Tracking and measuring output… without tears of frustration… is simple.

Once you understand that tighter constraints (precision and specificity) in how you set outputs makes for easier creativity and productivity.

It makes your day smoother and, over time, you get a more reliable quality of output for a given level of effort.

Some people just LOVE tracking their workflow and productivity – it makes them feel like Tony the Tiger – “GRRRRRRRRRREAT!”.

Other people have a less satisfactory experience of tracking – they — Continue reading this post

Here’s a very simple change in thinking that can transform your work. I call it output orientation.

Normally when we think about goal or task completion, we tend to concentrate on organizing and scheduling around the procedures that will create what we want.

With a slight shift, we focus our attention on the tangible results we want to see during the process.

Essentially we are setting our filters to the physicality of our goals – — Continue reading this post

Procrastinating, choosing to delay, choosing to postpone until…, deciding to not decide because… has become almost toxic to our thinking processes.

This is not surprising since the number of decisions we face each day has mushroomed since even our grandparents’ generation – we just aren’t yet fully adapted to handle so many decisions effectively.

By accepting “delay” as our default setting (rather than yes or no) — Continue reading this post

When I first became interested in personal development, I read widely and attended several workshops offering different approaches.

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This concept puzzled me, and it intrigued me:

“People have all the resources they need to deal with their problems.”

My point of view was:

“That is nonsense. It sounds like blaming the person for not using their resources. Almost everyone I know has issues and challenges (myself included) that they can’t resolve themselves.

It took a long time working with people and seeing the patterns of how they resolve their issues and change (or refuse to change) before I understood that the statement about resources was what writers call a sentence fragment.

Important parts of that statement are missing. For it to make sense, the sentence should read:

“People have all the resources they need to deal with their problems – they only need to learn how to access and apply what they have, to improve or change their circumstances.”

And therein lies the rub, as Shakespeare said.

People may have all the internal resources they need to deal with their problems, but their mental maps of the world may completely obscure possibilities and resources, literally blocking their attempts to improve or change their situation.

In maps from the middle ages through the early centuries of exploration, often there would be a sign somewhere on the map (over an “uncharted” land or body of water) that said, “there be monsters.”

And so travelers would avoid those places.

It’s the same with us. Our internal maps of life in the Universe are littered with signs telling us, “I went there (once) and hated it.”

“Badlands: “Keep Out – there’s nothing for the likes of you here!”

“You are not the kind of the person who would…”,

“This was awful, awful, awful; don’t even think about trying that again.”

Part of our job in turning prosperity into a habit is undoing some of the weirdness in our maps that came from not understanding and judging.

We must learn to challenge our senses of impoverishment, resource-scarcity, and victimhood based on poor framing of our experience and social misprogramming.

As we learn to “think better” and improve our mental self-talk about ourselves, learning to change the frames we hold, with greater fluency and speed, asking better questions of ourselves, and choosing to refuse to make ourselves feel bad or feel worse, and instead insisting that we keep moving to better and better use of what we have…

This is how we make the phrase:

“People have all the resources they need to deal with their problems – they only need to learn how to access and apply what they have, to improve or change their circumstances.”

… into a work of joy, goodness, and great prosperity. This is how you set the direction for all the other aspects of habit hacking, and a habit of prosperity that is worth having.

We work at the big picture overview level, and also at the small, detailed level. At some point; they meet in the middle.

Do this:

Schedule this exercise to do in regular small increments of time (it’s not something you can do in one sitting anyway).

You make a list about you and your experiences that are useful resources.

It’s a list about you and what you’ve experienced that is useful as a resource but at a deeper level, it’s really about you right now, and how well you can do resource-thinking.

This exercise has no end… you can continue doing this for the rest of your life, and it will only become more valuable and more useful as time goes on.

I have done (and re-done) this many times.

Here is the exercise:

The list is called “My Advantages”

1. Take a sheet of paper and put the title “My Advantages” at the top of the page.
2. Now list EVERY course you’ve studied, book you’ve read, idea that’s crossed your path, healing modality you’ve ever tried, person, place or thing that has helped you, educated you, or given you something of value, every hobby or interest – basically ANYTHING that taught you something valuable or could act as a resource on current or future projects.

List out WHAT it was and HOW it helped you. In some cases, this will require much, much writing.

As you add more and more items to the list, also review what you’ve written on the list and expand your comments on what you learned.

Without stressful effort the list will multiply into hundreds or even thousands of items under two conditions:

• You work the list consistently for a short amount of time, each day.
• You maintain the practice for at least six weeks.

As you do this, something else will happen. It might seem mysterious from the first-person perspective, but it is quite logical.

The brain gives you more of what you do more.

When the moment occurs, it’s like a kind of unlocking happens. Telling you what my experience of it was like would be as it was in an old Zen koan,

“…If you are thirsty, what good is it if I drink?”

You have to go through the experience for yourself.

I know how valuable the lists have been in my life – personally, professionally, and the profits they contributed to in so many areas.

I know what others have said and accomplished by working with this practice.

As you review your lists over time, your filtering for resources gets sharper and sharper; you remember your strengths, but most importantly you remember to use them to your advantage.

Create your “My Advantages” list now. Once you start, keep going and let momentum carry you to something special.

With the desired result clearly in mind, the desire to act in place and knowing what kinds of resources need to be brought into play, the last piece of the Resource Triangle answers the questions:

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“When and where can this be made to happen?”,

“How can I use this situation for my goal?”

and

“What are the possibilities here?”

The ability to spot opportunities is different from the stages we have looked at before because it asks you to look for what isn’t there – either some element or part of your goal in a situation, or taking something from a situation and adding it into your plan.

In other words, it asks you to scan the world dynamically for possibilities, and “mock up” or test in your imagination how things might work.

It is a definite skill and something that needs work to become an opportunity hound.

It’s at this point that someone usually raises an objection like,

“Oh.. I don’t want to become one of those pushy, presumptuous people…”

At which point I have to say, “I’m not talking about pushy presumptuousness at all – that’s just poor form.

I’m talking about acting on the idea that the world is FULL of possibilities and resources and places where things could be tried, and prosperity can be found, BUT you have to look at and try many things before you find the right ones. There’s nothing pushy about that at all.”

Finding and holding an opportunity viewpoint is not just about self. It’s also about insisting that you lift every experience to its highest level because it is possible AND it is good.

Being opportunity focused means holding criteria about how to make things work, about how to adapt the world to yourself, and adapting yourself to the world.

Being willing to persist in seeking out options and possibilities is an expression of the fullness and commitment generated by the thinking you’ve done in the previous angles of the Resource Triangle.

The secret of the OPPORTUNITIES angle in the Resource Triangle is that it tests your belief in the reality, utility, and possibilities in your goal.

If those are weak; then the KNOWLEDGE resourcing will be weak, as will the MOTIVATION, and desired outcome itself.

OPPORTUNITIES implies actively scanning the world and looking for as many “hows” and “partial hows” and resources and partial resources as you can find.

Rather than “positive thinking” about your goals, OPPORTUNITIES is about positive doings.

It’s the demonstration that you are serious about what you want.

It puts your commitment into practice, and it comes out as a “hustle in your bustle” in pursuit of goals.

The search for opportunities is one of the how’s of getting your schedule and your goals to match up.

The search for opportunities is one of the how’s of creatively pulling together missing resources.

The search for opportunities is one of the how’s of making every occasion an enjoyable chance to refresh your perceptions and look at things differently.

The search for opportunities is a continuous affirmation of the ultimate success of your projects and goals.

Take a project you are working on and, if you haven’t yet done so, craft and refine a written description of it so that the results:

• Are crystal clear
• Make your heart sing when you think about going for it
• Make the process is clearer and clearer
• Show you what resources you have
• Include the resources you need to acquire.

The fun thing with OPPORTUNITIES is that how you work them is as unlimited as possibility itself. Here are some ideas:

Take some part of your goal or project and think back across last week:

• Where did you go and what did you experience that might be useful as either inspiration, creative provocation, borrowable model or precedent?
• What possibilities did you miss for either asking for or giving help to someone else?
• Who might you have spoken with about some aspect of your project? Not to brag or puff yourself up, but to share or compare or learn from? (that could be anyone, by the way…)
• What spontaneous moments could have been used better?
• How will I use what I discovered here to be better prepared to recognize opportunities as they arise next week?

As an example, I dislike traveling on public transport and avoid it if I can.

Last week, I was visiting the same place a few times, and the bus was the most direct way to access it.

On the first day, there was a crazy person speaking out loud about the aliens preparing to come down from the skies.

It was so good and so… novel… in how he told the story;

I made a few notes on my phone for possible creative writing prompts (I mean… what if God… or the aliens… sent this man to give me ideas???? It would be rude not to use them… must resist… the urge… to hit THE CAPS LOCK…)

The second visit, the bus was full of old ladies with their shopping bags with wheels, and their elbows fully sharpened and ready for the shopping scrum.

All the conversations took the following form:

“Yes, I have this disease and that disorder, and pain… My God…growing old is hard… my granddaughter is going… the government should…”.

It was if they were all working off of a script… this led me to several possibilities:

• The universality of suffering and the issues of aging.
• The script idea (I have just had my first screenplay made into a film, and am queuing up for the next one) – give all the extras in an area, bus, plane, etc. The same basic outline of purposes, intentions and discussion topics but allow them to improvise within their character bounds, and function within a scene based on the outline. See what happens. (hmmm… a writer’s workshop with actors?)
• What would have to happen to make these people’s lives just a little bit easier or better? What’s the smallest amount of change in conditions that would have the largest impact?
• I wonder how many countries of origin and native language groups we have on this bus… oops, time to get off the bus.

Any circumstance (even one’s you don’t usually enjoy) can be used to create resources, ideas, better questions, and possibilities.

Make this a part of your life… it’s much better than muttering to yourself darkly as you go about your activities in the world.

The more opportunities you seek; the more (and bigger) opportunities you will find.

I hope you will allow this as a possibility.