Book Summary: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be
How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be – The 25 Principles of Success, by Jack Canfield
Jack Canfield is an American author and management expert. He is a founding member of the Transformational Leadership Council. He wrote this book in 2005, and is also co-author of the best-selling book series Chicken Soup for the Soul, that have sold over 100 million copies and been translated
into more than 47 languages. This book is built up around the idea that everybody can become successful if they decide what they want, believe they deserve it and practice the 25 principles mentioned in the book. Jack Canfield provides a roadmap to get to the goal and clarifies this with lots of examples and inspiring quotes from others to reflect on. The author conducted a lot of conversations with successful people and added his own lessons learned. Success is a work in progress that takes time, but with the necessary effort, perseverance and the right actions, you can go from where you are to where you want to be.
Summary
Take responsibility
The first principle in Jack Canfield’s book is that there is only one person responsible for your quality of life. This is you, so you need to take 100% responsibility for your life. People tend to blame others if things don’t work out as planned instead of analyzing the outcome as a sum of an event and what response was received to it.
You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons or the wind, but you can change yourself.
Believe you can achieve and learn how to set goals
In this book the author helps to make the purpose more tangible with practical exercises and teaches you that the danger is not to aim too high and miss it, but to aim too low and achieve it. Often people see stop signs when they experience fears, concerns or roadblocks. Therefore it’s important to set measurable and concrete goals, break them down into small manageable tasks and apply the rule of 5: every day do 5 things that will move you towards your goal of completion. One action at a time. Successful people believe and expect that their goal will come true and believe that they can make it come true. They see obstacles as growth opportunities, to change their behavior and become better.
If you keep on doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep on getting what you’ve always got.
Release the breaks and take action
It takes courage to step outside your comfort zone, overcome the roadblocks and take a risk to move on to get where you want to be. Successful people imagine themselves as having already completed the goal. This power of visualization is a strong tool to make the brain achieve more as it creates new levels of motivation. Don’t be afraid to fail, but take action even when feeling fearful – and learn from mistakes. When you have a clear vision, think, dress, talk and act like the person who has already achieved their goal.
Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.
Learn from others
For everything you want to do, there are books, courses or stories of others that have tried it before. Take the opportunity to ask people about it so you can learn from their experience. If you want something, keep on asking, be persistent and assume you can and will get it. Some people are afraid of being rejected. But don’t take rejection personally, because it’s not personal. If you get negative feedback, welcome it and use it to your advantage to learn what you need to improve on.
Do you want to be safe and good or take a chance to be great?
Conclusion
In the book the author covers how to create a vision, set goals, break them down into small steps, anticipate obstacles and plan how to deal with them, visualize and affirm success and believe in yourself and your dreams. He’s aware that these 25 success principles could feel overwhelming, but take action on the most important ones every day and go further with the other ones step by step. This will take time; it took the author time to figure them out too. As a reader it’s now your time to implement the principles that worked for him and the many examples quoted in this book. He concludes by saying that you and you alone are responsible for taking actions. Make the commitment to start now and get on with using them to create the life of your dreams.
Everyone who got to where they are had to begin where they were.
If you liked this summary but want to read more, you can purchase the book on Amazon.
