III. Save yourself years

The most powerful way I've learned to compress time is to learn through other people's experience. We can never truly master time as long as our primary strategy for learning and mastering our world is based upon trial and error. Modeling those who've already succeeded can save you years of pain. This is why I'm a voracious reader and a committed student of tapes and seminars. I've always seen these experiences as necessities, not accessories, and they have given me the wisdom of decades of experience and the success that results from it. I challenge you to learn from other people's experiences as often as you can, and to utilize whatever you learn.

" We have time enough if we will but use it aright."

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

Today's Assignment:

1. Throughout this day, begin to explore changing time frames. Whenever you're feeling the pressures of the present, stop and think about the future in ways that are empowering. For example, think of goals that compel you, and become fully associated to them. Visualize the image, listen to it, step into it and notice how it feels. Put yourself back into the midst of a treasured memory: your first kiss, the birth of your child, a special moment with a friend. The more you develop your capability to quickly change time frames, the greater your level of freedom and the range of emotions you will be able to create within your at a moment's notice. Do this enough until you truly know you can this change in focus to instantly change your state.

2. Learn to deliberately distort time. For something that normally seems to take a long time to complete, add another component that will not only speed up your perception of time, but allow you to accomplish two things at once. For example, when I'm running, I'll don a pair of headphones and listen to my favorite music. Or I'll watch the news or make phone calls while I'm on my StairMaster. This means I'll never have an excuse not to exercise, not to do what's important: working out and I

returning my calls.

3. Write a " to do" list that prioritizes according to importance instead of urgency. Instead of writing down zillions of things to do and feeling like a failure at the end of the day, focus on what's most important for you to accomplish. If you do this, I can promise you that you'll feel a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment few experience.

Of course, we must always take time to...

REST AND PLAY: EVEN GOD TOOK ONE DAY OFF! DAY SEVEN

Your Outcome: Achieve some balance.

You've worked hard and you've played hard. Take a day off to have some fun! Be spontaneous, be outrageous, do something that takes you outside yourself. What would create the most excitement for you?

" The great man is he that does not lose his child's-heart."

MENCIUS

Today's Assignment:

1. Either plan something fun and stick to it, or do something on the spur of the moment. Whatever it is, enjoy it!

Tomorrow, you'll be ready to explore...

PART FOUR

A LESSON IN DESTINY

THE ULTIMATE CHALLENGE: WHAT ONE PERSON CAN DO

" A mighty flame followeth a tiny spark."

—DANTE

He knew he must stop them. With a mere $800 in his pocket, Sam LaBudde drove across the Mexican border, stood on the fishing docks of Ensenada, and waited for his opportunity. Toting a video camera to get some " home movies" of his excursion, he posed as a naive American tourist and offered his services as a deckhand or engineer to each captain who docked his boat in the harbor.

He was hired on the Maria Luisa as a temporary crew member, and as the Panamanian tuna boat pulled away from the Mexican coast, La-Budde began to secretly film the activities of the crew. He knew that if he were discovered his life would be in jeopardy.

Finally it happened: they were surrounded. A whole school of dolphins, known to many as " water people, " began jumping and chattering near the Maria Luisa. Their friendly nature had drawn them to the boat; little did they know that they were also being drawn to their death. The fishermen trailed the dolphins because they knew that yellowfin tuna usually swim below the playful creatures. With cold-blooded calculation, they lay their nets in the path of the dolphins, not noticing or even caring

what happened to them.

Over the course of five hours, LaBudde's video recorded the horror. One after another, dolphins became entangled in the nets, unable to free themselves and come to the surface for the oxygen they needed to stay alive.

At one point the captain bellowed, " How many in the net!? " * As LaBudde swung to capture the slaughter on video, he heard a crew member yell, " About fifty! " The captain ordered the crew to haul in their catch. Numerous dolphins lay strangled and lifeless on the slippery deck as the crew separated them from the tuna and discarded their sleek, gray bodies. Eventually, the corpses of these magnificent animals were tossed overboard as casually as sacks of garbage. LaBudde's footage gave clear-cut evidence of what others had claimed for years: that hundreds of dolphins were regularly being killed in a single day's fishing expedition. Estimates are that over six million dolphins have been killed in the last ten years alone. Edited down to an eleven-minute format, LaBudde's video stunned viewers with the heart-wrenching reality of what we were doing to these intelligent and affectionate beings with whom we share our planet. One by one, outraged consumers across the nation stopped buying tuna, launching a boycott that only gained speed as media attention became more pointed.

Just four years after LaBudde first captured the tragedy on film, in 1991 the world's largest tuna canner, Starkist, announced that it would no longer pack tuna caught in purse seine nets. Chicken of the Sea and Bumblebee Seafoods followed suit, issuing similar statements just hours later. While the fight is not over—unregulated foreign tuna boats still kill six times as many dolphins as did the U.S. boats—LaBudde's day on the Maria Luisa has served as a catalyst for major reform in the American tuna industry, saving countless dolphin lives and undoubtedly helping to restore some balance to the marine ecosystem.

" Every man is an impossibility until he is born."

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

So many people feel powerless and insignificant when it comes to social issues and world events, thinking that even if they did everything right in their own personal lives, their welfare would still be at the mercy of the actions of others. They feel beset by the proliferation of gang warfare and violent crime, perplexed by massive government deficits and the S& L crisis, saddened by homelessness and illiteracy, and overwhelmed by global warming and the relentless extinction of the other species who live on this planet. Such people fall into the mindset of thinking, " Even if I get my own life and the lives of my family in order, what good will it do? Some nut in a position of power could accidentally push the button and blow us all up anyway! " This kind of belief system fosters the feeling of being out of control and impotent to create change at any significant level, and naturally leads to the learned helplessness typified by the phrase, " Why even try? "

Nothing could be more crippling to a person's ability to take action than learned helplessness; it is the primary obstacle that prevents us from changing our lives or taking action to help other people change theirs. If you've come this far in the book, you know without a doubt my central message: you have the power right now to control how you think, how you feel, and what you do. Perhaps for the first time you are empowered to take control of the Master System that has unconsciously guided you until this point. With the strategies and distinctions you've gained from reading and doing the exercises in this book, you have awakened to the conviction that you are truly the master of your fate, the director of your destiny.

Together we've discovered the giant power that shapes destiny— decision —and that our decisions about what to focus on, what things mean, and what to do are the decisions that will determine the quality of our present and future.

Now it's time to address the power of joint decisions to shape the destiny of our community, our country, and our world. What will determine the quality of life for generations to come will be the collective decisions we make today about how to deal with such current challenges as widespread drug abuse, the imbalance of trade, ineffective public education, and the shortcomings of our prison system.

By fixating on everything that's not working, we limit our focus to effects, and we neglect the causes of these problems. We fail to recognize that it is the small decisions you and I make every day that create our destinies. Remember that all decisions are followed by consequences. If we make our decisions unconsciously—that is, let other people or other factors in our environment do the thinking for us—and act without at least anticipating the potential effects, then we may be unwittingly perpetuating the problems we dread most. By trying to avoid pain in the short term, we often end up making decisions that create pain in the long term, and when we arrive further down the river we tell ourselves that the problems are permanent and unchangeable, that they come with the territory.

Probably the most pervasive false belief most of us harbor is the fallacy that only some superhuman act would have the power to turn our problems around. Nothing could be further from the truth. Life is cumulative. Whatever results we're experiencing in our lives are the accumulation of a host of small decisions we've made as individuals, as a family, as a community, as a society, and as a species. The success or failure of our lives is usually not the result of one cataclysmic event or earth-shaking decision, although sometimes it may look that way. Rather, success or failure is determined by the decisions we make and the actions we take every day.

By the same token, then, it is the daily decisions and actions of each one of us, taking responsibility on an individual level, that will truly make the difference in such matters as whether we are able to take care of our disadvantaged and whether we can learn to live in harmony with our environment. In order to bring about massive and far-reaching changes, both in our individual and joint destinies, it is necessary to commit ourselves to constant and never-ending improvement, to the discipline of CANI! Only in that way can we truly make a difference that will last in the long term.