Key Resourcefulness Principles

1. Cultivate your intellect:

Learn how to think effectively. Deepen your domain expertise. Learn wisdom from outside your field. Gain knowledge for the joy of it. This grows your inventory of helpful mental models for decision making, and improves your overall resourcefulness. Like compound interest in your financial investments, feeding your intellect across multiple domains has compounding effects on your wisdom. More details on this topic -> here

2. Explore creativity:

Despite what you may have heard about creativity being something you can only be born with - modern neuroscience has proven that resourcefulness can actually be cultivated (Scientific American article -> here). We can all adopt the artist’s mindset for seeing things differently, making novel connections, and innovating new ideas.

Creative professionals’ methods for driving imagination can stimulate our ability to come up with solutions with the resources we have available to us. There are many tools. Here are just a few:

• Perspective Shifting: Deliberately look at the situation from different point of views, rather than only through the perspective that reflexively came up in your mind. Examples:

  • The Future-Back Perspective: If the goal has already been achieved, what are all the events and decisions that led up to that happening?

  • What would a wise, impartial Judge think?

• Reversing the Polarity: Instead of obsessing about how to fix the problem, flip the script and map out your path to total failure. You will suddenly see all the hidden traps you need to dodge.

• The Edgar Allen Poe Technique: Get your creativity flowing by picking three random words of different categories and improvise a narrative that links them together. This fires up your brain to be creative and resourceful. After doing this exercise a few times, go back to looking at your problem.

3. Strengthen intuition:

Modern neuroscience teaches us brain care principles and methods for nurturing the brain-body connection that promote heightened cognitive ability and general wellbeing. Harnessing this integrated awareness brings forth access to traits such as creativity, confidence, healthy risk appetite, and determination. (details -> here)