BILL HARRIS: You know, I used to always tell people how they were unconsciously creating their reality and then it occurred to me to add that they were creating it unconsciously and unintentionally because no one would intentionally create poverty for themselves or create feeling bad a lot or create being lonely and alone, things like that. No one would intentionally do that.
JACK CANFIELD: No, people are always attempting to do that which they think will make themselves feel better. A gang member on a street in southern LA, who is robbing a 7-11 store is doing it because he thinks it’s going to make him feel better. He is going to have money, he is going to have respect of his gang, etc. The problem is, he does not have the same awareness of ethical training that you and I have. He doesn’t have the same skills that he might have not gotten in school because he was dyslexic or dropped out, or got kicked out, or his parents were coked out, so he has some brain damage, or whatever. In other words, he is doing the best he can to meet basic psychological and physical needs and when we give that child better skills and resources and awarenesses, through education and rehabilitation, they will choose to do better, but we cannot expect them to do better, ourselves or anyone else, unless they have new skills, resources or tools.
BILL HARRIS: Well, and when you look around you in your community, whatever that is in your life and you don’t see very many different options, then perhaps robbing a store looks like one of the better options.
JACK CANFIELD: Yeah, and for some people it may be the only option that presents them with the solution to their problem. Unfortunately, our society is not very good, especially in our inner city and urban schools, in really empowering kids with the tools they need, for example things I teach on success principles to give them the skills and resources to actually be able to go out in that world and be effective.
BILL HARRIS: So, tell me a little bit more about this new idea you mentioned earlier for another book.
JACK CANFIELD: Well, we have been talking about it all along, basically I think the power of our mind is so much greater than the mere power of our physical efforts. One person I interviewed recently said every hour of mental work is worth 17 hours of physical labor in terms of producing manifested results in the world.
Now, I don’t have a way to validate that statement yet, but a lot of people who are spiritually aware and who have been in this world of manifestation with less effort and so forth, and there are a number of people out there teaching that right now—the law of manifestation, laws of....what do I want to call it?
BILL HARRIS: Abundance?
JACK CANFIELD: Yeah, just prosperity consciousness. All that stuff that basically there seems to be a coherence in the field of theory that this is the way it is. So, one of my great gifts has always been to take things that seem to be a little woo-woo and far out and write them in such a way that the average person living in Iowa, Nebraska, and Oklahoma can relate to it
as well as the people living on he West Coast.
I have been applying it to my own life with great success so I want to tell my own story. I want to interview lots of other people, both anecdotally and people who are doing it as their entire life philosophy. Guys you and I know, like Joe Vitale and others. And, to then write it in such a way that the average person can understand it and apply it.
BILL HARRIS: Yeah, I think that is a really important change that needs to happen in the world, is for more people to understand this. There are way too many people that are creating miserable lives for themselves and they don’t really realize that they are doing it.
It’s really a shame. You know, looking at this thing in New Orleans, obviously the whole thing is very tragic, but one of the things I am struck by, and this is just a superficial observation that may not even be true, but it is what it kind of looks like seeing it on TV, it looks like a lot of these people don’t feel like...there is no way they can do anything so they are just kind of sitting there waiting to be helped.
JACK CANFIELD: I think that is true. A lot of people feel like there are no options. They have no alternative scenarios that they can play out and, again, we are looking at many people at the bottom end of the socioeconomic ladder, many of whom did not complete school, etc., so we go back to lack of awareness and lack of education. I think it’s a great wake up call for society to see how many people really are in that situation. We tend to forget about them, drive by their neighborhoods on the super highways and not deal with it, so I agree with you. I think it’s a sad commentary on the state of consciousness of a lot of people and again, I won’t hold them responsible, other than that all of us have to wake up at some point, hopefully, but usually we don’t wake up until someone like a teacher comes into our life, or an event like the hurricane that can be the teacher and say, “Wait a second, maybe we can do a better thing here than what we have been doing.”
I also think it is a grand statement about our government’s lack of preparedness, both on the state, local and federal level that we don’t plan for the negative. In other words, you have to have a positive attitude and focus on what you want, but I think you also have to be realistic and say, look let’s not deny that there are going to be category five hurricanes and if it were to happen, how are we going to deal with it. You and I are constantly thinking about what if this happens,
then how would we deal with it. If there is an obstacle to overcome, what are our strategies. I mean, you and I learned something from Dan Sullivan called strategy circles, where you anticipate every possible negative scenario and come up with three things to overcome it,
so again you focus back on getting to what you want.
BILL HARRIS: Yeah, every time that I do any kind of a project, I and some of the other people here, we sit down and we think of all of the things that can go wrong and some people would see that as focusing on the negative, but as soon as we think of something that could go wrong, we think about how we are going to keep it from going wrong, how we are going to counteract it if it does happen and that keeps a lot of things from getting in the way so that we can go forward
toward where we want. Ultimately, we are focused on where we want to go, but we realize that shit happens and if you are not prepared for it, it really can take you out.
JACK CANFIELD: That’s absolutely correct and you do have to have contingency plans and that is what allows you to be masterful.
BILL HARRIS: Well, it is like you said, a lot of these people at the lower end of the ladder are kind of ignored. People do not like to even be reminded that those people exist and those people sort of fall through the cracks.
You know, because you have spoken for this group, one of the things dear to my heart is an organization called Self-Enhancement, Inc., which is an organization in Portland, Oregon that helps disadvantaged inner city kids and their motto is “Life Has Options.”
JACK CANFIELD: I like that.
BILL HARRIS: And, that is exactly what they do with these kids. They show them that the small number of options that they see in this ghetto community are not all the options and that the other options that they have never heard about, or if they have heard about, they dismiss them as being impossible for them, they are possible. And then of course as you get more and more people going through a program like they have and coming out the other end, going to college and becoming a doctor or starting a business, or whatever, then other people that are in the pipeline somewhere else, say hey, other people are doing it. It is doable.
JACK CANFIELD: Oh, it is so true and I think that is one of the things if there is anyone listening to this is a parent, one of the reasons I take my kids around the world, every year we go to some other country. Last year I took my 14- year-old son to Spain and to London and France. At the
end of that trip, he said “You know, I think I want to live in Paris for a year when I graduate college or graduate from high school.” That option didn’t exist for him until he saw it and so we want to constantly expose our kids to new options. When I was teaching in an all black high school in Chicago back in the 1960s, most of my kids had never been more than three blocks away from their home. They had never been downtown to the loop, downtown Chicago. They literally thought everyone in the world was black, except the people on TV. You know, we used to take them on field trips to the zoo, to downtown, just to get them to see that there are other
options available to you. So, we have a responsibility to ourself to take ourselves places we have never been and expose ourselves to new people, new ideas, new cultures, new kinds of music, etc., so we are constantly seeing that we can expand into those arenas.
BILL HARRIS: Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. You know, the big ah-ha for me in this conversation has been what you said a little bit ago, that you can’t be responsible for something you are unaware of.
JACK CANFIELD: Right.
BILL HARRIS: To me, I mean I can sort of wangle that around and think, “oh yeah, I have been saying that in another way for a long time,” but the way you said it, it was kind of a new idea to me and I think that’s really a very brilliant statement. I hope you don’t mind if I steal it and teach it to people.
JACK CANFIELD: You can’t steal it because I am giving it to you.
BILL HARRIS: Okay, all right. Well, we are getting pretty close to the end of our time and I was hoping that perhaps you could, since this is what you are best known for, maybe you could end by telling a couple of your more favorite Chicken Soup for the Soul stories.
JACK CANFIELD: Oh sure, I will share two stories with you. One about the power of love and the other about the power of believing you can do anything.
One of my favorite stories of all time was in the first Chicken Soup for the Soul book and it was called “Puppies for Sale.” It is about a little boy walking through a mall and he sees a sign on a retail store, not a pet store, and it says “Puppies for Sale.” So, he goes inside and asks the owner if he can see the puppies and he asked him how much they are. He says, “Well, I have about six of them and I am selling them from anywhere from 25 to 50 bucks, depending on the dog.” The little boy said “Oh good, can I see them?” So, he said sure and he whistled and out from the back of the store came this dog named Lady with five little tiny balls of fur behind her. The little boy noticed that one of the puppies was limping and he said “What is wrong with that puppy?” He said “Well, that puppy when he was born, we had him examined and his hip socket is malformed and he is never going to be able to run, jump and play like the other puppies.” The little boy said, “That’s the one I want. How much?” He said, “You really do not want that dog.” He said, “No, I really do. How much?” And he said, “Well, if you really want him, I will give him to you free.” He said, “No sir, that dog is worth every bit as much as the other puppies and I will pay full price.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out $1.87. ”I will give you $1.87 down and I will give you 50 cents a week until I have him paid for.” The owner says “Son, you are not listening. That puppy will never be able to run and jump and play with you like the other puppies.” At that, the little boy reached down and he pulled up his left pant leg all the way up to his knee to reveal a very badly twisted left leg with a big metal brace on it. He looked the owner in the eye and he said “Well, you see mister, I don’t run so well myself and the little puppy is going to need someone who understands.”
Now that story, which I just shared with you, I want to share a little wrap around with that. A woman came up to me at a conference about two months ago and said she was a homeless woman living on the street. She was about to commit suicide. She had already picked out the place on the railroad tracks where she was going to kill herself. She was pregnant and she was
described by the locals as mentally ill. She was eating out of the dumpster behind the McDonald’s and she walked by a library the day before she was going to kill herself and she said “you know, if there was a solution to my problem, it might be in a book .” She went into the library and they were just putting out a table of inspirational books and there was one called Chicken Soup for the Soul. She said “I picked it up and I went over to a table and I started leafing through it and I found ‘Puppies for Sale’ and I started to read it. And she said, “When I finished that story, I broke into tears and I realized that puppy was broken, but it didn’t mean he was not valuable.” She said “I realized I am like that puppy. Just because I am broken, does not mean I am not a valuable person.” She said from that day forward, she decided not to kill herself. She went and got some help. She got off welfare. She now has a house.
She actually brings other homeless people into that house and works with them. She is now a professional speaker and she has been on television. So, the healing power of a story is very amazing.
BILL HARRIS: Yeah, that’s a great story. It is amazing that you can tell some of these stories without breaking up yourself.
JACK CANFIELD: Well, I used to not be able to tell that story without crying.
BILL HARRIS: You know, I have several stories that I tell and a couple of them are ones that I heard from you and I get choked up telling some of them.
JACK CANFIELD: Well I will share one more with you. It is about a guy named Roger Crawford, who literally was born with what I like to call a bummer of a birthmark. I always precede it with this very funny cartoon where there is this deer with a bull’s eye right in the middle of his chest and the other deer says “bummer of a birthmark, Hal.”
Anyway, Roger Crawford was born with one finger on his right hand, a finger and a thumb on his left hand and his left leg had to be amputated from the knee down when he was 11. His parents believe like you and I believe that anything is possible if you believe it. So, they said to Roger, “Nobody can do everything, but everybody can do something. What is the something that you want to do?” He said “Well, I want to play football.” So, his parents got down and they trained him how to play football. He was not going to be the quarterback, but he could definitely tackle and block, so his dad who had played football, taught him all that. He went out for the team and they eventually had to sue the school system to even let him try out. He was so good he made first string defensive end and his goal was that one day he would intercept a pass and run for a touchdown.
He practiced after school every day on how to do that. He got good at it, but he never had the opportunity present itself in a game until the next to the last game he ever played, which the quarterback faded back, threw the ball into the flat a little too short and Roger intercepted it and
started running toward the goal. He got six yards from his goal when someone grabbed his left leg. Roger said “I pulled, he pulled and my left leg came off because it was a prosthetic device.” He hopped on one foot the final six yards over to the goal. He said “better than the six points
was the look on the guy’s face holding my prosthetic leg.”
The point being that it doesn’t matter what scenario you have as a current reality. Everyone is saying, “Well you know, I am poor, I am black, or I am born in the south and I am a woman and they are sexist down here,” whatever it might be, the reality is if Roger Crawford can learn to play football and go on with one finger and learn to become a tennis champion by duct taping the racquet to his arm and eventually, he was able with a new graphite racquet, to stick one finger in the groove right at the head of the racquet and wedge it back with his other hand. He went on to become captain of his high school tennis team and captain of his college team, winning a full scholarship to Loyola Marymount and winning the NCAA championship doubles tournament that year when he was a senior.
Anybody can do anything. I always say, you hear a story like that and you go “what’s my excuse?” Give it up. You can give me any excuse, blind, quadriplegic and I can give you a story of someone with a similar condition who has gone on and created an incredibly impactful and fulfilling life.
If somebody else can do it, it must be doable!
So, we always want to remember to be inspired by people who have gone for it and keep ourselves motivated.
BILL HARRIS: That is another great story. It reminds me of my attorney, Leonard DuBoff, who is blind and not only is he blind, he has a prosthetic right hand and his other hand has two fingers and a thumb. Leonard was in chemistry lab in college and somebody made a mistake and there was an explosion and he lost his sight and all of this sort of stuff. Now, he is one of the top intellectual property attorneys in the world and he has had clients, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and other really big name clients and his books he has written about intellectual property law are used in most law schools and you would never think that this
guy had any kind of a handicap at all. In fact, he loves to tell blind jokes.
He is a really remarkable guy, and he has every excuse about being on disability of some kind and doing nothing, but he lives in a house in the richest part of Portland and most of his neighbors are professional basketball players.
Helena Nyman: I hope you enjoyed this interview as much as I did! Jack and Bill are right:
I believe that anything is possible if you believe it!
What is the something that you want to do?
I would love to hear from you! If you have a dream that you would like to share with me, please e-mail it to: nyman@consultant.com! (Thank you!)
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