What's Your Mission?

As we celebrate the first sixth months of publishing our The 51% Project blog, we want to take this time to thank all our loyal followers. Your comments, thoughts, suggestions have been, and continue to be, great motivators and much appreciated inspiration. Please continue to provide us your input, as although our posts come from personal experience and perspective, your participation helps us discover and explore new ideas, and new ways of thinking and being in the world. Helping us to broaden our view of life is a very special gift, and we are so grateful!

We are often asked, “What is The 51% Project? What is your mission?” So, we thought we’d go back and reprint our first entry as a review to our long-time followers and as an explanation of our purpose our new followers might have missed.

Again, thank you for your continued support and encouragement. The 51% Project has brought many changes to our own lives, and we hope that you, too, have found it useful!

Dorothy and Susan

Reprint of January 8, 2011 blog post:

If you change the way you look at things,
the things you look at will change.
-Wayne Dyer

Many of you have asked, “Why 51%? I put forth 100% or 110% or 120% of effort all the time?” Our response is, “To whom?” Your work, your play, your friends, family?” These are all good recipients of that 120%, but what about to you? Do you put 100% of effort toward caring for yourself, toward making adjustments in the way you personally live, to the nurturing of your wounds, to the outcomes you want to experience in your daily existence? We’ve asked ourselves the same question and the answer is – no. Like many, our own “stuff” is often at the bottom of our to-do list and by the time we get to US, we’re just too darn tired to do the work. And, like many, though we know this is counter-productive – we’ve heard it, read it for years from a myriad of our favorite authors and teachers: Love thyself, To thine own self be true, You cannot care for others if you don’t care for yourself - we forget.

The 51% Project aims to help us, and maybe you, remember. So, we’re going PUBLIC (gulp) with our “stuff”, enlisting the theory that putting forth the extra 1% will create the Tipping Point, the push over the edge that will turn our intention into the positive actions and outcomes we seek.

If you’ve read Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, this idea won’t be new to you. Gladwell, a prominent social scientist, contends that it’s the moment where the extra 1% of something – effort, action, thinking, FLU - becomes an epidemic, causing a state of critical mass that moves a “thing” from status quos to rapid forward movement. A contagion becomes an “outbreak”, an idea becomes a movement, and power is put in the hands of the many – not the few. Think about a corporation – when the principals acquire 51% of the shares, they own the power to control the outcomes, the profits, and the values this company represents. We contend that the same is true in making changes – personal and global. If we do something 51% of the time, that something takes on the power to affect the way we are, the way we live and the way we engage with others.

We have both chosen personal issues we want to change. (We’ll get to some of those global issues later!) We have committed to exercising the 51% theory in bringing forth those changes and will share our journey here on these pages. Along the way we will share the bits of inspiration that we find helpful - quotes that move us, videos and music that become our touchstones, as well as the setbacks we experience. Many of these will not be new to you, but it is our hope that somehow seeing how they work for us, will make them clearer – maybe even bringing on a few ah-ha moments for some of you. We encourage your comments, suggestions and the sharing of some of your experiences too.

In our discussions with others about this project we have discovered some reoccurring themes – places where we all seem to get stuck, ego-isms that undermine success like: blurring boundaries, negative thinking, confusing right action with power, losing sight of the goal, and more. We will try to bring some new ways of thinking about these deterrents by sharing our own truths about them and also the wisdom of those authors and teachers we spoke of earlier.

Please join us in our personal experiment to put forth just 1% more effort to reach the tipping point that assures us, and you, the good, happy life we, and you, deserve.