Appendix B: Help Wanted Blueprints

Appendix B

Help Wanted Blueprints

Follow these directions to tutor learners

in making more breathtaking breakthroughs.

For you yourselves know how you ought to follow us,

for we were not disorderly among you;

nor did we eat anyone’s bread free of charge,

but worked with labor and toil night and day,

that we might not be a burden to any of you,

not because we do not have authority,

but to make ourselves an example of how you should follow us.

— 2 Thessalonians 3:7-9 (NKJV)

Just before completing the final draft of 2,000 Percent Living and a few months before I started to write this book, I visited an exhibition of Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts. In case you are unfamiliar with this aspect of the artist’s work, let me explain a little bit about it. Mr. LeWitt found the process of conceptualizing art to be interesting and worthy apart from producing the art, and he liked to draw. As a result, he worked on helping people to recreate his drawings on a grand scale without his presence. If you would like to see some of such recreated wall drawings, you can find examples at the MASS MoCA Web site, www.massmoca.org. I also encourage you to visit the exhibition, which is planned to continue until 2033.

As I toured the extensive display of recreated wall drawings, I was impressed by examples of the complex plans that Mr. LeWitt (who is now deceased) provided for those who want to render his wall drawings. The details are so thoroughly developed and easy to understand that virtually anyone who can read English can expect to create an excellent wall drawing that will appear as Mr. LeWitt intended.

If you are musically inclined, think of his instructions as being similar to the score of a symphony. By playing what the composer wrote on period instruments, musicians can recreate the delightful sounds that existed during the composer’s lifetime.

A new question occurred to me while I was touring the exhibit: How well would people understand the nuances of how to create 2,000 percent living breakthroughs after the best of the current practitioners are no longer alive? I imagined that many well-meaning people might misinterpret what has been written on the subject and that, consequently, much effort could go into relatively ineffective activities.

As an example of such a problem, I have been struck by how many learners view answering all of the questions posed in the 400 Year Project books as a complete substitute for following the processes described in the text. Such questions were intended instead to start learners’ thinking in ways that make it easier to use the processes. In an attempt to avoid this confusion among learners, I have omitted from recent 400 Year Project books most of the kinds of questions that earlier project books included.

Having become aware of the humbling issue of how to best serve unborn generations, I immediately began to appreciate that Mr. LeWitt’s instructions could be likened to blueprints. With a good blueprint to make something, any reasonably competent person who knows how to use blueprints and has the right tools can create the desired result.

I immediately determined that I would include blueprints for a few of the most important aspects of 2,000 Percent Living in an appendix to the book. Learners who just want to graze through the concepts of 2,000 percent living will get what they want from the fourteen lessons. Learners who would like to create many breathtaking breakthroughs can use the blueprints to make faster progress and to accomplish more.

Since providing blueprints is such an obvious idea, you may be wondering why I hadn’t done similar work earlier to advance the 400 Year Project (see Adventures of an Optimist). I certainly toyed with related ideas, but I avoided doing much about them beyond coauthoring The 2,000 Percent Solution Workbook. In choosing to be mostly silent about detailed instructions, I was primarily concerned that I not stifle anyone’s creativity. I believed that what I’d learned and been writing about can be reconceptualized into simpler and better forms. I also hoped that many 2,000 percent solution tutors would soon begin work and that they would develop better blueprints than I could through drawing on their experiences with applying and teaching the process.

Over the first fifteen years of the project, I learned something that surprised me: With God’s help I can describe improved breakthrough methods much faster than most people become interested in learning how to use them. That circumstance suggests that I need to focus on making it easier to grasp the importance and advantages of using such breakthrough methods and to appreciate how little time and effort is usually needed to apply the processes to create remarkable solutions. As a result of my continuing concern about the relatively slow growth in the number of people applying the breakthrough process, I have decided to make more blueprints for you here in Appendix B of Help Wanted.

In thinking about the blueprints that I describe, I realize that my task is a little more complicated than Mr. LeWitt’s. What he wanted to enable will still be literally relevant centuries from now. What I am describing should be improved over time as new resources, knowledge, skills, and circumstances emerge. Therefore, I need to write the blueprints to allow for such advances to be incorporated into future solutions. I have done my best to project potential advances in methods by using the help of the Holy Spirit to imagine some possibilities so that your application of the blueprints will be more likely to benefit from any fundamental improvements in opportunities. I also made this information more relevant for the future by grounding my writing as much as possible in circumstances that are likely to remain relatively similar to today.

Let’s get started by looking at the first blueprint for Help Wanted: conceiving new classes of potential benefits so that more dimensions of benefits can be exponentially expanded through applying complementary breakthroughs.

Copyright © 2011 by Donald W. Mitchell. All rights reserved.