The Success Principles

The Success Principles condenses 64 lessons Jack Canfield learned on his journey to becoming a successful entrepreneur, author, coach and speaker into 6 sections, which will help you transform your mindset and take responsibility and control of your own life, so you can get from where you are to where you want to be.

Remember yesterday’s example with your dollars being passengers on a bus? This lesson is exactly what that’s about. You are the director of your own life.

There’s no way of denying that. But that’s exactly what complaints are. Every time you blame the government, your boss, or the economy, because you’re not where you want to be, there’s really only one person at fault.

For example, if you think you’re not being paid enough, because you can never save enough money to go on vacation, ask yourself how you spent the last $500 you got as a gift, raise, or end of year bonus. Did you get a new TV? What if you had instead invested it into an index fund – it just might’ve been the investment you needed to make to pay for that cruise 3 years later.

What are you doing, or NOT doing, to end up in the situations you’re in?

Every time you want to complain, ask yourself this question instead, and you’ll slowly start to take control and responsibility for your own choices.

I’m so guilty of this. How many unfinished projects do you have? Think about work, your hobbies and side projects, and friends you’ve been meaning to catch up with for ages. Since Christmas I have a reminder in my phone to call an old friend. 4 months!

There’s an entire Trello board of potential would-be projects that I haven’t gotten around to. I bet you’re life’s not different.

Jack has a brilliant suggestion to solve this problem. He calls it a completion weekend.

Go through all of your lists, ideas, projects, relationships and to-dos and take one of the following 4 actions for each one of them:

Do it. Delegate it. Delay it. Dump it.

Just making a decision for every single thing you’ve got on your list will massively lighten the mental load on your brain and free plenty of precious thinking space. Whether you decide to delay it until June, hand it off to someone else, or scrap the project altogether, as long as you’re consciously choosing, you’ll feel a lot better.

2 finished projects are better than 15 ones where you’ve done half and then stopped, so get on this and enjoy the relief that comes with it, which’ll allow you to focus on what really matters.