How to Create the Mindset of a Bestselling Author With Jack Canfield

Welcome to the Real Fast Results podcast!  You have made a
wise decision to join in today because it is our honor and
privilege to bring for the words and advice of Mr. Jack
Canfield.  In this episode, Jack is going to share how
to develop a bestseller mindset.  According to Jack,
there’s a lot that goes into creating a bestseller, but most
importantly, you have to have the right outlook.  As you
probably know, this man has been able to accomplish more than most
people could even dream of.  Let’s see what he has to say…
Benefits to Having a Bestseller Mindset For me, it has meant
selling nearly 500 million books around the world.  I’ve had
47 books on the New York Times Bestseller List, and I have been
able to travel to 47 different countries and give workshops. 
As a result, I was in the movie The Secret, and I’ve had lunch at
The White House.  I hang out with people like Jeff Bridges,
and Chaka Khan, people like that who are celebrity friends that I
have now.  And, you know, I’ve personally been able to stand
on the first base line at a Dodger’s baseball game.  I’ve had
meetings with Bill Clinton, and John Gray, and I could just
go down the list of fun things that have happened for me.
Most important is the ability to make an impact in the
lives of other people.  I can remember being in a
hotel in New York and watching this girl walk in with a bald head,
probably about 12 or 13, obviously doing chemotherapy.  I
walked up to her, and I said, “I wanted to tell you that I’m
supportive of you. I’m Jack Canfield.”  “Oh my God! 
You’re the Chicken Soup for the Soul guy.  I’ve read Chicken
Soup for the Recovering Soul,  Chicken Soup for the Teen Soul,
Chicken Soup for the Cancer Patient Soul…”  And, you just go
like, “Wow!  I’m making a difference in the lives of
others.”  That’s what really matters, the impact you can have.
Achieving a Bestseller Mindset, from a Big Picture Standpoint
You have to believe that it’s possible for you to have something
really important to say, and that you have the ability to say
it.  So, a lot of it is self-esteem, self-concept, and
belief in yourself.  Then, I think most people don’t
think big enough.  One of the quotes that I have in my book,
The Success Principles, is by General Wesley Clark, who used to be
the head of the NATO forces in Europe for the United States. 
He said that it doesn’t take any more effort to dream a bigger
dream than it does to dream a small dream.  In other words,
you can think of five zeros after a one, or six zeros after a one,
or eight zeros after a one, in terms of your income and in terms of
impact. I just set a goal to train one million trainers to do my
work by the year 2030.  People think I’m crazy, but we’ve
already trained 1,500 people since last November and certified
them.  So, we now have people in 79 countries teaching our
work.  When I told my publisher, we wanted to sell a billion
books by 2020, he thought we were freaking crazy. 
We’ve sold a half a billion books, and it’s only
2016.  The “hockey stick curve” is taking off.
You have to dream big and believe big, and I think you also
have to have an attitude and a mindset that it’s going to take
work.  You have to learn how to market, you have to
learn how to do a podcast, you have to learn how to be on Good
Morning America.  You have to learn how to do internet
marketing.  You have to have a mindset of studying.  You
have to be willing to learn. Quincy Jones, who’s 83 years old, the
producer of Michael Jackson, “We Are the World”, The Fresh Prince
of Bel-Air, etc., said something.  He said that when he
decided to do television, he went to UCLA, and this was in the 60’s
or 70’s, but he said that he took six months of courses in
screenwriting, producing, and directing.  He said that
every field has a structure and a science to it, and you have to
study that if you want to be successful, whether it’s music theory,
how to be a bestselling author, etc. What is the craft of
being a good writer?  What is the willingness to get
feedback?  You have to be able to get feedback. One of the
things that I tell people all of the time is that most books get
published when people have read them: The writer, the wife/husband,
the acquisition editor at the house.  Well, with Chicken Soup
for the Soul, we had 40 people read every story and grade them on a
scale of 1-10.  We put that on an Excel spreadsheet, and
everything that averaged less than a 9 never made it into the book,
including stories that I wrote. It’s like you have to have the
willingness to get feedback and get off your ego trip as well. How
Can I Make Myself Feel Like I’m Worthy of a Bestseller? Here’s the
deal.  Everybody has a message.  Every life has lessons
that people have learned. You have to be willing to share
that, and if you are willing to be clear that you have something
valuable. Now, if you don’t work on yourself, if you don’t
do self-introspection, if you don’t take seminars, if you don’t do
therapy, if you don’t meditate, etc, your awareness of what you
know and how much you know is going to be limited. 
So, #1, you have to be somewhat committed to growth, somewhat
committed to constantly learning and never-ending
improvement.  CANI, as Tony Robbins likes to say. The reality
is that you’ve got to be a learner, and then you share what you’ve
learned. The belief is that you’ve got something of value. Mark
Victor Hansen used to always say to me, when we were co-authors of
Chicken Soup for the Soul… I’d say something, and he’d say, “You
have to write that down.  Write a blog.  Write a
chapter.”  I’d say, “Mark everyone knows that,” and he’d say,
“No Jack, they don’t.”  Often, we figure that everyone
knows what we know, and the fact is that we all have a lot of
unique knowledge. I think that whether it’s through
affirmations, through meditation, whatever it may be, you’ve got to
start with the idea that, “I have something to share, and I am
worthy of success.”  My wife is writing a memoir right now,
and she has had some amazing lessons in her life.  She’s so
afraid that people are going to judge her for where she used to be
in the earlier chapters of her book. I told her, “I’m going to
steal the freaking manuscript and publish it behind your back if
you don’t publish it because it’s so good.” I think the
main thing is to have other people read what you’re writing, and
they’ll tell you if it’s good or not.  It doesn’t
mean that you don’t have something to say, it just means you
haven’t written it yet.  Most people, the feedback they get
is, “Oh my God!  This is so valuable,” or “Oh my God!  I
wish I had read this book 20 years ago.” I was counseling some
writers the other day, and one of the women had written a book
called: Dial Down the Drama: Reducing Conflict and
Reconnecting with Your Teenage Daughter--A Guide for Mothers
Everywhere.  She is a woman who was a child psychologist, and
she was working with lots of, I think, 20,000 teenagers, but when
her daughter hit 12, it was like “Uh-oh”.  Now she’s in it,
right?  So, she negotiated those teenage years.  Her
daughter is now 20, and she wrote a book based on her
experience.  The only people who are going to be
interested in that book are going to be mothers with daughters, but
that’s a lot of people. You may be someone who had a
special needs child, and you had to learn how to negotiate the
educational system.  That’s a valuable message.  You may
be a meditation teacher, but you’re only going to attract a certain
kind of person.  Maybe they’re Christians, maybe they’re
Buddhists, maybe they’re teenagers that are getting off drugs, but
everybody has a group that will resonate with your message. 
You have to believe that.  Also, don’t compare yourself to
someone who has a universal message, like the Dalai Lama, Tony
Robbins, Lisa Nichols, The Secret.  You know, we’re
not all meant to be billion dollar bestsellers, but we’re all meant
to get our message out there and be bestsellers in certain
categories, for sure. The Path to Feeling Worthy
First of all, you can’t feel worthy or unworthy.  You feel
mad, sad, glad, and scared.  That’s it.  What you think
is that you’re unworthy.  So really, you have to address your
thoughts.  Self-esteem comes from the Latin word
“aestimare”, which means to estimate.  We either estimate that
we’re good or we estimate that we’re bad.  It is a
thought.  It is a thought that most of us picked up either
from our parents telling us, “You’ll never amount to anything,” or
“You’re a bad kid,” or we made a decision because we got rejected
by our girlfriend, we didn’t make the debate team, we didn’t get
into Harvard, you know, whatever.  Then, we tell ourselves,
“I’m not okay,” or “I’m bad.” You know, maybe you had an abortion
when you were 16 and now you’re judging yourself as a bad person,
but that’s you making a judgement.  The fact is that
you can simply replace that thought with another better-feeling
thought.  So, it’s a matter of repetition. 
Thoughts are things we think, and we can change them or replace
them through repetition.  I don’t know if you’re familiar with
EFT tapping, where you tap on these 9 acupuncture points while you
think your negative, limiting belief.  Literally, you can
disappear a limiting belief.  I’ve seen people do it in 10
minutes or less, using tapping. I wrote a book called Tapping Into
Ultimate Success about tapping with a tapping expert. You can go on
YouTube and type in “tapping”, and there’s like 5,000 free YouTube
videos teaching you how to tap.  But, the main thing is that
it is a choice.  You do not have to suffer with low
self-esteem anymore because it is simply a thought that can be
replaced with another thought through repetition, through tapping,
through self-hypnosis; there are a number of things you can do.
Bestseller Mindset: Write the Book Well, I think it’s simply, you
have to write the book.  And, part of the mindset has
to be, “I’m going to do whatever it takes to make it
good.” That’s where I really am a big believer in
feedback.  I know one couple who wrote a business book, and
they invited 15 people to come to their apartment in Aspen. 
Every morning they had to read a chapter and give them feedback,
and in the afternoon, the other people went skiing, and they edited
the chapter based on the feedback.  The next morning, they did
another chapter. What we did was send our stories to our 40-reader
panel.  Urban, rural, black, white, brown, Asian, old, young,
conservative, liberal, independent. You know, trying to get a
really universal feedback thing.  Most people are
afraid to put it out because they are afraid of what they’re going
to hear.  Treat everything as a first draft. 
Just get words on paper, and then you can go back yourself and edit
it, like, a week or two later, when you’ve got some distance. 
Then, give it to people and let them bleed all over it. 
You’re not in school, you’re not going to get a grade, you’re not
going to fail.  You’re just going to get feedback. 
“Here’s where I’m confused,” “You said this in another chapter,” “I
don’t know what you mean here.”  You know, that’s how you make
it better. The guys who wrote The One Minute Manager, they would
take their book, print 5,000 copies, sell them for cost to all of
their clients, get feedback, and only then would they rewrite it
and send it to a publisher.  You’ve got to be
committed to doing the work, and again, your message is worth the
work because once it gets out there, it’s going to last
forever.  We all have life lessons that someone
coming along behind us can benefit from.  Whether it’s an
80-page book or a 500-page book, it doesn’t really matter. 
What matters is getting your message out there. I think
another thing you have to deal with, in terms of a bestseller
mindset, is you’ve got to get over your fear of rejection because
you’re going to get rejected by editors that are going to acquire
your book, the publishers.  You’re going to be
rejected by people who won’t have you on their podcast.  You
are going to have people read your book and give you critical
reviews.  But, you’re going to reach so many more
people.  I just did a book called The 30-Day Sobriety
Solution.  It came out in January.  It’s got 95 reviews
on Amazon.  Ninety-three of them are five-star reviews, and
three of them are one-star reviews.  So, you’re always going
to have people that are going to go, “This doesn’t work. 
These guys are full of it.”  You’ve got to develop a
thick skin. Your message isn’t for everybody.  You
know, if I had a message for fundamentalist Christians, that might
turn off the New-Agers living in San Francisco.   If I had a
new age message, it might turn people off, you know, going to Joel
Osteen’s church in Texas.  So, you’re not going to
please everybody, and you just have to confront
that.  Get over that fear. Really spend time
on getting a great title.  You know, the “Chicken
Soup for the Soul” title came in a meditation.  Originally, we
got rejected by a lot of people, but that title is now a brand
worth almost a billion dollars.  You know, there’s “Chicken
Soup for the Soul” cat food and dog food.  It’s ridiculous
what has happened with that, and we actually won a brand management
award in Asia for the best brand in books and so forth. I was
counseling some people that were writing a book, and it was about
how to avoid your children, declaring you incompetent and assigning
you to an insane asylum so that they can take your wealth. 
They had some big, legalistic title that nobody would pay any
attention to.  We ended up with, “How to Protect Yourself from
Your Own Children in Old Age”.  So, people are like,
“Stop.  What is that?  I want to know what that
is.”  Really invest in a good title. 
Sometimes you might have to pay a consultant to brainstorm with
you. Your book is going to be sitting on a table somewhere, or
spine out on a shelf.  You want something that’s going to grab
you.  We did a lot of research on titles.  You
can actually muscle test titles.  Put covers of a
book in front of somebody and have them muscle test it.  If
they go weak when you push down their arm, when they’re looking at
your book, they won't but it. They will look at that cover,
and they won’t know why they didn’t buy it, but they won’t buy it.
We had a guy that had a book called Dumpster Diving for
Wealth.  People were throwing away valuable things in their
dumpsters, and the cover was a guy’s butt sticking out of a
dumpster.  Everyone we tested with that cover went weak. 
When we took the guy out of the dumpster and had him standing next
to it with something valuable, everyone tested strong.  Nobody
wanted their face in a garbage bin, basically.  So, there are
a lot of tricks like that you can learn along the way. 
You’re sending a message to people emotionally, and you
don’t even know you’re doing it.  That’s, I think, a
critical piece of it too. Another thing is to set big
goals.  You’ve got to dream big.  Set a big
goal.  We set a goal to sell a million and a half books in a
year and a half, and our publisher laughed at us.  He said,
“You’ll be lucky to sell 20,000.”  We said, “No.  We’re
going to visualize it.  We’re going to affirm it.”  We
put mock New York Times headlines all around our office.  You
know, “Chicken Soup for the Soul Sells 1.5 Million”.  We made
up fake bestseller lists with our book #1 in the New York
Times.  Now you can do it on your computer, but then we did it
with whiteout, back in 1993. You have to have that big
dream, and then visualize it.  We used to visualize
bookstore windows where the whole window was filled with Chicken
Soup books, just like you see them when the new Harry Potter book
comes out.  Well, three years later there were bookstores with
whole windows full of Chicken Soup books.  People
underestimate visualization.  See, you want to live in that
dream as if it’s already true.  This is basic “Law of
Attraction 101”, but it works. Visualizing There are two
things that are important:  You want to have
a vision board where you have some external images. 
For example, you sitting next to Oprah.  You can Photoshop
it.  I just was on Super Soul Sunday in December; I had Oprah
on my vision board for a year before that.  I wanted to be on
Super Soul Sunday, so I had that, and in September I get a call out
of the blue.  We weren’t even talking to our editors and
producers.  Images of a headline with how many books you’ve
sold.  Pictures of your books you can mock up.  You can
go on Fiverr and have someone for $5 make all kinds of images for
you. Then, what you want to do is maybe have 3x5 cards, or
index cards, with your affirmations.  “I’m so happy
and grateful that I’ve sold a million copies of Real Fast Writing,”
or whatever it is. You read your affirmation with enthusiasm, close
your eyes, and then visualize what you would see from inside your
eyes as if you were looking out at the world, with some iconic
image that says, “I’ve made it.”  So, whether it’s the
$1,000,000 check, the headline, your cover on Writer’s
Digest.  You know, Success Magazine or whatever it might
be.  Visualize that, and feel the feelings that you
would feel if you already had that experience. The
feelings are the gas.  The feelings are the
turbocharger.  It’s like a car.  The destination, you put
in Waves or your GPS, is the goal.  The gas that moves the car
forward is your emotions.  So, feel the emotions
strongly, believe it’s possible, and do that for a couple of
minutes.  Then you just go live your day, but pay
attention because you’re going to get downloads of ideas. I was
over in Hawaii, after the first Chicken Soup for the Soul book came
out.  I was in Turtle Bay Hilton.  I remember this, and I
was visualizing our book having sold over a million copies. 
And, I did that for about seven minutes.  I was just really
into it, and then I came out, and all of the sudden I was just
flooded with ideas.  “What if you put a book in the back of
every limo driving to LAX?”  And, the limo driver, he would
start to read the book, and the person would say, “Where can I get
this?”  The limo driver says, “I’ve got a box in my back
car.”  You know, “Sixteen dollars, you’ve got one.” What if
they were in every salon where people are waiting for their nails
and their hair to dry?  They could sell them to the people
there.  Well, we had sales people going into every salon on
Ventura Blvd selling our books.  Doctor’s offices,
Chiropractors’ offices. We were in bakeries, Shell stations,
etc.  Places where you wouldn’t expect to find books,
which we later called “bypass marketing,” bypassing the book
stores.  Now we have Amazon, and websites, and all
that stuff.  That wasn’t available to us in 1993.  So,
those ideas will start to come, and then you have to act on
them.  That’s another thing about the mindset; it has
to be an action-oriented mindset. I always say, “Birthing
the book is the feminine quality.  Marketing the book is the
masculine quality.”  A lot of people give birth to their book,
but then they put it in the dumpster behind the hospital. 
They don’t raise it.  I actually have a son who wrote about
getting through his drug experiences as a teenager, called Long
Past Stopping.  It’s a fabulous book, and he refused to do
media.  He was just too shy, and the book never did well. You
know, here I am, his father, teaching him all of this stuff, but he
was so shy and so afraid of rejection, he wouldn’t do it. 
You’ve got to do the sales stuff.  You’ve got to get
out there and talk about your books. Additional Steps:
Marketing I have a handout that I give out at writer’s workshops
called, “How to Market a Bestselling Book”.  There are 37
steps, which we don’t have time for.  Just some other steps
that are important. Read books on marketing. John
Kremer wrote a great book called 1,001 Ways to Market Your
Books.  Well, when we did Chicken, we took about 900 of those,
that we thought were relevant, and made a Post-it for each one. I
had two staff people writing them for days.  We put them on a
wall, about 12 feet long, and every day we took a Post-it off and
did it.  It took us two years to get through all those
post-its, but by the end of that, we were #1 on the New York Times
list and we stayed there for three years.  Then, the
second book came out, and it was #2.  It was there for three
years.  At one point, we had #1, #2, and #3 on the New York
Times list because we kept doing those things. I think
hiring a media coach [is important] because most of us don’t know
how to make good media; there are secrets to that. 
I’ll give you one.  John Gray taught me this--the guy [who
wrote] Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus.  You talk
about that your life’s going along at a certain level, then
something bad happens.  You have an accident, you get cancer,
your daughter gets pregnant, you lose your job, bankruptcy happens,
you lose your mortgage. Then you’re down in the pits, down
here.  Then you discover something that gets you out of the
pit. My book, The Success Principles, may have helped you, and for
someone else, it may have been a book on cancer, or nutrition, or
how to eat holistically.  Then, when you put that into action,
not only did you get better, you got better than you were
before.  Now, you’re up here, and this thing you discovered is
what my book is about, and it’s going to help you because you’re
down here and you’re in the same situation.  You don’t know
what to do with your kid, you’re divorced, you’re laid off, you
just got a new job as a manager and you don’t know what the hell
you’re doing.  That’s what my book will teach you to do. 
That little model will get you through any talk show, any
podcast, and people will identify with you because they identify
being down in that crater. I’ve got this great idea, and
everyone tells me I should write a book.  Now I’m depressed
because I don’t know what to do. They discover you, and you help
them get their book written.  Now they’re up here, and they’re
wealthy, and they’re on Oprah.  So, it’s that kind of a thing,
and you have to have your little success stories.  You can
tell them not just about your own life, but about all the people
that you’ve helped so far with this methodology, technique, book,
or whatever it might be. There are other points like, “How do you
get on the covers of magazines,” and “How do you get in the airline
magazines?”  The world today is a podcast
world.  Tim Ferriss, who wrote The 4-Hour Work Week,
understood that very quickly.  Bloggers and Podcasters
are the new book tour.  So, you have to know how to
play in that world and become one so that you have the respect of
the other people.  Tim started forwarding everyone’s blogs a
year before his book came out.  I actually mentored him in the
writing of his book.  He’s now far surpassed me in the
marketing side for, you know, the younger generation. 
But, the reality is that you should study the people that
have been successful. As Tony Robbins says, “Success
leaves clues.”  I’ve left clues. John Kremer is leaving
clues.  There are a lot of people who are bestsellers leaving
clues.  So study that.  I watch an hour of Ted
Talks, and podcasts, and YouTube videos every single
day.  There’s so much information out there that we
have to be lifelong learners. Here’s a real cool thing one of my
friends does.  He does a three-minute video blog every single
day.  He was here in my house a couple of weeks ago.  He
was in the guest room, I thought, and I walk into my office, and he
has his camera out, and he’s going, “I’m in Jack Canfield’s office,
and if you’ll notice, there’s 3,000 books in here.  Leaders
are readers.  Look at all of these books.  You need to be
reading.  By the way, one of the books you need to read is…”
And then he promoted some book.  He does this sort of thing
every single day. He went from having 600 people at his workshops
to 800, to 1,000, every single day, all around the world. 
When I met him, he was making $140,000 a year.  He makes over
a million a year now.  Again, he took a little course with me
on how to be a bestseller, and then he applied this one technique
better than anyone I know, and he’s got a huge following. Learning
More From Jack I just want to say one thing about the Bestseller
Blueprint.  I got together with Steve Harrison, and we, not
only with myself, but with about 10 other bestsellers, we put
together a course, literally from A-Z. The course teaches you
everything you need to know about how to write the book, how to
name the chapters so that they become hooks for the media, how to
market the book, how to get on radio shows, how to get magazine
interviews, etc. I mean, there’s so much in there. So, I really
want to encourage people to check that out, and you can just go to
BestsellerBlueprint.com.  Go to JackCanfield.com for my
workshops.  I do two “Break Through to Success” seminars every
year, and then we are doing some one-day workshops around the
world.  We have books, and tapes, and all of that good
stuff.  But, my parting line would be this: “You have
everything you need to do everything you want.  All you have
to do is believe that and take action on that.  And, if you
follow the principles of taking action, responding to feedback, and
continuing on and never giving up, you can achieve every goal you
want in life.  I’m proof of that, and there’s millions of
people around the world that are proof of that.”
Resources: Some of Jack's Books: Chicken Soup for
the Soul Chicken Soup for the Recovering Soul Chicken Soup for the
Teen Soul Chicken Soup for the Cancer Patient Soul The Success
Principles Tapping Into Ultimate Success Other Books Jack
Mentioned: Dial Down the Drama: Reducing Conflict and
Reconnecting with Your Teenage Daughter-- A Guide for Mothers
Everywhere. The One Minute Manager Long Past Stopping 1,001 Ways to
Market Your Books The 4-Hour Work Week Men Are From Mars, Women Are
From Venus Real Fast Results Community If you are diggin’ on this
stuff and really love what we’re doing here at Real Fast Results,
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http://www.realfastresults.com/results. As always, go make results
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