Words Into Works #041 | The Rule of Five

In 1993, Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen had a goal: to get their book Chicken Soup for the Soul to the top of The New York Times bestseller’s list.

They sought out the advice of 15 best-selling authors, but as helpful as their advice was, Canfield and Hansen felt overwhelmed with information.

In his book The Success Principles: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be, Canfield recalls his experience:

To tell the truth, we became a little crazy. We didn’t know where to start.

The Trap We Fall Into

When you have a goal, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed with all the information that’s readily available to you.

The problem is, failing to choose the right information can cause analysis paralysis, decision fatigue, and even inaction on your part. If you don’t know what to do, where do you even begin?

However, what if you applied everything you learned by taking five actions every day to ascertain what works for you? How could this help you to achieve your goals faster?

The Rule of Five: How to Achieve Your Goals Faster

Overwhelmed with choice, Canfield and Hansen eventually asked teacher Ron Scolastico for his advice. Scolastico used the analogy of a lumberjack cutting down a tree to simplify what they needed to do:

If you would go every day to a very large tree and take five swings at it with a very sharp axe, eventually, no matter how large the tree, it would have to come down.

With that advice, Canfield and Hansen created what they called “The Rule of Five”: A commitment to taking five daily actions that would quickly move their goal towards completion.

For Canfield and Hansen, that meant having five radio interviews every day; sending out five review copies to editors who would review their book; calling five network agencies and asking them to buy their book as a motivational tool for salespeople; and giving a seminar to at least five people and selling the book in the back of the room.

How You Can Use the Rule of Five

The Rule of Five is effective because it forces you to think outside the box and consider actions you wouldn’t have previously considered.

For example, what five daily actions could you take that would help you lose weight? The obvious would be exercising and eating healthily. But what other actions could you take that would contribute to your goal in the long term? These could include learning a new healthy recipe, taking the stairs instead of the escalator, or emailing a health professional for advice.

If you’re an entrepreneur and have a monetary goal, you could email five new prospects a day. Or, you could take five unrelated actions, such as creating a finance tracker on Excel and updating it daily; making one cold call; writing copy; fixing a bug on your website or reading 10% of a Kindle book on marketing.

If you’re improving your love life, why not begin a conversation with five new people every day? If you feel like you’re not ready for that, chunk it down and compliment five new people a day. That amounts to 140 interactions in a 28 day month! Imagine the possibilities.

Maybe you can’t always take five actions, but it’s important to do something. For example, if your goal is to run a marathon and your current daily action is to run 8 kilometers, if you’re pushed for time one day, run 4 kilometers instead. If you’re having trouble committing to your habits, try using The 20-Second Rule.

If you’re ambitious, you can track your five daily actions or even ideas for your five daily actions in an Excel spreadsheet. I’ve been doing this for 6 days now, and I’ve already had a few personal wins I wouldn’t have otherwise had.

The Power of Persistence

Eventually, Canfield and Hansen’s persistence paid off:

One day we sent copies of the book to all the jurors in the O.J. Simpson trial. A week later, we received a nice letter from Judge Lance Ito thanking us for thinking of the jurors, who were sequestered and not allowed to watch television or read the newspaper. The next day, four of the jurors were spotted reading the book by the press, and that led to some valuable public relations for the book.

Canfield and Hansen took five daily actions for over two years. The result? Chicken Soup for the Soul became a #1 New York Times bestseller, sold over 10 million copies in 39 languages, and was called “The publishing phenomenon of the century” by Time magazine.

To quote Robert Collier: “Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out”.

Time to get to work.