Appendix C: How to Have Your Own Optimistic Adventures

Appendix C

How to Have

Your Own Optimistic Adventures

Optimism: the noble temptation to see too much in everything.

— G. K. Chesterton

When Tom Karp mentioned that some people might want to learn how to lead the kind of life I do in pursuing optimistic adventures, I was astonished. That thought had never occurred to me. Feeling humbled by the suggestion, I decided to put this material at the back of the book, lest people (presumably almost everyone) who want to live quite differently from how I do needlessly examine this information.

Let me present some cautions as I begin: It’s a lot easier for me to describe something that’s happening in the world (like the 400 Year Project) than it is to describe an internal mental process that I use. So you may find these directions to be somewhat hard to understand and to follow. Further, what works for me may not work as well for you. If you would like to learn more about how to become optimistic or lead an adventurous life, you may benefit more by reading studies done by those who have considered the subjects and measured high performers. I don’t have a particular book in mind: Books weren’t a major resource for guiding me in how to live as a practical, unlimited optimist seeking worthy adventures. That may seem strange given the number of books I read and review, but it does reflect the limited amount of helpful advice I have found in books about designing and pursuing optimistic adventures.

But if you’ve persevered to the book’s end and still want to read more of what I have to say, read on. I’m optimistic that I can share some valuable insights with you.

Stop Working on Your Weaknesses: Enjoy Successful Experiences That Shape Your Thinking into Practical, Unlimited Optimism

Experience is a dim lamp, which only lights the one who holds it.

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Optimism, if not naturally occurring, can be acquired by the right kinds of experience. In fact, successful experiences deliver the best encouragement for practical optimism, no matter how optimistic or pessimistic you are now. Let’s consider a sports example to make the point. If a baseball pitcher notices that his fastball has unusually good movement on a given day, that experience will encourage the pitcher to consider throwing a fastball to a good hitter in a demanding situation. Let’s assume the pitch works well for that game. Intrigued by that success, the pitcher may study film to see if his pitching movements had changed that day to make the fastball work better. The pitching coach and the catcher may also compliment the pitcher on the fastball success, encouraging more experimentation and use.

As you can see, if that success with the fastball continues to build in future games, the pitcher will have increasing practical optimism about throwing a fastball. With enough success, the pitcher will look forward to throwing fastballs as often as appropriate.

Having improved one pitch, the fastball, the pitcher may now decide to make his changeup (a slower pitch) look more like the fastball to batters during the pitch’s delivery. If the pitcher can achieve that appearance, batters expecting a fastball will be fooled. In addition, batters will be a little slower in addressing the fastball knowing that there might be a changeup coming. If the pitcher starts having more success with his changeup, he’ll use that pitch more often.

When these two pitches are working unusually well, it will be natural for the pitcher to want to experiment with a slider or cut fastball that will move differently than his fastball. Success will again encourage more experimentation and use.

Having improved three pitches, the pitcher will have become more optimistic that he can improve yet another pitch and may start working on improving his curveball. By having learned a process to become more successful with each succeeding pitch, the pitcher will also become optimistic that following that improvement process will lead to future successes in improving or adding pitches.

Peter Drucker knew that people aren’t very good observers. As a result, he directed people to become more curious about the most obvious occurrences — what works much better and much worse than expected. That’s good advice for finding opportunity. But if your purpose is to become a practical, unlimited optimist, you’ll need to focus even more narrowly on what works much better than expected. It is within those high-performance areas that you will most easily build confidence that good results will follow whenever you carefully assess the opportunity and follow a good process. Peter also agreed with that observation, as evidenced by his consistently advising people to build on their strengths rather than try to improve their weaknesses.

Stop Living an Ordinary Life:

Continually Seek Adventures That Delight Your Curiosity

There are two kinds of adventurers:

those who go truly hoping to find adventure and

those who go secretly hoping they won’t.

— William Least Heat-Moon

With the end in mind of building confidence through repeated success in improving, let’s look at the beginning stage of creating practical, unlimited optimism — pursuing continual experimentation in high-performance areas with an open mind. One of the helpful traits for an unlimited, practical optimist is to get bored easily. Feeling tired of the usual choices makes it easier to notice or dream up more intriguing alternatives. I advocate viewing such interesting alternatives as opportunities for adventure. Why? You never know what you’ll run into if you try an alternative and thinking about adventure will help you notice the unexpected. To me, an adventure is rewarding just for answering the question initially posed by my curiosity, even if the practical results aren’t ones that I would want to duplicate. That easily rewarded attitude is also helpful for keeping me open to noticing whatever is valuable about the process or the results; the important lesson may have nothing to do with the original impulse to satisfy my curiosity.

I schedule plenty of time for adventures because they so frequently provide a chance to learn something wonderful that I didn’t realize that I could learn. Here’s an example. I have always loved classical music. During August in the northeastern United States where I live, August orchestral performances are usually outdoors and the weather can be pretty unpleasant between the humid heat and thunderstorms. So for many years, I wondered how I could enjoy lovely indoor classical concerts during August in comfort without taking a trip to Sydney, Australia. Voila! I discovered that the Salzburg Festival runs an impressive indoor program in August. Salzburg is at a high enough altitude that the weather is pleasant in August rather than oppressive.

Having always wanted to see Mozart’s home and the other cultural treats near Salzburg, I talked my family into an adventure to Austria built around going to the festival. The music was delightful; the food was great; the nearby activities were fun; and I found one unexpected benefit — I could do astonishingly prolific conceptual work while sitting in the municipal garden in downtown Salzburg. In fact, I could work so much better in that garden during August that most of my annual output of new concepts for several years was produced while in Salzburg. An hour at that time of the year in the Salzburg municipal garden was worth several hundred hours anywhere else I’ve ever worked on new concepts. I can’t explain this happy result and still haven’t been able to duplicate the experience anywhere else. But I’m sure you see now why I’m excited about new adventures: That conceptual acceleration is the kind of unexpected reward that can come from an adventure with a different purpose in mind.

Obviously, if your information about what you are planning indicates that the adventure is bound to be filled with good experiences, your likelihood of being disappointed is small. I’ve learned, however, to avoid having any expectations for an adventure. An adventure should just be considered rewarding if it’s a new experience for you and helps answer some question or lets you learn more about some interest you have.

Adventures don’t mean that you have to go to faraway places. An adventure can be as simple as checking out a place you’ve never been to that’s quite close to your home. For example, the Charles River winds in gentle, tree-protected curves near my home. I can rent a canoe at a spot that’s three miles from home and explore the river for many miles in either direction. Within a few hundred feet of the dock, I’ll see animals, plants, rocks, and buildings that I’ve never seen from the roadways. Since the scenery changes so often, each trip is like the first time I’ve been to some of the places. When I take along a picnic lunch and tie up at a different place, I experience even more adventure as I explore new parts of the shoreline.

I also find it valuable to turn my car or direct my walks onto streets I’ve never been on before and to just follow whatever road seems the most appealing when a cross street appears. Many of the most beautiful drives and walks I’ve ever been on have resulted from such unplanned adventures. In fact, my favorite drive near my home is one I didn’t discover until I had been living in the area for over 20 years. I obviously need to be more adventurous!

Adventures don’t just have to be about places. Adventures can involve people instead. Watching people on television often gives you a sense of which ones you would enjoy learning more about. This curiosity may lead to reading books about or by the person. These days many learned and famous people travel a great deal. By paying attention to events in your area or where you plan to travel, you may be able to meet the person and have a chat. That’s how I originally met Peter Drucker and began appreciating his philosophies at a deeper level, a process that’s informed much of what I’ve done since then.

An unexpected benefit of people-directed adventures is that you’ll meet people who will describe adventures that you’ll want to pursue. Find enough champion adventurers and you’ll soon have a large backlog of great adventure plans.

Adventures can also be mental rather than physical. Take on some mental challenge you’ve never tried before, and you may have all kinds of exciting experiences. If you haven’t yet written a book, that’s a marvelous adventure. Why? There are so many unexpected things that happen in writing a book that it’s more like 25 adventures than 1 adventure. If nothing else, you’ll be astonished by how much you learn about yourself and what you think and believe.

Expand Your Curiosity:

Selectively Dive Deeper into Your Best Adventures

God doesn’t require us to succeed; he only requires that you try.

— Mother Teresa

A wonderful adventure always opens up many new opportunities for further adventures. Chances are that unexpected people, places, and things will intrigue you that you didn’t expect to find on your original adventure. Here are a few examples of fine adventures that came out of that trip to Salzburg. I mentioned the trip to Peter Drucker, a native Austrian, and he told me a story I had never heard before about the source of Roman military success. A meteorite had buried itself in the area containing an unusually strong iron ore, rich in manganese, nickel, and tungsten. The Romans learned how to use the meteorite as the raw material to make swords that were stronger and sharper than those used by their enemies. That observation led me to look into other sources of advanced technology employed in the Roman Empire, a key step in my discovery of how much advanced knowledge has been lost or been long ignored over the ages.

At a local palace near Salzburg, there are some intriguing water works in the gardens. I had seen many modern water works in public places but didn’t realize that imaginative water works had occurred much earlier in Europe. From this happy discovery, I read up on such water works and located many others that I’ve enjoyed on subsequent adventures.

The best performers in the Salzburg Festival were often new to me. Many of those performers are more popular in Europe than in the United States, and I had been ignoring them. Whenever I found a diva, soloist, or conductor who delighted me in Salzburg, I later arranged to attend their rare performances in the eastern United States.

Salzburg is also home to the most amazing puppet theater that I’ve ever visited. Instead of performing little stories like those from Grimm’s Fairy Tales, this theater puts on performances of operas. Each such experience gives you a new perspective on the opera, on puppetry, and how we respond to stories. I became addicted to these performances and attended as many as possible.

And, of course, my knowledge of Mozart deepened. That increased knowledge led me to explore more aspects of his life and music, something I continue to do. I also discovered that I do my best book writing while listening to Mozart’s violin sonatas.

Notice that extra exploring during an adventure takes lots of time, attention, energy, and money. I always make it a point to schedule my adventures as lightly as possible so that I’ll have plenty of time and energy for unplanned activities. In addition, I always budget generously for unexpected activities so that the cost of the adventure doesn’t get out of hand. 

How might this creating flexibility during an adventure work in practice? I typically plan only one daily activity while on a vacation, an activity that will take no more than four hours. That open schedule leaves plenty of time to wander around, talk to people, and see things that I don’t expect. If nothing strikes my fancy, I bring along plenty of reading and fill in the spare time that way. However, that reading fallback is seldom necessary. Instead, I’m usually short of time to do everything that interests me.

Use Your Best Adventures to Plan Future Ones

The sad truth is that excellence makes people nervous.

— Shana Alexander

Having enjoyed some great adventures, you’ll begin to wonder if it’s possible to have similarly appealing new ones. Yes, of course, you can have even more wonderful adventures that allow you to satisfy similar interests. You will increase your odds by noticing first what works best for you on a grand adventure. I’m sure your list will look different from mine, but perhaps by sharing some of my interests you’ll be able to identify your interests more completely.

I find that my best adventures have many elements associated with them. And the more of these elements that are present, the better the adventure:

• high quality access to the fine arts

• delightful weather

• a historically significant location

• a locale that changes my perspective about life

• many places to take pleasant walks

• unaccustomed, tasty food

• beautiful scenery

• a culture that’s new to me

• unusual architecture in the hotel

• easy opportunities to speak with people from all walks of life who live in the area

• lots of activities that appeal to my family

• daily learning opportunities.

As an example of why this list is right for me, let me share an experience with you. One summer my wife and I could not think of where we wanted to go or what we wanted to do for our vacation. I suggested we just pack up the car and start driving, stopping at interesting places along the way. Our travels eventually took us to northern New England along the Atlantic coast, aboard the Bar Harbor ferry to Nova Scotia, around the Bay of Fundy to enjoy the fascinating tides, across the beauties of rural Manitoba and Quebec to Montreal where we visited the botanical gardens and symphony and dined on great French food, and finally down through New York state along the Hudson River where we visited old friends. When we got back home, we looked at each other and said, “Next time we stay close to home, let’s just go to Montreal. It’s got everything we like.” Montreal in August matches up quite nicely with my grand adventure list, except the culture isn’t totally new. Even so, I always find new aspects of Montreal’s culture on my trips, so those new cultural aspects keep Montreal fresh for me. Just brushing up on my French and learning some new words certainly energizes the learning challenge. On my last trip, I arranged to give a talk to the local Harvard Club about one of my books and opened the remarks in French to an appreciative audience of French Canadians.

Compose a Great New Direction: Build Your Adventure Around a Theme

True leisure is not freedom from work but freedom in work,

and, along with that, the time to converse, to ruminate, to complete the meaning of life.

— Lewis Mumford

I like adventures to lead to epiphanies, those “aha” moments that permanently change my point of view. I find that if I’m drawn to something, someplace, or someone, that’s a good sign that future epiphanies are brewing within me. Focus on whatever or whomever is drawing me toward the adventure; build that appeal into a theme; and I will have increased the likelihood of experiencing epiphanies.

Here’s an example: Having read more books than I care to admit about early Native American culture in the southwestern United States, I wanted to appreciate more about what it was like to live in that culture as it was formed by the earliest arrivals, the so-called Anasazi, ancestors of today’s pueblo dwellers. On a family vacation, we visited many of the key locations in the southwest including Mesa Verde in Colorado and Canyon de Chelly in New Mexico. In addition, my wife arranged for specially guided tours at the Grand Canyon in Arizona and at Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico where we could learn about the earliest Native American settlers in those areas.

We chose to drive, and the driving gave us a sense of the vast distances that separated different groups of the Anasazi from each other. When my older son, Don, and I hiked down to the floor of the Grand Canyon and back up again; that experience added a sense of the physical challenges involved in the region. On that hot day, we drank over a quart of water each one thousand feet in altitude we hiked in both directions. There was a pipe carrying water along the trail every thousand feet to make that drinking easier. An Anasazi, however, would have had to make do with whatever water could be carried.

My biggest epiphany came late in that day when I was struggling slowly back up to the top before the sun set. Sitting nearly exhausted, I was surprised to see a man in his 70s and a boy of about 10 hustling up the path behind me. They stopped for a moment to visit with me. While I was worn out from just climbing down to the bottom and going back up again, the two of them had started before dawn, climbed to the bottom, crossed the width of the canyon, climbed to the top of the opposite rim, climbed down that trail to the bottom again, crossed the width of the canyon a second time, and were now finishing their second trip up to the rim that day. Their total hike was almost triple the length of mine, and they were moving a lot faster than I was. My epiphany was that mental barriers hold us back from our greatest physical accomplishments: I would have said that no one of either age had any business doing half that much hiking during the middle of August’s high heat in Arizona. But they were having a great time and clearly were energized by the experience. That epiphany played a key role in defining stall theory for what holds us back from accomplishing much more.

Go for the Gold:

Turn a Seemingly Impossible Challenge into an Adventure

The Difficult is that which can be done immediately;

 the Impossible that which takes a little longer.

— George Santayana

One of the best ways to become a practical, unlimited optimist is to accomplish something that seems impossible when you begin. I often think back to the grandfather and grandson I met at the Grand Canyon. From the experience of accomplishing a seemingly impossible goal you learn that whatever seems impossible is simply based on a misperception caused by being unaccustomed to thinking about and doing something. Your initial idea of the furthest limits of possibility will turn out to be highly conservative. But you won’t realize that inappropriate conservatism until you move beyond the mental limits you place on yourself through ignorance.

In the same way that exercise physically conditions an athlete to accomplish more, succeeding with apparently impossible challenges mentally conditions people to become more confident about and competent in extending their performance limits. I was lucky to learn this lesson while young: Others have frequently set daunting challenges for me that I couldn’t or didn’t want to avoid. Succeeding with these overwhelming challenges made me realize that I could achieve more than I had previously thought.

Let me share a few examples. In sixth grade, each child in my class was expected to produce a large project that could be displayed at Back-to-School Night for our parents. That evening, parents would vote for their favorite project and there would be a prize for the winner. This project was expected to take months and would require a large expenditure of time, effort, and money. Naturally, students wanted to work on what interested them, whatever that was. About eight of us had the same project idea. Our teacher, Mrs. Gail, decided that we should each pursue a different project. Being pretty aggressive and outspoken, I made quite a fuss about wanting my choice. Exasperated, Mrs. Gail told me that I was acting like a pig and because of that I didn’t have a choice about what my project was; I had to make a pig farm. That command certainly quieted me down.

Knowing almost nothing about pigs, I was stumped at first. I also couldn’t imagine anything interesting about a pig farm (except perhaps eliminating the dirt and odor). But I was determined to win the competition (have I mentioned that I’m a highly competitive person?). I decided that I would design and display the model pig farm of the future. So I learned all about the problems that pig farmers have and designed a pig farm that would eliminate those difficulties (such as building pig houses shaped so it would be hard for the sows to accidentally roll over on their new piglets). My farm was fascinating: Everyone who saw my pig farm loved it, but they needed an explanation before they could appreciate the nuances of what I had done. Realizing that I had done good work, I wasn’t satisfied: I wanted top recognition for my work.

Gauging my chances of success to be limited, I began to think about what adventurous things I could do to win. Mrs. Gail wouldn’t let me attach an explanation to my pig farm. What could I do to overcome that limitation? I wasn’t allowed to come to the event when the parents would vote, but I was determined to find a way to be there. I contacted every other teacher in the school to find if any of them needed help that night. Several teachers did, and I volunteered to assist. Since I was supposed to be in several different rooms at various times, I periodically sneaked into my classroom between shifts and gave quick explanations of my pig farm to parents whenever Mrs. Gail was engaged in conversation away from my project and looking in the other direction. Most parents got to hear my pitch before the evening was over. Sure enough, my pig farm won the prize based on the parent votes.

Here’s another example of accomplishing something that seemed impossible when I stared, also connected to something Mrs. Gail said to me. Our elementary school was named Eliot. I asked Mrs. Gail one day for whom the school was named. She walked me to the storage area in the back of the class and showed me a small image of an old-fashioned-looking man and described him as the most important American educator ever, a former president of Harvard University. Now I had never heard of either Eliot or Harvard, but it seemed to me like I should learn more. What I learned fascinated me.

I was eventually riveted by reading Catherine Drinker Bowen’s biography of Justice Oliver Wendell Homes, Jr., Yankee from Olympus (Little, Brown, 1944). Based on that book, I decided I wanted to become a judge and noted that the esteemed Supreme Court justice was a graduate of Harvard Law School. Clearly, that was where I needed to study. I also decided that my chances of following the esteemed justice’s path to Harvard Law School would be better if I first graduated from Harvard College.

During high school, I discovered that most of my favorite 19th century American writers had lived near Boston and many had attended Harvard. It sounded like an unbelievable adventure to attend Harvard and experience that vastly different culture after spending almost my whole life in southern California. Fortunately, I again had an irresistible incentive: The other top students in my high school also wanted to go to Harvard, mostly because the recently deceased and much admired John F. Kennedy had earned an undergraduate degree from the university.

If I wanted to win that competition with my classmates, I needed to find a way to be accepted. Given that my family had little money, and neither of my parents had finished high school, admission to Harvard seemed like a worthy and all-but-impossible challenge. But being practical, I planned to go wherever I got the most scholarship money.

Just before taking the National Merit qualifying test (an examination used then to screen for the top 1,000 high school graduates in the country each year), I needed to fill out the name of the school where I would use my scholarship if I became one of the 1,000 who won (out of the large number who were competing). I naturally wrote down Harvard with no expectations. It was an amusingly adventuresome thing to do. When I won one of the National Merit scholarships, I was the only person in my town to do so. Sure enough, a few months later Harvard wrote to tell me that I had been accepted, and they would supplement my large National Merit scholarship with enough extra money so that there would be few expenses to pay out of the family pockets beyond traveling to and from California. Since my dad worked for a railroad, I could travel by train at very little cost. After I was accepted, my parents didn’t know what to do. My mother didn’t want me to leave California.

Fortunately, my National Merit scholarship was funded by my dad’s employer, the Santa Fe Railway. Dad would have been terribly embarrassed if I had turned down the scholarship. So I told him I would just have to go to Harvard. I probably could have changed my choice of schools by contacting the National Merit people, but I didn’t want to miss such a great adventure. I was particularly pleased to be the only person to be admitted to Harvard from my town that year. To my mother, I pointed out that it would be cheaper for me to attend Harvard than the California schools that had offered less scholarship aid.

What I didn’t know until many years later is that in those days over 99 percent of those who would probably have done well at Harvard College didn’t apply. The many qualified nonapplicants either didn’t know about the school, thought they couldn’t afford it, or only considered schools close to home. What hardly any of the nonapplicants with limited funds realized was that Harvard had a policy of ensuring that any student who was admitted would receive the necessary financial aid to attend. With a sense of adventure, those students could have gone to Harvard, too.

Simply by applying, I’d turned this seemingly impossible task into something that was actually quite achievable for me as well as potentially for tens of thousands of others. I would have never expected that relative ease of gaining admission to be the case until I experienced it. Even then, Harvard had a reputation as being very difficult to get into.

When I was a college senior, I had an unexpected success when I wasn’t looking to achieve an impossible result that gave me great confidence boost that helped me later succeed with many tasks I would have otherwise thought to be impossible. Here’s what happened: As a backup plan for graduate school if Harvard Law School didn’t accept me, I applied to Harvard’s and Stanford’s business schools. I wasn’t interested in business at the time, but I wanted to be sure that I got into some good graduate school. To apply, prospective graduate business students were required to take a diagnostic test related to analytical skills. Although I had planned to study for the test and get a good night’s sleep, I ended up not studying and went to a party for most of the night before. A few months later, I was dumbfounded to discover that I had received a higher score on this test than any of my Harvard College classmates. That unexpected success made me realize that perhaps I had a talent for business analysis and thinking that I hadn’t appreciated.

For years, I drew on that test success for confidence every time some big business challenge arose, beginning with taking my first course at Harvard Business School while I was a second year law student. The test success also made me confident enough to take a leading role in my business school studies and to apply for a permanent job with one of the most difficult employers for MBAs to attract, the Boston Consulting Group. Imagine my surprise when I learned that by going into management consulting I’d tied for the top starting salary among my law school classmates. Ever since then, I’ve just assumed that I would excel at anything the business world could send my way.

Tackle an Impossible Long-Term Challenge

to Enjoy a Life-Changing Irresistible Adventure

The impossible often has a kind of integrity

which the merely improbable lacks.

— Douglas Adams

Once you have built up confidence that you can succeed with impossible tasks, I urge you to take on some impossible long-term task that will strain your talents far beyond what you believe your limits are. The 400 Year Project has been that kind of task for me. I find that everything I accomplished before the project began now seems like just so much child’s play, even though I surpassed my sense of the possible within the business world on several occasions before 1995. There’s a tremendous energy and excitement you’ll feel from taking on the adventure of pursuing your impossible long-term challenge that won’t be matched by anything else in your life.

Although I haven’t done it yet, I suspect there may well be an even greater gain in confidence, competence, and excitement from taking on a second and a third impossible long-term challenge following success with the first one. Writing this section has made me intensely curious about how adding those challenges might feel to me; I can report, however, that I am incredibly excited by the mere thought of those possibilities.

Here’s advice for picking your long-term, impossible-seeming task: Choose a task that’s so far beyond what others imagine could be done that your family and friends will wonder what’s the matter with you. I find that skeptical reaction to be especially bracing; it’s like receiving Mrs. Gail’s assignment to build a pig farm all over again.

While I can’t spell out any other challenges for you to consider in creating your adventures, I’m sure there are many wonderful adventures that I haven’t thought of. I hope you will find them all soon so I can learn from your adventures. If you have adventures you would like to share, please send me an e-mail at askdonmitchell@yahoo.com.

What if you can’t come up with any impossible challenges to focus on for your long-term adventure? I have two alternative suggestions for your consideration:

1. Pray for guidance until you receive an answer.

2. Run a global contest to define a great impossible challenge for your long-term adventure.

However you pick your long-term adventure with overcoming the impossible, have fun with the adventure!

Some Practical Advice: A Brief List to Guide You

Small is beautiful. Less is more.

— E. F. Schumacher

One of the drawbacks of using stories to explain how to have your own optimist adventures is that the stories can become more memorable than the lessons. With Tom Karp’s gentle encouragement, I’ve put together a list of the key actions you need to take without telling you any stories. Hopefully, this list will help you connect the dots among the stories to pursue more optimistic adventures.

1. Think back to when successes led you to do more of something. You may not realize how much B. F. Skinner’s concept of behavioral reinforcement through rewards can influence your actions. We are all suckers for that approach. Note when you’ve been gripped by positive feedback.

2. Consider how much more optimistic you are about those areas where you have had success than the other areas of your life. Remember some achievements you’ve enjoyed simply because confidence you built from past successes led you to try more.

3. Make a long list of everything you have had a burning curiosity to learn more about. Your curiosity should be so strong that you feel your heart racing and your body coursing with energy as you consider these areas.

4. Write down five exciting adventures that would help you satisfy each of your most burning forms of curiosity. These adventures can be described in a sentence or two.

5. Identify the exciting adventures you could start and finish today. If for some reason you didn’t list any adventures like that before, think of some now.

6. Take at least one exciting adventure a day. It helps to plan ahead by allowing some time for a daily adventure and choosing an adventure that will fit well into your next day’s schedule.

7. After you’ve finished 60 exciting adventures you can do in a day or less, plan and experience a longer adventure. If you can, try to spend at least a week on this longer adventure.

8. Enjoy at least one two-day or longer adventure every month. This experience will help you to expand your adventuring horizons.

9. Teach someone else how to do this same sequence of steps 1 through 8. You’ll get new ideas for how to improve your adventuring if you describe the process to someone else.

10. Outline the key elements of an ideal adventure for you. A good place to start is with the elements of past adventures you’ve enjoyed that aren’t mutually exclusive (and few are).

11. After you’ve completed 30 adventures that take longer than a day, pick a seemingly impossible short-term task requiring just a few days to pursue that you fervently care about and build an adventure around finding ways to do that task. You can use The 2,000 Percent Solution Workbook’s questions at the end of Chapter One to help you pick out a challenge and find a solution.

12. Repeat step 11 at least 75 times. This experience will build both your competence and your confidence.

13. Pick an impossible-seeming long-term task (one that will take at least five years to pursue) and build an adventure around exploring how to accomplish the task. You can use adventures involving all lengths of time to assist you in achieving your task.

14. Take on other impossible-seeming long-term tasks after you’ve successfully completed the first one. At this point, you’ll be a full-fledged unlimited, practical optimist.

15. Write a book telling others what you’ve learned about how to have more optimistic adventures. Allow yourself to feel great joy as you do.

Copyright © 2007. 2012 by Donald Mitchell.