Book SummaryThe Success Principles, by Jack Canfield

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of The Success Principles

Jack Canfield struck gold as a co-author of the best-selling Chicken Soup for the Soul book series, but it took him years to achieve success. In The Success Principles, he details 67 principles to help anyone achieve their goals and dreams. The basic formula for success is to identify what you want, know that you deserve to have it, and use the book’s principles to get you there.

We combined and reorganized the principles by theme for clarity and coherence. We’ve grouped them into eight parts by theme (two more than Canfield’s six), combined similar principles, and omitted repetitive principles (Principle 9: Success Leaves Clues; Principle 22: Practice Persistence; and Principle 24: Exceed Expectations).

Part 1: Learn the Success Basics | Principles 1-8, 10-11, 23, 30

Key Takeaways: Believe you can get what you want, work to get it, and take responsibility for your life.

Top Principle: Principles 1, 30—Take Responsibility for Your Life: Accept that your life circumstances are within your control, and operate with this formula: Event + Response = Outcome. An Event is something that happens in your life; your Response is how you choose to respond to the event; the Outcome is the result of how you choose to respond. If you’re frequently dealing with the same event but don’t like the outcome you’re getting, adjust your response until you get the outcome you’d like.

For example, if you hate your job, you may blame your boss. But you accepted that job and chose to stay in it, even if it’s keeping you from doing work you’re more passionate about. Instead of blaming your boss, get what you need to make the job worthwhile, or make a change. For example, ask that you not be expected to work weekends, or ask for a raise that’s long overdue.

Principles 2-3—Identify Your Life’s Purpose and What You Want: When you know your life’s purpose, you can tailor your actions to support that purpose. In contrast, if you don’t feel a sense of purpose, it’s easy to go aimlessly through life without feeling as though you’re achieving anything worthwhile or meaningful. Principles 4-6—Believe in Yourself and Your Dreams: Science has shown that what happens in our lives tends to follow what we think will happen, or what we’ve been conditioned to think will happen. So, to achieve what you want in life, believe it will happen, believe you can do it, and don’t be deterred by conventional wisdom that says otherwise.

Principles 7, 8, 11, 23—Set Goals: Goal-setting helps you develop new skills, grow as a person, and do things that scare you but are good for you. Write goals with plenty of detail, interact with them daily, break them into steps, and work on those steps every day.

Principle 10—Expand Your Comfort Zone: As we grow up, we often let limiting thoughts about ourselves and our abilities guide how we live our lives. Writing affirmations is a great tool to envision your ideal reality and motivate yourself to leave your comfort zone to achieve it.

Part 2: Act With Intention | Principles 12-16

Key Takeaways: Achieving success requires taking action. Learn to forge ahead, even in the face of challenges and fear.

Top Principle: Principles 15-16—Face Your Fears, and Do the Work: Though everyone has fears, successful people learn to feel their fears and do the work anyway. They also recognize that reaching their goals isn’t just going to happen—they have to be willing to do what’s necessary, which often requires sacrifice. Train yourself to set your fear aside by reframing it, focusing on positive imagery, and focusing on positive feelings. To do the work, evaluate your plan of action, assess whether your steps are sufficient, and be willing to practice and fail until you can do the work well.

Principle 12—Act Like You’ve Made It: Acting as though you’ve already achieved your dream activates the Law of Attraction: You start attracting and recognizing the people and opportunities that could help you reach your goals. To start acting like you’ve made it, think about how your life would be different, including what you’d feel, think, talk about, and wear.

Principles 13-14—Push Yourself to Act: Even when you have a plan of action, you may make excuses that prevent you from following it, such as waiting for the right time to start. Identify your main excuse for waiting and address it so you can get to work.

Part 3: Use Feedback to Your Advantage | Principles 17-21

Key Takeaways: To be successful, communicate your needs and wants to others, and ask others for feedback on your performance to continuously improve yourself.

Top Principle: Principle 19—Seek Out and Use Feedback: Feedback is a useful tool to achieve your goals because it can help you tell when you’re getting off track and need to correct your course. Though you may be afraid of what you’ll hear, the benefits outweigh the downsides.

People are often afraid to give feedback because they don’t want you to react in a negative way. To benefit from feedback, learn to ask for it and accept it graciously. Here are two questions to ask:

• In what ways do you see me holding myself back?
• On a scale of one to 10, how would you rate (BLANK)? This question can be used in any number of personal or professional situations. Often, the person will have specific ideas of things you can do to improve your relationship. For example, Canfield asks his wife and coworkers this question weekly, seeking continuous improvement.

Principles 17-18—Ask for What You Need and Want: Learning how to ask for what you need and want, even when you’re afraid of the answer, can help you reach your goals. To ask for what you want, use clear language, assume what you’re asking for is possible, and if you’re rejected, try again another time.

Principles 20-21—Always Strive to Improve: Working to improve yourself and become successful means that you don’t stop once you’ve...

The Success Principles Summary Part 1: Learn the Success Basics | Introduction

Jack Canfield made it big as a co-author of the best-selling Chicken Soup for the Soul book series, but it took years for him to achieve success. In The Success Principles, Canfield details 67 principles to help anyone achieve their goals and dreams. To develop the principles, Canfield interviewed successful people, from athletes to authors. He applied the principles to his own life, and he teaches them to people all over the world through seminars. His students have accomplished feats such as becoming millionaires, receiving a Teacher of the Year award in their school district, and sustaining fulfilling relationships.

The basic formula for success is to identify what you want, know that you deserve to have it, and use the book’s principles to get you there. Think of the book as a road map: It can show you where to go, but you have to drive the route. In other words, achieving your goals requires you to make the time and effort to do the work.

Shortform Introduction

We reorganized...

The Success Principles Summary Principles 1, 30: Take Responsibility for Your Life

While it’s easy to blame your quality of life on things you can’t control, this isn’t an effective way to improve your life. To achieve success, it’s better to believe that you’re completely responsible for your quality of life and have the power to improve it. In this section, you’ll learn why it’s easy to not take responsibility for your life and how to change your behavior.

Event + Response = Outcome

If you accept that your life circumstances are in your control, then you operate with this formula:

Event + Response = Outcome

• Event: Something that happens in your life
• Response: How you choose to respond to the event
• Outcome: The result of how you choose to respond to the event

Your Response to an Event affects the Outcome of that situation. If you’re frequently dealing with the same event but don’t like the outcome you’re getting, you have two possible responses:

1. Blame the event for your outcome. You can blame any number of things for your troubles, from the economy to racism to gender bias. For example, maybe you’re constantly late for work and blame traffic. Though challenges exist, they aren’t the only reason...

Shortform Exercise: Take Responsibility

Practice taking responsibility for your actions.

Describe a situation in your life (event, response, and outcome) where you blame the event for the outcome.

The Success Principles Summary Principles 2-3: Identify Your Life’s Purpose and What You Want

If you don’t feel a sense of purpose, it’s easy to go aimlessly through life without feeling as though you’re achieving anything worthwhile or meaningful. But when you know your life’s purpose and direction, you can tailor your actions to support that purpose. When your actions align with your purpose, you feel satisfied.

This section explains how to identify your purpose and take your first steps to achieve it.

Find Your Purpose

Canfield suggests several strategies:

1. List the times you have felt most happy. Evaluate whether they share any similar characteristics, and brainstorm ways you could earn your living from them.

2. Meditate. Quiet your mind and ask yourself what your purpose or role in the world is. (How to meditate is discussed further in Principle 47.)

3. Make a Life Purpose Statement. Here are the steps:

• Write two characteristics you like about yourself, such as “creative” or “deep-thinker.”
• Write two verbs that capture how you enjoy expressing those qualities, such as “facilitate” and “collaborate.”
• In the present tense, describe your ideal world and what everyone would be doing. For example, “Everyone is being kind to...

Shortform Exercise: Reflect on Behavior and Preferences

Evaluate how your wants in inconsequential situations affect your behavior.

Do you have a go-to response when you have a different preference than others around you? What is it?

The Success Principles Summary Principles 4-6: Believe in Yourself and Your Dreams

The human brain is a powerful tool, when used correctly. Science has shown that what happens in our lives tends to follow what we think will happen, or what we’ve been conditioned to think will happen. So, to achieve what you want in life, believe it will happen, believe you can do it, and don’t be deterred by conventional wisdom that says otherwise. In this section, you’ll learn techniques to change your thinking and achieve success.

Five Tips to Believe in Yourself

Sometimes we don’t think we’re capable of achieving our dreams because we don’t have the right characteristics for success. Canfield offers the following tips:

1. Cultivate good self-esteem. Your self-esteem, or how you see yourself, ties into how readily you achieve your dreams. You likely developed your sense of self from your parents, and they may have passed along to you negative attitudes about themselves and what they’re capable of. Instead of seeing yourself as capable of taking on challenges, you may hold yourself back.

Instead, strive to see yourself in a positive light and believe you’re capable of what you set your mind to. When you believe in yourself, your brain is more likely to take...

Shortform Exercise: Believe in Yourself

Assess which of the five “believing in yourself” tips you do well, and which you’d like to improve on: cultivate good self-esteem, stop saying, “I can’t,” ignore people’s judgments and ideas about how to live your life, know that any time is the right time to pursue your dreams, don’t think you have to go to college.

Out of the five tips to believe in yourself, which ones are you already good at? How so?

The Success Principles Summary Principles 7, 8, 11, 23: Set Goals

Setting goals is a powerful way to evaluate your dreams and make a plan to achieve them. This section outlines how to write goals and how to increase the likelihood you’ll achieve them.

The Benefits of Goal-Setting

Goal setting has three main benefits:

1. You develop new skills. To reach your goal, you’ll likely have to develop new habits and skills you can continue to use. For example, if your goal is to become a better ukulele player, cultivate the discipline to practice regularly. Even once you’re an accomplished player, you’ll still be able to use that discipline elsewhere.
2. You do things that scare you but are good for you. Goal-setting helps you work through your worries to try new things that improve your life.
3. You develop as a person. Ultimately, it’s our goal as humans to live well, and goal-setting helps—in addition to developing new skills, it opens your mind to what is possible, allowing you to be a well-rounded, resilient, capable person.

Write Your Goals

When writing goals, incorporate these characteristics:

1. Quantity and timing. Setting a measurable goal helps you determine whether you’ve achieved it. To be measurable, a...

The Success Principles Summary Principle 10: Expand Your Comfort Zone

We often let limiting thoughts about ourselves and our abilities guide how we live our lives. In this section, you’ll learn about your comfort zone and how to use affirmations to expand it and achieve your goals.

The Problem With the Comfort Zone

Most people develop ways of thinking about how they should act and what they can achieve. The things they feel comfortable doing form their comfort zone. If they get close to the limits of their comfort zone, they’ll opt to stay inside it, which restricts what they can achieve.

For example, Canfield limited himself to buying shirts for $35 or less. Then, one of his bosses took him shopping at an Italian clothier in Los Angeles. The minimum price for a shirt was $95. Canfield started sweating, telling himself he couldn’t afford the clothing in the store and wouldn’t enjoy owning such expensive things. He bought one shirt while his boss bought a number of new items.

When Canfield wore the shirt later, he liked how comfortable it felt. He realized that his stories about who he was and what he should wear had limited his comfort. He now often custom-orders $300 shirts to get exactly what he wants. **In this spirit, learn to...

Shortform Exercise: Write an Affirmation

Craft an affirmation using Canfield’s tips.

What is a long-term goal you’d like to achieve?

The Success Principles Summary Part 2: Act With Intention | Principle 12: Act Like You’ve Made It

Achieving success requires taking action. In Part 2, you’ll learn to forge ahead, even in the face of challenges and fear.

How Would You Act if You’d Already Made It?

One powerful technique to achieving your goals is to act as though you already have. In the same way that visualization stimulates your reticular activating system (RAS), acting as though you’ve already achieved your dream activates the Law of Attraction: You start recognizing the people and opportunities that might help you reach your goals.

To start acting as though you’ve achieved your goals, think about how your life would be different. Consider:

• How you’d feel
• How you’d think
• How you’d talk
• What you’d wear

You can also try to model the behaviors of successful people. Successful people tend to:

• Be self-confident
• Celebrate their accomplishments
• Feel comfortable taking risks
• Say what they want and don’t want
• Think they can achieve anything

Throw a “Come as You’ll Be” Party

To practice acting as though you’ve achieved your goals, plan or attend a “Come as You’ll Be” party: **a party set five years in the future where you act as if you’ve achieved your...

The Success Principles Summary Principles 13-14: Push Yourself to Act

Once you’ve developed your goal and have a plan to reach it, it’s time to follow it. But even with a plan, you might delay acting for a variety of reasons:

• You keep refining your plan instead of starting to do the steps. Planning is important, but at a certain point, it’s counterproductive—the plan is good enough; just begin.
• You’re waiting for the right time to start. In reality, there’s rarely a right time to start.
• You’re afraid to fail. The idea of your plan not working out can paralyze you into not taking action. But you won’t know if you don’t try.

In general, it’s best to act on your plan as soon as possible. Examples include enrolling in online courses, networking with people in your field, or saving for the downpayment on a house. Here are some of the effects of taking action:

• You show others you’re serious about your plan.
• Others notice your efforts and may feel inspired to support you.
• You learn how to do things that were only possible to learn by doing them.
• You get feedback or advice on how to adjust.

Feedback from personal observations and from others can help you determine if you need to make adjustments. Though...

The Success Principles Summary Principles 15-16: Face Your Fears, and Do the Work

Fear can prevent you from achieving your goals. Everyone has fears, but successful people feel afraid and take action anyway. They also recognize that reaching their goals isn’t just going to happen—they have to be willing to do the necessary work, which often requires sacrifice. This section offers tips to move past fear and encourage yourself to do the work.

Overcome Fear

As humans, we’ve evolved to be fearful in order to survive. Fear helped us realize when we faced danger and released the energy to help us escape. Most situations we face today aren’t a matter of life and death, but we may still feel as though they are.

Often, we’re fearful not because we face immediate danger but because we imagine a negative outcome. To counter this, think of fear as an acronym meaning:

Fantasized

Experiences

Appearing

Real

Instead of imagining the worst outcomes, train yourself to set your fear aside by reframing it, and focusing on positive imagery and feelings.

Technique #1: Reframe Your Fear

Follow these steps to reframe your fears:

1. Write out your fears. Focus on things that you’re afraid of doing rather than things you’re afraid...

Shortform Exercise: Face Your Fears

Reframe your fear.

Describe a personal goal.

The Success Principles Summary Part 3: Use Feedback to Your Advantage | Principles 17-18: Ask for What You Need and Want

In Part 3, you’ll learn how to communicate your needs and wants to others, and ask for feedback on your performance to continuously improve yourself.

Learn How to Ask

Sometimes, all it takes to get what you want is asking for it. But it’s easy to hold yourself back—maybe you’re afraid of rejection, so you decide it’s better not to ask than to face a “no.” Learning how to ask for what you need and want, even when you’re afraid of the answer, can help you reach your goals.

Follow these steps to ask for what you want:

1. Use clear, precise language. If you ask for something vague, you may get a vague answer or something that isn’t what you want. Learn how to phrase three common requests for change:

• Behavior. If you need someone to do something, tell them specifically what it is. For example, saying, “Would you do the dishes more often?” is less specific than, “I want you to wash the dishes each time I cook a meal, and I’ll wash them when you cook a meal.”
• Time. If you need to have something done at a certain time, but you don’t say so directly, it probably won’t be done at that time. Instead, include a specific time frame in your request, which...

The Success Principles Summary Principle 19: Seek Out and Use Feedback

Feedback is a useful tool to achieve your goals because it can tell you when you’re getting off track and need to correct your course. In this section, you’ll learn about different types of feedback, why we aren’t always great at responding to it, how to respond better, and how to use it to achieve your goals.

Feedback: Positive and Negative

There are two main types of feedback:

1. Positive. Positive feedback is the kind we like and prefer—it shows us we’re on the right track. Examples include praise from a boss or feelings of happiness and satisfaction when we do something we like.
2. Negative. Most people don’t like negative feedback because it means we have to change or do something differently. Some examples of negative feedback include not getting a promotion and feelings of despair or loneliness.

Reactions to Negative Feedback

Though negative feedback can be upsetting, reacting to it in a positive way can help you grow and achieve your goals. Instead of feeling criticized, think of feedback as an opportunity to learn and adjust accordingly.

Here are three unhelpful responses to negative feedback:

1. Getting upset at the source. When you...

Shortform Exercise: Evaluate Your Reaction to Feedback

Assess whether you react well to feedback.

Think of a time that you reacted negatively to feedback. Describe the situation and how you reacted.

The Success Principles Summary Principles 20-21: Always Strive to Improve

Working to improve yourself and become successful means that you don’t stop once you’ve achieved one goal—you’re constantly improving yourself or your work.

The world is changing rapidly. Working to improve and grow is a necessity for successful people. But if you let the fast pace of the world dictate the pace at which you improve yourself, you may feel like you’re barely keeping up; creating changes in yourself takes time. Working systematically on small changes can help improve yourself and your work.

Even Slight Improvements Make a Difference

In The Slight Edge, author Jeff Olson discusses the outsized impact that making small changes can have on your life. For example, doing slightly more of something, like substituting a glass...

The Success Principles Summary Part 4: Prime Yourself for Success | Principle 25: Surround Yourself With Nurturing, Successful People

In Part 4, you’ll learn to prime yourself for success by finding people who can support your endeavors and developing new ways of thinking about yourself and your efforts.

Who You Spend Time With Matters

If you spend a lot of time with people who stress you out, aren’t successful, or aren’t supportive, you’re less likely to achieve success. Aim to spend time with people who uplift you, support and nurture your dreams, have a positive attitude, and are successful.

Identify the Negative People in Your Life

To start surrounding yourself with supportive people, identify those who are negative and holding you back. Here’s how:

1. Write down all of the people you spend time with regularly. Consider family, friends,...

The Success Principles Summary Principle 26: Appreciate Your Successes

It’s common to focus more on our failures than our successes. We tend to take even small successes for granted. But over time, this can diminish your self-esteem and work against your continued achievement. In this section, you’ll learn why celebrating your success is important, as well as several techniques for how to do so.

Why Do We Focus on Failure?

There are three main reasons we tend to focus on failure rather than success:

1. As we grew up, our family and teachers emphasized our failures. For example, your parents may have reacted to a good grade by saying, “Nice work,” but to a C or less by giving you a lecture. Or maybe your teachers marked wrong answers with a red pen rather than marking correct answers with a check mark. As adults, we may continue to emphasize our failures rather than our successes.
2. We remember events associated with negative emotions better than those associated with positive ones. Failure produces strong negative emotions. As a result, many people think they have many fewer successes than they actually do because their memory emphasizes failures.
3. We define success in a specific way. People tend to define success as an...

Shortform Exercise: Recognize Your Successes

Identify nine major successes.

Divide your life into three equal time periods. Write three successes for each chunk of life.

The Success Principles Summary Principle 27: Improve Your Bedtime Routine

How you reflect on your day has an impact on what you learn and how you approach the next day. This section discusses two activities to restructure your bedtime routine for success.

Why Bedtime?

The last 45 minutes before you go to sleep is an important time to reflect and plan for the next day. This is because your brain processes what you think about during this time up to six times more than everything else you did during the day. It’s also why studying before you go to sleep can be an effective test-taking strategy and why you might not sleep as well or might have...

The Success Principles Summary Principle 28: Finish Your Projects and Declutter Your Life

Finishing projects and decluttering your life can give you a sense of accomplishment and the confidence to move forward with your goals. This section explores the importance of these tasks and how to tackle them.

Finish What You Started

Seeing something through to completion involves the following steps (steps 5 and 6 look the same, but they’re different):

1. Choose to do something.
2. Plan how you’ll do it.
3. Begin.
4. Keep going.
5. Finish.
6. Complete.

We often go through all the steps except the last one—we finish, but we don’t do the last thing that would make the task complete. For example, you choose to start a new filing system for your home office. You buy a filing cabinet and some file folders and file most of your paperwork, but you neglect to file your invoices. If you’d just finish filing the invoices, the task would be complete, but instead, it sits unfinished for weeks.

Why does it matter? Because the more unfinished tasks you have, the more time you spend thinking about them being unfinished when you could put that energy toward other things.

We leave things unfinished for several reasons:

• Our work habits are subpar.
• We take on...

Shortform Exercise: Eliminate Clutter

Make a plan to eliminate clutter in your life.

Walk through your home, and make a note of all of your clutter. Examples include piles of paper, broken tools, or t-shirts you never wear.

The Success Principles Summary Principle 29: Resolve Past Hurts

When you experience something painful, but don’t process it, it diminishes your ability to take on similar or new challenges. In this section, you’ll learn how to recognize when you’re holding yourself back and learn two techniques to overcome hurt or discomfort.

Negative Emotions Are Poisonous

Negative emotions like anger or resentment rob you of energy that you could use toward more positive outcomes like achieving your goals. For example, if you’re trying to work on a project but can’t stop thinking about that mean comment your friend made about you, you won’t move as quickly or accomplish as much. From a Law of Attraction perspective, whatever emotion you’re releasing into the universe is what you attract—if you harbor anger and resentment, you’ll attract more of it into your life.

Forgiveness is the key to breaking this cycle. It helps you express your emotions and move on. For example, forgiving a business partner who stole money from you allows you to acknowledge your resentment and put the past behind you so you can focus on the present. This doesn’t mean what the person did is acceptable or that you should trust them, just that you acknowledge what they did...

The Success Principles Summary Principle 31: Welcome Change

Learning to embrace change is an important part of readying yourself for success. In this section, you’ll learn why it’s important and some techniques to help you do it.

Change Is Inevitable

It’s common to become accustomed to the way things are and not want them to change. But the world is constantly changing, from new technologies to the economy. Learning to welcome change makes it easier to adjust to it and benefit from it.

There are two types of change:

1. Cyclical. Cyclical changes, like economic or seasonal changes, are temporary and last a short time.
2. Structural. Structural changes are fundamental changes to society, such as the invention of the Internet. Because of these changes, we don’t do business or communicate the way we used to, and we won’t ever go back; we’ll just move on to something else.

Structural changes are the most significant. If you refuse...

Shortform Exercise: Reflect on a Previous Change

Evaluate how adapting to a past change impacted your life.

Think of a time that you resisted a change that you eventually embraced. Describe what the change was and why you resisted it.

The Success Principles Summary Principles 32-33: Practice Positive Self-Talk

Research has shown that when we talk to ourselves, it’s mostly about ourselves, and it’s mostly negative. Negative self-talk colors our view of what’s possible and makes us unmotivated to act. Plus, our body reacts physically to the negative things we say about ourselves. Learning to speak positively to yourself can help you in many facets of your life.

In this section, you’ll learn to recognize negative self-talk and limiting beliefs and how to counter them.

Your Thoughts Physically Affect You

Lie detector tests are a good illustration of how your thoughts affect you. If you were hooked up to a lie detecting machine, and someone asked you whether you stole money, physical changes might start to happen in your body, regardless of whether you lied or not. For example, your heart rate might increase, and you might start sweating.

Negative and positive thoughts do different things to the body. Negative thoughts can make you feel powerless, unmotivated, and weak. Positive thoughts can make you feel more in balance and relaxed. They can also release endorphins in the brain, which are associated with pleasure. Learning to retrain yourself to think positive thoughts helps...

The Success Principles Summary Principles 34-35: Master Four Success Habits Per Year

Successful people make a continuous effort to become successful. This requires letting go of destructive behaviors and developing new success habits. This section will discuss how to develop new habits and how to stick with them.

The Upside and Downside of Habits

Habits automate some of your life. Over time, you’ve learned to live your life a specific way, from safe driving to how you eat breakfast. But habits can also be undesirable behaviors, like drinking too much soda or being late. Eventually, you may suffer the consequences of your bad habit. For example, the consequence of drinking too much soda might be developing diabetes. The solution? Rid yourself of bad habits by replacing them with good ones.

Activity: Develop Productive Habits

Studies suggest it takes about 13 weeks, or a quarter of a year, to cement a new habit. Aim to learn...

Shortform Exercise: Implement New Habits

Identify your bad habits and make a plan to work on the worst four.

List your bad habits.

The Success Principles Summary Principles 36-37: Learn Throughout Your Life

Just like developing new habits, learning throughout your life is key to being successful and adapting to changing times. Canfield offers four strategies to learn more:

1. Watch less TV; read more. The average person in the U.S. watches six hours of TV a day. Eliminating one hour of TV a week would help you make time for other pursuits, such as learning a language, spending more time with family, or reading. Reading is one of the most beneficial activities because it allows you to learn from people who have already achieved great things.

If you’re hoping to become an expert in your field, reading for an hour each day on related topics can greatly accelerate the pace of your learning. If you read a book a week, you’ll have read over 1,000 books in 20 years, putting you in the top 1 percent of people in your...

The Success Principles Summary Part 5: Grow Your Professional Skills and Network | Principles 38-41: Focus on Your “Core Genius”

In Part 5, you’ll learn how to improve your leadership skills, grow your professional network, and focus on the work you do best.

Passion and enthusiasm can drive you to do your best work and achieve success. These qualities come from within when you do activities you feel passionate about. You also probably have skills and abilities that are so effortless for you that you do them willingly, possibly without charging people. But successful people turn their passion and their “core genius”—what they do best—into their business. In this section, you’ll learn how to identify both, build your time around them, and create a support team to help you along the way.

Identify Your Passion

Ask yourself these questions to see if you’re following your passion:

• Do I love my work? If I don’t love my work, what would I rather be doing? Would it be lucrative? Successful people find a way to make it work, which means living with less money or turning their passion into a lucrative business.
• What would I do for work if I had all the money I’d ever need from winning the lottery?
• **Which activities outside of work make me feel the most connected to other people and...

Shortform Exercise: Explore Your “Core Genius”

Examine the intersection between your core genius (what you do best) and your daily work.

List three to five of your main talents.

The Success Principles Summary Principle 42: Align Your Time With Your Values

From the workplace to home, our lives are filled with distractions that prevent us from spending time on what’s important to us. In this section, you’ll learn how to say no to distractions and pursue the activities that matter to you.

Learn to Say No

As a child, you learned that saying no to something your parents wanted you to do wasn’t an acceptable answer. Later, as an adult, you may have avoided saying no because you didn’t want to upset someone. But successful people learn how to say no to benefit their career and personal lives. For example, if your boss gives you an impossible deadline, it’s reasonable to refuse to do the work or negotiate a different deadline.

Here are two strategies to make saying no easier:

1. Make a list of things to stop doing. These could be activities that direct precious energy away from what you’d like to focus on. Write them down and follow them like a policy. When you share this policy with others, it helps them respect your boundaries. For example, one item on Canfield’s stop list is to accept no more than five speaking events per month.
2. **Use the “I...

The Success Principles Summary Principle 43: Cultivate Your Leadership Skills

Successful people are often leaders in their field because achieving their vision or goals required motivating, recruiting, and leading groups of people to action. Though not everyone will have a large impact like Nelson Mandela or Steve Jobs, you can still make a big difference in your place of work or community. However, leadership skills aren't innate—it takes practice to develop them. This section discusses five leadership skills to hone.

Skill #1: Communicate a Compelling Vision

To recruit others to work toward your vision and do their best work, present a clear, compelling vision of what you want to achieve and why it’s important. Use your own natural enthusiasm for the goal to convince people to follow your lead. In addition, tell people how your vision will make those working on it better. For example, if you’re starting an urban garden, inspire volunteers with your vision of how they and the community will benefit from it. Appealing to people’s emotions creates a sense of connection and motivates them to act. You can do this by telling stories about yourself, volunteers, partners you work with, and so on.

Skill #2: Learn From Listening

In addition to...

The Success Principles Summary Principles 44-45: Network, and Find Mentors and Coaches

To be successful in your life and career, cultivate a network of people you can call on for advice and do business with. This section covers how to find mentors and coaches, and how to network.

Find a Mentor

Sometimes, we seek career advice from friends and family who aren’t well-equipped to provide it. They may not have pursued a similar career or have experience with the challenges you face. Cultivating a group of mentors in your field whom you can call on regularly for advice helps you advance your career and achieve your goals.

Though you may have a sense of what you’d like to do in your career, you may still be shortsighted or need help overcoming challenges. A mentor who has been in the field longer than you have has experience and advice they can share to help you.

Here are the steps to finding and securing a mentor:

1. Research potential mentors. Look for people who have the skills, expertise, or experience you need to achieve your goals. Search online, read trade publications, and ask others in your field who they think would be a good mentor for you. If multiple people recommend the same person, it’s a sign that person would be a good mentor. 2....

The Success Principles Summary Principle 46: Convene a Mastermind Group and Choose an Accountability Partner

Professionals in and outside of your field can offer insight and encouragement that helps you achieve your personal and professional goals. This section covers how to form a mastermind group, how to work with an accountability partner, and how to form a support team.

Form a Mastermind Group

Many successful people use mastermind groups—five or six people who convene regularly to confidentially help each other navigate challenges and reach their professional or personal goals. The concept originated in a 1937 book Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill.

Joining or forming a mastermind group gives you:

• Access to resources such as knowledge, and fresh perspectives
• Access to the networks of the people in your group
• The ability to go faster and farther with your goals

Members of a mastermind group draw on each other’s support, as well as energy from a higher power—God, or however you refer to a greater power. When people gather for a shared purpose, they’re able to channel energy they get from this power toward their endeavors and goals.

Here are two questions to keep in mind when forming a mastermind group:

1. **Should the focus be professional or...

The Success Principles Summary Principle 47: Consult Your Intuition

When confronted with a challenge, many people know how to seek outside help, but few know how to access their inner wisdom or intuition. In this section, you’ll learn how intuition works and how to use it.

Tapping Into Your Intuition

You’ve likely had an experience where your intuition told you something. For example, you might have felt a prickle on the back of your neck and realized someone was looking at you. Everyone has intuition, but successful people learn how to access it at will so they can use it to their advantage. Consulting your intuition can help you solve problems, make decisions, earn money, access your creativity, and more.

There are three main ways your intuition speaks to you:

• Emotions. You may feel certain emotions that reveal the true nature of a situation. For example, negative emotions about something suggest wariness or uncertainty while positive emotions suggest contentment and excitement.
• Thoughts, hunches, and/or voices. Your intuition may take the form of certain thoughts, a mental image, or an inner voice speaking to you. It may use phrases or complete sentences, and you may be able to converse with it to get additional...

Shortform Exercise: Make an Intuition Consultation Plan

Decide how to approach consulting with your intuition.

On a scale of one to 10, with one being “completely disconnected” and 10 being “completely connected,” how would you rate your connection with your intuition? Why?

The Success Principles Summary Part 6: Cultivate Successful Relationships | Principle 48: Hone Your Listening Skills

In Part 6, you’ll explore the suite of skills required for successful relationships:

• Listening and asking questions to help people feel heard
• Resolving conflicts through discussions
• Asking questions to learn the truth
• Following through on commitments
• Acting with class

The Basics of Active Listening

Active listening is an important skill to facilitate effective communication and ingratiate yourself with others. This section covers the basics of active listening and how to do it.

Active listening requires more than merely listening to someone. It includes:

• Observing body language
• Showing your attention with your own body language, such as making eye contact, nodding, or facing the person
• Considering the underlying message of what’s being said
• Asking clarifying questions

The main way people fall short of these techniques is focusing on speaking rather than listening. If you’re focused on talking in order to show your intelligence or knowledge, you may fail to listen to what people around you are saying. For example, this could happen if you’re thinking about something that you’d like to say instead of listening, or if you’re...

Shortform Exercise: Focus On Your Priorities

Ask Canfield’s four questions to identify your priorities.

In three years, what will you need to have done to feel happy?

The Success Principles Summary Principle 49: Host “Heart Talks”

We’re often better at telling people what to do than listening to what they have to say. And many of our institutions, like businesses and schools, are structured around talking with little listening. Yet people need the ability to discuss and express themselves. Without this opportunity, people may hold their discontent or issues inside, fostering resentment or distrust. To remedy this, create space for discussions, or “Heart Talks,” where people can share their concerns, wishes, and dreams so they feel heard and can put forth their best effort. In this section, you’ll learn how.

Heart Talks 101

Heart talks can be used with most kinds of groups, such as work teams, sports teams, or civic groups, and in a variety of situations, including:

• When there are conflicts between different groups or team members
• After a merger or other event
• As part of a meeting, or before it
• In response to an emotional event, like the death of an employee

Heart Talks can be done regularly or as needed. For example, your team might choose to do a talk at the beginning of every team meeting, while others might do them only if there’s an emotionally challenging situation at...

The Success Principles Summary Principles 50-51: Speak as if Words Have Power, and Tell the Truth

Your words—spoken and unspoken—have a powerful effect on you and those around you, yet we don’t often think about this power. To become successful, be conscientious about how you use words.

Being honest and telling the truth can be difficult—you might worry about being judged, feeling uncomfortable, or facing someone’s anger. But telling the truth is an important part of being an authentic person. Lying requires energy, and when you don’t do it, you can put that energy toward becoming your best self instead. In this section, you’ll learn about the power of words, the benefits of telling the truth, and a process for telling the truth faster.

The Power of Words

The Law of Attraction holds that If we focus on negative ideas, we’re directing energy into making those things happen. To make positive change in the world instead, it’s important to speak positively to ourselves and others. Use language that shows:

• Love
• Appreciation
• Support
• Possibilities for the future
• Acceptance

Ideally, your words should align with your purpose and values. For example, if you hope to inspire self-confidence in those around you, speaking about yourself in a critical or...

The Success Principles Summary Principle 52: Ask Questions to Learn the Truth

It’s common to make up “stories” about a situation or experience to help us interpret it rather than asking questions to learn the truth. Often, our stories are negative, and they affect how we choose to act. In this section, you’ll learn to ask questions to determine what’s going on rather than letting your negative stories affect your emotions and guide your actions.

Avoid Assuming

When you spend too much time thinking about what others think about you, it’s common to assume the worst. If you don’t check into it, you can’t know how others feel, and you run the risk that you’ll start acting based on how you think they feel rather than how they actually feel. However, you may feel hesitant to check in with someone because talking about feelings can be intimidating. Instead, push through your insecurity, and check in with the person you’re wondering about so you can learn the facts and act accordingly. You may find out their behavior has nothing to do with you.

For example, during one of Canfield’s seminars, he could see a participant whose body language indicated he wasn’t enjoying himself: The participant had his arms crossed and a displeased expression. Canfield...

The Success Principles Summary Principle 53: Show Your Appreciation

From personal relationships to the workplace, showing your appreciation helps others feel affirmed and valued. Yet we may hesitate to show appreciation or not show it in the way that the person prefers to receive it. In this section, you’ll learn about five “love languages” through which people like being appreciated, how to discover someone’s love language, and how to apply this knowledge in a professional and personal setting.

Employers Tend to Overlook Appreciation

Studies indicate that employees and employers value appreciation differently. For example:

• When asked to rank 10 factors that would motivate employees to do their best work, employers ranked appreciation eighth. But employees usually rank appreciation as their number one motivator.
• 88 percent of people said their employers don’t acknowledge their work, and 46 percent said they left a company because their employers didn’t appreciate them enough.

The data suggest that employers need to appreciate employees more. Learn the love languages to appreciate people in both your workplace and personal life.

The Five “Love Languages”

People have a preferred “language” or way of receiving appreciation,...

Shortform Exercise: Identify Your Love Language

Reflect on what makes you feel appreciated at work.

Do you feel appreciated at work? Why or why not? In your answer, include an example of what people at your company are or aren’t doing to appreciate you.

The Success Principles Summary Principle 54: Rethink Your Agreements

Making agreements and delivering on them is an important skill for successful people. This section will discuss why following through with your agreements is important and how to ensure you deliver.

Delivering on Agreements Is About Integrity

When you deliver on an agreement, you demonstrate that you have the integrity to see commitments through to completion. Yet we sometimes hit roadblocks and fail to deliver. There are three common reasons for failure:

• You’re pressed for time. You may agree to do something and not be able to deliver because you’re too busy or lose track of what you agreed to do amid your other commitments or responsibilities.
• You don’t want to draw attention to yourself. Though you could’ve negotiated an agreement that fit better with what you’re capable of delivering, it’s easier to agree to the original terms than to draw attention to yourself through adjustments.
• **You don’t...

The Success Principles Summary Principle 55: Act With Class

Acting with class can help you distinguish yourself from others and achieve success. In this section, you’ll learn what it means to be a class act, tips for acting with class, and how doing so can help you succeed.

How to Act With Class

Acting with class means striving to improve in many areas of your life for yourself and those around you. Improving yourself attracts people into your life who can help you further. For example, acting with class can help you attract business partners who hold themselves to high standards like you do. Your chances of success are greater when your values align.

Here are seven guidelines for acting with class:

1. Accept responsibility for your actions and results. As discussed in Chapter 1, taking responsibility for your actions and their results means taking ownership of your role and recognizing that you have the power to act differently to elicit different results if you don’t like the ones you’re getting.

2. Develop personal standards and follow them. People who act with...

The Success Principles Summary Part 7: Cultivate Your Financial Success | Principle 56: Develop Positive Thinking Habits About Money

In Part 7, you’ll learn how to grow your wealth and give back to the people, charities, and institutions you care about.

Let Go of Limiting Money Beliefs

Making enough money to enjoy the lifestyle you want can help you feel successful. But it’s easy to let limiting beliefs about money and unhelpful behavior get in the way. In this section, you’ll learn how to change your thinking to better position yourself for financial success.

You likely developed your ideas about money during childhood. Phrases you heard and experiences you had can color how you think about money as an adult, causing you to hold back from taking steps to attain your preferred level of wealth. Some common phrases you may have heard include:

• Nothing is free.
• Money doesn’t grow on trees.
• Money doesn’t buy happiness.
• More money, more problems.
• Rich people are evil, greedy, unethical, and so on.

When Canfield was a child, his father employed many of these phrases, and told him that rich people were rich because they exploited poor people. Canfield also watched his dad work hard for a month selling...

The Success Principles Summary Principle 57: Choose to Be Wealthy

In life, you get what you focus on, and the same is true for wealth. To become wealthy, choose to become wealthy. This section offers tips on how to begin that process and how to gain knowledge about wealth.

Who Is Wealthy?

We tend to think that rich people are famous, but this isn’t necessarily the case. In 2014, the U.S. had about 9.6 million millionaires, the majority of whom were ordinary people who used smart saving strategies to grow their wealth. They make saving and investing money a priority: They direct money toward their savings or investments first, then live off whatever is left.

Understand Your Current Finances

Many people aren’t conscious of what they spend money on, how much they’d need to save to retire comfortably, or even how to save for retirement. Taking steps to understand your personal finances will position you to grow wealthy in the way you choose. Here are the steps:

1. Develop financial literacy. Learning about finances can help you prepare for retirement, save for the things and experiences that are important to you, and more. Canfield suggests reading at least one book a month about finances to grow your understanding of...

The Success Principles Summary Principle 58: Save and Invest Your Money

Saving for retirement will help you reach financial independence—not having to work for money. But many people don’t know how to effectively save. This section discusses how to start saving money to be able to retire comfortably.

The Power of Compound Interest

Many people balk at the idea of consistently saving money. They may be deeply in debt or may not think saving is important. Though saving money may not seem important, it’s necessary to ensure you have enough money to retire comfortably. Plus, if you force yourself to save a certain amount of money each month, it’s easy to see when you don’t have enough left over to live on, which encourages you to earn more money so that saving feels comfortable.

Even saving a small amount of money each month can go a long way over the long term. Saving early and regularly not only helps you put money away, it allows your money to earn interest that compounds over time.

Here’s how compound interest works: If you invest $1,000 into a fund or account that earns 10 percent in annual interest, you’ll earn $100 by the end of the year for a total of $1,100. If you reinvest the $1,100, you’ll accrue $110 in interest for a total of...

The Success Principles Summary Principle 59: Spend Consciously

It’s common to think that being successful means living a lavish lifestyle and not having to think about what you spend money on. Though living the lifestyle you want while investing and growing your wealth is an admirable goal, it’s still important to learn how to consciously spend money. Conscious spending means two things:

1. You spend only the money you have. You earn more than you spend, and don’t take on debt to buy what you want.
2. You do what you want while spending little. You devise creative ways to do things that don’t require spending a fortune.

On the whole, conscious spending will allow you to get what you need without having to go into debt or spend much to get it. This section covers four tips for developing a conscious-spending mindset.

Tip #1: Pay in Cash

To encourage yourself to spend only on what you need, pay in cash for most things. Counting the amount of cash you spend on a given purchase and seeing what you have leftover makes you more aware of the money leaving your possession than when you use a card. You may find that purchases you deemed essential feel less so. It’s also harder to make large purchases because you can’t use...

The Success Principles Summary Principle 60: Increase Your Income

To build your wealth, you can either spend less of your earnings, or earn more. Earning more is better because it allows you to save money for retirement while not having to forgo things you want to buy in the present. This section offers suggestions for how to earn more.

Three Basic Steps to Earn More

Here are three steps to earn more money:

1. Determine how much you want to earn.
2. Brainstorm what you can do to get it. The three main things you can do are provide a service, make a product, or add some kind of additional value to your company.
3. Develop and deliver it. Once you’ve decided what you’ll do, make a plan and follow it.

Optional: Consider developing additional streams of income. This could allow you to earn more money on top of full-time work. Plus, if demand for one of your income streams fluctuates, you have your other income streams to fall back on. Aim for sources of income that don’t require a large initial investment of time or money. That said, don’t be shy about developing the skills you need to reach your goals and build new income streams. This includes taking online courses or going back to school.

Five Strategies to Earn...

Shortform Exercise: Plan How to Earn More

Evaluate how you might supplement your current income.

Which one to two strategies appeal to you most to increase your income? Why?

The Success Principles Summary Principle 61: Donate Your Money and Time

Though growing your wealth is a worthy goal, so is sharing your wealth to help make the world a better place. This section explains the benefits of sharing your wealth through tithing.

Tithing 101

Tithing means giving your wealth to spiritual institutions or philanthropic organizations that you care about. Corporations can donate a portion of their proceeds to worthy causes. For example, the CEO of Medtronic pledged to give 2 percent of the company’s profits to charity. As a company has grown, they’ve gone from donating $1.5 million in the first year to $17 million in more recent years.

For individuals, there are two types of tithing:

1. Give money. God created a world where the success of an individual contributes to the success of others around them. When you share your wealth and care for others, you bring additional prosperity for yourself. To celebrate this reality, a common practice is to give 10 percent of your income to the church, mosque, or synagogue you attend or derive spiritual guidance from. You can also dedicate a portion of your income to donating to charitable organizations you care about.

Example: Canfield and his co-authors for the _Chicken Soup...

The Success Principles Summary Principle 62: Serve Others

Just as sharing your wealth brings you prosperity, serving others enriches your life while making the world a better place. This section discusses how to start doing it, and the success stories of those who have started on this path.

Questions to Get Started

To serve others, ask yourself the following questions to determine which opportunities align with your interests:

1. Which organization’s work do you admire? You may already know of an organization whose work you’d like to help bolster in some way. Explore what needs they have for your skills or expertise.
2. Which causes, issues, or people are important to you? Examples include childhood literacy, veterans, or the environment.

Ways to Serve

Here are some common ways to serve others:

1. Volunteer. Volunteering is one of the best ways to serve others. Many organizations rely on volunteers with business expertise for accounting, fundraising, and recruiting volunteers. They also need board members knowledgeable about business.

The benefits of volunteering include:

• Expanding your personal and professional network. When you volunteer, you meet many people who may become friends or be...

The Success Principles Summary Part 8: Make the Most of Technology | Principle 63: Learn What Technology You Need, and Use It

When Canfield first published this book in 2005, the world had yet to undergo some of the major shifts in technology that we enjoy today. Canfield added this last part on technology to teach readers how to take advantage of today’s digital tools and resources.

In this section, Canfield shares tips to embrace digital tools that make life easier while being selective and strategic enough to prevent feeling overwhelmed.

Limit Information Exposure

The digital age has produced myriad resources for accessing information and learning new skills. For example, if you want to learn how to make sourdough bread, there are plenty of YouTube tutorials to guide you. However, there is so much information that it can be overwhelming. Consider taking steps to limit the information you consume and the technology you use.

Canfield recommends putting yourself on a “Low-Information Diet” as recommended by Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Work Week. Ferriss says exposure to too much information is harmful because:

• There’s so much information to consume, it requires a large portion of your time.
• The information is...

The Success Principles Summary Principles 64-65: Develop Your Online Brand

Successful people are hyperaware of how their online presence, or brand, affects their entrepreneurial or philanthropic endeavors. They actively cultivate a brand that frames them as an authority worth listening to. In this section, you’ll learn four steps to cultivate a brand that’ll help your business succeed.

Step 1: Develop Your Online Footprint

To create your brand, it’s important to know what you want to do. Whether it’s starting a new business or leading volunteers in cleaning up a local beach, make a plan to get people to engage with you or align with your cause. You may also want to make yourself attractive to prospective employers. Do this by creating content that positions you or your company as credible, forward-thinking, and authoritative.

For example, if you aspire to become a C-level executive someday, creating an online presence or offering content that shows you’re forward-thinking and competent will make potential employers more confident in your abilities. Some executives also hire media relations personnel, write books, or accept speaking invitations to grow their presence in their field. People with a significant presence in their field are often...

Shortform Exercise: Assess Your Social Media Use

Reflect on your professional social media habits.

Do you use social media to advance your professional brand? Why or why not?

The Success Principles Summary Principles 66-67: Crowdfund and Crowdsource Your Endeavors

When you need funding for a new business and can't attract venture capital, crowdfunding and crowdsourcing offer an alternative. In this section, you’ll learn tips and strategies to effectively raise money through crowdfunding and familiarize yourself with different crowdfunding platforms.

Crowdfunding 101

Crowdfunding means giving money to people, causes, or companies you care about. Companies and individuals around the world have used crowdfunding campaigns to fund all kinds of endeavors, such as launching new companies or products, or creating documentaries. In 2010, crowdfunding generated $89 million; by 2013, it generated $5 billion, an amount expected to double every two years.

Here are four crowdfunding strategies:

1. Use video to tell your story. As we discussed in Principles 64-65, video is one of the best ways to engage your audience. It allows you to share your passion in a direct way. Campaigns that used video on Kickstarter, one of the largest crowdfunding websites, are successfully funded 50 percent of the time compared to just 30 percent of campaigns without a video. Plus, campaigns with a video tend to raise more money. However, one of the...