Leadership Lessons from Jack Canfield's 144 Rejections

The Rule of Five: Consistent Persistence

Before Chicken Soup for the Soul sold 500 million copies, Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen faced 144 rejections. Even after a small publisher accepted the manuscript, the book took 14 months to reach a bestseller list. During that time, the authors kept making calls, giving talks and asking booksellers to stock it.

Canfield calls the practice that helped launch his first book the “rule of five.” He and Hansen took five steps toward their goal every day—calling bookstores, contacting military base exchanges or arranging speaking opportunities. None of those actions guaranteed a sale. Together, they gave the book a chance to find its readers.

“Consistent persistence is the rule,” Canfield said. The word consistent matters. Persistence can sound like an extraordinary response to a setback. Consistency is less dramatic and more demanding: deciding what advances the work, then doing it again tomorrow. And then the next day. And the next.

Make Accountability Useful

Canfield recalled working at a training company where employees completed a short report every Friday. They recorded what they had accomplished, what they had intended but failed to accomplish, the obstacles they had encountered and the help they needed. The form made missed goals visible. It also gave managers information they could use to remove barriers.

“We were required to say what we hadn’t accomplished,” he said. “We were required to say what help we needed.”

That pairing distinguishes useful accountability from a search for someone to blame. If employees can report only wins, leaders lose sight of stalled work. If they can report problems but receive no support, the exercise becomes a ritual of exposure.

Canfield favors frequent check-ins over waiting for a quarterly review. Accountability partners, he suggested, could name their priorities in the morning and revisit them the next day. An unfinished task would prompt a direct acknowledgment and a question about the help needed to complete it.

The same principle applies to feedback about the workplace. Canfield described a consultant who asks employees to rate their experience on a scale of one to 10. When someone answers three, the consultant first asks why the score is that high: What is already working? Then comes a more manageable question—what would move the experience from a three to a five?

Give People Room to Tell the Truth

Those conversations require trust. Canfield warned that employees who expect to be punished for every mistake may start concealing problems. A leader then sees a reassuring version of events until the consequences become difficult to ignore.

Canfield learned an early lesson about the cost of dismissing a warning while working a summer job at a General Electric plant. He noticed that rain threatened materials stored outside and suggested moving them. His manager rejected the advice. Rain came, the materials were damaged and, by Canfield’s estimate, much of a day’s work was lost.

The lesson extends beyond that manager’s decision. Someone close to an operation may see a problem first. If speaking up invites a rebuke, the next warning may never reach the person who can act on it. Leaders need the truth of what is happening, Canfield argued, and they have to show that offering it is worthwhile.

They also have to accept the standards they set. Canfield pointed to managers who expect punctuality from employees while arriving late to meetings themselves. In such moments, the behavior people observe carries more weight than the rule they have been given. Accountability becomes credible when leaders admit mistakes and follow the same expectations as everyone else.

Trust also means allowing others to make decisions. Canfield recalled advice from a leadership program: When a leader steps away, the team should handle ordinary problems without calling for a rescue. Otherwise, employees learn to wait for the person in charge. Giving people room to decide may bring some imperfect choices, but it also lets them build judgment.

Turn Training Into Practice and Decide What Success Is For

The gap between knowing and doing shows up in leadership development too. Canfield thinks organizations often launch too many programs too quickly, before people have practiced the first ideas. His prescription: “pick one or two things and really focus on those for a long period of time.” He cited brief daily meetings at Ritz-Carlton hotels, where teams discuss one company value and name an action that will put it into practice that day.

Managers must reinforce the behavior afterward. As Canfield put it, “You have to be reinforcing it and rewarding it.” He also urged leaders to provide staff with training in AI so they can learn to use it. Then examine whom your goals serve—customers, employees, investors, families and communities—because “we all have different purposes and different definitions of success.” Leaders’ priorities become clear in the work they repeat, the questions they ask and the behavior they reward.