Jack Canfield, Chicken Soup, and the Real Work Behind Visualization - Beyond The Secret

Ultimize. Jack Canfield is a wonderful example of the Law of Attraction working, but he's not an example of the Law of Attraction working without a lot of work. That distinction matters because if you only hear the highlight version, it sounds almost effortless. He had a vision. He pictured Chicken Soup for the Soul becoming a massive number one bestseller. He imagined it at the top of the New York Times bestseller list, and then one day there it was. That's inspiring. Guess what? It's also incomplete. And incomplete inspiration can be dangerous, not because the vision part is wrong. The vision part may be very useful. The problem is that the vision part is the beginning of the story. It's not the whole story. Canfield has described setting a goal to sell 1.5 million books in a year and a half. He's described putting mock New York Times headlines around the office. Great. He has described making fake bestseller lists with Chicken Soup for the Soul at number 1 for him to see. That's classic law of attraction. See it first, picture it clearly, live with the image. I got no problem with that. In fact, I love it. The problem comes when people remember the fake bestseller list and forget everything that happened after it. Because let's not forget, he did get onto the real bestseller list a gazillion times. Because what happened after it was not mystical, it was relentless, it was practical, it was daily, it was also exhausting. Canfield didn't just put a mock headline on the wall and wait for publishing history to knock politely on the door. Oh no, he and Mark Victor Hansen had already spent years speaking, teaching, collecting stories, and learning what audiences responded to. The official Chicken Soup history says they had been using stories in their talks, testing them on audience members, and audience members kept asking whether the stories were available in a book. That's not magic. That's market research. People kept saying, I want this. Canfield and Hansen paid attention. Then Canfield made a writing commitment. He said he wrote 2 stories a week. His wife would go to bed around 10. He'd stay up till midnight writing. That's the part I love, because midnight writing does not look like a miracle while it's happening. It looks like a tired person Choosing the future one more time. Hansen claims there were more than 100 rejections from major publishers for the book. The New Yorker described Canfield and Hansen driving to the American Booksellers Association meeting in Anaheim one year and walking all day from booth to booth putting proposals into the hands of skeptical people. That's such a perfect image— booth to booth, not cloud to cloud. Not vibration to vibration, booth to booth. That's where the dream met the carpet. That's where the law of attraction put on comfortable shoes. Eventually, a small Florida publisher took a chance, but even that wasn't the end. That was just the beginning of the next job. Canfield wrote later about what he and Hansen called the rule of 5. Every day they did 5 specific things to move the goal 5 radio interviews, 5 review copies sent to editors, 5 calls to companies that might buy the book in bulk, a seminar for at least 5 people with books sold in the back of the room, free copies sent to celebrities, phone calls, press releases, talk shows, sometimes at 3 in the morning, church talks, book signings at any bookstore that would have them, gift shops, card shops, gas stations, bakeries, restaurants. Now, that is not a vision board. That's a war plan with postage. And according to Canfield's own account, they did that for more than 2 years, a minimum of 5 things a day, every day, day in and day out. That's the story. Not instead of the vision. It was alongside the vision. So the mock New York Times list may have aimed their minds, but the Rule of Five moved the body. That's the mature lesson. When people say the Law of Attraction worked for Jack Canfield, I'm happy to agree, but let's define what worked really means. It worked because the vision became a daily operating system. It worked because the picture on the wall became phone calls, it became mailings, it became interviews, it became seminars, it became asking again and again and again after hearing no a thousand times. It became persistence when most people would have gone home and told themselves, the universe must have different plans for me and my book. This is where I want you to be very careful. Don't, I repeat, don't use visualization as a substitute for work. Use it as a reason to work. That's the difference. If your dream is strong enough to picture, it should be strong enough to schedule. If your goal is exciting enough to affirm, it should be specific enough to act on. If your future is important enough to imagine, it should be important enough to protect from the thousand distractions trying to steal your day. I've had this in my own life too. I've had big visions for reaching more people through communication and personal development. Wonderful. But the vision didn't record the videos. The vision didn't write the scripts. The vision didn't create the courses. The vision didn't handle the boring technical problems that make a grown man question every life choice he's ever made. I had to do those things. The dream gave me direction. The repeated work gave me results. That's why Canfield's story is so valuable, not because it proves you can imagine your way to a bestseller, because it proves something better. You can imagine a future so clearly that you become willing to do the unglamorous work that future requires. That's the Law of Attraction at its best. Not the universe rewarding a wish, your behavior becoming aligned with a vision. That's what it is. Your day is becoming organized around the future. Your environment, your people, your habits, and your direction all pointing in one direction. So yeah, make the vision clear. Put the headline on the wall if that helps. Make the pretend bestseller list if it helps. Picture the bookstore window. Picture the window in vivid detail. But then ask the question Canfield's real story forces us to ask. What are my 5 things to do today? Not my 5 hopes, Not my 5 affirmations, not my 5 reasons this should be easy, my 5 things I do. Because the future doesn't just respond to what you picture, it responds to what you repeatedly do.