Drip It — Change It, Drip It

Lessons From The Blue Sweater

by Bernie on May 31, 2009

In The Blue Sweater we follow Jacqueline on her journey from an idealistic 20-something out to change the world who learned some hard lessons in reality, to a world-changer who is truly making her dent in the universe.

The book starts out in the concrete jungle of New York City, where Jacqueline starts her career as an international banker at Chase Manhattan. We follow her career as she has stints in South America and Africa and finally back to the US where she founds the Acumen Fund. She now works to find ways to eradicate poverty through innovative businesses that have the poor as their customers. How’s that for an innovative solution?

What follows are three lessons I took from the book.

Start.
We often find ourselves waiting for the exact right time to do something, especially when it’s something big. I know I’m guilty of that. Here’s some advice that Jacqueline got right before she started her work at the Acumen fund, after she had spent a number of years over in Africa:

“Don’t wait for perfection”. Just start and let the work teach you. No one expects you to get it right in the very beginning, and you’ll learn more from your mistakes than you will from your early successes anyway. So stop worrying so much and just look at your best bets and go”.
Such great advice. There is one truth you will never escape – you’ll never get there if you don’t take the first step. So start. Right now.

Understand people and culture

The people in Africa gave Jacqueline a very hard time when she first went to there to help. Why? She, and the people who sent her, didn’t understand the people or the culture there. Here’s and example: UNICEF once hired an expensive Italian designer to create a poster campaign aimed at convincing women to vaccinate their children with simple written messages accompanied by gorgeous photographs. They were perfect, except for the small fact that there was an extremely low female literacy rate in Rwanda. Ooops!

Remember if you haven’t walked a mile in a person’s shoes, it is hard for you to understand them, and impossible for you to move them to action.

The solution lies in simplicity on the far side of complexity
Oliver Wendall Holmes once said that I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.

This simplicity often comes in the form of a third alternative to two seemingly conflicting ideas. For Jacqueline, the issue became more and more clear as time went on. Charity alone, wasn’t the answer. The market alone, wasn’t the answer. Jacqueline’s key insight was that change could be created by finding solutions where the poor were the customers, not the recipients of handouts. It’s a dramatic paradigm shift, and the results are dramatic as well.

By Steve Cunningham

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The Sigmoid Curve and Your Life: Making Personal Changes

by Joel on May 31, 2009

This is the last article in a series of four. The first article presented the theory. The second explained how to embrace change rather than simply enduring it. The third article was a detailed example of the author’s application of the theory in her own life. This article includes practical guidelines, the drip, trickle, and flood, for implementation in your own life.—ed.

Break down an element of behavior that will be necessary to make the change into the smallest repeatable part. Then do just that tiny little thing every day. For example, losing weight requires eating less and moving more. So, taking the moving more part of the equation, find some small, minute behavior change that you can do every day. Buying sneakers will get you started but it is generally not something you would do daily as part of the behavior change. However, putting on those sneakers is something you would do daily. So as part of your grand plan to lose weight you decide that the smallest unit you can do daily is to put your sneakers on. That’s all. Just do that every day.

The reason this works is that it isn’t a big enough change from what you are already doing to provoke resistance. “Heck, I’m only putting my sneakers on.” And then once they’re on you may decide to do a little more. But do not do too much, as this will provoke resistance. Just be consistent at putting your sneakers on every day. After a few weeks of that you can up the ante—maybe you’ll take 2 marching steps. Whatever it is, do it every day.

Do the physical drip activity and combine it with a corresponding mental activity. For example, “I enjoy moving my body—it feels good to work out.” Run this through your mind over and over every day. What you want to do is change your old mental ruts to new, more useful ruts (ruts are good as long as they take you where you want to go). Your brain is like modeling clay and you are remodeling it. Read The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force if you want to know more.

Make one big decision that necessitates many, many subsequent actions. For example, hire a personal trainer and give that trainer a key to your house and permission to roust you from your bed. Pay the trainer an amount of money that makes you feel as if you must follow through or you have wasted a serious amount of money. And to really flood, give your next month’s rent/mortgage payment to someone to hold on your behalf. If you make your weight-loss goals, that person pays your rent/mortgage. If you don’t make your goals, the money goes to charity and you have to find additional funds.

By Jule Kucera

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Be Happy — Despite Difficult Economic Times

May 31, 2009

In difficult economic times, we hear a lot that is negative and angry. Does a negative attitude change our financial situation or motivate us to make changes for the good? Or does it just make us more angry and bitter, unable to take steps to make things better? In the past I’ve allowed negative feelings [...]

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Sorry, Charles Dickens. It’s certainly not the best of times, but it’s also not the worst of times. Despite everything going on in the world now, you can make it better. Yes, you can, and you don’t have to spend a lot of money or time to do it. Here’s how I found out. During [...]

Uniquely Yours

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My friend Vinod Savanth is an animal lover with a heart as big as Texas. He treats his three dogs well and is a responsible pet owner. He has a long commute, as many of us do. And on that commute, he frequently sees dogs and cats injured by cars. Traffic is so heavy where [...]

Helping the youngest of Uganda, one brick at a time

April 30, 2009

As a result of a rising population, extreme poverty and an HIV pandemic, the shocking statistic is there are over two million babies currently orphaned in Uganda. There are babies every day and every week, abandoned in toilets, in bus stations or at the roadside, and they’re left to die. In the Ugandan capital, Kampala, [...]

Discover Love

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Love is contagious. The more you get, the more you want to give. Where can you turn to get yourself infected? Your husband, wife, or life partner offers you love. So do your friends and family members. But any fear that they don’t really mean it gets in the way of receiving as much love [...]

charity:water

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Right now, 1.1 billion people on the planet don’t have access to safe, clean drinking water. That’s one in six of us. Unsafe water and lack of basic sanitation cause 80% of all sickness and disease, and kill more people every year than all forms of violence, including war. Many people in the developing world, [...]

The Best Health Care in the World?