Applied Outcome Thinking

Recently I have become absorbed with the idea of defining a life mission and then making strategies.  Everyone is capable and have great potential, but are they successful at doing what they want or getting what they want out of life.  After coming across people that are phenomenally successful at accomplishing their goals in life at a young age, I starting picking their brain and adapting my perspective in life to become more successful.

One book that I picked up but never read is this popular book on productivity called Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen.  I am trying to synthesize areas of strategy planning, project management, and personal productivity.  One chapter I chose was called Outcome Thinking where one defines specific projects and next actions.

In a sub-section called Applied Outcome Thinking, he noted two problems in life: (1) know what you want, but don't know how to get it, (2) don't know what you want.  And he said the solutions are (1) make it up, and (2) make it happen.

I think in this section he was trying to get the readers to visualize the ultimate outcome of their efforts.  He notes that you cannot define the right action until you know the outcome and also that the outcome is disconnected from reality if it is not clear about what you need to do to physically (tangibly) make it happen.

The last thing he mentioned is that when the operational behavior is grooved by everything the comes our way at all levels wondrous things happen.  This seems to connect back to material in the beginning in the book, where to be productive, it is important to know how to absorb and organize information, rather than throwing in the wastebasket in our head to sort and later organize when we get around to it as  is the normal mode of operational behavior.