The Magic of a Huge Resource Pool - Talk 4 of 25
Topic: The Magic of a Huge Resource Pool
Theme: Creative Problem Solving
Author: Barry Sweet
Date: January 7, 2018
Video Production by Tim & Karen Morse. Morsephotography.com
There is a magic in having a huge resource pool.
And what I mean by this is very simple. Resource pool big = problems are small. Resource pool small = problems are big. If you have a tool belt and you need a phillips screwdriver, but you got a hammer, a pair of pliers, a flathead screwdriver, a drill… and you don't have the Phillips… It makes it really hard for you to do your work.
But if you have a tool belt with all the tools you can imagine, then all of a sudden you're extremely powerful. And that's why we build these huge resource pools. That's why the Explorer Stage is so powerful… and that's why the crazy idea, there's such a benefit for saying the craziest thing you possibly can, because then someone has the privilege of spinning an idea that's way out there… and sometimes it's way out there that these fantastic solutions come in. And so it's a privilege to be able to vocalize a goofy, crazy idea that you don't think applies at all, because someone else can upspin it and turn it into this fantastic solution. That's the whole vision I think for wisdompool.org… is to have a place where all of us can deposit the best of our wisdom, not just “the kind of stuff that works”, not just “the stuff that's maybe OK”, but really the stuff that we use.
I've written a book called Seven Questions, and the idea was… it's an eight-page book and the idea was wouldn't it be great if we just had seven questions (so to speak in our back pocket) that we could pull out at any time and then have our relationships go into the deep end of the pool as quickly as possible. So the first page explains the idea and then the next seven pages, it talks about all the important aspects of who we are, our self… it even talks about the taboo issues of religion, sex, and politics… but I've looked through thousands of questions to try to come up with the best questions that we can ask.
And there are 10 questions on each page under each genre and you look through the page and you say “Oh, I would choose that question… or I'd use that one. I would absolutely never ask that question and I would never ask that question… but this one is the one for me. This is the one that I would use. And you do that for each of the seven… memorize those questions and then you've got this really rich way to deepen your relationships. That was the whole idea of Seven Questions.
But in developing those questions… I found what I call The Question of Questions. It's one of the most beautiful, one of the most elegant questions I've ever found in this life to get into the deep end of the pool with other people. That question is: “What do you love?”. And when you ask that question… you get these marvelous answers like “…the feel of an aspen grove with the light and shadow on the ground and the sound on a summer day” or “…the smell of baking bread in my grandma's kitchen” or “…I love a razor sharp and number two Ticonderoga pencil, because I'm a writer and I love the way that lead flows off that pencil onto my page… and that iridescent green band that holds the eraser… and the feel of those crisp six sides… and the way that eraser effortlessly erases every hint on writing when it is no longer needed…”
So you get these really incredible answers when you ask what I call “The Question of Questions” or “The Elegant Question”. But next door to that, is this thing that I've come to call “The Inelegant Question” and the Inelegant Question Is this: “What do you use?” See how it's kind of brusque? It's not elegant in any way. It's not a pretty question but this really tells us things that we use in life. It tells us the things that we actually use, not just the grand ideas that are, you know, filled with glamour and Hollywood star power. It's just “What do I use? What do you use?”
And that's one of the most powerful questions I can ask too… because that's where we share our wisdom with each other.
And if wisdompool.org became a place where we shared What do you use? with each other… or What do I use? Gosh, we could stand on each other's shoulders…
We could become so much less devolved as we are as a culture... I still can't believe it's 2018 and we are this evolved. We should have been way farther along by now, but I think we need to use this Internet as a way that we can help grow each other up.
(…and stay young at the same time) but become better than we are.
When I asked Walt McNairy one of the people I admire the most in this world the things that he uses.
His answer was “When you've got to make a big decision. Go to the five people that you admire the most, and trust the most, and ask them. Consult your mentors. Why not draw from that pool of wisdom rather than just trying to bang out an idea on your own alone. When you've got these incredible resources at your fingertips.” Resource pool huge = problems are small. Resource pool small = problems are huge.