Four things are needed to implement a project: people, money, time, and thinking. The first three are in most cases utterly lacking. So, being good at thinking is crucial.

An example of what I mean is David Allen’s natural planning model. Asking “Why?” is so simple, and yet so often it is asked when it is too late.

Being smart isn’t an inborn quality. Thinking is a skill that needs training, and however beautiful are the anticipated results, training requires some effort. And yet, 30 years after Edward de Bono’s CoRT, a thinking course still isn’t included in most school’s curricula. Perhaps that’s why so many projects fail, even those with plenty of money, time and workforce.

Currently reading Buckminster Fuller’s “Critical Path”. However controversial, it’s still an overwhelmingly bright and integral vision.

“70 percent of all jobs in America and probably an equivalently high percentage of the jobs in other Western private-enterprise countries are preoccupied with work that is not producing any wealth or life support – inspectors of inspectors, reunderwriters of insuranse reinsurers, Obnoxico promoters, spies and counterspies, military personnel, gunmakers, etc.”

This was written in 1980, and I suspect this is still shamefully true 27 years later, with a bunch of new professions like auditors of seo optimizers, metaverse travel guides, tamagotchi cemetery keepers etc. etc. The difference, however, is that now there is much more individual projects and freelance work one might only dream about in 1980, with web2.0 social sites as just one example.

Then, there are jobs related to life support but done in a non-sustainable way, like the oil industry which is also mentioned in Fuller’s book, with a reference to an oil geologist who counted that it costs nature well over a million dollars to produce each gallon of petroleum.

Then,

“We find all the no-life-support-wealth-producing people going to their jobs in their cars or buses, spending trillions of dollar’s worth of petroleum daily to get to their no-wealth-producing jobs. It doesn’t take a computer to tell you that it will safe both Universe and humanity trillions of dollars a day to pay them handsomely to stay at home.”

Fuller supposes that it would be more effective from the planetary point of view to give people income adequate for high standard of living instead of forcing them “earning a living”.

“What do I see that needs to be done that nobody else is attending to?”, this is the question people would ask themselves more often in this case, Fuller says.

Of course, one of conditions for this is a special kind of education with focus on individual’s unique talents and their application for the needs of humanity. Here again, Fuller’s view is against the currently dominant system:

“The physical and social costs will be far less for individual, at-home-initiated, research-and-development-interned self-teaching than having individual students going to schools, being bused, and so on.”

Perhaps now, with e-learning, we are much closer to this vision than ever before. And, of course, if parents, too, weren’t so busy “earning a living”, they would better help their children with their individual learning.

“I can conclude at the outset of 1980 that the world public has become disenchanted with both the political and financial leadership, which it no longer trusts to solve the problems of historical crisis. Furthermore, all the individuals of humanity are looking for the answer to what the little individual can do that can’t be done by great nations and great enterprises.”

But will people really ask themselves this question, “What needs to be done that nobody else is attending to?” if they wouldn’t have to earn a living anymore? Deepa Chopra in The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success wrote about the same question he offered his children:

“I never, ever want you to worry about making a living. If you’re unable to make a living when you grow up, I’ll provide for you, so don’t worry about that. I don’t want you to focus on doing well in school. I don’t want you to focus on getting the best grades or going to the best colleges. What I really want you to focus on is asking yourself how you can serve humanity, and asking yourself what your unique talents are.”

They made it, Chopra says, and are financially independent.

Back to Fuller, he names himself a design science revolutionary, not a political revolutionary. Design science is exactly what gets lots of attention nowadays, when people starts shifting to green, sustainable life, with WorldChanging or Massive Change as some points of reference, to name a few. So, changes are really coming, and who knows — perhaps some Fuller’s prophecies are just about to materialize?

Undoubtedly, one of the main problems of the Information Age is information. How we can select, digest, interpret, learn and transfer it the most effectively? For example, it’s crucial in any form of learning, but especially in online learning, to be sure a student has really understood a topic and got the meaning the authors have intended to convey. It’s equally important when we come to personal development: how to find a sure ground in the overwhelming chaos of theories, movements, views and possibilities constantly present around us?

One of the hints comes from Merab Mamardashvili, a Georgian/Russian philosopher who introduced the idea of “Perception Cone” — an evolving field of findividual experience.

It’s clear that our perception doesn’t hold all the information we are able to perceive — in fact, we ignore the most of it. Our perception, our ability to feel, experience, be alive, are, Mamardashvili says, inside some cone which doesn’t coincide with the set of external objects around us. For example, you can listen to radio without actually hearing anything, but instantly hear a song that moves you. In the same way, if you try reading a book that isn’t interesting to you, its contents is just inaccessible to you. It looks like the way we communicate with the world is via a sort of “speaking things”, impressions or dream particles which arise in us interest, emotions and motivation. We can learn and work productively only within our inner cone, as all unrelated information will be screened anyway. That cone grows basing on growing personal experience (not on cramming).

Then, the first task of learning is to transfer knowledge and skills from an external state of impersonal “information” to the inner perception cone of anindividual , making them accessible for further exploration. Accordingly, the first task of self development is to realize your cone, to track the path of your personal evolution, your relationships and ideas history. That means that the half of the time we spend to learning new things should, in fact, be spent to getting the meaning from the experience we’ve already got.

The most important secret of life isn’t hidden somewhere in the head of a Grandaster who has to reveal them to us. The most important secret is that we already know everything the most important to us.