10/3/2017 Blinkist: Serving curious minds.

Find the bright spots, learn

from them and spread them
around.

Your inner rider is a terrific thinker and planner. Unfortunately, he is also prone to
spinning his wheels: overanalyzing every aspect of a potential change without
actually doing anything. Worse still, his analysis is totally problem-focused,
obsessing over all the difficulties ahead.

But endless analysis of the obstacles in your way gets you nowhere; you must
give the rider a clear direction to go in so he can put his planning and rational
thinking to good use. Instead of looking at the problems, find and focus on the
so-called bright spots: specific situations or areas where change has already
succeeded. Then figure out how change was achieved and leverage these
lessons to make the change more widespread.

This approach was employed by Jerry Sternin in 1990, when the government of
Vietnam invited him to help fight children's malnutrition. Rather than tackling
the myriad and near- unsolvable causes of malnutrition (poverty, poor sanitation
etc.), Sternin decided to look for bright spots. He found that in a small local
village with near-universal malnutrition, some children were in fact well-
nourished. Their families had already solved the problem.

By observing these families, Sternin discovered that there were small but
important differences in the way these children were being fed. For example,
while the children received no more food than in other families, their mothers
fed them smaller portions more often. Sternin managed to spread these
behaviors to other families, who accepted them more readily because they came
from their own community, not from outsiders.
10/3/2017 Blinkist: Serving curious minds.

The impact of these small changes was amazing: six months later, 65 percent of
the children in the village were better nourished. The bright spots had spread
considerably.

Find the bright spots, learn from them and spread them around.

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