The thought struggling to be born generates the question. That means only two people who know the correct answer : the face in your mirror, and the person who has already done it. Finding those who have done it through the same path you predict for yourself is best. It's akin to the ubiquitous Microsoft puzzle game called "Chips Challenge," where you have to earn each new code for the next level up... and suddenly receive a few free passwords in the 150-level game. Life does contain those little freebies. Technically, they are what we call shortcuts.

When a girl stricken with polio takes exactly 1000 days and focuses every one of those days on getting her legs to cooperate, and she ends up qualifying for the Olympics AND winning a bronze medal, then returning four years later to set three new world records that remain unbroken and unmatched a full forty years later, she's in a position to tell you and I both how to run faster, and how to be the best on earth at something. On her 56th birthday, she looks better than you or I have much expectation of duplicating. Her body continued to function with excellence as the result of the tiniest maintenance program. You should already know her name: Wilma Rudolph, the fastest woman in all of history. She has the authority to tell you how to make a ridiculous dream come true. Who would have guessed a teenager with braces and crutches all her life would outrun the history books? SHE would have guessed, and then made it happen.

The failing appliance salesman, most certainly having trouble feeding his family, worried sick about an unpaid electricity bill, serendipitously trying out for a part in a play called "Mr Roberts" in what's known as an open casting call, where you don't have to be a member of the Screen Actors Guild, can tell you and I a bit about making dreams come true. His blue eyes empowered two successful careers as an Academy Award-winning heartthrob and professional race car driver. In his spare time, this formerly destitute appliance salesman has earned and given away an average of ten thousand dollars... more than ten thousand times! And his Newman's Own sauces and other products proved to be excellent values to the consumers. Every dime of profit given away! How many for-profit companies would even consider such a thing? Ten thousand dollars ten thousand times! Paul Newman is in a fantastic position to talk about how to turn wacky fantasy into reality.

If you've earned and given away more than a hundred million dollars running a major corporation while maintaining a joyous family life, worldwide fame as an actor, played all around the world, then you can tell us how you're going to accomplish something worthwhile in your life. If you haven't, then you need to use your eyes and ears precisely twice as much as your mouth. That's precisely WHY you have two ears, and one mouth; two eyes, just one mouth: each set of tools is issued to you in direct proportion to its need and to its utility. Whatever religious beliefs you perceive yourself adhering to, if any, someONE or someTHING gave you a very specific set of tools. The end of your life, your usefulness to yourself and to others in the last 24 hours is based on nothing more, or less, than the mathematically measurable quantity and quality of your use of those tools. Contrary to what you think, the events of your life, including and especially those you have no control over, have only the tiniest influence on your personal outcomes. Whether the outcome of the immediate event or the outcome of your total life, your first boost of intelligence and wisdom occurs within seconds of the very moment you understand clearly that the outcome of every single event is determined by the precise manner in which you process and respond to the event.

Two women receive flowers. One melts with passion and appreciation for being loved; the other woman is immediately hostile, demanding to know why he's suddenly being nice, and what he thinks he's getting away with.

I've seen people devastated by losing their homes, even small ones, and remember Denis Waitley recalling how he looked at his million-dollar home, product of many, many years of effort, burning to the ground in California.

Seeing his dream-house and so many cherished photographs and possessions collected over the decades of his life, his emotions never had a chance. They were intercepted by his eyeballs, which caught sight of his wife, children, and dog, safely out of the burning wreckage. The flood of relief, and the thought of having to cope with a different ending, erased his concerns for the material loss. His four favorite people and his canine best friend were all hugging. No burns, no hospital burn units, no tragic funerals, just a great big marshmallow-toasting bonfire.

Paul Newman was by no means a child star. He wasn't even an actor. As a grown man with a family of his own, he made many bad decisions that kept him at the bottom of the proverbial barrel. When he responded to events by asking himself better questions, he repeatedly got better answers, and better results. Since he has already succeeded in several different careers AFTER being just another struggling adult, don't you personally think he's in a better position than you to state with unerring accuracy that asking better questions will not fail, in fact, cannot fail. It explains how the 16-year old son of William J. Blythe III, born after his father died, could overcome the challenges of having a brutally alcoholic stepfather in a small town to become America's youngest attorney general, then governor of his state, and, oh, yes, after that he went on to become by far the most successful US President in our history, helping to create an astonishing 50,000 new American millionaires every month for 100 consecutive months. Hello? If you don't get it from the horse's mouth, which end of the horse will we find you at?

I purposely use President Clinton as an example because a personal view of him, separated from fact, reveals that, despite all of the military involvement in Bosnia and elsewhere, fewer American soldiers died under his command than any other President of the 20th century. Hm. Lowest inflation in forty years, highest employment, greatest economic expansion, lowest welfare rolls in decades; ad infinitum. However you feel about him personally, you won't have a problem accepting that he knows how to make lifetime dreams come true, yes or no?

Like Wilma Rudolph, Paul Newman, the wife getting flowers, Bill Clinton proved that the outcome of every event in our lives is determined far less by the event than by what we think, say, and do when we've taken in the information.

One of the great proofs of this is found in the example of the telegram. The one that arrives telling you that someone in your immediate family was brutally killed last night. The next 24 hours are easily the worst of your life. When you get a phone call advising that it was a mistaken identity, you get the happy shock that your loved one is alive and well. Only from this distance now can we clearly see that it wasn't the supposed death of the loved one that hurt so badly; it was your response to the event that caused the physical, emotional, and spiritual changes that occured in your mind and body when you first received that telegram.

The ability to understand this instantly increases your intelligence, moving you one complete, measurable step towards the point you are headed towards. In the event you're foolish enough to think that your destiny is someday, someway, someplace, please remember that destiny and destination have the same root. Either you decide your destination, your destiny in life, with a specific written plan, or you forfeit the majority of your life to someone who does. Either you have a written set of goals for your life, or you will work for a man or woman who has a written plan for your life. If the company you work for is owned by someone whose face is different from the one in your mirror, you can bet your life that they have a written plan for getting people like you to make their written plan, also called a goal, or dream, become reality. Do you understand this? Don't even bother nodding your head and SAYING you understand it, because saying it only demonstrates that you can parrot the words, not that you understand them.

My mother was strenuously mistaken when she told me that knowledge is power. In truth, it's only potential power.

When does it become power? You're right: when action is taken on the knowledge. If you know that, say, in 2100 AD, all the new American coins issued in the year 2000 will be worth hundreds of times their face value, how many will you personally put away? A thousand dollars' worth? Ten dollars' worth? Or just nothing at all? Knowing it means bupkus until you actually use it.