WHAT ONE PERSON CAN DO

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 coldblooded
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.

HOW YOUR IDENTITY IS FORMED

start small, and build. The Chinese understood that the way we identify
anyone is by their actions. For example, how do you know who your friend really is? Isn't it by the way
he or she acts, the way he or she treats people?
The Communists' real secret, though, was that they understood that we determine who we are—our
own identities—by judging our own actions as well. In other words, we look at what we do to
determine who we are. The Chinese realized that in order to achieve their broader objective of
changing the prisoner's beliefs about his identity, all they had to do was get the prisoner to do things
that a collaborator or a Communist would do.
Again, this is not a simple task, but they realized it could be done if they simply could wear the
American POW down through conversation that lasted twelve to twenty hours, and then make a minor
request: get him to say something like "The United States is not perfect" or "It's true in a Communist
country that unemployment is not a problem." Having established this footing, the Chinese would
simply start small and build.
They understood our need for consistency. Once we make a statement that we say we believe, we
have to be willing to back it up. They would merely ask the POW to write down some of the ways in
which America is not perfect. In his exhausted state, the GI was then asked, "What other social
benefits are there to communism?" Within a short period of time, the GI would have sitting in front of
him a document not only attacking his own nation, but also promoting Communism with all the
reasons written in his own handwriting. He now had to justify to himself why he'd done this. He'd not
been beaten, nor had he been offered special rewards. He'd simply made small statements in his need
to stay consistent with the ones he'd already written, and now he'd even signed the document. 

EXPAND YOUR REFERENCES AND EXPAND YOUR LIFE

We can always use whatever life has to offer in an empowering way, but we have to do it proactively.
The choices I have in my life come from a rich set of reference experiences that I have consciously
pursued on an ongoing basis. Each day I look for ways to expand. Into my thirty-one years I've packed
literally hundreds of years of experience. How can I say that? The number of challenging and enriching
experiences that I have in a month relates more closely to what most people experience over a
period of years.
One of the major ways I began to do this, starting at the age of seventeen, was through the rich
experiences that books provide. Early in my life, I developed the belief that leaders are readers. Books
could take me to other lands where I could meet unique people like Abraham Lincoln or Ralph Waldo
Emerson whom I could utilize as my personal coaches. I also knew that within the pages of books I
could find the answers to virtually any question I had. This breadth of references that hundreds of
books have given me has provided countless choices for how I can assist people. I pursued these
references because I realized that if I didn't feed my mind with the nourishment it craved, then I would
have to settle for the intellectual junk food that could be found in the nightly "sound bites" on
television news or through the opinions of the newspapers. If this is our major source of information,
then we can expect to get the same results as everyone else in society does.
The most powerful way to have a great understanding of life and people, to give ourselves the greatest
level of choice, is to expose ourselves to as many different types of references as possible. In my
youth, I was inspired to seek spiritual understanding when I realized that I'd attended only one church
and been exposed to only one religious philosophy for the majority of my life. In high school I received
a scholarship in journalism to attend a two-week program held at California Polytechnic State
University in San Luis Obispo. On that Sunday we were all given an assignment to write a story about
a church service.
As we began to walk through the community, deciding where we would go, I found myself gravitating
toward the church of my denomination171. But along the way, I heard several of my friends talking
about the Mormon Church we had just passed and how "horrible" those people were. It seemed to me
that people just aren't that deplorable172; I had to see what was going on. So I attended the service,
and saw that the Mormons loved God as much as I did. 

A UNIVERSE OF IDEAS AND EXPERIENCES

In expanding our references, we create a great contrast with which to evaluate life and possibility. If
you've been magnifying your problems out of proportion, consider this: we live in a galaxy that
contains several hundred thousand million stars. Then realize that we live in a universe that has
several hundred thousand million galaxies. In other words, there are several hundred thousand million
suns in our galaxy alone. And all of these suns have planets revolving around them as well!
Think of the magnitude. The stars in our galaxy make one turn around the Milky Way's axis only once
every several hundred million years. When you think about the immensity of this universe, and then
look at the life span of an average human being (generously about eighty years), does it give you a
different perspective? The human life span is but a speck170 in time. And yet people worry themselves
to death about things like how they're going to pay the mortgage, what kind of car they drive,
or how their next business meeting will go.
"I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars."

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

ALBERT EINSTEIN
One of the finest beliefs I developed years ago that helped me to enjoy all of my life experience was
the idea that there are no bad experiences, that no matter what I go through in life—whether it's a
challenging experience or a pleasurable one—every experience provides me something of value if I
look for it. If I pull just one idea or one distinction from an experience, then it expands me.
Back when I was still in high school and scraping together money any way I could in order to attend
personal development seminars, my friends were amazed that I'd go back to some of the same
seminars again and again. Often they'd ask me, "Why would you go back to the same program?"
Inevitably I'd tell them that I understood the power of repetition, and each time I heard something
new because I was different. Plus I knew that hearing something again and again would eventually
condition me to use it, that repetition truly is the mother of skill. Every time I reviewed a program, I
made additional distinctions or heard ideas that impacted me differently and enabled me to create new
references, and thus new interpretations, new actions, and new results in my life.

RULES REALIGNMENT

1. What does it take for you to feel successful?
2. What does it take for you to feel loved—by your kids, by your spouse, by your parents, and by
whoever else is important to you?
3. What does it take for you to feel confident?
4. What does it take for you to feel you are excellent in any area of your life?
Now look at these rules and ask yourself, "Are they appropriate? Have I made it really hard to feel
good and easy to feel bad?" Do you have 129 things that must happen before you feel loved? Does it
take only one or two things to make you feel rejected?
If that's true, change your criteria and come up with rules that empower you. What do your rules need
to be in order for you to be happy and successful in this endeavor?

PARADOXICAL PROVERBS

Look before you leap.
Too many cooks spoil the broth.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder.
You can't teach an old dog new tricks.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.
A penny saved is a penny earned.
He who hesitates is lost.