Jack Canfield talks about growing up in Texas and West Virginia with an abusive father and alcoholic mother, and how those experiences shaped his empathy. He explains the origins of Chicken Soup for the Soul and describes success as knowing the combination to a lock, something he's researched for decades.
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Well, I. I think what most people don't know about me is I was born in a really lower middle class family and born in Texas. My dad was in the Air Force. And so I lived in five states by the time I was six and have very little memory of it. But we settled in Wheeling, West Virginia, where I grew up primarily. And my father was somewhat abusive and so my mother divorced him and I got a stepfather who really raised me from the time I was about 6 until graduated high school. And I was a typical middle class by then suburban kid in West Virginia, except for the fact that my mother was an alcoholic and my father was a workaholic and sometimes drank as well. So it created a lot of compassion and empathy for me because I'm very, what's called hyper vigilant. I notice every little thing because I had to to survive in those families. And also I think I have a huge sensitivity to pain. And that was really how I got started the Chicken Soup for the Soul, which really catapulted my career. Those came about when one of my students, some lecture I was giving, said, you know that story about the puppy you just told? And I said, yeah. Is that in the book anywhere? I said, no. And she said, well, it needs to be. I said, why is that? My daughter needs to read that story. Well, just tell her the story. I can't remember. I needed to see it in the book. 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, 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 hip hop singer, one is in high school, but he's in the school play. Just had to leave the school plays. 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 keep pushing it. 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. Every one of us knows what we want. We can feel it. I'll just tell people, if you could have anything you want, there were no limitations. What would you do? And everyone has an answer. Little kids, big adults, and that's their core essence. And if we all just fully do that which we're passionate about and understand the principles for how to bring that into being, then I believe the world will work perfectly. That's why I do what I do. Thank you. Thank you very much. Well, it's a pleasure to be here and to share these ideas with you and really help you take your life to the next level, which is what we all want to do. We wouldn't come out to these kind of events. I'm going to start by sharing with you a number of very important critical ideas. And the first one is this one. There's a friend of mine, his name is Orin Hudson, and he was the Alabama State chess champion. And he grew up in the ghettos of Birmingham and became a chess champion. Then he was the number one Cadillac dealer and became a professional speaker. And I was talking to him. We were having lunch together down in New Orleans, and it was at a professional speakers convention. And we were talking about my new book, the Success Principles. It was about to come out. And he said, you know, to me, success is like knowing the combination to a lock. He said, if you know the combination to a lock, it doesn't matter if you're male or female, white or black, Hispanic or Asian, you're 55 or you're 16, your IQ is 150 or your IQ is 93. If you know the combination, the lock has to open. And the problem is, most of us are going through life and we don't know the combination. We maybe have three of the four numbers we need, but we don't have them all. And so the idea is that what I'm about, what I've spent 30 years of my life doing, was researching what is the combination to the lock.
