Shelf Esteem | Jack Canfield

Have you ever read a book, underline a whole bunch of stuff in it, put it aside, maybe come back a year or two later, you pick that book up again, you start reading it and you realize you don't remember one thing that you underlined. We've all done that, you know. And when you do that, you end up with something I call shelf esteem. You got all these notes on the shelf of notes you took in seminars and things you've underlined in books, but you're not applying it. And so for me, what I realized early on was I had to go back and actually study and review and then apply what I learned. I read over 3,000 books in my life. I actually took a speed reading course in college and I decided I wanted to know a lot of stuff, I really wanted to learn a lot of stuff. And what I realized is I gone through a lot of those books, but I've been cleaning up my office and kind of decluttering and so forth. As I look in these books, I was, oh my God. And if I had to do it over again, I would have read fewer books and studied them more. My friend Darren Hardy, who's the publisher of Success magazine, said read less, study more. And I totally agree. Because what you want to do is you want to read something, underline the important parts to you, then go back, read, read them again, and then ask yourself, how can I apply this in my daily life? Because one idea applied is worth 20 ideas that you never apply. You just know the stuff, but you're not doing it. And so it's really critical. I remember at one point I had all these magazines and books stacked up in my bathroom, things on how to eat better, how to have an alkaline diet, you know, and another book would come in and I'd bring that book upstairs and I'd put it in the pile and wife say, would you quit reading all those books and actually do some of that stuff? And so it was my friend W. Clement Stone, who was my mentor way back when he was a 600 million dollar millionaire. He said read, assimilate, apply. And that's what he would do. He would read very few books, autobiographies of famous people, how to books and so forth. Then he would deciduously apply what he learned. And that's why he was able to amass a fortune of $600 million back in the 1970s. It'd be billion dollars worth of know capital today. And so I really want to encourage you to pick some few books. My friend Bob Proctor, every Single year will read Think and Grow Rich and the Science of Getting Rich by Wallace Wattles and Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. He reads it every January and sometimes he'll read it again in the middle of the year. Now he's been doing that for like 40 or 50 years. So he's really mastered those principles. So I really encourage you to do that. I always tell people when they buy the Success Principles book that I wrote, go through once fairly quickly, just read the whole book, then go back chapter by chapter. Take a chapter a week and really apply it. Apply E plus R equals O. Apply 100% responsibility to your life. Stop complaining, stop blaming, stop making excuses, and then really get clear is what is my purpose and then what is my vision for this year? What are the goals that I want to have? And then using affirmations and visualization, but actually practicing it, doing it. And if you, you know, creating a mastermind group. I know so many people who know that idea, but they're not applying it. So take the core books in your life, figure out what they are, the ones that have had the most impact on you, and ask yourself, am I fully living what's in that book? And if you're not, again, study it. You know, I tell people when they take my seminars like Breakthrough to Success and Train a Trainer Online and One Day to Greatness. Take your notes, review them the same day you took them. Here's some interesting research done at the University of Syracuse, I think it was, where, no, it was Cornell University where this professor was studying sleep, but he was also studying, what was it that separated the a students, the 4.0 students from the B and C students that weren't achieving as well. And what he found out was several things. Number one, they did take copious notes. Number two, they reviewed those notes the same day they took them before they went to bed. So their unconscious would review that through the night. And then they got a minimum of 8 hours sleep. Most people are not getting enough sleep. And so if you review things right before you go to bed, we know that your unconscious works on that and helps log it into long term memory through the amygdala in the back of the brain. Note the anyway, I forget the brain part, but you get the idea. There's a part of your brain which actually is tasked with taking things from short term memory to long term memory. And that review is really helpful. And then review those notes, review that chapter, review your underlines at least six times before you go on to the next thing. And then Start applying those things, it'll really make a huge difference in your life. You know, one of the things I also learned from me is I learn a lot from watching something like a TED Talk or a TEDx Talk. You may not be visual learner from reading, but maybe you're an auditory learner where you hear something. So someone told me just the other day they listened to the success principles audio every day in their car non stop for a year. And literally they could quote me chapter and burst of all those, all those principles because it was the review over and over and over. So I would encourage you to do that as well. And we've all heard this phrase, ready, fire, ready, aim, fire. Well, a lot of people are just aiming, aiming, aiming, aiming, aiming, aiming. And they're never, never firing. And so it's better to take something and apply it. Even if you don't do it perfectly, you're going to get feedback immediately to tell you if you did it well or how you could do it better. And so by applying the thing you learn and getting that immediate feedback, you're going to get better at it much quicker than if you're just thinking about it constantly and never doing that. You know, think about everything you do in the world as a first draft. A lot of people, they don't want to show their book to anybody because they're afraid of the feedback they're going to get. They don't want to put their idea out there because someone might judge it. Just think of it as a first draft. The first time we did Chicken Soup for the Soul, we wrote that book six times. So each was another draft, another draft, another draft, until we got it really good based on feedback. So if we'd been thinking about it and not doing anything about it and not getting the feedback, that book never would have come out and, and never done as well as it did. One of the things I know too, I used to teach people juggling in my workshops. Why did I do that? Because we would be doing seven day workshops back then and the first day they would drop the ball all over the place. The next day they would drop them again. But every night their brain was integrating what they'd learned. Ball went too high, threw it too far in front of me, threw it too far back of me, didn't reach up fast enough or reached up too high and there every day that integration in the brain was getting them to be better the next day. And by the end of, almost everyone was juggling perfectly with three balls. So basically, again, it's the application of the knowledge, not just the first learning of it. It's going to get you where you want to go. So practice, practice, practice what you're learning, apply it, and don't overdo it in terms of too much information. It's better to do the application of it, and you're going to find that you're going to be much more better off if you do that. So again, read less, study more. Hey, thanks for watching today. And if you like what you saw, make sure to like it, share it with a friend who may need it, and subscribe to my channel. If you'd like to receive more videos like this, and if you'd like more information about the topic we talked about today, go to my website@jackcampfield.com for some resources that you can use to apply even more of what you learned today. Thanks again for watching.