With 471 men and women owning or controlling about seventy percent of all the cash on earth, there are a thousand dead bodies per hour just from starvation.

Be good enough to explain how it's okay for college coaches to get salaries that are twenty-six times the salary of a full professor -- such as Notre Dame decided to do -- yet kids who have not committed crimes -- are so ravenously hungry they die a thousand per hour, every single hour of every single day.

If you really and truly believe that you cannot make a huge, history-altering difference, you might want to consider the following.

Benjamin Franklin left about four hundred and fifty dollars in a bank, with instructions that only part of the interest, and none of the principal, be used to train printing apprentices from financially depressed areas, for a period of two hundred years. With many chunks given out along the way, the fund came due just before the turn of the 21st century, and, having paid to train a few thousand printing apprentices, there were still some seventeen million dollars left. Let's remember, this started with a few hundred-dollar bills.

We know that drops of water are far stronger than granite, for, left to drip a sufficient period of time, a sufficient number of times, the water will drill holes through even ten feet of granite. Before we complain about how long it takes to accomplish it, let's first be certain of how the water manages to work its way into and right through solid rock. Once we determine the method by which it's done, then and only then is it logical to seek to speed up the process.

To help create the picture, the analogy is invoked of a sculptor who also wishes to penetrate, and actually shape an enormous block of granite or marble without powertools or acids. This said to set aside, momentarily, the supposedly "automatic" tools to get the job done -- likenable to your distorted perceptions about the "automatic" nature of wealth, or looks, higher education or some supposedly magical talent.

The sculptor approaches a block of granite weighing a hundreds pounds or more. Not something you'd want to forcefully punch with your bare fist. He strikes the chisel and there's not even a scratch. He strikes it again. Still nothing. After a dozen shots, he looks carefully and sees almost a scratch. A hundred strikes of the chisel, his chest is heaving, and he sees the scratch is now an iota past "merest scratch." Another hundred strikes and there's a whisper of a line almost appearing.

A thousand strikes later, he's getting his rhythm going now, arm swinging back, bam! Bam! Bam! You can hear the ringing of the metal hammer bouncing off of that heavy chisel with the thick sound that steel on steel makes to the human ear. The video film shows us that the granite block split open after exactly 1,755 strikes of hammer against chisel. That brings us to the purpose of this paragraph, to ask you whether he hit the granite correctly on the 1,755th strike, or was the split a direct result of the ACCUMULATED energy of all his little baby strikes?

Why bother reading on until you've read that paragraph at least twice? Even after thirty-four years of reading a book per day, each review of that paragraph reveals new distinctions that I didn't even know I was ignorant of! Nothing wrong with an adult learning how to learn better. Those of you who wish to rapidly accelerate your results in this life will develop the self-discipline to stick with a nugget, or a lemon, until every reasonable drop of benefit has been elicited.

When it comes to useful information from our wiser role models, the first understanding, which is to say the surface, or superficial distinctions, have a root utility with definite limitations. It's when we get to secondary, and tertiary distinctions that your life starts popping with excellent shortcuts. You see, those second-level and third-level meanings are the arenas where you find human beings in the top twenty percent, and in the top twenty percent of the top twenty percent. Those supposed dummies who looked beyond the obvious, who are not offended by change, who work backwards from their desired goal in order to live it forwards, which leaves them wide open to newer meanings of old information. It works one hundred percent of the time for one hundred percent of the reading population. It's that flexibility, that willingness to close the mouth and open the ears/eyes/nose and inner ear, that will prove you are smarter than you give yourself credit for. Study ANY piece of wisdom and you'll get more and more out of that wisdom.

It's that rarified air of the immoderately snobbish knowledge gatherers who genuinely believe that the nonacademes are unable to 'get it.' Sad for them, and good for you, knowing has only a fraction the power of doing. You have no problem remembering dozens of commercials, or tv shows, or celebrities who have zero real impact on your life. As long as you have a definite reason why it's so important to you, even fifth-grade dropouts can memorize an encyclopedia when they are motivated. Do they memorize it in a week? Of course not. We are reminded of the illiterate teenager, serving serious jail time for violent crimes, who read one page of the dictionary every day, and became one of his generation's most eloquent speakers after changing his name to Malcom X. Don't think it was the name change that made him a famous orator; it was that little tiny strike of a chisel on granite, that tiny little dent in the dictionary one page at a time.

Granite sculptors and billionaires have more in common regarding their daily steps than they do with you. This is not the art or persuasion of success, it's the mathematical pattern seen in Olympic Champions from a dozen different countries and cultures who are doing the same exact visualization exercises every day and then winning gold medals as the best on earth.

This is the scientifically duplicable ergo replicable pattern seen in close to half of America's self-made billionaires, and closer to ninety percent of the half that were closely studied and/or interviewed and/or meal mentor-ed with. (A meal mentor is when you write/call an extraordinarily successful person and say, "Hi, we both know you're one of the best in the world. Because I want to grow up and be like you, I'm asking you to consider being my mentor for the time it takes to break bread together, breakfast, lunch or dinner, my treat, of course." There are many ways to phrase it, This technique works with very successful people, who look down on others only when they're reaching down to help that person up. Never mind the egomaniacs, stick with true role models; they respond as most of us do when appropriately praised.

This pattern is seen in the lives of no less than thousands of very ordinary people who became extraordinary people by examing something carefully enough to get the extra glassful, examing from more than one coign of vantage, and then using their tools just an ounce more.

We know that the chisel left on the shelf doesn't accomplish much of anything, as we know that having looks or talents or wealthy parents are not enough in and of themselves to get much of anything accomplished.

For sure, you have tools at your disposal, right in front of, and behind your face, that you can be using more effectively in this very precise period that the calendar tells us will never be repeated. Are you SURE you understand what twenty-four hours consists of?