Inside of you there is a child of irrepressible belief. I'm the guy standing next to that child within you, and I'm looking up at you with admiring envy and hopes of being like you. Maybe you already know a child who looks up to you that way OR WOULD LIKE TO. Your actions in the next 24 hours will tell us far more about you than anything your parents or children or spouse or siblings or friends think of you.

You don't even have to say a word to that child. Just act as if you are bent on being the best in the world at something and you are one-conditionally, ten-times-your-money-back-mister guaranteed to become world-class at a deliciously accelerated rate, and everyone around you enjoys an elevated opinion of you. Give a moment's thought to a young kid who was thought by to be his generation's greatest potential piano player. At 19, still living at home, his years of practice collided with his father going broke in business, with no more piano lessons and no more piano. Mrs. E. C. White, a Kansas City teacher who had studied under Theodore Leschetitzky, the renowned European master, was particularly disappointed. As Paul Harvey first unearthed many years ago, Leschetitzky himself heard the boy play and predicted he'd be one of the few true masters of his time.

He never did all that much More than 30 years later his haberdashery store went broke, and people's expectations of him did not rise too much higher than before. His track record was hardly promising. More importantly than anyone else, his belief in his ultimate ability to truly focus on a desired task spoke volumes when he got himself elected to the U.S. Senate, and after ten years of service, a major American newspaper erroneously reported that Mr. Dewey had been elected U.S. President. In point of fact, as you well know, that former piano progidy, Harry Truman, was elected President.

No one says you have to get elected President or earn five million dollars unless those happen to be your most intensely felt desires. If you haven't got any intense desires, whether they're religious or food-oriented, whether the passion is for romance or beautiful paintings, if you do not have any passionate or intense desires, then you need to either get some or get off our planet, you're using up too much of our precious air and water.

It's so easy for you and I to speak of an exciting life. When a girl who could neither hear nor speak nor even see grew up to write two best-selling books and spend fifty years serving people who, and I quote "are less fortunate than I," well then that's a day for us to thank Helen Keller for telling us repeatedly, "Life is either a daring adventure or it is nothing at all."

Stop settling. You don't like your job? Fine. You don't have to quit your job. First invest one percent of your time looking for a new job. One percent of your time is exactly fourteen minutes and forty seconds per day. (There are 1,440 minutes per day. When you divide 1,440 by one hundred, you have fourteen POINT four minutes).

No more excuses, you can't say you didn't understand the rules. This particular game is called "YOUR LIFE" and there are no time-outs, no half-times, no way you can ever stop the clock; you can only stop being there to see it.

If you say you "don't have" 14 minutes per day then you are clearly suffering under a mental defect. Before you have time to get offended, remember that, God forbid any one of us should require, for example, daily dialysis to stay alive, you can bet your last sweet potato (never liked those) that you, I, anyone will MAKE the extra hour or two hours or as many hours per day as it takes to stay alive rather than drop dead. Is this true, or not? If you're that fully capable of understanding it, what rot passes into your perception that misguides you into waiting for life-and-death situations?

You need to treat every day as if it's your last on earth, cause Baby, you're an idiot if you don't realize that at some point in time it will be. Stop denying the inevitable. It's like moaning and groaning over what you don't have rather than rejoicing at what you do have. Who are you kidding?

At the bottom of all these pages you are reminded that you are so worth the effort that I invested even more than a million and a half minutes of pumping and working at high speed, treating every single day as if it might be the last, and the result is the Shortcuts Way of Living. How I hope you accept it in precisely the spirit it's given. It's free, and it always will be.

The exquisite nobility of all that Martin Luther King accomplished in one generational swoop could was barely tarnished by the almost equally opposite emotions of his remnant, focused on mega-million dollar personal gain rather than service.