Rumi said, Passion burns down every branch of exhaustion. Passion is the supreme elixir and renews all things. Let divine passion triumph and rebirth you in yourself. Jack Canfield is a man who has let divine passion triumph. He has become famous for showing people how to rebirth their lives. Jack is the co-creator of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, which has created more than a billion dollars in gross retail sales.

This alone makes him uniquely qualified to talk about passion and success. Jack is America’s leading expert in creating peak performance for entrepreneurs, leaders, managers, sales professionals, employees and educators. Over the past 30 years he has helped hundreds of thousands of individuals achieve their dreams. Affectionately known as America’s number-one success coach, Jack has studied and reported on what makes successful people different.

His books on success include The Success Principles, Jack Canfield’s Key to Living the Law of Attraction, The Aladdin Factor, The Power of Focus and Dare to Win. Jack is a featured teacher in the movies The Secret, The Opus, and Try It on Everything. He has spoken to over one million people in 37 countries around the world. His latest project, the Dream Big Collection, has been featured on an infomercial, a PBS special and The Today Show.

Chris Attwood, co-author of the New York Times bestseller, The Passion Test: The Effortless Path to Discovering Your Life Purpose, conducted the following interview with Jack Canfield. Jack has chosen to incorporate The Passion Test in his trainings, recognizing the key role that passion plays in achieving success.

CHRIS ATTWOOD: It’s such a delight, Jack, to be with you, as always. I wonder if we can harken back to those days when you were in a position much like the people who are listening to this interview and those who are reading the magazine. Tell us the story of before you were famous, before you’d enjoyed all the success you have today. Who were you and how did you get started? How did you transform your life from what it was to what it is today?

JACK CANFIELD: I started out as a typical Midwestern kid. I grew up in Wheeling, West Virginia; it’s really near Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. My dad made $8,000 a year. That’s eight with three zeros. We weren’t rich by any means. My mother was an alcoholic. My dad was pretty much a workaholic, so I didn’t see him that much. I was just a typical kid. When I was in about the fifth grade I had an aunt who was fairly wealthy on the other side of the family.

She had a son named Jack who was killed in an automobile accident. She kind of adopted me to replace him and sent me to a private military school in town. I was a day student and came home every night. I got a much better education, because at that time in West Virginia I think we were the 40th state in terms of our ranking for education. Mississippi and Alabama were only the few underneath us.

Public education wasn’t very good. As a result of that, I did get a fairly good education. I won a scholarship to go to Harvard, and I went there. The funny part is I started to study history, thinking I was going to be a lawyer. My senior year, I took a class in psychology as an elective course and fell in love with it. I found my passion. I love people and the interaction and human behavior and all that.

I hadn’t had any undergraduate classes in that. Someone said, Why don’t you go into education and you can sneak into psychology? I ended up going over to the University of Chicago and ended up teaching in an all-black inner-city high school. I was making $240 a month.

CHRIS ATTWOOD: Two-hundred and forty dollars a month?

JACK CANFIELD: Two-hundred and forty dollars a month because I was a graduate student while I was teaching. I think my rent was $79 a month, so the first month I had $40 dollars left over for the next two weeks. On the 15th, I remember I used to go out to this Italian restaurant. It was all-you-can-eat for $7.00 dollars. That was my big deal.

I can remember eating what I called my 21-cent dinners many, many nights. This was a can of Contadina tomato paste with garlic salt and water poured over a bag of spaghetti noodles. One cost 10 cents and the other cost 11 cents; in my little $79-a-month apartment with a Murphy bed that came out of the wall. You had to bring the bed down to get to the clothes that were in the closet behind it.

There was a little tiny stove and little refrigerator over in one corner of the room; I had only one room. I’ve been there at the bottom of the economic ladder, if you will. However, at that time I was finding my passion. I got very involved in the Civil Rights Movement. I ended up going to Jesse Jackson’s church. It was the year Martin Luther King was killed in 1968. It was a very awakening time for me.

I was going into deeper issues than, perhaps, I had grown up with until that point in time. I was a regular guy from a regular family who fell in love with teaching and empowering people.

CHRIS ATTWOOD: That’s so great. What shifted? What changed in your life that put you on a different trajectory?

JACK CANFIELD: When I was in graduate school and I was teaching at Calumet, I was discovering that the kids there weren’t very motivated to learn. I was always curious about everything. You could set me down in a doctor’s office. I could pick up a magazine on any topic and find it interesting, but my students didn’t believe they could learn. They didn’t believe it was worth it. They were gang members and so forth.

I became more interested in how to motivate them to want to achieve in life and believe they could achieve in life, which led me into self-esteem and values and goal-setting. It was at that time that I met this guy in the Laundromat. He was a graduate student, and he said, Do you know about the Kendall College ‘Living Philosopher’s Series’? I said no. He said, I go up there every week. Would you like to go with me? I said, Sure.

They had speakers like Alan Watts, the great Zen teacher of America. They had a guy named Herbert Otto, who is the head of the National Center for the Exploration of Human Potential. I said, Wow! I want to go hear him speak. He talked about the fact that we’re only using about 5% of our capacity of our brains. We all could be speaking five or six languages. We could all learn math and science, type 150 words-a-minute, and play the piano.

I said, I’m not anywhere near that! I became very interested in how to expand my potential. He said, You should go down to the W. Clement and Jessie V. Stone Foundation and take some of their seminars. Also, there was a growth center called Oasis in Chicago. It was kind of like Esalen and Omega are today. I went and started taking seminars, and I became a junkie. Literally, I took 38 weekend workshops in that one year.

The reason I didn’t take more is they didn’t have them on Mother’s Day and Thanksgiving and Super Bowl Sunday. I couldn’t get enough. I’d grown up in this all-male military school. My father had come out of the Navy in World War II. I was hungry for that feminine, intuitive, passionate, growing side of myself. That was the switch for me. I never turned off after that.

CHRIS ATTWOOD: That’s very neat. Talk to us about the role passion has played. You mentioned it a little bit, but how has it played as you’ve seen your life expand, you’ve taken on new roles and new opportunities, and you’ve enjoyed tremendous new success? Has passion been an important part of that? Talk to us a little bit about it.

JACK CANFIELD: Chris, what happened for me is that wasn’t a word anyone was using back then; at least I wasn’t aware of it. I’ve always given myself permission to go after what I was interested in. I would have said I would follow my interests and follow my heart. We talk a lot about the Law of Attraction and what we want to attract into our lives.

One of the things I’ve been teaching in that arena lately is that we also have to be willing to follow that which we’re attracted to-whether it’s a person, a kind of music, a food, a certain religious path, a certain teacher, a certain kind of movie style, a genre of literature or art, or whatever it might be. When I was an undergraduate studying history, I started studying Chinese history.

For some reason I was totally interested in that. As I look back on it, I probably had some past lives in China. My house is full of Asian furniture and Asian art. It’s always been something I feel very comfortable with. I actually have a couple clear memories of past lives in China. I think it was a bleed-over into this lifetime until I discovered the psychology part, which was extremely interesting to me.

Certainly some of the Asian philosophy-Taoism, Buddhism; I love Hindu chanting and so forth-have been parts of my life as well that came from that period. I’ve always been someone who, if I was interested in it, went and studied it. Early on, Marshall Thurber, who is a friend of mine, shared with me and said, If you’re going to study, study with the Masters.

Fortunately I studied Gestalt with people like Fritz Pearls. I studied Psychosynthesis with Martha Crampton and all the people at the Psychosynthesis Institute in California. I studied with Carl Rogers in psychology and Jack Gibb who created the TORI Process: Trust, Openness, Realization and Interdependence. He was one of the original founders of the National Training Labs.

These were all seminal people. I kept finding myself sitting at their feet and learning from them because I found out they had something they had to teach. They were writing books about it. I signed up for their seminars and, fortunately, got in. I’ve lived my whole life that way. Whatever I was, we can now say, passionate about I just gave myself permission to do it. I sold companies and moved out to California in order to follow the passion to do large-group trainings.

I started out doing therapy with people and had small-group therapy with eight to 12 people. I took a training called Insight Training Seminars. They had 350 people in the group. I thought, This is much more exciting. You can reach more people. If somebody is stuck, you have 349 other people to work with. The intention in the room is so strong because there are so many people. Then there’s the energy field. I was always giving myself permission to do that.

CHRIS ATTWOOD: Would you say that’s a key piece? You’ve written a book called The Success Principles. Is that giving oneself permission to do the things you’re drawn to, that you have an interest in, or that you’re passionate about? Is that one of the keys? Is that enough? Obviously, it isn’t. Tell us a little bit about what you have learned coming now from the perspective of having been immensely successful starting out in that. Give us some insight into what has led to that success and what you’ve learned along the way.

JACK CANFIELD: In 2005, I published a book called The Success Principles. It took me 18 months to write it. It’s over 520 pages long. I consider it my magnum opus. It’s me saying, Here’s everything I know about success. It’s not really everything; we cut out a few chapters because the book got too long.

CHRIS ATTWOOD: Your version.

JACK CANFIELD: I wrote 84 chapters before I was done because I wanted to put it all in one book, which was stupid. There are 64 principles. It’s interesting that the I Ching has, I think, 64 hexagrams too. I guess there was some Chinese influence again that I wasn’t even aware of at the time. The point is that I looked at my own life and I said, I’ve been super-successful. I’m happily married. I have great kids.

My staff loves me. They’d never go anywhere. They work their butts off for me. I’m well-loved across the country. I’ve been on every major talk show. I’ve sold millions of books. We’ve sold over $1 billion in retail, which was mentioned in your introduction, but I thought, There’s something about the way I’m living my life that works. Let’s see if I can figure that out.

I sat down one Saturday morning and outlined what I would teach if I was teaching someone how to be as successful as I am. That was the main idea. I ended up with all of these principles. What I’ve learned along the way is in that book. We don’t have time to talk about 64 principles, but I can share a couple of the key ones.

CHRIS ATTWOOD: That would be great.

JACK CANFIELD: Number one, I think you have to take 100% responsibility for your life. W. Clement Stone, my mentor, asked me that. He said, Do you take 100% responsibility for your life? I said, I think so. He said, This is a yes or no question. You either do or you don’t. I said, I’m not even sure I understand the question then. He said, Here’s the deal. Have you ever blamed anyone for anything? Of course.

Have you ever complained about anything? I said, Sure. He said, Then you don’t take 100% responsibility for your life. I said, I get it. I literally spent a year learning how to be 100% responsible with no blaming and no complaining. I often jokingly say in my talks where I have a slide of Martin Luther King, Remember that famous speech Martin Luther King gave? ‘I Have a Complaint’?

It wasn’t called that. It was called ‘I Have a Dream’. Martin Luther King realized it does no good to focus on blaming the white man, blaming the rich or blaming whoever. The only thing that makes sense is to focus on your dream and go toward that. That’s what I’ve done with my life. I’ve realized that I’ve created my feelings by having thoughts and expectations that are out of balance with reality. I love Byron Katie’s work where she goes deeply into that idea.

That’s a key piece of success. I always used to say, If you get that everything in your life you created, then you realize you can un-create it and recreate it. If you think somebody else created your poverty, the fact that you’re overweight, the fact that you’re isolated, or whatever it might be, it’s not empowering to you to think that thought. If I take responsibility, it means I can un-create it and recreate it. That’s the first chapter of my book. The second chapter is ‘Be Clear Why You’re Here’.

CHRIS ATTWOOD: Before you go on, Jack, can I ask you a question about 100% responsibility?

JACK CANFIELD: Please, go ahead.

CHRIS ATTWOOD: There are some people who put a meaning on responsibility that it’s their fault. Is that another kind of blaming? What is it that’s going on there, and how does one take 100% responsibility without feeling, Oh my gosh! I’m the one who made myself so miserable, and I can never get over it?

JACK CANFIELD: There’s another piece of information you have to have that I write about later in the book, which is giving up guilt. If you go to the Law of Attraction, remember we talk about ‘ask, believe and receive’. I’ve added, ‘ask, believe, act and receive’. What happens is this. When you’re receiving, you have to be a vibrational match for that which you want to attract into your life.

When you’re in the state of guilt, where you’re basically mad at yourself, or a state of resentment, where you’re mad at other people, you’re pushing away what Abraham calls your ‘vibrational escrow’. In other words, you’re not attracting into your life because you feel so bad. You’re not a vibrational match for good. It’s important we let that go. The key concept here is this: you and everyone else in the world are always doing the best they can at the time with the limited awareness, skills, insight, tools, et cetera, they have to meet some basic need.

Whatever you may have done in the past, you now might feel guilty about it. I’ll give you some examples that people have talked about in my seminars a lot: they had an abortion, they cheated on their taxes, they cheated on their exams at school. One person paid a lawyer to take his LSAT for him. The idea is they felt guilty about it. At the time, they were doing the best they could with the limited awareness, skills, et cetera, to meet a basic need called love, attention, financial income, or whatever it might be.

As we look at where we are now, we have more awareness, we have more insight, we have more skills, and we have more tools. That’s like being an eighth grader beating yourself up for once being a third grader. You don’t have the same skills when you’re in the third grade as when you’re in the eighth grade. Basically, you did the best you could. If you could have done differently, you would have.

People always say, Now I know I should have. No, if you could have, you would have, but you didn’t because you couldn’t have. Give yourself some space. The other thing that comes up around 100% responsibility that we should probably talk about for a minute is this. You look at a tragedy like the plane going down in Buffalo a couple months ago when everyone was killed, and the question comes up: Did they create that? Are they 100% responsible for that event?

As I sit here, I don’t sit high enough in consciousness to know if that’s really true or not. Here’s what I do know: live your life as if you are 100% responsible and say, If my wife left me, I’m going to ask, ‘How did I create that?’ If I lost my job I’m going to say, ‘How did I create that?’ If I’m being beaten up on a regular basis by an abusive husband, ‘How am I allowing that to continue?’

It’s by staying there, by buying the alcohol he drinks and on which he then gets drunk and loses control. There are lots of things you might be doing that you could stop doing. Even if you’re not 100%, if you act as if you’re 100%, then you’re going to look to see, What am I contributing to this condition? Whatever you are, you’ll find. If you don’t think you’re 100%, you won’t look. That’s why I say, Act as if you’re 100% responsible.

CHRIS ATTWOOD: Thank you for that.

JACK CANFIELD: You’re welcome.

CHRIS ATTWOOD: Please go on. You were about to share with us another principle.

JACK CANFIELD: The next thing I think you have to get clear about-and this the work you and Janet do with The Passion Test, which I’ve used in my seminars and have also done a couple other closed-eye processes that I use with guided images and so forth-is to identify what your purpose is. I believe, as I believe you believe, that we all have some kind of inborn talent, unique abilities, destiny, if you will, what we’re here for. When you can identify with that and you’re aligned with that, then you’re happy.

You’re filled full, which means you’re fulfilled. Unfortunately, most people are not aligned with their purpose. They’ve never taken time to figure it out. No one ever taught them to do it. That’s why I love your book so much and the work I do so much. There are other people doing that work, too, in their own way. I think of what Stephen Covey said, You don’t want to get to the top of the ladder in life and find out the ladder was leaning against the wrong wall with all that work doing the wrong thing, because it didn’t make you happy.

It’s really critical that people identify their passions and their purpose. The next thing is you have to clarify your vision. I’ve always had a vision of what I wanted. I always knew what I wanted in the next three to five years. I wanted to start a center, I wanted to start company, I wanted a bestselling book, or I wanted to create a Train the Trainer program so we could have a legacy of this work going out.

Most people, if you ask them, What’s your vision of your life? If you had the perfect life five years from now, what would it look like? would never have sat down and thought about that. Literally, we take people through seven areas of their life: Finances and Career, Relationships, Health and Fitness, Fun and Recreation, what I call Personal-which is personal growth and development and spiritual growth and development-Possessions, and then finally, Service, which is what difference you want to make in the world.

Then people get clear about that and turn that into measurable goals and objectives, support that with affirmations and visualizations, get into action without fear of rejection, and then respond to feedback. Most people don’t respond to feedback. They’re way too busy worrying about what other people think rather than finding out what they think and then responding.

Most people won’t ask for feedback because they’re afraid of what they’re going to hear. I always say if I don’t ask my wife for feedback on how we can have a better relationship, I’m the only one who doesn’t know. She’s told her mother, her girlfriends, her sister, and the lady at the nail salon. I’m the only one who can change it and make it better, but I don’t have the information.

Little by little you start to get more comfortable with asking for feedback, then responding to the feedback, then persevering, building teams, building accountability partners and mastermind groups and all these things-which we could drill down into further if you want-that are the core things one must do. Unfortunately, none of that stuff is taught in our public schools.

CHRIS ATTWOOD: Isn’t that an interesting statement about our education system?

JACK CANFIELD: Think about this, Chris. When was the last time you heard of someone getting divorced because they hadn’t memorized the seven causes of the Civil War? They get divorced because they don’t know how to communicate. They don’t know how to give feedback. They don’t know how to say, I’m sorry. They don’t know how to forgive. They don’t know how to share their feelings in a safe way. It’s really sad. The most important information we need to know is not being taught.

CHRIS ATTWOOD: At least not being taught within the education system.

JACK CANFIELD: Yes, within the education system. Fortunately, for people like you and I, people go to workshops and learn it. That’s how we make our living. It would be so much easier if we were learning this stuff at a young age.

CHRIS ATTWOOD: Absolutely agreed. I want to put this in context. You shared with us some key principles: taking 100% responsibility for our lives, identifying our passions and purpose, clarifying our vision, asking for feedback and then acting on it. A lot of people these days are facing some very difficult circumstances. Millions of people today have lost their jobs, and many millions more are living in a state of deep concern, if not fear. Would you talk to us a little bit about whether it is really possible to implement these kinds of principles in this current kind of environment, and if so, what does it take to do that?

JACK CANFIELD: It’s absolutely possible to live these principles. In other words, it’s like saying …

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For more information about Jack Canfield and his work, please go to http://www.jackcanfield.com/.

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