“The only work that will ulti­mately bring any good to any of us is the work of con­tribut­ing to the heal­ing of the world.” ~ Mar­i­anne Williamson

One of those sub­jects that’s easy to push under the rug.  Pre­tend it doesn’t really hap­pen.  Pre­tend it doesn’t really hurt any­one.  Ignore.  Look the other way.

Not today.

As told by Jen, from are you there God? it’s me, gen­er­a­tion X . 

If you do noth­ing else today, view this short slideshow below. 

To view full screen click the “Fullscreen” icon in the lower cor­ner of the slideshow.

Note:  If you’re hav­ing trou­ble view­ing this, please click here.

This orig­i­nally appeared on Jen’s blog. I was deeply moved by her courage, and shar­ing of this story. In the short time I’ve known her, I’ve come to see that she speaks very much from her heart.  The words in this you’re see­ing today speak to some­thing that’s all too easy to ignore.

Will you run away?

For more infor­ma­tion on Jen, visit her blog and fol­low her on Twit­ter.

Today, it is with much excite­ment that I present to you Marelisa Fábrega.  Marelisa has been a con­stant sup­porter and friend here at “The Jun­gle of Life” for the past year, and was one of my early vis­i­tors when I first started out.  Her arti­cles are always thought-provoking and with a real focus on each of us find­ing abun­dance, in all it’s forms, in our lives.

One area of inter­est for Marelisa is explor­ing ways to spark the cre­ativ­ity muse in all of us.  She has cre­ated a won­der­ful ebook, filled with nearly 100 pages of tech­niques to use when your cre­ative side could use a lit­tle spark.  This hand­book has some­thing for every­one, and is a tool you’ll come back to over and over. For more infor­ma­tion on this great resource, please check out:

How to Be More Cre­ative: A Hand­book for Alchemists

Marelisa is a con­stant source of such pos­i­tive and uplift­ing mate­r­ial.  You can keep up with her by vis­it­ing her blog, Abun­dance Blog at Marelisa Online.  For reg­u­lar updates, sub­scribe to her RSS feed and fol­low along with her on Twit­ter.

Today we’re flip­ping things around.  Read along, as Marelisa talks about…

Flip It

photo credit: der bobbel

“We are all cups, con­stantly and qui­etly being filled. The trick is, know­ing how to tip our­selves over and let the beau­ti­ful stuff out.” ~ Ray Bradbury

Ian Ayers—author of the best­seller “Super Crunchers”—and Barry Nale­buff, both Yale Pro­fes­sors, co-authored a book called “Why Not:  How to Use Every­day Inge­nu­ity to Solve Prob­lems Big and Small”, in which they insist that cre­ativ­ity is a skill that can be taught.  An inter­est­ing tech­nique that they pro­pose in their book for com­ing up with new ideas is to con­stantly ask the fol­low­ing ques­tion: “would flip­ping it work?” I found an excel­lent video in which Barry talks about the book, and presents some inter­est­ing exam­ples of how the con­cept of “flip­ping it” can lead to very cre­ative solu­tions.  Below you’ll find some  of these examples:

The Upside-Down Christ­mas Tree
Christ­mas is the favorite hol­i­day of the year for a lot of peo­ple, and dec­o­rat­ing the tree is a beloved Christ­mas tra­di­tion.  How­ever, hav­ing a tree dec­o­rated with orna­ments stand­ing in the mid­dle of one’s liv­ing room is not all fun and games; here are some of the prob­lems that are often encoun­tered with a tra­di­tional Christ­mas tree:
•    It takes up a lot of floor space.
•    Small chil­dren are always reach­ing for the tree orna­ments.
•    There’s never enough space under the tree for all of the presents.
•    Pets are con­stantly run­ning around the tree knock­ing off the orna­ments.
So how can these prob­lems be solved?  With an upside-down Christ­mas tree.  You can hang it from a bracket on the ceil­ing like a chan­de­lier, stand it upside-down on a tree stand, or mount it tip-down on the wall.  Some peo­ple even con­sider that you can bet­ter dis­play tree orna­ments with an upside-down Christ­mas tree, since it’s eas­ier to place the orna­ments at eye– level and they don’t get lost in the foliage.

Organ Dona­tion: Flip the Default to Opt-Out
Barry explains that there are over 90,000 peo­ple on the wait­ing list for organs in the United States.  Some of these peo­ple die before organs become avail­able.  Why does the US have such a long wait­ing list for organs?  Because there’s not enough peo­ple who are con­tribut­ing. The US uses an opt-in method for organ dona­tion: unless some­one signs a “Uni­form Organ Donor Card”, their organs can­not be used.  And not enough peo­ple sign these cards.
The flip of opt-in, of course, is opt-out; the pro­posal is to change the sys­tem so that people’s organs are donated unless they sign a form to opt-out.  Many coun­tries in Europe, includ­ing Spain, France, and Bel­gium, have opt-out organ dona­tion pro­grams. By chang­ing from an opt-in to an opt-out pro­gram, these Euro­pean coun­tries have elim­i­nated their organ wait­ing list.

Pen­sion Plans and Bananas
Although this isn’t one of the exam­ples used by Barry in his talk, in 2006 Con­gress passed “The Pen­sion Pro­tec­tion Act” which allows employ­ers to enroll new employ­ees in 401K plans auto­mat­i­cally, unless the employee chooses to opt-out.  That is, instead of ask­ing: “How can we over­come the iner­tia of employ­ees and get them to enroll in a 401K plan?”, they flipped the sit­u­a­tion by allow­ing employ­ers to cre­ate auto­matic opt-in plans.
For one last flip, Barry argues that the best way to peel a banana is hold it with the stem/handle point­ing down, pinch the tip, and then peel down­ward toward the stem. Although this is the oppo­site of how most peo­ple peel a banana, it’s how mon­keys do it (the experts), you don’t have to deal with banana strings, and you can con­ve­niently hold the banana by the stem as you eat it.

Con­clu­sion
As you can see from the four exam­ples explained above, flip­ping the prob­lem can be used to solve prob­lems both big—organ dona­tion and 401K plans—and small—Christmas trees and bananas.  In addi­tion, peo­ple have a ten­dency to get com­pla­cent and to do things in the way in which they’ve always been done, with­out stop­ping to think if there might be a bet­ter way to do them.  So, how are you going to use the “flip it” cre­ativ­ity tech­nique to solve your every­day prob­lems and help change the world?