Miguel de cervantes

There's a story I love to tell of a fellow standing on the banks of a river. Suddenly, he sees someone caught in the raging current, bounced about on the jagged[112] rocks, and hears him calling for help. He leaps[113] in, pulls the drowning man to safety, gives him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, attends to the man's wounds, and calls for medical help. As he's still catching his breath, he hears two more screams emanating from the river. Again, he jumps in and makes another daring rescue, this time of two young women. Before he even has a chance to think, he hears four more people calling for help.

Pretty soon the man is exhausted, having rescued victim after victim, and yet the screams continue. If only he had taken the time to travel a short distance upriver, he could have discovered who was throwing all those people in the water in the first place! He could have saved all his efforts by addressing the problem at its cause rather than its effect.

Similarly, understanding the Master System allows you to eliminate the cause instead of exhausting yourself fighting the effects. One of the finest programs I ever designed is my three-day Date With Destiny seminar. Instead of the usual 2, 000 participants, I limit this program to 200 people. At Date With Destiny, we work together to assist each person to understand exactly how their Master System is set up.

This understanding transforms people: suddenly they understand why they feel the things they feel and do the things they do. They also learn how to change virtually anything in their lives. Most importantly, we then have them design what their Master System needs to be in order for them to achieve their ultimate purpose in life. How can they organize themselves so they can be effortlessly pulled in the direction of their desires rather than be pulled apart by a sense of conflicting values,

beliefs, or rules?

Some of the most important questions we ask in this program are " What are the values that are controlling me? How do I know when my values are being met—what are my rules? " Date With Destiny has been attended not only by U.S. senators and congressmen. Fortune 500 CEOs, and movie stars, but also by people from every walk of life. All of us have in common some of the same challenges. How do we deal with disappointment, frustration, failure, and certain events in our environment that we can't control no matter how successful we become?

The emotions we feel and the actions we take are based on how we evaluate things. And yet, most of us have not set up this system of evaluation for ourselves. The profound changes that people experience in this program in a mere three days are beyond words. People literally change the way they think and the way they feel about their lives in a matter of moments, because they take control of the portion of their brain that controls their experience of life. The changes end up being emotional and even physical as the brain sets new priorities for what's most important. While this book is not a replacement for Date With Destiny, I want to provide the same foundational tools that we use in that program for your immediate use. With the chapters that follow, you can produce the same kinds of changes in your life starting now.