The foundation for the whole book is that you can invent your own framework. Since you see the world not as it is but through a framework or map that you learn from your environment, you can invent a new framework for seeing the world in a more positive way or in a way that may help you solve personal problems.
Specifically, they say that the conventional framework is one of measurement, which assumes that you are faced with scarcity. They claim that this type of framework leads to problems:
"All the manifestations of the world of measurement - the winning and losing, the gaining of acceptance and the threatened rejection, the raised hopes and the dash of despair - all are based on a single assumption that is hidden from our awareness. The assumption is that life is about staying alive and making it through - surviving in a world of scarcity and peril."
This is an invented framework. Change the framework toward a model of plenty and you will be enveloped in a world of possibility - plenty of possibilities.
Much of the conventional framework is negative, is based on pessimism and leads to conflicts. According to the authors, optimists, not pessimists, are the realists:
"Often, the person in the group who articulates the possible is dismissed as a dreamer or as a Pollyanna persisting in a simplistic 'glass half-full' kind of optimism. The naysayers pride themselves on their supposed realism. However, it is actually the people who see the glass as 'half-empty' who are the ones wedded to a fiction, for 'emptiness' and 'lack'... are abstractions of the mind, whereas 'half-full' is a measure of the physical reality under discussion. The so-called optimist, then, is the only one attending to real things, the only one describing a substance that is actually in the glass."
What I love best about this book is that it often asks you to replace the conventional competitive framework for a more cooperative framework in order to reach your possibilities. Thus, they have chapters on Being a Contributor, Lighting a Spark and Telling the WE Story.
Here's what they say about Being a Contributor:
"Unlike success and failure, contribution has no other side. It is not arrived at by comparison. All at once I found that the fearful question, 'Is it enough?' and the even more fearful question, 'Am I loved for who I am, or for what I have accomplished?' could both be replaced by the joyful question, 'How will I be a contribution today."
Lighting a Spark is used to enroll a person you are having difficulties with in a common project:
"Enrollment is the art and practice of generating a spark of possibility for others to share."
Telling the WE Story paints the beauties of cooperation in the transcendent way the authors use that make reading this book like attending a concert:
"This entity, the WE, can be found among any 2 people, in any community or organization, and it can be thought of, in poetic terms, as a melody running through the people of the earth. It emerges in the way music emerges from individual notes when a phrase is played as one long line, in the way a landscape coalesces out of the multicolored strokes of an Impressionist painting when you get some distance, and in the way a 'family' comes into being when a first child is born."
The Art of Possibility is an excellent piece of art. It is short but engulfing. It makes clear that the world of competition and measurement hinders your development, while the world of cooperation and possibilitiy offers opportunities to reach self-actualization and happiness. Read it and be uplifted.
