The Success Principles Summary & Review: 64 Rules for Getting Where You Want to Be

The Success Principles in one minute

Success is not a mystery; it is a set of learnable behaviours, and the first one is refusing to blame anyone else for where you are. Jack Canfield, the co-creator of Chicken Soup for the Soul, spent thirty years collecting what high achievers actually do and distilled it into 64 principles. They start with the formula E + R = O (Event + Response = Outcome), move through goal-setting, action and persistence, then widen out to your daily habits, your team, your relationships and your money. The book reads like a mentor who has already made every mistake sitting beside you, saying: here is what works, and here is the exercise, so do it today.

Key takeaways

1. Take 100% responsibility: E + R = O. You cannot control the event, but you can always change your response, and that is what changes the outcome.
2. Decide what you want, precisely: Vague wishes produce vague results. Write goals as “how much, by when” and set one breakthrough goal that would change everything.
3. Believe before you see: Visualisation and affirmations are not magic; they keep your attention on the target long enough to act.
4. Take action, then adjust: Canfield’s motto is “Ready, fire, aim.” Feedback only arrives after you move.
5. Ask, ask, ask: Most people never get what they want because they never ask. Reject rejection: “some will, some won’t, so what, someone’s waiting.”
6. Practise the Rule of 5: Five specific actions toward your biggest goal, every day. This is how a rejected manuscript became a 500-million-copy brand.
7. Clean up incompletes: Unfinished tasks, tolerations and unforgiven grudges drain attention. Complete them or let them go.
8. Redefine your time: Sort days into Focus, Buffer and Free days, then protect your core genius from everything else.
9. Build a team: Mentors, a coach and a mastermind group compress decades of learning into months.
10. Money follows habits: Pay yourself first, track spending, give a percentage away, and find a way to serve more people.

What is The Success Principles about?

The Success Principles is Jack Canfield’s step-by-step guide to achieving any goal, built on 64 principles used by high achievers. It teaches you to take full responsibility for results, define clear goals, act daily, build supportive relationships and manage money, so you can get from where you are to where you want to be.

About the author

Jack Canfield is best known as the co-creator of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, which has sold more than 500 million copies worldwide and once placed seven of his titles on the New York Times bestseller list on the same day, a Guinness World Record. Before publishing, he taught in inner-city Chicago schools and then worked for insurance magnate W. Clement Stone, whose “Success System That Never Fails” seminars became Canfield’s own apprenticeship in achievement. A Harvard graduate with a master’s degree in psychological education from the University of Massachusetts, he founded the Canfield Training Group and has taught these principles to more than a million people in over 100 countries. The Success Principles, written with business strategist Janet Switzer, was his attempt to put thirty years of that teaching into a single book. Explore all Jack Canfield book summaries →

Key concepts at a glance

Concept	What it means	Use it when
E + R = O	Event + Response = Outcome. Only the response is yours to control.	You catch yourself blaming, complaining or making excuses.
Breakthrough goal	One goal that would quantum-leap your life, written as “how much, by when.”	Your to-do list is full but nothing is changing.
Ready, fire, aim	Act first; use real feedback to correct course.	You have been planning the same project for months.
The Rule of 5	Five specific actions toward your top goal every day.	You want steady, compounding progress.
Incompletes and tolerations	Unfinished tasks and small irritations that quietly drain energy.	You feel busy but tired and scattered.
Inner critic to inner coach	Rewriting self-talk from judgement into constructive guidance.	Negative self-talk stops you before you start.
Focus / Buffer / Free days	Three kinds of day, each with one job.	Your calendar is a blur of half-done work.
Mastermind group	5–6 peers meeting regularly to solve each other’s problems.	You are making big decisions alone.
Pay yourself first	Automatically save and invest a fixed percentage before spending.	Your income rises but your savings do not.

Part 1: The Fundamentals — Responsibility, Clarity and Action

The opening section is where the book’s reputation comes from, and it starts with the principle Canfield calls non-negotiable: take 100% responsibility for your life. He learned it from W. Clement Stone, who asked him on his first day of work whether he took full responsibility for everything that happened to him. Canfield said no, and Stone replied that until he did, nothing else in the training would work.

The tool is the formula E + R = O: every outcome is an event plus your response to it. The economy, your boss and your upbringing are events you do not control. Your response, meaning your thoughts, the images you hold and the actions you take, is entirely yours. Canfield argues that only three behaviours guarantee you stay stuck, blaming, complaining and making excuses, because each hands your power to something outside you. His test is simple: if you are complaining, you must believe a better alternative exists, so go and pursue it.

Next comes clarity. Canfield asks readers to decide exactly what they want in seven areas: career, finances, free time, health, relationships, personal goals and community contribution. The exercise most readers remember is the “I want” list: a partner asks “What do you want?” over and over for fifteen minutes while you answer without editing. The early answers are shallow; the later ones are the real goals.

Goals then get two rules. They must be measurable in size and time, “how much, by when”, and you should set one breakthrough goal that would fundamentally change your life. Canfield carried his own goals on index cards and read them aloud morning and night, a habit borrowed from Stone.

The rest of Part 1 closes the gap between knowing and doing: chunk it down into daily actions, take action on a “ready, fire, aim” basis because feedback only arrives after you move, feel the fear and do it anyway, ask, ask, ask for what you need, and reject rejection since a no only means you have not found the right person yet. When feedback comes, ask “On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate this?” and then “What would make it a ten?”

The section ends with the story behind Canfield’s signature tactic. After Chicken Soup for the Soul was rejected by more than 140 publishers, he and Mark Victor Hansen were told to do five things every day to promote it: five interviews, five review copies, five bookstore calls. They kept it up for over a year and the book sold millions. That became the Rule of 5, probably the most copied idea in the book.

Part 2: Transform Yourself — Habits, Self-Talk and the Hour of Power

Part 2 shifts from what to do toward who you need to become, starting with your environment. Canfield’s principle is to drop out of the “Ain’t It Awful” club, the friends and colleagues whose main activity is complaining, and spend more time with people already achieving what you want. Self-esteem gets the poker chip theory: people with a bigger pile of past wins take bigger bets, so keep a victory log and review it whenever confidence dips.

The most useful chapter for productivity is clean up your messes and incompletes. Every unfinished project, unanswered email and unmade apology occupies a slice of attention. Canfield suggests listing twenty things you are tolerating and completing, delegating or dropping each one. Old resentments count as incompletes too, and he offers a written forgiveness exercise for closing them. The payoff is recovered energy you can point at your goals.

On self-talk, he asks readers to turn the inner critic into an inner coach: keep the critic’s information (“you were late again”) but drop the judgement and add the next step (“so set an alarm ten minutes earlier”). Limiting beliefs get a four-step process: identify the belief, note how it limits you, decide how you would rather be, and write a turnaround statement you repeat daily.

Two habit principles finish the section. Develop four new success habits a year, one per quarter, because thirteen weeks is long enough to make anything automatic. And 99% is a bitch, 100% is a breeze: a commitment with exceptions needs a fresh decision every day, while a total commitment needs none. Canfield’s own daily anchor is the Hour of Power: twenty minutes of exercise, twenty of meditation and twenty of reading before the day can interfere.

Part 3: Build Your Success Team — Time, Focus and the People Around You

Part 3 is about leverage, and it opens with a principle most productivity systems eventually reach: stay focused on your core genius. Canfield estimates most people spend under 30% of their time on the one or two activities that produce most of their results. List everything you do in a week, mark what only you can do, and start delegating the rest.

To protect that genius he borrows Dan Sullivan’s system and asks readers to redefine time into three kinds of days. Focus days are at least 80% core-genius work. Buffer days handle preparation, admin, learning and delegation. Free days are a full 24 hours with no work at all, and they go into the calendar first, not last. Two boundary principles back this up: just say no, with scripts for declining without guilt, and say no to the good so you can say yes to the great, because the real threat to a breakthrough goal is decent opportunities, not bad ones.

The second half is about people. Find a wing to climb under gives a script for approaching mentors: ask for ten minutes a month, be specific about what you want to learn, and always report back on what you did with the advice. Hire a personal coach for accountability, and get a mastermind group, an idea from Napoleon Hill, of five or six peers who meet weekly to solve each other’s problems. Inquire within closes the section with meditation as a decision-making tool; many of Canfield’s biggest moves, he says, came from quiet rather than analysis.

Part 4: Relationships, Money and Starting Now

The final sections are shorter and more personal. On relationships, the principles are about communication quality: be here now (full attention, phone down), have a heart talk (each person speaks uninterrupted about how they feel), tell the truth faster (unspoken resentments are incompletes) and speak with impeccability. For teams, two habits stand out: practise uncommon appreciation, since feeling unappreciated is the top reason people leave jobs, and keep your agreements, because small broken promises erode the trust big ones rely on.

On money, the advice is deliberately conventional. Pay yourself first by automatically diverting at least 10% of income to savings and investments. Master the spending game by tracking every expense for a month, which usually exposes two or three leaks. Give more to get more, his case for tithing a fixed percentage, is framed as a discipline of gratitude. And find a way to serve: the surest route to more money is solving a bigger problem for more people.

The book ends with two principles that are really one instruction. Start now, because conditions will never be perfect. And empower others by teaching these principles, because teaching is the fastest way to make them your own.

Who is The Success Principles best for — and who should read something else first?

Read it if you want one comprehensive reference you can return to for years, you are at a transition point (new career, new business, post-setback) and need a full reset, or you learn best from stories and concrete exercises rather than theory. It is also an excellent first success book for someone who has never read one, because it covers so much ground in plain language.

Read something else first if you want a single, tightly argued system for habits, in which case Atomic Habits is more focused; if your main problem is prioritisation rather than motivation, in which case The ONE Thing or Eat That Frog will get you moving faster; or if you already have a strong achievement mindset and want the research behind it, in which case High Performance Habits is the evidence-based cousin of this book.

Questions to reflect on

• Where in your life are you currently blaming, complaining or making excuses, and what would “changing the response” look like this week?
• If you could only pursue one breakthrough goal this year, what is it, and can you state it as “how much, by when”?
• List five incompletes or tolerations that are quietly draining you. Which one could you finish or drop today?
• Who are the five people you spend the most time with, and are they members of the “Ain’t It Awful” club or people who lift your standards?
• What would your five daily Rule-of-5 actions be if you started tomorrow morning?

How to apply The Success Principles (7-day plan)

1. Day 1 — Take 100% responsibility. Write down one situation you have been blaming on someone else. Next to it, write three responses that are within your control. Pick one and do it today.
2. Day 2 — Run the “I want” list. Set a 15-minute timer and write “I want…” statements without stopping. Circle the three that surprised you.
3. Day 3 — Set your breakthrough goal. Choose one goal and write it as “how much, by when.” Put it on an index card and read it aloud morning and night for the rest of the week.
4. Day 4 — Start the Rule of 5. List five specific actions that move the breakthrough goal forward. Do all five before you check email.
5. Day 5 — Clean up incompletes. List twenty things you are tolerating. Complete, delegate or dump at least five of them today.
6. Day 6 — Ask for something. Make one request you have been avoiding: a mentor’s time, a referral, a better price, help at home. Accept a no without argument and ask someone else.
7. Day 7 — Design your week. Mark next week’s calendar with Focus, Buffer and Free days, and schedule a 20/20/20 Hour of Power for each morning.

Frequently asked questions

What are the main ideas in The Success Principles?

The book has six sections: the fundamentals of success (responsibility, purpose, goals, action, persistence), transforming yourself (self-esteem, incompletes, self-talk, habits), building a success team (core genius, time design, mentors, masterminds), successful relationships, money, and starting now. The through-line is that outcomes come from responses you choose, so the whole system is about choosing better responses more consistently. The most quoted ideas are E + R = O, the Rule of 5 and “how much, by when.”

What does E + R = O mean?

E + R = O stands for Event + Response = Outcome. Two people can experience the same event, such as losing a client, and end up with completely different outcomes because they responded differently. Since you cannot control most events, your only reliable lever is your response: what you think, what you picture and what you do. Whenever an outcome disappoints you, the formula asks you to examine your response rather than the event, and to change it next time.

What is the Rule of 5 in The Success Principles?

The Rule of 5 means taking five specific actions every day toward your most important goal. Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen used it to promote the first Chicken Soup for the Soul book after more than 140 rejections, doing five interviews, mailings or calls a day for over a year until it took off. Its power is consistency: five small actions a day is more than 1,500 a year, and it removes the daily question of how much effort is enough.

How long is The Success Principles and how should I read it?

The 10th anniversary edition runs close to 600 pages, roughly ten hours cover to cover. Canfield designed it as a reference, with each principle in a short chapter that ends in an exercise. A good approach is to read Section I (the fundamentals) in full, since later sections assume it, then skim the remaining chapter titles and go deep only on the five or six principles that address your current bottleneck. Many readers reread a different section each year.

Is The Success Principles still relevant, or is it dated?

The core principles are behavioural rather than technological, so they have aged well; responsibility, clear goals, daily action and honest relationships do not go out of date. The 10th anniversary edition (2015) refreshed the examples and added material on using technology and social media to build a platform. Some readers note that the “law of attraction” chapters lean on anecdote; the practical advice around visualisation and affirmations is uncontroversial as an attention tool, and the rest of the book stands on its own.

What is the difference between The Success Principles and Atomic Habits?

Atomic Habits is a deep, research-backed treatment of one mechanism: how habits form and how to design them. The Success Principles is a broad manual covering goals, mindset, time, relationships and money, with habits as one chapter among sixty-four. To fix a specific behaviour, start with Clear. For a full life audit with exercises to work through over months, start with Canfield. Canfield tells you what to aim at; Clear shows you how to make the daily actions automatic.

Who is Jack Canfield and why should I trust his advice?

Jack Canfield co-created the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, which has sold more than 500 million copies, and built that success while applying the principles he later wrote about, including the Rule of 5 and persistent asking after 140-plus rejections. He trained under W. Clement Stone, holds a master’s degree in psychological education and has taught achievement seminars for over four decades. The book’s credibility rests on the fact that he collected these principles from people who used them, then tested them in his own career.

Related summaries

• The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy — the math behind the Rule of 5.
• Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill — the source of the mastermind principle.
• The Magic of Thinking Big by David Schwartz — the belief principles, expanded.
• Eat That Frog by Brian Tracy — a sharper tool for daily action.
• Best productivity books — the full ranked list.