What is positive deviance? Who is a positive deviant?

More inspiration from Better by Atul Gawande:

The antistarvation program, run by Tufts University nutritionist Jerry Sternin and his wife, Monique, had given up on bringing outside solutions to villages with malnourished children. Over and over, that strategy had failed… The Sternins therefore focused on finding solutions from insiders. They asked small groups of poor villagers to identify who among them had the best-nourished children — who among them had demonstrated what the Sternins termed a “positive deviance” from the norm. The villagers then visited those mothers at home to see exactly what they were doing.

How does one become a positive deviant when:

Most of us, most of the time, are far removed from planning a polio mop-up for 4.2 million children in southern India or inventing new ways to save the lives of frontline soldiers. Our enterprise is more modest.

Regardless  of our age, gender, and occupation, below are “five suggestions for how one might make a worthy difference, for how one might become… a positive deviant”:

1. Ask an unscripted question.
   Ask an unscripted question which allows us to make a human connection, for example, “Where did you grow up?” Then, listen and make note of what we learn. We just might discover something new.
2. Don’t complain.
   Although we may face numerous pointless, frustrating problems in our lives, Dr. Gawande argues that we ought not to complain because of the “difficulties of having to work with other human beings under circumstances only partly in one’s control” and that complaining leaves us feeling “angry and sorry for ourselves.” I agree, though I’d like to distinguish complaining from critically examining or questioning an issue. At this point, I need to further reflect before clearly articulating the difference between the former and latter. I do believe, however, that it is important to point out, if not challenge, the problems to which we become witness. Only then can these issues be addressed in a systemic and systematic manner.
3. Count something.
   We should be scientists in this world. “If you count something you find interesting, you will learn something interesting.”
4. Write something.
   Make small observations about our world. Although it is easy to lose our “larger sense of purpose,” writing allows us to “step back and think through a problem.” After all, even the “angriest rant forces the writer to achieve a degree of thoughtfulness.”

Most of all, by offering your reflections to an audience, even a small one, you make yourself part of a larger world. An audience is a community. The published word is a declaration of membership in that community and also of a willingness to contribute something meaningful to it.

I am in total agreement with this statement, which captures my thoughts precisely. I enjoy reflecting on various aspects of life. Putting these reflections into writing achieves three purposes: my thought process is better streamlined; my current state of thinking, maturity, or even prefrontal cortex development, is stored for future reference; these ideas are shared with others and consumed, challenged, or even expanded upon.

5. Change.
   According to Dr. Gawande, there are three ways in which people respond to new ideas: “a few becomes early adopters; most becomes late adopters; some remain persistent skeptics who never stop resisting.”

Nonetheless, make yourself an early adopter. Look for the opportunity to change. I am not saying you should embrace every new trend that comes along. But be willing to recognised the inadequacies in what you do and to seek out out solutions.

I frequently demand change in certain things while remaining a persistent sceptic in others. For example, I take a highly critical approach to numerous social issues. I must admit, on the other hand, that I have never owned an iPod or a Facebook account. What a bag of paradox. Or, maybe not. Perhaps I desire for change so strongly that my never-ending resistance of the likes of Facebook is considered “change” in itself.

On a concluding note, it is Saturday, March 26, 2011. In two hours, I will be on campus to take part in training as a volunteer for the Orientations programme. I remember waking up in 2010 on this same Saturday with a dreadful upper-respiratory tract infection and scrambling to reach campus in a semi-medicated state to attend the same event, with the exception that I was offering the training then. In 2009, I woke up to the torturous noise of an alarm clock on the same Saturday at the Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre, taking part in a weekend-long Biology field trip. I know, without a doubt, where I would really like to be on this day next year. What a difference four years make.

So find something new to try, something to change. Count how often you succeed and how often you fail. Write about it. Ask people what they think. See if you can keep the conversation going.

Jessica Jackley shares the following in her TED talk, which I find highly insightful. Do we give for others or for ourselves? I wonder if this is a fair question in the first place, whether we could separate giving for others and giving for ourselves.

I gave, in general, when the negative emotions built up enough that I gave to relieve my own suffering, not someone else’s. But truth be told, I was giving out of that place, not out of a genuine place of hope, of excitement to help and of generosity. It became a… transaction for me, a trade. I was purchasing something, I was buying my right to go on with my day and not necessarily be bothered by this bad news… We buy our distance, we buy our right to go on with our day… That exchange can get in the way of desire to really be meaningful and useful in another person’s life. In short, to love.

In Better, Atul Gawande discusses a case of medication adherence in a young patient with Cystic Fibrosis (CF) at America’s leading CF management centre. This is an excellent illustration of how the best become so and continue to improve.

“But let’s look at the numbers,” [Dr. Warwick] said to me… “A person’s daily risk of getting a bad lung illness with CF is 0.5 percent… The daily risk of getting a bad lung illness with CF plus treatment is 0.05 percent… So when you experiment [with treatment adherence] you’re looking at the difference between a 99.5 percent chance of staying well and a 99.95 percent chance of staying well. Seems hardly any difference, right? On any given day, you have basically a one-hundred-percent chance of being well. But… it is a big difference.”

Followed by some calculations on a well-used black board:

“Sum it up over a year, and it is the difference between an 83 percent chance of making it through [the year with treatment] without getting sick and only a 16 percent chance [of remaining healthy through the year without treatment].”

The author then concludes:

In this short speech, I realized, was the core of Warwick’s worldview. He believed that excellence came from seeing, on a daily basis, the difference between being 99.5 percent successful and being 99.95 percent successful.”

At last, a solution:

Dr. Ben Carson says in a recent interview that “if you need to have something done you have to get somebody who’s busy to do it, because people who are not busy never have time to do anything [since] it takes them all day to do nothing.”

I have been struggling with the apparent paradox of having a busy and well-balanced life at the same time. It turns out, however, not to be a paradoxical relationship. Rather, it is one of symbiosis.

I have not yet found my niche in this ecosystem. Fluctuating between states of extinction and proliferation, I yearn for equilibrium.

Frank Vertosick Jr. writes in When the Air Hits Your Brain:

We are all slaves to chaos — chaos in the scientific sense. Chaos theory predicts that the outcome of a chaotic process depends upon minuscule variations in the “initial conditions.” Example: a billiard ball rolling off the hood of a car. When placed in one spot, it rolls one way; placed one millimeter to the right or left of that spot, it rolls in a different direction altogether. Where the ball ends up depends entirely upon where we place it initially. The impact of the initial conditions has been named the “butterfly effect,” since, in the chaotic theory of weather, the beating of a butterfly’s wings in Asia can cause a hurricane in the southern Atlantic months later. Our lives evolve from our own butterfly effects. The tiniest perturbations in our youths, our “initial conditions,” generate profound alterations in our later lives.

This is the writing of not merely a technician, but an artist. We are reminded of our fallibility and vulnerability, and the magnificence of the human spirit.