2,000 Percent Living Lesson Six: Read Helpful Sources

Select reading materials
that will help you identify and understand
the future best practices
(the best ways anyone in the world
will do that or any similar activity
in the next five years)
and the ideal best practices
(the best ways anyone can ever
hope to do that or any similar activity
by using technology
that will be available in the next five years)
in those areas where you want
to gain breakthrough results.

When they had read it,
they rejoiced because of its encouragement.

— Acts 15:31 (NAS)

Although most people don’t read nearly as rapidly or
remember what they’ve read nearly as well as they
would like (the subject of Lesson Five), a bigger
problem occurs when most people select what to read:
The vast majority of people have never read anything
that will help them to make useful breakthroughs. In
this lesson, you will learn what you should be reading as
your first priority for making breakthroughs.

After you switch your reading focus, the ultimate
improvements in your quality of life can become greater
than the difference between using a searchlight and a
penlight for illumination at night.

Read to Identify and Understand
the Future Best Practices

Would that they were wise, that they understood this,
That they would discern their future!

— Deuteronomy 32:29 (NAS)

Unless you have already been developing 2,000 percent
solutions (ways of accomplishing at least twenty times
more with the same time, money, and effort … or the
same results with 1/20 the time, money, and effort),
chances are that the concept of a future best practice is
new to you. If so, I’m pleased and honored to have an
opportunity to introduce you to this way of looking at
opportunity.

Let’s start by considering what a best practice is: It’s
simply the most effective way anyone is accomplishing
any given task today. The definition of effectiveness is
determined by what the goal is. For instance, if you want
to go very fast while traveling on the ground, you will
probably use a turbofan-propelled vehicle in some
appropriate place such as the Black Rock Desert in
Nevada or the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. If, instead,
you want to as fast as possible anyplace, you will want
to be in a rocket in space where the lack of atmosphere
and the reduced pull of the Earth’s gravity mean that
you can go a lot faster than anywhere else.

If you were trying to find the fastest ways to travel in a
variety of directions in various places, you would
probably find the answers by looking at sources that
keep track of speed records. You could also rely on any
memories you have about past speed records to
investigate other sources.

Notice that the best practice changes over time. In 1800,
the fastest way for a person to travel safely was quite
slow compared to what an automobile can do today on a
race track. In 1950, the fastest way to travel in a jet
plane would have been quite slow compared to what a
rocket in space can do today.

Sometimes, the best practice changes very rapidly. For
instance, the newest semiconductor generation will be a
lot better than the last one and will appear about every
eighteen to twenty-four months. In other cases, the rate
of best-practice improvement will be slower. A much
faster generation of rockets to carry a given load, for
instance, may only come along every decade or two.

In most cases it isn’t very convenient to determine what
the current best practice is. For many activities, there
are no record books. In fact, those who do certain things
very well may seek to keep what they do secret so that
no one else can copy them. Such secrecy is typical in
many businesses because employing the best practice is
a source of competitive advantage that increases profits
and reduces risk.

When the current best practice isn’t published, you will
probably need to access a variety of resources to find
what works best now. One way to avoid a major search is
to find people who have been looking for the same answer.
You may find such a person in an expert who follows a
certain industry, an editor whose publication covers the
arena where you want to find the best practice, or
someone who just wrote a book on the subject. By
reading what they’ve written about these practices, you
can get a sense of what these searchers probably know.
Feel free to go beyond reading what they have written
by corresponding with or speaking to them.

In other cases, you may find that no one else is looking or
has looked for what you seek. In that circumstance, you
will need to do your own research. Internet searches can
often help you to find articles and books that will provide
hints of where to look. The last section in this lesson
considers this research problem in more detail.

Here’s an important observation to keep in mind: To
accomplish your goal by developing a 2,000 percent
solution, the best method may be to combine more than
one best practice. In my many years of experience in
seeking best practices, I have rarely found that people
were combining as many best practices as would be
desirable.

Let’s look at the speed example some more to understand
more about the point. Typically, rockets powered by
chemicals are the fastest way to lift a large load through
the Earth’s atmosphere, but their engines burn fuel very
rapidly so that little fuel is left by the time the rockets are
outside the atmosphere, limiting acceleration potential.

Nuclear power plants, by comparison, don’t deplete their
fuel supplies very rapidly, but these power sources
present a different problem: No one is very enthusiastic
about launching large nuclear power plants into space. If
that concern can be overcome with appropriate safety
measures, a chemically powered rocket could be used to
launch a large nuclear-powered rocket into Earth orbit
from which it would be aimed towards deep space and
accelerate for many years by relying on its atomic fuel.
The combined approach of a chemical rocket launching a
nuclear rocket into space would result in travel vastly
faster than what is allowed by a fast chemical rocket, the
current best practice. The technology exists to
accomplish this combination process safely, but the
combination hasn’t yet been employed to set a speed
record.

So what, then, is the future best practice? It’s the best
that anyone is likely to accomplish in the next five years
using the technology and knowledge that will be
available during that time. Let’s assume that you read
an article describing a program to have a nuclear-
powered rocket ready to go within five years that would
achieve high deep-space speed after being launched into
Earth orbit by a chemically fueled rocket. From having
studied the potential of both technologies, you would
realize that this approach is the future best practice for
gaining high speed in space.

If you didn’t read such an article but determined
through research that someone could start today and
accomplish the identical result within five years, that
combination would still be the future best practice. If you
determined instead that developing such a combination
would take twenty years, this use of chemical- and
nuclear-powered rockets isn’t yet a future best practice
… but someday it may be. The future best practice now
would be some enhanced version of the chemically fueled
rockets.

Let’s consider a less exotic example of current and
future best practices to bring the concept more down to
Earth for you. People develop all kinds of diseases as a
result of various dietary deficiencies (such as from
lacking iodine, iron, vitamin C, and vitamin D). Standard
blood tests can be used to detect these deficiencies.

If you are looking to help undernourished people, the cost
of the blood tests often exceeds the cost of providing food
or supplements that cure the deficiencies. As a result, not
many blood tests are conducted among poor people in
underdeveloped countries who are most at risk, and
many people in developed and underdeveloped countries
suffer from the consequences of deficiencies that they
don’t know they have.

Many nations have laws that require nutritional additives
in certain foods (such as iodine in salt and vitamin D in
milk). But the consumer or purchaser doesn’t normally
have the equipment to test for their presence, and
corruption may have caused an inspector to certify food
that hasn’t received the right additives.

To overcome the health problems from dietary
deficiencies, the current best practice would be to test all
of the food and all of the people to ensure that the
additives are being received and consumed in adequate
quantities. Let me propose a potential future best practice
that’s consistent with today’s technology: Biologically bind
a different inexpensive marker to each legally mandated
nutritional additive so that it would be apparent through
the ordinary senses that the additive is present.
Technology to color and flavor foods is quite good, and
that technology could easily be applied to marking
additives. The iodine marker might make salt look more
sparkling and attractive. The vitamin D marker might
make milk smell slightly like something pleasant such as
freshly mown clover. Properly done and combined with
education about the importance of these additives, the
markers would also help encourage consumption of the
needed vitamins and minerals.

Now that you know what the concept of the future best
practice is, let me explain why it’s important to you:
Without knowing what the future best practice is, you will
probably work on solving a problem that has already been
solved or soon will be. As a result, your 2,000 percent
solution will fall far short of what’s possible. Why not get
the best result you can from your work?

In the 2,000 percent solution process, you should think of
the future best practice as the floor (or the starting point)
for seeking improvement. Without knowing what the
future best practice is, you will probably work on a goal
that’s far too low. If outperforming the competitors is
important, you will fail because some of them will exceed
your performance.

Read to Identify and Understand
the Ideal Best Practices

The LORD has conquered this whole area
for the community of Israel,
and it is ideally suited for all our livestock.

— Numbers 32:4 (NLT)

The ideal best practice is simply the most that would ever
be possible to accomplish by applying what is or can be
known in the next five years. To explain what I mean,
let’s revisit the speed example discussed in the
preceding section. In looking at the opportunity to reach
the ideal best practice, a rocket scientist might become
intrigued by the opportunity to speed up the initial
velocity of the nuclear rocket quite a bit by using
additional chemical rockets launched from space as
supplemental sources of momentum. That’s an important
consideration if you want to reach high speeds sooner
because nuclear rockets as conceived of now would start
slowly and build speed very gradually.

Here’s what could be done instead: Chemical rockets
could deliver components and fuel for additional chemical
rocket boosters to be assembled in space (at, say, the
international space station) that would be attached to the
nuclear rocket after it had been launched into space.
With such a faster start from the second set of chemically
fueled rocket engines, the nuclear engine would accelerate
much faster toward the speed of light (186,000 miles per
second). As a result, higher speeds would be reached
sooner. A lower-cost method might be to reuse materials
from rockets that deliver materials to the space station.

In terms of the food-additive example, the ideal best
practice might be to put the person preparing or eating
the food in charge of applying the additives. The food
would arrive in a store, dining hall, or restaurant without
any supplemental additives, but each person would have
a stock of the needed additives biologically bound to a
variety of seasonings that make the food taste better.
In this way, everyone would be covered … whether
eating at home, in a refugee camp, or in a fine-dining
restaurant. Access to the additives would be provided
free to everyone on Earth. Why? It costs a lot more for a
society to let people live without these additives and deal
with the consequences of the dietary deficiencies than it
does to provide the additives in a desirable form. Sure,
some people wouldn’t use them. Schools and social
worker’s and doctor’s offices could be places to
distribute information about how important it is to use
the additives.

The ideal best practice is important because it represents
the outer limit of what is possible now. It’s usually well
beyond the level of the future best practice. In fact, a
major part of the value of identifying and measuring the
future best practice is to raise the sights of the person to
become better prepared to identify the ideal best
practice. For more help, read the blueprint for ideal
practice identification in Appendix B.

Check Potential Sources before Reading
or Contacting Them

God gave Solomon very great wisdom and understanding,
and knowledge as vast as the sands of the seashore.

— 1 Kings 4:29 (NLT)

Chances are that you don’t have very much experience
with checking out potential sources of information about
current, future, and ideal best practices. In this section,
I want to simplify the task and also help you become
more effective at doing it.

Living in the Internet age presents special problems. If
you are older than a certain age, you probably aren’t quite
sure about all the ways to use the Internet for this task.
If you are younger than a certain age, you would never use
anything other than the Internet … even if the other
sources are preferable. I am writing for both audiences, so
please bear with me while I’m explaining something that
you already know. Pretty soon I’ll probably share
something that you don’t yet know. If you think you are
already a great best-practice researcher, feel free to go
ahead to Lesson Seven now.

I usually start looking for best practices by using the
Internet because it helps me to find and consider a great
many potential sources more rapidly than any other
method. I start with Google keyword searches. A
particular advantage of that search engine today is that it
is very effective in picking up sections of recently
published books and articles. The Google searches tell me
a lot about what’s on the Internet and what I might have
to access elsewhere. However, in looking at the potential
sources, I remain keenly aware that not everything on
the Internet is accurate.

If I were working on the food-additive issue, I would
probably use words and phrases like “vitamin
deficiency,” “mineral deficiency,” the names of the
various diseases that result from vitamin and mineral
deficiencies (I might have to do a prior Google search to
find those names), “food additive,” “iodine in salt,”
“vitamin D in milk,” “nutritional supplements for
malnourished people,” “UN food program,” “markers for
food additives,” and so on. Basically, I would search using
any word, name, or phrase that struck me as potentially
relevant to the current, future, or ideal best practice for
my issue of interest.

Most of the time, those searches would lead me to some
major online and offline knowledge sources including
research institutes, academic journals, professional
publications, expert journalists and editors, government
and nongovernmental programs, professional
organizations, industry associations, and, possibly,
schools and programs located within universities.

Before picking a source to investigate, I need to consider
what I want to use the source for. If I want to actually
solve the problem and implement the solution, I probably
need to find someone who provides services. If so, I’ll
check out those sources first. If I just want to write
about the subject, I’ll look for people who have lots of
knowledge regardless of whether or not they attempt to
apply what they know.

Having narrowed down what I’m looking for, I’ll read a
little from one or two online examples of what the most
promising sources produce. From reading a page or two,
I can usually tell if what the person knows or does applies
to what I’m interested in. Whether or not there seems to
be an appropriate source, I’ll note how to contact the
source. If I cannot find many good sources, I may want to
ask a lot of people who else is knowledgeable about what
I am interested in.

After checking out what seems to be promising, I’ll
probably realize that I need to use some different search
words. For instance, in checking out the UN food program
and nutritional supplements, I learned about a product
called Plumpy’Doz for malnourished youngsters. I would
then add a search for that product. During that search, I
learned about a term I didn’t know before, RUF,
referring to ready-to-eat food. I would search on that as
well. From that search, I might learn about contamination
problems and pick up some more terms to search on.

If I wanted to find out how many people have various
kinds of vitamin and mineral deficiencies, I would do
online searches until I found out who measures and
keeps track of those statistics. Each new search would,
in turn, lead to other searches, until I began to see that
what I was learning was circling back to form a factual
fence of reliable sources around the subject.

In the course of doing all this searching and sampling, it
would be highly unusual if I read as many as 30,000
words (spending fifteen minutes reading at 2,000 words a
minute). I would also be astonished if I found a book or an
article that had more than ten pages in it that were
relevant reading.

As you can see, the search task is more one of eliminating
available material than it is of finding the right material.
My advice is to eliminate as much as possible while
reading as little as possible. Only those planning to write
a dissertation on a subject need to have read “all” the
relevant literature.

As soon as I think I have exhausted most of what the
Internet would tell me, I begin assembling lists of
questions I still need answers to and other lists of people
who might be able to answer them. If people are
accessible by e-mail, I just send an e-mail. If they
aren’t, I call or drop a letter in the mail (depending on
how long I can afford to wait).

If a potential source person is important to my answer, I
follow up three or four times. If a source is critical, I show
up on the doorstep and ask for access if I cannot get their
attention in any other way. Most people will see you on
this basis.

What if you don’t want to do all this work? Research
librarians are very skilled at this kind of investigation.
Ask one to help you search. In many cases, a research
librarian who isn’t busy will spend a little time helping
you in the library for free. Many also offer their
services on an hourly basis outside of their hours at
the library. If you can’t afford to hire a librarian, you
may be able to attract a graduate student working in
the field as an unpaid or less expensively paid intern
to work on your issue.

One of my great hopes for the 400 Year Project is that
for-profit and nonprofit organizations will also begin to
offer many free online resources that track current best
practices. On a proprietary basis requiring a payment,
you can buy studies of particular business best practices
that have been researched by organizations such as
APQC (www.apqc.org) and various accounting and
engineering firms. APQC also offers help with doing your
own benchmarking studies to locate the current best
practices.

In many cases, I find it necessary to perform special
measurement studies involving surveys for my clients.
You can obviously hire someone to do that for you, or
you can learn how to do it for yourself. Many
universities offer courses in survey design and analysis.

Equipped with your new ability to find helpful sources
and draw immense, practical lessons from them, you
will be able to perceive opportunities beyond your
wildest dreams. What a great blessing that is from God
for helping direct you towards the accomplishments
that He would like you to make. In Lesson Seven, you
will begin to learn how to make such accomplishments.

Copyright 2010 Donald W. Mitchell, All Rights Reserved.