Friday, April 18, 2008

Resourcefulness

I first stumbled upon the concept of Resourcefulness in a TED Talk by Tony Robbins and was instantly inspired by it. Also, more recently Steve Pavlina shared the concept and his view on this topic in a blog post. Steve puts the concept in perspective by clearly outlining Internal and External resources that are available at anyone's disposal at anytime. He also underscores the importance of Internal resources by sharing a hypothetical scenario and I can't agree more.

The internal resources are "invisible" and are available with everyone at all times and are Creativity, Self-Discipline, Confidence, Intelligence, Determination, Courage, Knowledge, Skills, Attitude, Passion and Awareness. The outer resources are Money, Assets, People, Technology, Food, Land, Electricity and Transportation.

Few years back I stumbled upon a lecture at Stanford by Google's Marrissa Mayer titled Creativity Loves Constraint. She was basically referring to technology constraints during product development and how creativity helps. So in order to achieve a desired outcome (product) one should use technology in a creative ways (external=technology, internal=creativity, determination, knowledge, skills). We all basically apply both internal and external resources everyday in our lives but we are "unaware" of it.

The challenges of life may be overcome by having awareness of the internal resources and being able leverage to create external resources effectively is a skill that can be learnt with determination, attitude, awareness (oh! all internal resources).

Lets see if we can stop complaining about limited resources and leverage what we have effectively.