Most global plans don’t interest people because few people really actively care about “the world.” The “world” is too big, too huge to care about. The ‘world’ is also too far away — people think of the world when the watch the TV news or read international news. Instead of caring about the world, most people really actively care about themselves, their family and friends, and sometimes their communities. Some people care about nature, too, and some about disadvantaged groups, such as abused children or the poor of Haiti. But for most people, actively caring about the world is too hard, too exhausting and too great a burden.
In a sense, our upgrades together become a global plan designed for the majority of people who don’t care about the world. On the Benefits page we list the payoffs and the benefits you get if our methods spread. But on that webpage we also list the benefits to you if the plan only goes one more step and no further. For instance, if you pass on the approach to a few friends and they use it, but don’t pass it on. They will still:
- Appreciate that you gave them the book, because of the useful materials.
- Appreciate that you offered some ongoing support.
- Be in a better position to help you should something bad happen in your life (because they had more ongoing support and probably have developed more skills.)
- Maybe buy you a better birthday present than they otherwise would have.
Meanwhile, you yourself will have superprogram support for your goals and help to solve your problems, too.– So there’s a lot of realism to the plan and its methods. We don’t expect people to suddenly care about the world. We expect them to have enough incentives to pass it on to people they care about — but if most people do this, it then spreads around the world!
At first, only a handful of people will be using the methods. So at first there will just be first-person testimonials that explain what a person tried, and how it worked out. Then eventually we’ll have larger numbers of people using superprograms and the other tools. Eventually we’ll have some statistics on the program’s impact.
The growth rate will be particularly important. If the number of participants grows from 2 to 4 to 8 in a year, that won’t impress many people. But if we keep up that same rate of doubling every four months, then superprogram use will spread around the world in less than 12 years. Then give people another ten years or so to make some major changes in their lives. Then give them another 20 years to cause institutional change in areas such as education, business, the nonprofit sector, health care and politics.—Then very soon we have the beginnings of a transformed world.
At this point, I don’t expect you to completely believe this will work. Belief will probably come gradually, as you understand more and more of the pieces of the plan. It’s like the following two see-saws. The first see-saw is probably how most people see the world — they believe the bad outweighs the good, and that’s why we have so many problems and so much misery.
But wholeheartedly using our upgrades will gradually tip the balance towards the positive, as below. First your life tips towards the positive. Then the lives of the people who actively use your support, and then it spreads around the world.
For this to happen, people need to arrange ongoing support and fully commit to the program, to using the CLEAR method. If they do, especially if they regularly do C and R actions, they will create the capacity to do more good, and will invite and support people, leading to the chain reaction spread of this approach. Then this way of doing good, that’s much more powerful than conventional ways of doing good, will lead to a transformed world.