Short instructional talk by Jack Canfield introducing the 'Rule of Five' goal-setting technique: pick your top 1–3 goals and perform five focused actions per day toward them. He presents the anecdotal origin during the Chicken Soup for the Soul launch (using five daily 'axe swings') and reports the technique helped the books reach bestseller lists; directs viewers to his website for more information.
Chapters
Hi, I'm Jack Canfield, and I know a lot of you are setting goals right now for the new year, and you want to get them achieved. And research shows that most people make New Year's resolutions and they make all these goals, but they don't actually get them achieved. They don't manifest them. They don't come true. And so I want to teach you a technique that I think if you use, can actually change your life. It's called the Rule of Five. You know, when I started with the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, Mark Victor Hanson, my co author, and I, we were so amped up, we were almost like burning ourselves out. And we went to this very wise guy and we asked him for some advice. And he said it would be as if you went to a tree with a very sharp axe. And he said you would take five swings with that ax every day. He said even eventually the largest tree in the world would have to eventually come down. He said, that's how you have to approach this. And out of that, we created what we call the Rule of five, which is whatever your most important goals are, and you can't do this for everything, or you overwhelm yourself, but prioritize your goals. Pick the top one, two, or three, and then say, I'm going to do five things a day to make that dream, that goal, come true. And if you do that, you're going to find some magical results occur. Five things a day. We applied that to Chicken Soup for the Soul, and as a result of that, that first book made the bestseller list. We were on that list for over a year and a half, and eventually we had three books on the bestseller list at the same time, all from the Rule of Five. Now, if you'd like to know more about this technique and many others that I have to share with you, just go to my website, jackcampfield.com and I'll be glad to teach you everything I know to help you achieve everything you want.