Why Everything You Believe Matters | Jack Canfield

Hi, I'm Jack Canfield and welcome to this week's video. If you're going to be successful in creating the life of your dreams, you have to believe that you're capable of making it happen. You have to believe that you have all of the right stuff to pull it off. Now, whether you call it self concept, self esteem, self confidence, or self assurance, your beliefs about yourself are so powerful. Now, I pulled this video from my success archives because I wanted to share some of these powerful stories of people.

Who did believe in.

It's never been seen on my YouTube channel before and I hope you enjoy it.

Now. The second principle of the law of attraction is believe. So we've got ask, believe, receive. Let's talk about believe for a minute. Believe means I have no doubts. I remember talking to Pete Rose, the baseball player, and I asked him, when you go up to bat, how often do you expect to get a hit? Now, in baseball, if you hit three out of 10, you're batting.300. That's pretty good, right? He said, every single time I expect to get a hit. He said, if I didn't expect to get a hit, I shouldn't be up there, right? So expectation and no doubt and belief is critical. And I'm going to suggest to you a term that you think about for your life called become an inverse paranoid. Now, do you all know what a paranoid is? A paranoid is someone who thinks the world's plotting to do them harm.

Right?

The world's out to get me. And inverse paranoia believes the world is out to do you good. It believes in a beneficent universe. It says the world's a friendly place. It's a place that's on my side, it's looking out for me, as opposed to it's a dog eat dog world, you know, and it's a terrible place to be. Now I learned this from my mentor, W. Clement Stone, who was my, you know, 600 millionaire mentor back in Chicago when I was in my early 20s. And he introduced me to the law of attraction. He introduced me to positive thinking, to expectancy way back then. And he was the guy who coined the term, if life hands you a lemon, squeeze it and make lemonade. That was his term. He made that up. And so we want to have this positive belief that anything is possible and it's simply a choice. I was working in New York with some real estate agents during the subprime crisis that was facing America. And I asked him, there was one guy, he was doing 400% better than everyone else. In a down market. And I said, how do you do this? I said, what kind of thoughts do you think when this is going on? He says, oh, I just tell myself I make money no matter what the market's doing. That's his belief. And because he believes it, he creates it. Now you might say, well, he believes it because he did it. And I'm telling you, he did it because he believes it. See? And so the reality is we can create anything we want if we believe in it. Now, my favorite story that illustrates this is about a guy who's an Australian. He just died a couple years ago. His name was Cliff Young. And in 1983, when he was 61 years old, he showed up at a race. It's the Sydney to Melbourne race. It's 875km. That's about 650 miles. And it's normally a six and a half day race. And most of the people that run this, it's considered one of the hardest endurance races of ultramarathons you can possibly do. And most people that run this are like 30 or younger. And he shows up to a field of 120 runners and he's 61 and he's wearing Oshkosh overalls. He's got on construction boots with galoshes on top of him because that it might rain. And he's wearing a baseball cap. Everyone else is wearing Nike Puma Asics running gear. They're all ready to go. And they said, sir, you can't run this race. You'll have a heart attack. We never heard of you. Have you ever run a marathon before? No. Have you ever run a 10k? No. Well, what makes you think you can do this? He said, well, I'm a farmer and we have a 2,000 acre farm. I have 2,000 sheep. And up until two years ago, we never had any farm equipment because we couldn't afford it. And when a storm would be coming, I would go out with my dog and we would herd up 2,000 sheep. Sometimes it would take us two or three days to get them all into a safe place. And I never slept, so I think I can do this. Well, they didn't take him very seriously, but they decided to let him run. They thought he'd probably drop out after the first day and they didn't care about it too much. And the first day everyone takes off and, you know, boom, the gun goes off and everyone's running real fast. And here's Cliff. It's what they called the Cliff Young shuffle. They actually Named this after him. And what happened was he was way behind. And the first day, you know, everyone went to sleep and you know, he was still running. And they woke up and they started running. He was way behind. But see, Cliff had an advantage that nobody knew about. The advantage was he'd never read a book about running. He'd never read Runner's World magazine. He'd never talked to an elite runner, never talked to a coach. He didn't know that when you do this kind of race, you're supposed to run for 18 hours, sleep for six, run for 18, sleep for six. So when everyone went to bed, he was so far behind, no one was there to tell him to go to bed. So he just kept on running. He ran non stop for five and one half days and broke the record by nine hours. So sometimes your belief about what you think is true is the thing that's keeping you stuck. You know, nobody thought anyone could break the four minute mile until Roger Bannister did it. And then the next year, 11 people did it. Now they knew it was possible. And so I want you to take the position that anything is possible. There's a wonderful quote that says, never tell anyone something cannot be done. God may have been waiting for centuries for somebody ignorant enough of the impossible to do that very thing. So think about, you may be that person, that person could be you. Starting today, you could do anything you want in your life. You know, I have a wonderful story about a kid I met. His name's Farah gray. He was 19 years old when I met him, and he'd written a book called the Realionaire. And so I helped him get it published with my publisher. And when he was 11, he started his first business in Chicago. He. He's a kid living in the Cabrini Green projects, which is one of the worst ghettos in America. And his mom was on welfare and he decided he wanted to help her because she was working sometimes two and three jobs. She'd had a heart attack, she wasn't feeling very well, and he wanted to contribute. So he started finding rocks around the neighborhood and sanding them. And he was making them into. He'd paint them then and he'd make them into bookends and paperweights. Then he'd go out to the edge of the ghetto and sell them for people who could afford them. And he made $50 his first day, which was a lot more than his mother was making, you know, scrubbing floors and doing all of that. So anyway, he starts getting other kids to help Him. And pretty soon he's got 11 or 12 kids. They're all standing rocks. He's giving them 50 cents of, you know, every dollar they make, and he's keeping the other half. He's an entrepreneur. Then he started another business where he took kids and he got wagons. And he would go to older people in the community that couldn't go to the grocery store. And he would help them carry their groceries back with the wagons and charge them a dollar or something like that. And then he was splitting the 50 cents each kid and so forth. And then he started something called the Urban Neighborhood Education Economic Council. And this was called Unique. And he would get businessmen to come in and help him teach the other kids business principles. And he would learn them as well. And by the time he was 14, he'd read a book by Deepak Chopra teaching. Another very important principle of the law of attraction was called the Seven Spiritual Laws of Success. And one of them was, do what you love. If it's hard, if it's not something you love, if it's not easy, if it's not your natural ability or your talent, you shouldn't be doing it. And it first made him angry. He said, that's ridiculous. My mom works really hard. Everyone I know works hard, and they're not doing well. I don't agree with this. But he kept thinking in his head, maybe there's something there. And one day he decided, okay, what do I love? What am I good at? He said, I love kids, and I love food. He said, well, what do I know kids love about food? Kids love sweets. So he created this syrup. It was an old recipe from his grandmother. And he started making it and taking it to the local grocery stores. And it caught on. And at the age of 15, he sold his company for one and a half million dollars. A kid in a ghetto, no high school education. Then he moves to Las Vegas, where he starts a newspaper for street people. He starts a show, a Las Vegas show. He starts a radio show, and he opens up a real estate brokerage. And now he gives speeches. And all the funds go to helping kids get out of the ghetto by learning these principles. But my point of this, he believed from the very beginning he could do anything he wanted. It never occurred to him he couldn't. And if you're a black kid in Chicago and you're 14 years old, most people wouldn't say, hey, man, you can be a millionaire in a year and a half. But he did. And I can tell you story after story of people Dr. Ruth Simmons, the President of Brown University, first African American President of Brown University of any Ivy League university, rather. And she was one of 11 sharecropper children in Texas. And now she did that. Kelly Perkins, a woman who had a heart transplant, a heart transplant and has climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, Mount Fuji, Mount Whitney after her heart transplant. Everyone said it was impossible. Can't be done. Jean Dominique Bobi, he's the person. They now have a movie about him. It was called the Butterfly and the Diving Bell or the Diving Bell and the Butterfly. And some of you may have read a review of it, some of you may have even seen it. But here's the guy who was paralyzed in his whole body. All he could do was blink one eye. And yet he had a secretary come in after they finally realized he was in there. They thought he was in a coma. And one nurse one day said, if you can understand all this, blink. And he did. And blink again. He did. She would bring in a chart of all the letters in the Alphabet and she'd start pointing to him one at a time. And when he'd get to the one he wanted to type, he would blink an eye. He wrote an entire book that way. Two paragraphs a day. Two paragraphs a day. He'd compose all night and then blink, blink, blink, blink all day long. And yet he wrote a best selling book. So even with all of that, he was able to believe he could still make a contribution by sharing his inner journey with the world. Kyle Maynard, a wrestler with no arms, no legs past the knee, just like Matty Christiansen. Here's a kid who became the state wrestling champion in Georgia and never pinned in his entire career. Bench presses. I can't even get my elbows together. He can eat with a spoon. I watched him do it. I watched him drink three Guinness beers with those same hands over in Ireland. And I watched him get up on the bar and walk down the bar on his stumps and flirt with all the women. And he wrote a book called no Excuses. And there needs to be no excuses. If you believe you can do it, you can do it.

Well, thanks so much for watching this video on the power of belief. Now I have a question for you. Are you ready to change your beliefs about yourself? And if you feel inspired, please leave a comment below with your answer. I'd love to read what you have to say. So thanks for watching. And remember, everything in your life will only change for the better when you change. Now, if you found this video helpful, make sure you like it. Share it with a friend who may need it and subscribe to my channel for more videos like this one and subscribe. And for some additional resources on the power of belief, visit my website@jackcampfield.com thanks again for watching.