. And as they picked up the Buddha with the crane, because it was very heavy, a big crack went down through it. And as the crack went down through it, the head monk got scared and he lowered the Buddha down. And he said, you know, we better take a look at it and see if we've done any damage to it. And it started to rain, so they put a canvas over it to keep it dry. That night the monk came out and he shined a flashlight in to see if it was staying dry, and something reflected back from inside the crack. He said, "Clay does not reflect light. There must be something else in there." And so the next morning they chipped away in behind where they wouldn't see it if they made a mistake, and lo and behold, sure enough, was this golden Buddha. And their best theory is that 300 years earlier when the Burmese were attacking Thailand, the monks of this monastery covered up covered up the Golden Buddha with clay to make it look worthless so they wouldn't steal it. They also think all the monks were killed in a massacre and the secret died with the monks, and then they rediscovered it. The word discover means what? Take the COVID off of, discover something. It was always in there, but they took the COVID off. I was having dinner with my wife that night and she said, you know, Jack, that Buddha is like all the people in our seminars. They come in with this cover of clay of their negative beliefs, their self-doubt, their sense of guilt and shame, their beliefs that they're not enough, that they're not worthy, they don't deserve. And, and what we really do is we take the clay off so this golden essence can come and be there as who they are again, their true identity. It's not like we put anything in, it's just that we remove the things that are not there. I think I think Barbara talked a little about that earlier today. So as we go through this next hour and a half, think about and hold that metaphor, that image of the Buddha. And it could be the Golden Christ, the Golden Buddha, the Atman, the Source, whatever you want to call it. But that's who you really are. And although we do a lot of things of giving you more information and tools and all of that, really, if you were to stop doing the stuff that's negative, as Harv said, you've been defined when you came in, you were just fine. And what we did was we layered on all that stuff. If we could just start to remove that and realize that everything you need is in you now— you have everything you need to do everything you want to do. It's just that we've learned not to trust that.