2,000 Percent Living Lesson Eight: Multiply Your Access to Valuable 2,000 Percent Solutions

Teach someone else
how to identify and eliminate stalls
and to design and to implement
2,000 percent solutions
that are attuned to the Holy Spirit.

“If I then, the Lord and the Teacher, washed your feet,
you also ought to wash one another’s feet.”

— John 13:14 (NAS)

Most people who learn how to create a 2,000 percent
solution never teach anyone else how to do so. That’s a
terrible mistake because these problem solvers miss out
on tapping into the benefits from many more 2,000
percent solutions than they can develop on their own.

Let me quantify why it’s so valuable to teach others.
Imagine that you can produce a new 2,000 percent
solution with about 100 hours of work, and that it takes
another 100 hours of your time to implement each
solution. Most people work at a full-time job that requires
about 2,000 hours a year of their time. Assuming you
have lots of other things to do, you’ll probably have just
enough time to produce and implement one or two 2,000
percent solutions a year on your own.

Keep doing that for ten years, and you can put in place
ten to twenty 2,000 percent solutions. Sounds
impressive, doesn’t it?

Now let’s assume instead that you produce and
implement only one 2,000 percent solution. After that,
you teach someone else (such as a family member or a
colleague) whose solutions will directly benefit you. Let’s
assume that the teaching process takes you fifteen hours
and that person produces ten or twenty 2,000 percent
solutions over the next ten years. Let’s further assume
that the learner also teaches one other person whose
solutions will benefit you. If each new learner, in turn,
teaches one new learner right after creating his or her
first solution, by the end of ten years there will be at
least ten more people who can produce 2,000 percent
solutions. If they all stay active, by the end of ten years,
fifty to a hundred 2,000 percent solutions will have
been created and implemented … even if you never
create another one yourself. If this making of and
teaching of how to make 2,000 percent solutions
continues over twenty years, there will be two hundred
to four hundred 2,000 percent solutions created and
implemented that benefit you. At the same time, you
will have spent much less time than if you had kept
creating your own 2,000 percent solutions.

Naturally, the numbers of solutions are even larger if
you teach more people than one at a time, you keep
teaching over the years, and the learners do the same.
With so many people teaching and creating 2,000 percent
solutions, the benefits grow to extraordinary levels. If
your solutions are all in service to God’s purposes, you
will have achieved enormous fruitfulness for Him.

In imagining such possibilities, it’s good to remember
that most people learned to crawl before they learned to
walk. Teaching one person is the equivalent of crawling,
a good first step, when it comes to passing along the
2,000 percent solution process. Let’s look at some key
lessons for how to do that task well.

Find a Talented, Eager Person
with a Pressing Need
Who Wants to Learn

Instruct the wise, and they will be even wiser.
Teach the righteous, and they will learn even more.

— Proverbs 9:9 (NLT)

You are blessed by God that you can be teaching 2,000
percent solution processes at a time when there are
relatively few people who are qualified to provide this
instruction through having succeeded in creating a
2,000 percent solution. As a result, you can be very
selective about whom you choose to teach. If you choose
well, the benefits for God and for both you and the
learner will be much larger.

Let me suggest some learner-selection criteria that are
based on my experiences with teaching people to use the
process:

• People who are well connected to and listen closely to
the Holy Spirit are going to make faster progress
because they will receive good guidance from that all-
knowing source. If these people also like to pray, they
are likely to receive even more supernatural guidance.
If the purpose is one that they feel God strongly favors,
they will be even more motivated to do the necessary
work.

• People with lots of existing skill in analytical and
problem-solving methods are more likely to make the
best use of the process. Many of my most successful
clients and students had engineering, medical, or
systems-development training and experience. The
analytical and problem-solving tools from those
disciplines increased their ability to use the 2,000
percent solution process by enabling them to see more
and better opportunities and to develop more practical
solutions.

• People who truly want to learn the process so they
can continually use it in the future will pay more
attention and gain more from what you share with
them. Eagerness to learn this process is probably the
rarest of the valuable qualities to find among potential
learners. My experience has been that most people
would rather be stuck with their problems for the rest
of their lives than invest the time and effort to learn how
to create 2,000 percent solutions. Be sure to test for
whether apparent enthusiasm is more than lip service:
Before you commit to teaching the person, assign
something simple to start, give a short deadline, and
see what happens.

• People who have a pressing need to make a
breakthrough quickly are going to be more highly
motivated to master and apply the 2,000 percent
solution process. Check for such a need. If no needs
press on their emotions, be skeptical of their potential
commitment and check it out carefully.

• People who like to connect with other people to ask
questions, to find information, to gain expertise, to
recruit help, and to discuss ideas can draw on many
more resources to make progress. By seeking to
involve other people, these problem solvers are also
less likely to become stalled during some part of the
process.

• People who consider it an honor or a privilege to
study with you will do better work than those who see
this as just another learning opportunity. As a result,
you may find that people who already hold you in high
regard will make better candidates. Tell prospective
learners about what you accomplished with the 2,000
percent solution process because that success may
encourage respect. Otherwise, there’s a tendency for
learners to take the easy way out when difficulties arise
and to become distracted when competing time
demands arise.

Get in Sync and Set Mutually Acceptable Deadlines

But when Amasa went to summon Judah,
he took longer than the time the king had set for him.
— 2 Samuel 20:5 (NIV)

It’s easy for a learner to misunderstand how to create
2,000 percent solutions. Please read (or reread) Chapter
13 of The 2,000 Percent Solution Workbook and perform
the tasks described there to ensure that the learner and
you understand one another while the learner creates a
2,000 percent solution. Otherwise, working together can
be as uncommunicative as if you were broadcasting on
one television channel while your student was tuned in
to watch another channel.

Let’s face it: Even learners who don’t delay through
procrastination probably don’t do much work on a
2,000 percent solution task until just before a deadline
arrives. You as the 2,000 percent solution teacher
would do well to develop a schedule of mutually
acceptable deadlines to help your student continually
focus on what needs to be done next.

The scheduling method I like to use starts with assigning
just the first important task and setting a short time until
the first deadline before assigning any other tasks and
deadlines. I try to make that task a relatively simple one,
such as identifying one or a few personal stalls.

From this first assignment, I hope to find out how well a
student understands the subject, how adequately the
person learns independently, and how efficiently the
learning occurs. For someone who has no trouble
reading, understanding, and applying the material, this
first task can be accomplished in fewer than five hours
of activity.

Someone who has trouble reading and understanding or
who is confused will take much longer.

I also ask learners to keep track of how they spend their
time and to share their journals with me. In this way, I
can check on where they had trouble and make
suggestions to avoid those problems in the future. In
addition, I encourage learners to contact me with
questions: No one ever does, even if they are totally
lost. That’s because they usually cannot tell that they
are lost until I tell them.

After seeing the results, I either congratulate the
learner on success or send the person back to rework
what was done. (I describe more about supplying
feedback in the section on encouraging learners.) If the
person did the assignment well and in an appropriate
amount of time, I will assign something more difficult
the next time, but still with a short deadline. If the
learner didn’t meet the deadline, took too long to do
the assignment, or didn’t perform the work well, I will
simplify the tasks a lot and shorten up the deadlines in
future assignments.

Based on the learner’s success, I either give the
learner more room to roam with future assignments or
I reduce the slack. Eventually, I sense how big an
assignment to give that person and how long it should
take.

In all cases, when giving the assignment, I ask the person
if I have given enough time. If someone requests more
time, I automatically agree. In that way, the learner feels
committed to the deadline.

Keep giving short-term assignments, and you will have
lots of opportunities to provide timely feedback. In the
process of assigning frequent deadlines following short
work periods, the learner will probably be kept fairly
active working on creating a 2,000 percent solution.
The combination of frequent assignments and timely
feedback will greatly increase how much learning occurs.

Help the Learner Pick
an Appropriate Problem to Solve

But I personally have heard about you,
that you are able to give interpretations
and solve difficult problems.
Now if you are able to read the inscription
and make its interpretation known to me,
you will be clothed with purple
and wear a necklace of gold around your neck,
and you will have authority
as the third ruler in the kingdom.

— Daniel 5:16 (NAS)

In trying to use their new knowledge about stalls and
stallbusting to work simultaneously on eliminating
problems in many different areas, even enthusiastic
learners can quickly become unfocused and confused.
As a result, learners may fail to move forward to
mastering the more valuable eight-step process
needed to create and implement a 2,000 percent
solution.

Many learners also have trouble conceptualizing a
measurable twenty times improvement in some activity.
Although The 2,000 Percent Solution and The 2,000
Percent Solution Workbook explicitly describe the size
of the gain and give quantitative examples, some
learners just don’t quite appreciate the reality. Some
even think that a 2,000 percent solution is merely a
metaphor, rather than a threshold target. As a result,
such a learner may want to set a goal to improve some
kind of performance by “a lot” or by some much smaller
percentage than 2,000 percent.

As I mentioned in Lesson Seven, many learners have
trouble imagining what the size of the benefits are from
creating a 2,000 percent solution for one problem versus
another one. You may have to help them think through
the quantification process to understand where their
time may have the best payoff.

Some 2,000 percent solutions are more difficult to
develop than others. When I work directly with learners,
I always encourage them to pick problems of average or
less difficulty for them, after considering the
backgrounds, knowledge, resources, and people they can
draw from. There will be plenty of time later to develop
solutions for more difficult problems.

Some problems are also more valuable to solve because
their solutions will eliminate many other problems
without any additional effort. I always encourage
learners to consider if such problems may exist and may
be appropriate for them to solve.

Finally, you want the learner to gain recognition and
respect for the work that is done. If you can see that
some solutions will lead to gaining recognition and
respect while others may not, steer your learner toward
the possibility of more recognition and respect without
mentioning that you are thinking about those things.
You don’t want people to focus on the benefits rather
than the problem: Such thoughts are distractions that
increase frustration and impatience with learning.

Chapters 3 and 4 of The 2,000 Percent Solution
Workbook are designed to help learners consider
these helpful factors for selecting a problem to solve.
Be sure that your learner thoughtfully answers the
questions in those chapters of the workbook and shares
the answers with you. Ask for incorrect, incomplete, or
inadequate answers to be revised until the learner
seems to be on the right track. Be encouraging as you
do this. It’s easy for a learner to become so frustrated
while identifying which solution to create that she or he
may think about quitting before even really starting.

Always Encourage the Learner

Then the messenger who had gone to call Micaiah
spoke to him, saying,

“Now listen, the words of the prophets with one accord
encourage the king. Please, let your word be like the
word of one of them, and speak encouragement.”

And Micaiah said, “As the LORD lives,
whatever the LORD says to me, that I will speak.”

— 1 Kings 22:13-14 (NKJV)

I have read an awful lot of bad advice about how to help
people improve. Some of that bad advice is to say two
positive things for every negative one. Other “experts”
advise putting the positive comments first before
making negative ones.

Forget all that advice! It doesn’t work well in creating
2,000 percent solutions. I say that you should instead
give only positive comments with a huge smile on your
face.

Many people would like to do that but don’t know how.
Let me make some suggestions to help.

First, write down every positive thing you can think of
about what the learner did. It doesn’t matter what those
things are. Make the list of what you may be able to
praise.

Second, write down where you want the learner to
improve.

Third, consider the simplest ways that the learner can
make those improvements.

Fourth, carefully write and rewrite a formal reaction to
the work in the following format:

• Describe your happiness in being able to work with
the learner on a 2,000 percent solution.
• Express pleasure in hearing from the learner.
• Explain that you are delighted to receive the work.
• Thank the learner for doing the work.
• Boldly state how pleased you are with the person’s
progress.

• Describe all the things you like about what has been
done, beginning with the highest praise and working
down to the least praiseworthy items from the
learner’s perspective.
• Gently mention that you see some “opportunities for
improvement” to build on the learner’s successes.
• Describe each of those opportunities and the easiest
way to accomplish the optimal results in as much detail
as you need. Give specific examples of what a good
improvement looks like.
• Express your complete confidence that the
improvements will soon be achieved.
• Mention that you are looking forward to any other
improvements the learner would like to make.

• Offer to answer any questions the learner has.
• Offer to review any reworks of the assignment that
the learner wants to provide, to ensure that there is
mutual understanding.
• Describe how much you are looking forward to seeing
these improvements.
• Connect the improvements back to the learner’s goals
and explain how much closer the learner will be to those
goals after developing the improvement opportunities.
• Relate that you are excited about the outlook for a
successful completion of a fine 2,000 percent solution.

Why do I advise this detailed, positive approach? It’s
because such a communication captures my honest
feelings about what has been and will be accomplished.
The learner has taken up the challenge to do something
truly astonishing, a challenge that daunts most people
so that they never become much more fruitful in the
ways that God intended. The learner has also taken
positive steps towards achieving that goal. If the
learner remains faithful by doing the remaining work,
the learner will succeed. My joy will be boundless when
that occurs.

How could I not express enthusiasm about every sign of
progress and opportunity to share ways to improve?

Having created a written explanation that follows this
outline, it becomes easy to provide smiling, happy
feedback that captures the essence of the encouraging
message. Then, give the learner a copy of what you’ve
written. Wait patiently while the learner reads what
you’ve written and absorbs what you’ve said and
written. Stay with the learner as long as he or she would
like to talk. End the discussion on as positive a note as
you can. Finally, thank God for giving you a faithful
learner who wants to serve Him.

In the next lessons, I continue to spell out how to create
many more benefits by building on your first 2,000
percent solution and your first experience with teaching
a learner to do the same. Before leaving this lesson, be
sure to take note of which methods described here will
help encourage you to advance in your knowledge of
and experience in teaching others to create 2,000
percent solutions.

Copyright 2010 Donald W. Mitchell, All Rights Reserved