First-person YouTube talk by Jack Canfield recounting three pivotal mentors—W. Clement Stone, Reverend Jesse Jackson, and psychologist Martha Crampton—and the lessons each taught him: 100% personal responsibility, disciplined time use and ambitious goal-setting (Stone); stage presence and inspirational public speaking (Jackson); and integrating spirituality with psychology, meditation, and visualization (Crampton). The talk includes concrete, hyper-specific examples (reduce TV by 1 hour/day = 365 hours/year; target income goals and outcomes) and ends with practical encouragements to seek mentors and engage with the channel/website for resources.
Questions this video answers
$600 million (in 1970).
365 hours per year.
140 extra months (about 11 years).
$100,000 in one year.
Went from about $8,000 a year to $92,325 that year.
Chapters
Hi there, I'm Jack Canfield, co creator of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series and the author of the Success Principles. And if you've been following me for any length of time, you know that I place a huge amount of value on finding and working with mentors who can help you achieve your goals and expand your sense of what's possible. And I credit a great deal of my success in life to the valuable lessons I've learned from my mentors. I'd like to talk about three of the people who, through their techniques and examples, played an instrumental role in helping me create the life that I enjoy today. My first mentor was a man named W. Clement Stone, who was a self made multimillionaire worth $600 million back in 1970 when I worked for him at his foundation in Chicago. Now Stone, as I said, was a self made multimillionaire who hired me to work at his foundation where he trained me in the fundamental success principles that I still operate from today. And my job was to teach these same principles to others. And so it's largely through him that I learned how to do the work I still do today of helping people achieve their dreams through the applications of the success Principles. Now, on my first day of work, he asked me three questions that changed my life. The first one was, do you take 100% responsibility for your life? I said, I think so. And then he said, this is a yes or no question, young man, you either do or you don't. And I said, well, in that case, I'm not sure. And he went on to ask me if I had ever blamed anyone for my life circumstances. And I said, yeah, I have. Then he said, then you don't take 100% responsibility for your life. He said, taking 100% responsibility for your life means that you acknowledge that you create everything that happens to you. He went on to teach me that I had to give up all blaming of people, all complaining about things and all excuse making if I wanted to be truly successful in life. He then asked me if I watched television, which he called the income reduction box, meaning that while I was watching television, I was not doing anything productive while I was watching other people on TV make millions of dollars. He asked me to reduce my TV watching by one hour a day, which would give me an additional 365 hours a year to read, to write, to exercise, or do anything else that would increase the quality of my life. He told me that dividing those 365 days by 40 hours, because there's 40 hours in a work week, I would gain an additional two and a half months of productive time in a year. Now, that has made a huge difference in my life. Think about this. In the 56 years since he told me that, that has added up to 140 extra months or 11 years of extra productivity, which equals more than 200 books which I've written, compiled, and edited, which has added tremendously to my success, my additional wealth, and my fulfillment. When I was in my early 20s, he challenged me to set a goal. And that was so far beyond my circumstances at the time that it would literally astound me and prove that his principles and techniques work if I achieved it. Now, it took me a few years to fully embrace this challenge and set what I felt was an outrageous goal at the time. But when I did, I set a goal to make $100,000 in one year. And using the principles he taught me, I went from making around $8,000 a year to making $92,325 that year. Now, I didn't hit my goal exactly that year, but I now knew the principles worked, and I did hit it the following year. And I've never made anything less than six figures since then. And as you may have also heard, I later set a goal to make $1 million in a year. And I did hit that and went way beyond it actually, that first year, making $6 million. Now, Mr. Stone also taught me to share my goals with everyone so people could help me achieve them. He also taught me about the importance of being in a mastermind group, taking action, responding to feedback, and the power of perseverance. Now, I only worked for Mr. Stone for a few years, but as you can see, Mr. Stone had a huge impact on the entire trajectory of my life. Now, another mentor of mine who also lives in Chicago was the Reverend Jesse Jackson. Now, I had originally come to Chicago to go to the Graduate School of Education at the University of Chicago with the intention of teaching history in high school. One Saturday morning, I met a fellow graduate student at the Laundromat, and he invited me to go to his church the following Sunday with him. I said yes, and it turned out to be the church where Jesse Jackson was the minister. Now, Reverend Jackson was a powerful and charismatic preacher, and I was mesmerized by his ability to move an audience to believe in themselves and to take action to better their lives and the lives of their community. He had such a persuasive way to inspire people and get them to believe that anything is possible. I returned to his Sunday Morning services again and again and again. To hear him speak and to learn from him. Watching him speak and seeing the effect he had over people really inspired me to work on my own stage presence and speaking skills, which I practiced in the high school classes I was teaching as part of my graduate program. I wanted to have the same kind of motivational impact on people as Reverend Jackson had. Now, apparently, it worked. As I can remember students who were suspended from school for several weeks, who would sneak into school just to attend my class and then sneak back out of school that same day. Now, interestingly, a few years ago, when I returned home from a speaking trip, I opened my suitcase and found a note in it that said, if you're the same Mr. Canfield that taught at Calumet High School, I want you to know that you've changed my life. You see, I had flown through o' Hare Airport in Chicago, and evidently he worked in the baggage claim area and had seen my name tag on my luggage and decided to insert that note. This was almost 50 years after I had taught there. Now, Jesse Jackson also taught me that it doesn't matter where you start out from. Anything is possible. And he inspired me to teach that lesson to others as well, starting with my inner city African American high school students, and later with adults all around the world. Now, my third most important mentor was a psychologist named Martha Crampton. I started working with Martha while I was a doctoral student at the University of Massachusetts. When I moved to Amherst, Massachusetts, after I left Chicago, Martha was training people how to use psychosynthesis, which is a transformational approach to personal development, spiritual growth, and self actualization. Martha's work introduced me to the idea that spirituality and psychology could be integrated together and that the personal fulfillment that we all want requires a spiritual evolution as well as career, financial, and personal success. Now, working with Martha is what set me on the path to discovering my true life purpose and to realizing that success was aligning with and fulfilling your soul's purpose. She also taught me the importance of meditation and the power of guided visualization, how to access and trust my intuition and follow my inner guidance. I spent many years studying with her and being mentored by her. I'm so glad I did because she added a depth to my life that I might never have discovered otherwise. Now, while there have been other people who have been valuable mentors over the course of my life, these are three of the most important ones. I hope that by sharing these stories with you, you'll have a better sense of who I am and how I got here and that you'll be inspired to have the courage to reach out to the people that you would love to learn more from and be guided by. Because as you go through life and work on achieving your goals and creating the life you want, I want to strongly encourage you to be on the lookout for people who have the skills, the wisdom and the expertise that will expand your belief in what's possible and give you the insights and the wisdom gained from their experience that you will need to accomplish your goals. And when you become aware of who they are, I want to encourage you, do whatever it takes to put yourself in their presence. Read their books, attend their lectures, watch their videos, listen to their podcasts, take their workshops and courses and programs, volunteer to intern with them, go to work for them and assist in their trainings. Do whatever it takes. Take the risk to reach out to them and ask them to support you on your journey. It will be well worth it, I promise you. All right, well, that's it for today, and thanks for watching. And now what I'd love you to do is to identify maybe one mentor you've had in your life who's helped you or taught you a very powerful lesson. Then take a moment to share one of the things that your mentor taught you in the comments below. Here's your chance to pay it forward and share what you've learned with others. And if you found this video helpful, please take a moment to like it, share it with a friend who may need it. Then make sure to subscribe to this channel for more videos like this one. And for some additional tools and videos on how to accelerate the achievement of your goals in your life, check out the resource page on my website@jackcampfield.com plenty of great free resources for you there. Thanks again for watching. Have a great day.
