Ten Upgrades for Humanity:  How to Do More Good. How to Build Up the World.

Ten Upgrades that Can Change the Trajectory of Your Life and Human History

The world's beauty is marred by so many life-destroying problems. It's easy to feel overwhelmed and believe that you can't make a real difference. But the more you are saddened by these problems, the more you are likely to love and value All Around's strategies. Each of our strategies is an upgrade over what most people of goodwill are currently doing.

To put our solutions in context, we'll cite a statistic from Independent Sector, an organization that tracks volunteerism and donations in the United States. They state that in 2001 about 44% of adults Americans volunteered, and the total hours volunteered amounted to an average of four hours a week. Four hours may seem high, but religious activities were included. In any case, we picture our ideal participant building up to at least five hours a week of action and using the following strategies to make the five hours go the furthest.

As you read the strategies, imagine how they can help you to do the kind of good that you care about, whether it is alleviating the suffering of the poor; renewing the environment; freeing the oppressed, or bringing about world peace. Imagine how these strategies can multiply the good that you and others already do.

1. Develop ongoing personal support for broad personal change. Many people who want to do good or improve themselves eventually fail because they have no ongoing structure to keep them on track and motivated. While they are temporarily inspired by a self-help book, a workshop, a class or a motivational speaker, they eventually lose momentum and focus. In contrast, our members have ongoing personal support to keep them acting on a regular basis. Support options include brief telephone Buddy calls, a Goal & Growth Group or a Discussion & Action Group. (Items that appear in green are available for free if you agree to our Use Policy. They can be found on our Resource Page.)

Ongoing personal support is our first strategy because having someone to support you on a regular basis will make this program real for you. Imagine the goals you could achieve and the good you could do with regular support and encouragement!

2. Create an attitude and an expectation to choose the best actions. If you are part of All Around, the same support systems that motivate action can help you maintain an expectation to do your level best. On our Home Page we already mentioned having the attitude of a surgeon. Enlarging on this idea, an emergency room surgeon that faces an overwhelming number of emergencies will do little for those who are too far gone and ignore those with minor problems in order to save those who can be saved. In the same way, we encourage people to replace some "nice" good deeds and some merely symbolic actions with high-leverage, strategic actions. Yet this attitude shouldn't be taken too far. Even the emergency room surgeon goes home and performs low-priority actions, such as watching a movie, reading a book, or taking the dog for a walk.

When we talk about high-leverage actions, we don't believe that there is a way to measure goodness and say one action is better than another. For instance, we can't tell you whether an organization that save lives by teaching people how to grow crops is better that one that indirectly saves lives through literacy training. But many choices are like the choice between donating money either for life-saving medicine or for high school band uniforms. In other words, would you rather one child not have a band uniform or another child not have a life-saving inoculation? Realize that our world is created by the sum total of individual choices like these.

While this high standard sometimes leads to unpopular yet life-saving choices, the following strategies can create some win-win situations.

3. Use techniques that build capacity and structures that maintain capacity. On our Home Page we mentioned the importance of building up your time, money and energy so you have more for yourself and more for others. It may seem obvious that the more you have, the more you can give. But we are talking about a deeper reality. When people want to do good, they usually just think in terms of giving time or money. Instead, we encourage people to see that building up their time, money and energy is a part of giving. Just as you must breathe in before you breathe out, you should think of building up your resources and helping others in the same breath. They should be married together in your thinking. So we encourage our members to spend at least hour a week building up whichever resource would allow them to give more, whether it is time, money, physical energy or skill. The ongoing support structures mentioned above, a goal-setting material such as our Dream and Goal Sheet and some time-management or money-management technique can increase your capacity if they are all used together.

4. Encourage nonprofit organizations to help their volunteers and donors build capacity. The attitude shift that was just mentioned can have a huge impact on the nonprofit sector. Currently most nonprofit volunteer recruitment creates win-lose situations. That's because when a charity needs more volunteers it normally advertises. This action draws from the volunteer pool in that community, leaving fewer volunteers for the others, who must increase their advertising budgets to meet their needs. This develops into an expensive competition for a limited number of volunteer hours. The same win-lose approach produces a competition for limited donor dollars, too.

A better long-term strategy that could increase the overall volunteer pool by half a trillion dollars a year is for the nonprofit organizations to offer time-management and money-management techniques to some of their volunteers and donors. This high-leverage training, combined with strong ongoing support, will create more time and money for the volunteers and donors. This, in turn, will increase the appreciation and loyalty of the volunteers and donors to the charity that offered the training. This will likely lead to more time and money given to the charity. Some volunteers may not want to undergo training since they may not feel as good about learning as they do about direct helping. But the more the charities make the case that this is a source of long-term good, the more this strategy will become widely understood, accepted and welcomed.

5. Climb the Ladder of Empowerment. Most people understand the proverb "Give fish and you feed people for a day, but teach them to fish and you feed them for a lifetime." But there are two high-leverage concepts that are even more powerful than this proverb. Please read the ladder from the bottom up:

People quickly understand the Ladder of Empowerment; but All Around tools like our Helping Inventory give you the opportunity to systematically review and study your helping to determine how you can help others move up the Ladder. We also have brief Skill Modules that distill the basics into a few key ideas and methods that you can practice. Some of these are Rung Two learning materials, such as our Active Listening, Personal Mission, Assertiveness and Conflict Resolution tools. Others are Rung Three tools, such as our original Many-One-New Problem-Solving Method. We have Rung Four materials, too.

When you realize that most organizations currently operate on the bottom two rungs, you can begin to have an idea of the vast amount of good that can be done if individuals and organizations learn to use all four rungs.

6. Give more help to those who help others. If you help people who are likely to help others, your "investment" of time goes further and does more good. On the other hand, if you empower people who are negative and destructive, they are likely to use the newfound power in ways that harm themselves and others. Saadi, an insightful mystic, put it this way: "Merely doing good to the evil may be equivalent to doing evil to the good."

This concept sometimes makes people uncomfortable because it requires people to make a judgment. While it's sometimes hard to judge people and causes, our strategy of helping people through ongoing relationships (see #1 above) minimizes the chances that you'll help the wrong kind of people or causes—or fail to help the people who are more deserving of your assistance.

Another reason some people struggle with this concept is that they feel they should love everyone equally. But while everyone deserves unconditional love and help, the form the help takes must be tailored to the person. For instance, selfish people should be helped in the context of a relationship that will help them mature, in addition to helping them get some of what they want. Some people label this idea of giving preference to certain people as elitist, unfair, judgmental or regressive. But being committed to perfect equality is like feeding a 180 pound man and a 50 pound child the same size dinner. The superficially fair-minded person would be ignoring the fact that different people have different needs. That's why the world will get better faster if you use discernment to individually tailor the way you help others.

7. Follow the Golden Rule...2.0. For most of human history, the Golden Rule was enough of a basis for fairness: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." But today, plenty of people are fair in their personal relationships, yet take more from the environment, the economy, the community and other life-support systems than they put back. This wasn't a problem back when most people interacted face-to-face in small towns and communities, and when the population was small relative to the planet's size. But now imbalances in the environment, economy, politics and other systems are accumulating at a faster pace and have broader negative consequences.

These increasing withdrawals from our life-support systems cost everyone more time, money and energy to fix. But the burden is especially hard on the poor and the disadvantaged, not to mention future generations. So we have developed what we call "The Golden Rule 2.0:" Put back into each of your life-support systems at least as much as you take. Otherwise, for instance, if everyone took from the economy more than they put back, this system would collapse in whole or in part, and cause people great hardship and distress (no matter how much extra we put into the community or any other life-support system!)

The Golden Rule 2.0 is an upgrade of the Golden Rule and is in the same spirit as the Golden Rule. But following it is harder since you have to monitor your impact on each of our life-support systems. But it will be worth it since when people begin to follow this 2.0 version of the Golden Rule, much suffering and loss of life will be prevented. In addition, we all will have greater peace, health and security.

Our Ecological Lifestyle Assessment will give you many examples of ways that caring and generous people unwittingly decrease the stability of our life-support systems. The assessment also helps you pinpoint the changes that you can make in order to have the greatest positive effect on our life-support systems.

8. Upgrade your approach to personal fulfillment. Although many people seek happiness, they often fail in their attempts gain real fulfillment. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., spoke about this when he said, "Most people die with their music still in them." We believe that All Around's strategies and support methods can help you express your own unique music. In addition, we have materials that are exclusively focused on personal mission, personal vitality and fulfillment, such as our Well Analogy Exercise and our Life Mission and Process materials.

9. Learn to do more good. Many people generously donate their time and money. Unfortunately most of them don't choose their charities and volunteer opportunities so as to have maximum effect. This wouldn't be a problem if there were enough volunteers, donations and resources to help all people in need, but there simply aren't. Thus there is still tremendous suffering and premature death. The All Around Wise Giving of Time and Money resource can help you boost your charitable and volunteer impact, especially if you use it in a Discussion and Action small group.

Through volunteering, donating and helping those around us, there are many times when we have a heartfelt desire to help others. Unfortunately, many efforts to help end up unproductive or even counterproductive. Sometimes these unproductive situations can't be predicted, but in many cases people can learn to recognize and avoid patterns of helping that are ineffective or counterproductive. They can also learn methods that help guarantee that we won't unwittingly harm someone as we try to help them. A springboard to this process is to discuss the short story The Joy of Really Knowing that You Helped. Besides using it in a group setting, this sobering short story is best used together with our Helping Inventory and Dream and Goal Sheet.

10. Invite others to join All Around. A high-leverage way to help others is to introduce them to the All Around Program. That's why we ask participants who are comfortable with the program and who have gotten results to pass it on to others. It's even more powerful if the person who does the inviting offers to be the support Buddy of the person starting out. This member-supporting-member structure amounts to a chain reaction of empowerment and world-sustaining lifestyles. Our vision is that this chain reaction can rapidly spread throughout the world and have a global impact from the summation of individual efforts.

Good ideas without structures that embody them are useless. Most of these ten upgrades are embodied in our CLEAR method which is to spend an hour a week on the best, most loving use of your time, an hour in each area:

C stands for building your capacity.

L means living your mission and achieving personal fulfillment.

E stands for empowering others personally.

A means adding to the stability of the world's life-support systems.

R stands for ripple effect, that is, passing on the CLEAR method to others.

More information can be found oun our CLEAR Basics page which can be accessed through the Resources Page. To help you organize and coordinate your efforts we have a four-month goal-setting form that we call a Life Pact. We also have a CLEAR Form that you can use to plan and track your efforts on a weekly basis. But before you set your goals we suggest that you take our Lifestyle Review to help you diagnose trouble spots. We also recommend doing the Lifestyle Review every four to six months, both to track your growth and to diagnose new trouble spots early on. These materials are all organized in our program for optimal use.