2,000 Percent LIVING

You'll learn how to live a much more fruitful life for the Lord through gaining Salvation (if needed), re-dedicating your life to Him (if needed), and being more focused on sanctification. Establish more Godly objectives, help lead more people to gain Salvation, and engage in your calling from Him in more effective ways through the Bible-based directions in 2,000 Percent LIVING, my latest book.

Friday, September 17, 2010

2,000 Percent Living Lesson Eleven: Use Complementary Solutions to Multiply Exponential Benefits

Link together at least seven
complementary 2,000 percent solutions
to create multiplied, exponential Godly results.


Now may He who supplies seed to the sower,
and bread for food, supply and multiply the seed
you have sown and increase the fruits of your
righteousness, while you are enriched in everything
for all liberality, which causes thanksgiving through us
to God.

— 2 Corinthians 9:10-11 (NKJV)

In Lesson Ten, I showed how one 2,000 percent solution
can lead to increased benefits in more than one area, such
as when cost reductions provide funds that are used to
increase spending on highly productive marketing
activities so that substantial growth and more cost
reductions follow. Now that you realize that you can
produce many 2,000 percent solutions and successfully
repeat the solution process annually for each application,
I want you to appreciate that with complementary
solutions you can eventually multiply the benefits you
create by many billions of times over your lifetime by
gradually adding complementary benefits until they
total thousands, then tens of thousands, next hundreds
of thousands, subsequently millions, and ultimately
billions of times. The exponential increases occur simply
because your results are enhanced by several other
2,000 percent solutions every time that you add one
more complementary solution.

This is an important point: Creating lots of
complementary 2,000 percent solutions is the biggest
productivity breakthrough that anyone can achieve.
Complementary solutions also save you time, money,
and effort by greatly decreasing the number of solutions
needed to achieve any desired level of increased
effectiveness. Here’s an overview of how benefits from
complementary 2,000 percent solutions multiply
exponentially compared to arithmetic increases from
2,000 percent solutions that aren’t complementary:

• Two independent 2,000 percent solutions deliver a
40 times improvement.
• Two complementary 2,000 percent solutions produce
a 400 times improvement.

• Three independent 2,000 percent solutions provide a
60 times improvement.
• Three complementary 2,000 percent solutions supply
an 8,000 times improvement.

• Four independent 2,000 percent solutions fashion an
80 times improvement.
• Four complementary 2,000 percent solutions create
a 160,000 times improvement.

• Five independent 2,000 percent solutions build a
100 times improvement.
• Five complementary 2,000 percent solutions forge a
3,200,000 times improvement.

• Six independent 2,000 percent solutions establish a
120 times improvement.
• Six complementary 2,000 percent solutions secure a
64,000,000 times improvement.

• Seven independent 2,000 percent solutions accomplish
a 140 times improvement.
• Seven complementary 2,000 percent solutions conclude
with a 1,280,000,000 times improvement.

• One repeated 2,000 percent solution for any of seven
independent 2,000 percent solution areas enhances total
benefits to a 520 times improvement.
• One repeated 2,000 percent solution for any of seven
complementary 2,000 percent solution areas expands
total benefits to a 25,600,000,000 times improvement.

By the time you have created one round of improved
solutions for all seven complementary 2,000 percent
solution areas, the size of the total benefits will stagger
your mind and provide never-before-seen quantities of
benefits. With normal diligence you should be able to
implement your solutions and achieve that amazing
accomplishment within ten years. I’m sure you agree
with me that complementary solutions are the way to go.

If all this sounds impossible to you, please reread the
Introduction where I describe Dr. Ramulu’s work in his
home village of Kasimpet, India. In that project, his team
defined and successfully implemented five
complementary 2,000 percent solutions (increased
incomes, decreased debt, reduced interest costs, higher
net worth, and a source for vastly expanding continuing
education) in less than a year. Their program contains a
method for continuing growth of 2,000 percent solution
learning to be applied to other people in the village and
surrounding villages in the future that will deliver a sixth
complementary 2,000 percent solution when
implemented. If at least twenty other villages in other
parts of India copy what Kasimpet did, that will be a
seventh complementary 2,000 percent solution. This
copying is likely because the Kasimpet cooperative’s
success has attracted a lot of attention and Dr. Ramulu
has established a Web site that explains his methods so
that others can duplicate them. All of these
complementary solutions could be in place within the
first two years of the project. I would be astonished if
they were not in place within five years.

Multiplied benefits from complementary 2,000 percent
solutions are described in much more detail in Chapters
10 and 11 of Adventures of an Optimist and in The
2,000 Percent Squared Solution. Rather than repeat
here what I wrote in those books, let me add some new
information to help you choose the right complementary
solutions to gain the greatest multiplied benefits from all
your 2,000 percent solutions.

Complementary Personal 2,000 Percent Solutions

I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.

— Philippians 4:13 (NKJV)

The best complementary personal improvements for you
to work on may not be the right ones for someone else.
Unlike the fourteen lessons described in this book that
apply to everyone, I cannot presume to direct you to
work on all of the complementary personal
improvement areas. Instead, you should identify and
work on the areas from this list where the
improvements will be most valuable for accomplishing
your most important goals:

• Overcome sinful desires that draw you away from God
• Move closer to God so you obtain more direction from
His Holy Spirit
• Expand your perception of how much you can ask God
to do in the name of Jesus for accomplishing His purposes
• Gain peace about circumstances that bother you
• Eliminate ongoing problems that require a lot of your
time and attention

• Love people more
• Forgive others more quickly and completely
• Be a better example of Christ-like living
• Help others gain Salvation
• Encourage new believers to learn more about the Bible
and to help others gain Salvation

• Exercise more
• Eat healthier food in appropriate quantities
• Eliminate harmful habits that undermine your health
• Remove dangerous pollution from your surroundings
• Follow practices that help you avoid accidents

• Upgrade relations with your family and friends
• Communicate better with colleagues
• Be a better neighbor
• Serve those who need your help
• Show kindness to other drivers, pedestrians, and
your passengers while driving

• Learn new skills and gain knowledge that help you be
more productive
• Acquire physical resources that enable you to be much
more effective
• Find employment that advances the accomplishment
of your goals
• Gain the attention of many more people who can help
you to achieve your goals
• Attract highly talented volunteers to help you

• Teach others to do what you do
• Persuade those you teach to help others learn and
continually repeat the teaching cycle with others
• Add financial resources to implement your goals
• Increase productivity of the work you do that cannot
be delegated to others
• Acquire more ownership of the benefits that your work
produces

• Improve your creativity
• More successfully invest your financial assets
• Develop a new, constructive pastime that serves others
• Establish a foundation to work on accomplishing your
goals after you die
• Leave financial resources for the spiritual
development, improved education, and increased
health of future generations

These improvement areas are complementary to one
another because they create greater effectiveness, more
resources, and enhanced accomplishments that build on
one another. If you choose to work on the opportunity
areas where you have the most room to improve, the
size of the complementary effects will be enhanced by
making improvements that exceed 2,000 percent in a
particular opportunity area.

Many people will have difficulties in identifying
measurements of current effectiveness and improvement
targets for these personal solution areas. Let me provide
a few examples of measures for personal improvement
for areas that don’t seem very quantitative to help you
better appreciate how to measure performance.

Let’s begin by quantifying the effects you are creating
now through following directions received from the Holy
Spirit as a result of having drawn closer to God. Here’s
one possible approach: Start a journal of what directions
you receive each day from the Holy Spirit and later spell
out the effects you can observe from your obedience to
the directions. The Holy Spirit is always speaking to each
of us.

Unfortunately, we usually don’t listen because we are
totally distracted by worldly things. Those who aren’t
very close to Him may notice His messages only once or
twice a month. Through spending more time reading the
Bible, thanking God for His help, praising God for what
He has done, praying for added guidance, and listening
to Christian music, your ability to hear the Holy Spirit
will increase. A possible goal could be to receive and
understand messages from the Holy Spirit twenty times
more frequently with combined benefits that are
similarly greater.

An improvement area that may seem even harder to
measure than drawing closer to God is being a better
example of Christ-like living.

Here are two possible approaches for measuring
performance and improvement in being such a better
example:

1. Start by speaking with your pastor, or a Christian
brother or sister, and reviewing the Bible to define
actions that are good and bad examples of Christ-like
living. Since Jesus cares about the purity of your heart,
not the works you do without a clean heart, be sure to
pray for God to encourage you to cleanse your heart in
the ways that He cares most about. Then, keep track
of how well your thoughts and actions avoid what is not
Christlike and how often you desire and perform what
is Christ-like.

After understanding how you are doing now,
occasionally measure in the future how you are doing in
thoughts and actions to learn and rejoice about how much
improvement He has led you to make in your heart so
you are serving as a better example of Christ-like living.

2. Ask people who spend the most time with you to rate
how well your demeanor, words, and actions serve as an
example of Christ-like living. You could ask them to tell
you in what areas you need the most improvement.
After praying for and gaining His added support, you
could occasionally ask the same people if you have done
better and in what ways you still need to do more to
improve.

In upgrading relations with family members and friends,
you could use measurement approaches similar to the
ones I suggested for identifying how good an example of
Christ-like living you are providing. The external
measurements might include factors such as how many
times people smile when they first see you, what kinds
of unprompted positive things people say about you, and
how often harsh words are exchanged with you. Surveys
of family and friends could also provide their
perspectives of how well their relationships with you are
working and how those relationships could be improved.

As you look for measures, it’s most helpful to measure
what will enhance accomplishing your goals. For
instance, if one of your goals is to help lead more people
to gain Salvation, your improvements in being an example
of Christ-like living should be oriented to drawing
unbelievers to talk to you and attracting their interest in
discussing and learning about Salvation.

Complementary
Organizational 2,000 Percent Solutions

You have increased the nation, O LORD,
You have increased the nation;
You are glorified;
You have expanded all the borders of the land.

— Isaiah 26:15 (NKJV)

You should place priority on creating benefits through
organizational 2,000 percent solutions because so many
more people are usually affected by an organization than
by an individual. In evaluating complementary
opportunities for organizational 2,000 percent solutions,
I think of churches, businesses, nonprofit organizations,
voluntary associations, and governments as being more
similar than different. As a result I discuss all these
types of organizations simultaneously in this section in
hopes that this broad perspective will enable you to
apply what you learn to more organizations.

A good starting place for developing complementary
organizational 2,000 percent solutions is to expand the
size of the organization by twenty times while using the
same time, money, and effort. For a church, growth
might mean helping more people gain Salvation who
honor God with their lives. For a business, growth
might mean adding more sales (or revenues). For a
nonprofit organization, expansion might mean adding
more beneficiaries. For a voluntary association,
becoming larger is a function of adding more members.
For a government, the increase might be defined in
terms of how many citizens are served by a highly
beneficial government activity.

As you can imagine, the methods used to establish such
enlargements are quite different from one type of
organization to another. A church might place more
emphasis on encouraging witnessing. A business might
improve its offerings and marketing. A nonprofit
organization might employ an appeal by a popular
celebrity.

A voluntary association might ask members to suggest
the names and addresses of prospects. A government
might cooperate with other governments to establish a
new multi-governmental structure (such as occurred
when the Common Market and NATO were started). In
setting objectives for enlargement, it’s important to look
for ways to grow that add capability rather than reduce
effectiveness.

All organizations have costs that can be measured in
terms of the time, money, effort, and resources that are
applied to accomplish the organizations’ purposes. If you
reduce the amount of time, money, effort, and resources
applied to achieve those purposes, you can free
resources to serve more souls, customers, beneficiaries,
members, citizens, and other stakeholders and accomplish
more. Some organizations may find that it is better to
focus on reducing costs before growing because the
released resources will make it easier to attract more
people by activities such as sharing witnessing tools,
lowering prices, providing more appealing offerings and
activities, and making the benefits of involvement easier
to appreciate.

All organizations also have investment costs to pay for
long-lasting facilities and specialized equipment they
need to function. Some organizations also need to acquire
land and buildings. While it’s normal for accountants to
assign only a small portion of investment costs to the
current time, these resources often need to be paid for in
advance. When such large payments are made, these
expenses can deeply drain cash resources. Today there
are many alternatives to being investment intensive, such
as by outsourcing some investment-intensive activities to
other organizations and by renting or leasing what is
needed rather than owning the resources. By avoiding
such large cash expenditures, organizations will have
more money for improving their attractiveness,
increasing their size, and eliminating operating costs.

Almost every organization will need to make some
expensive investments, such as for equipment required
to operate. The cost of acquiring the money used for
those investments can be substantial. Reduce the cost of
funds used for investment by 96 percent, and it
becomes much more affordable to expand through
making the required investments. In for-profit
organizations, lowering the cost of investment funds has
the added benefit for owners of making the enterprise
much more valuable. Since these days some nonprofit
organizations (such as cooperative banks and mutual
insurance companies) and governmental entities (such
as airports, toll roads, and power plants) are becoming
for-profit entities, the increased value potential from
lower capital costs has significance more often.

Your organization also has many different kinds of
stakeholders, such as beneficiaries, citizens, end users,
customers, employees, partners, suppliers, distributors,
agents, investors, lenders, and the communities you
serve. When your solutions enhance benefits for all
these stakeholders by twenty times, the ability and
desire to cooperate with your organization can be vastly
increased. When that happens, the potential for creating
more complementary 2,000 percent solutions is
greatly enhanced.

Chances are good that other organizations would benefit
by copying your 2,000 percent solutions. When other
organizations employ your 2,000 percent solutions, the
benefit for God or for society can increase by twenty
times more than from just the effects of making your
organization’s changes. In many cases, you have no
reason to hide your solutions. To the contrary, sharing
the innovations may help stimulate the growth of
Salvation, your market, increase what stakeholders can
afford to do to support you and others, and enhance the
general welfare in ways that are too broad in scale and
too subtle to appreciate fully in advance.

Naturally, if your shareholders are obtaining a lot of
their ownership rewards from proprietary solutions that
are invisible to competitors, you won’t be able to share
those solutions as freely as many churches, nonprofit
organizations, governments, and voluntary associations
can. Before concluding that companies have to keep all
improvements quiet, realize that disclosing your
advances after a delay of a year or two may create a
new exponential benefit by requiring your organization
to make many more complementary solutions in the
future to maintain its competitive advantages.

An organization that is fully confident of its capacity to
create 2,000 percent solutions may also choose to work
on large, difficult social problems (such as how to
eliminate pollution from radioactive materials and from
discarded electronic components, and from harmful
items that do not degrade in landfills) that are not being
effectively addressed and resolved. When such an
expanded focus succeeds, the organization’s increased
scope and accomplishments can create even greater
multiplied benefits throughout society in ways too
numerous to identify and measure.

Ultimately, the Earth has one untapped resource that
can supply more improvements than any other: unsaved
people who aren’t educated, don’t have highly productive
activities to do, and lack resources needed to accomplish
more. When an organization finds highly effective ways for
these unengaged people to gain Salvation and to learn
helpful knowledge and skills and to apply what they
learn, the opportunities for complementary benefits can
be far beyond our ability to comprehend in advance.

Organizations can also make contributions to spiritual
development by activities such as making witnessing
easier to do, information about God more readily
available, and Salvation more appealing to unsaved
people. Parallel improvements can be made in how
easily and effectively the newly saved become more
like Christ. When such spiritual improvements occur,
God’s purposes will be understood and acted on by
many more people. From such spiritual developments,
the benefit gains can greatly surpass what normally
occurs from the 2,000 percent solution process through
the effects of supernatural interventions.

In addition, not all opportunities are created equal. A
well-directed organization may find opportunities where
the benefits from each solution can be expanded by much
more than 2,000 percent. When such larger increases
follow, the growth in benefits from complementary
solutions is much higher. As a result, improvements occur
sooner from fewer implemented solutions.

Beyond that, a wise leader will direct the greatest
frequency of repeating the 2,000 percent solution
process for the highest payoff areas.

Humanity can gain the most from 2,000 percent
solutions by making it easier for people to use the
solution process for the first time and every time after
that. Here is an opportunity for thoughtful leaders to
make a difference through investing in resources for
streamlining the tasks required for creating exponential
solutions and making those resources available for their
organizations, their stakeholders, other organizations,
and society. When such streamlining occurs, we should
thank God that we are finally using all the gifts and
talents that He has provided for us.

Linking together many complementary personal and
organizational 2,000 percent solutions presents us with
awe-inspiring opportunities to make huge differences for
God and for others just in the course of one life. Surely,
this is one of the many blessings that Jesus had in mind
when He promised that His followers would accomplish
even greater things than He did while on Earth by
sending the Holy Spirit to guide them. Imagine how
much more will be accomplished when multiple
generations of champion innovators continually repeat
the 2,000 percent solution process for the best existing
solutions and add still more complementary 2,000
percent solutions to them. Wow!

Copyright 2010 Donald W. Mitchell, All Rights Reserved.