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=== II – Taking Control—The Master System ===
🎛️ '''14 – Ultimate Influence: Your Master System.''' In a workshop I pose four questions—from The Book of Questions’ “Would you end world hunger by killing one innocent person?” to “If you bumped a red Porsche and scratched it, would you leave a note?”—and watch how different people justify opposite choices with equal certainty. Then I raise the ante on a thought experiment: few would eat a bowl of live cockroaches for $10,000, more would consider $100,000, and most hands go up at $1 million or $10 million, revealing how a single changed condition rewires evaluation in an instant. These exercises set up the “Master System,” a five‑part evaluator made of core beliefs and unconscious rules, life values, references, habitual questions, and moment‑to‑moment emotional states. I compare it to a Periodic Table: the elements are few, but their mixtures can catalyze, neutralize, or paralyze behavior. To prevent analysis from becoming avoidance, I teach “chunking” so dozens of micro‑steps (like getting to the gym) compress into one decisive action. With a diagram and drills, I show how each component selects meaning, and how meaning drives feeling and action. The deeper point is that influence is lawful, not mystical; when you master the evaluators, you master your responses. In practice, shifting any one element—state, question, value, rule, or reference—can flip the whole chain from hesitation to momentum and align daily choices with a chosen destiny. ''Understanding the Master System that directs all human behavior is as much a science as are chemistry and physics, governed by predictable laws and patterns of action and reaction.''
🧭 '''15 – Life Values: Your Personal Compass.''' In Dallas in early 1979, Ross Perot gathered a handpicked team—guided by retired U.S. Army colonel Arthur “Bull” Simons—to extract two EDS executives jailed in Tehran on $13 million bail; he called his men “Eagles,” and, as told in On Wings of Eagles, their unauthorized mission succeeded against formidable odds. I pair that story with teacher Jaime Escalante of Garfield High (immortalized in Stand and Deliver), who transferred his standards to barrio students until calculus became a badge of pride. These examples show values in motion: courage, loyalty, and commitment in a rescue; discipline, teamwork, and determination in a classroom. I argue that indecision is really values‑confusion and that leadership begins when philosophy and action are one. Exercises help you list, rank, and test your top values so they stop contradicting each other under stress. Clarified values simplify choices: when you know what matters most, the next move becomes obvious. In this framework, values are not slogans but selection criteria that filter options and set the emotional stakes of every decision. Mechanistically, your hierarchy of values allocates attention and energy, making some actions feel compelling and others irrelevant—and that allocation writes your destiny. ''Values guide our every decision and, therefore, our destiny.''
📏 '''16 – Rules: If You're Not Happy, Here's Why!.''' From the Hyatt Regency Waikoloa on Hawaii’s Big Island, I watch a total solar eclipse alongside scientists with telescopes, vacationing families, and TV crews; clouds roll in by 6:28 a.m., “totality” lasts about four minutes, and many race to a giant screen to watch what’s above them unfold on television. Reactions split by personal rules: one man curses a $4,000 trip “wasted,” another mother laments missing it while her daughter chirps “It’s happening now,” and a woman nearby says, “Isn’t this incredible?” Minutes later, the trade winds clear the sky—yet most have already left angry. The point lands: rules are the specific beliefs for what must happen to feel good or bad, and most people make feeling good scarce and feeling bad easy. I show how conflicting rules sabotage relationships (we keep score in different games) and why you must elicit and communicate rules with spouses, kids, partners, and teams. Then we redesign criteria: “Anytime I…” rules that you control, with many ways to win and almost none to lose. Happiness becomes a structural outcome, not a lucky mood. Psychologically, rules set thresholds that gate emotion; lower the bar for constructive feelings and raise it for destructive ones, and your nervous system starts defaulting to resourceful states. ''Set it up so that it's incredibly easy for you to feel good, and incredibly hard to feel bad.''
🧵 '''17 – References: The Fabric of Life.''' A nineteen‑year‑old Navy pilot named George Bush watches a jet skid across a carrier deck as a wing nearly cuts a sailor in half; a commander barks, “Get a broom and sweep these guts off the deck,” and the crew acts. Soon after, Bush bombs a radio tower on Chichi Jima, takes flak, jettisons late, tears his parachute, splashes down bleeding, and drifts toward the island—until the U.S. submarine Finback surfaces and hauls him aboard before enemy depth charges pound the water. Those episodes, and days of thinking in the submarine’s cramped quarters, hardened convictions he would carry into later leadership. I contrast them with Saddam Hussein’s formative brutality to show how different stores of experience—references—seed opposite beliefs and strategies. References are the raw materials from which beliefs, rules, and values are molded; state determines which files you access in the moment. We expand power by expanding references on purpose—through modeling, practice, and service—and by indexing them so the best ones come up under pressure. In this logic, choice grows with experience and organization; the more useful patterns you’ve lived and cataloged, the more options you can perceive. Mechanistically, references supply evidence; evidence hardens belief; belief guides action; action creates new references in a compounding loop. ''The larger the number and greater the quality of our references, the greater our potential level of choices.''
🗝️ '''18 – Identity: The Key to Expansion.''' A U.S. GI in a North Korean POW camp spends more than twenty hours in a tiny room with Chinese Communist interrogators who neither beat him nor starve him; after polite conversation, he produces a handwritten denunciation of America and praise of Communism that is broadcast to other camps, then goes on to inform and collaborate. The shift did not start with tactics but with self‑definition: he accepted a new image of who he was, and behavior snapped into line. I map levels of belief—from specific to global—and place identity at the top as the ultimate filter that governs consistency. Research like Pygmalion in the Classroom shows how “gifted” labels elevate performance by installing a different self‑story; daily life does the same, for good or ill. Because humans avoid the pain of inconsistency, public declarations and private self‑talk lock us into whatever “I am…” we most rehearse. The practical work is to choose and condition an identity that matches your desired destiny, then align state, questions, values, rules, and references to it until it becomes your default. In this model, identity is the control knob for the whole system; change who you are in your own eyes, and the rest of the machinery reconfigures. ''What we can or cannot do, what we consider possible or impossible, is rarely a function of our true capability.''
=== III – The Seven Days to Shape Your Life ===
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