Jack Canfield Commencement Speaker - Kaplan University 2012 Summer Graduation

You know, when the rest of the world was keeping up with the Kardashians, you were keeping up with your studies, right? When they were online to see a movie, you were online studying a course. When they had their face buried in a, you know, pillow at night, you had your face buried in a book. So you were out there doing what you had to do, sacrificing, making choices that allowed you to get off where you are now. And today is a commencement. It's not an endement, it's a commencement. Commence means to begin. You are about to go off into the rest of your life. This is the first day of the rest of your life and some wonderful things have happened for you here. You have developed some amazing qualities. I'm going to suggest to you that more important than anything you learned in a book or online, in a course or in a lab or in a practicum, you learned some powerful qualities. You learned how to focus, you learned how to persevere. You learned how to keep on going when the going was tough. You've developed resilience. You had to be creative to balance your time. Your master's now at time management, you know so many things that you had to balance. And the one thing that I want to suggest you've developed more than anything else is what we call deferred gratification. Which means you are willing to put off the gratification of now for a greater gratification of something in the future. There's a book which I recommend you all read sometime. It's called Don't Eat that Marshmallow Yet. And what it comes from was a study that was done in the 1960s at Stanford at the Bing Elementary School, where they took four year olds into a room and they put them in front of a plate and on that plate was one marshmallow. And the researcher said, I'm going to leave the room and I'm going to come back. And if you haven't eaten that marshmallow, I'll give you two. Now imagine you're four years old. There's a marshmallow, it's right in front of you. It's juicy, it's sugary, you know what it tastes like. And this person leaves for 15 minutes. Do you know only 30% of the kids were able to not eat the marshmallow? Only 30% of Americans ever graduate from college. Isn't that an interesting statistic? And so you have passed the marshmallow test. You know, when I got the idea to do Chicken Soup for the Soul, I Had two staff people quit over it. We were a corporate training company at the time. They're going Chicken Soup for the Soul. We're going to get into IBM and Xerox with that being. Couldn't you do like the eighth habit of a highly successful person? I said, no, I'm doing this. And I worked on that book. I had a full time job. I was running around doing trainings. And every night from 10 until midnight my wife would go to bed at 10. You can set your clock by my wife. If it's 10:01, she's doing this. And so I would work from 10 until midnight and sometimes 1 in the morning. I did that for a year. My goal was two stories every week at the end of a year and I had 100 stories. Chicken soup for the Soul. We took that book to New York to get it sold to a publisher and we had 22 publishers. Turn it down. People don't read short stories. It's a stupid title. It's not edgy. There's no sex in it. No one's going to read this book. Our agent gave it back to us and then we took the book and we actually came to Chicago to the American Booksellers association convention which happened right here in this conference center, the McCormick Place. And we went from booth to booth to booth to booth to booth to booth to booth of acquisition editors from publishing companies. 144 no's. 144 no's. Took us 18 months to find a publisher. Now that book, which nobody wanted. And our publisher, when we said, do you think, you know, we'll sell a lot of books? He said, well, maybe, maybe 20,000. We said, that's not our dream. He said, what's your dream? We said, we want to sell 150,000 by Christmas. Book came out in July right about now. And we want to sell a million and a half in a year and a half. Now how many of you can remember telling your dream to somebody and having them laugh out loud at you? Did any of you have that experience? Yeah, our publisher laughed out loud. He said, you guys are crazy. We said, we know. We're also entrepreneurial. We're dream builders. We believe we can do it. That book sold 1.3 million copies in one and a half years. And it went on to sell 10 million copies in 47 languages and spawned a series that now has 225 titles in 47 languages around the world. And I tell that not to impress you about me, but to impress upon you something you already know, but I don't want you to ever forget. You never give up. We didn't give up. It made all the difference in my life. And you haven't given up. And don't think today is the last day. I remember when I was leaving Harvard with my diploma going, I'm never writing another paper. I've never taken another test. This has never happened again. And then I got a master's degree and a second master's degree and then I wrote 225 books. But it's great. Celebrate, have fun, take some time off. Enjoy it. You earned it. Get a massage, whatever. However, there's going to be a time when you got to dig back in and remember what you've learned here. You can overcome any obstacle, have any dream that you want to have in your life. So where do you go from here, by the way? When I left college, I was in the half of the class that made the top half possible. You got that? Do you know what they call the guy or gal who graduates bottom of their class at medical school? They call him Doctor. Right. So wherever you were, whatever your grade point average is, you are now a gradu. Little Jackie Canfield from Wheeling, West Virginia, who got a scholarship to go to Harvard and was totally freaked out when I got there because people were using words I had never heard before. These were students, not even professors. They'd gone to Ivy League prep schools and so on and so forth. And my freshman year and freshman composition, My average was C +. I go, can I have a B minus minus minus, minus minus minus. And now I get invited back as a celebrated author to speak to the writing classes at Harvard. So wherever you are, just, you know, it goes up from here if you choose to take it up. You know, I have been on every major talk show. I have spoken to presidents, I've eaten at the White House. I've had every honor you can possibly have in the world. And no one would have ever predicted that. So wherever you're sitting today, this is kind of a. You now have a visa to go into a whole other world that you might not have had before. And I want to help you or, you know, encourage you to dream big. Now, Sergeant Major here, wonderful guy. We talked coming in. He's been in embassies all over the world. He's trained people in Quantico and so forth. And one of my favorite people is also a military person. I met General Wesley Clark. He was the head of the Allied. He was the head of Allied Command for all the NATO troops in Europe. And I met him here in Chicago in the Peninsula Hotel when I was receiving an award for being an outstanding American. Little Jackie Camfield. And I was in a room with Desmond Tutu and Jane Goodall and President Clinton and Hamid Karzai and Shimon Peres and all these world leaders that had come together. And General Wesley Clark said something I'll never forget. He said, it doesn't take any more effort to dream a big dream than it takes to dream a small dream. I want you to think about as you leave here today. You've accomplished one dream, but now it's called what's next? And it's going to be a progression of next, next, next, next, next, next, next. How big the dream is is how big you determine it is. Doesn't take any more time, doesn't take any more effort when you're dreaming to dream 10 times bigger, 5 times bigger. Why not? It's up to you. You can do it, you know, I want you to leave here and sometime in the next week or two, if you haven't taken time. We've all seen the movie with Morgan Freeman, the Bucket List. Remember that? And he made a list of all the things he wanted to do before he died, but he didn't make that list until he found out he had a terminal illness. Now, we all have a terminal illness. It's called life. We're all going to die, right? However, at whatever stage you're at, I want you to make that list. Make it now. What do you want to accomplish? I made a list when I was 43 years old, had 114 things on a list. I've accomplished over 70 of them. Big things, you know, visit the Great Wall of China, eat dinner at the White House with the President and so on. Make your list, make it big. Don't worry about what's possible. Worry about what you want, what's going to make you come alive, what's going to make your life look back and go, whoa, that was a life I saw. I wasn't in Israel, but someone sent me a picture, and it said, when you die, will your life be worth making a movie about? You know, would it be worth making a movie about? Would it be so extraordinary, so amazing, you have a choice? Do that. Lou Holtz, who was a coach at Notre Dame, made a bucket list, wrote down 105 things because he just lost his job as a coach at University of South Carolina. His coach got fired. He was the assistant coach, and his wife gave Him a book called the Magic of Thinking Big. Wow. The Magic of Thinking Big. And he read the book, and then it said, make A list of 101 things you want to achieve before you die. So he made a list. He had 105 things. His wife comes home and he says, did you read the book? He says, yeah, because his wife had bought him the book and she'd have to go back to work to be a radiologist. And he was kind of embarrassed by that because they had children. But anyway, he read the book and he wrote down 105 things that he wanted to do. 106, whatever it was. And so she said, did you read it? He said, yeah. What'd you write down? He said, well, I want to take a river raft down the Snake River. I want to land a plane on the aircraft carrier. I want to go underwater in a submarine. I want to meet the President. I want to meet the Pope, because he was Catholic. I want to win a national football championship. Now, when I heard Lou tell this story just a couple of years ago to a group of Catholic CEOs at a meeting that was down in Florida that I attended, he said, I've achieved 102 of the things that were on my list. Now, when he showed the wife his list to the wife and he read the list, she said, lou, write down one more thing. He said, what's that? Said write down 107 and put this next to it. Wrote down 177. Find a job. And I know for many of you, that's going to be on your list as you leave here. I was coming down in the elevator with the man today, beautiful man. And he was talking about being in the criminal justice program, and he's worked in all these Fortune 500 companies in security. And I said, well, what's your dream job? What do you want to do if you could do anything? And he told me, so ask yourself, what is your dream job? Not what you're settled for job. What you can get by with job. But you have the ability to go out and find your dream job. Some of you may already be in it, some of you may already have landed it, but whatever it is, go for it. Tell you a quick story that might inspire you a little bit about what's possible. Ignatius Piazza graduates from chiropractic college. Parker. Chiropractic College down in Texas. And he. Someone's from Texas. Okay, good. Or someone has a last name. Parker. Who knows? And so anyway, he graduates and he decides he wants to live near pebble beach up in Monterey, California area. And he wants to be a chiropractor. So he goes to the local chiropractic association and says, can you help me, you know, get established here? I want to start a practice. He said, no, don't come here. We have one chiropractor for every eight people. Go away. He said, no, I want to live here. What he did was, with no support from any of the professional community, took a map, put a pin where he wanted his office to be. And for six months he did the following thing. He went and he knocked on doors of houses saying, hi, I'm a new doctor in town. I wonder if I could ask you a few questions. You know, I'm thinking of opening this practice. I'm wondering if I should keep it open from 7 until 9 in the morning or from 5 until 7 in the afternoon for people who have 9 to 5 jobs. Do you think I should call it Ignatia Piazza Chiropractic? Or should I call it Chiropractic West? Should I advertise in this paper or that paper? And he asked a number of questions. He said, and when we open, if I have an open house, would you like to receive an invitation? And if they said yes, he wrote their name down. Now, this was a town where they didn't need a new chiropractor. Six months he knocked on 12,500 doors, talked to 6,500 people, had a gun pulled on him once because his name is Piazza, he's Italian. They thought he was a hitman coming to kill her father. Spent a whole day on a porch with a pit bull growling at him, you know, worried about that. Anyway, when he opened his practice six months later, in his first month of practice, he made $72,000. He went on that year to make over $1 million. Many years later, sold his practice for multiple tens of millions of dollars because he'd opened up offices in five other cities. Taking people out of chiropractic school and getting them set up. So no matter what anyone tells you, there are going to be naysayers out there. You can't do that. It's never been done. BS.