This is a method I have been using to make difficult or important decisions. It is easy, simple, free and incredibly effective. It uses Napoleon Hill´s idea of a Master Mind and Carl Rogers´ insights on client-centred Psychology.
You may have read Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. It sold more than 15 million copies and is considered a Lifetime “Must Read” book.
After spending more than 20 years studying and interviewing many hugely successful people of his time, Hill created a list of principles for business success. One of them is The Power of the MasterMind. His definition of a MasterMind: it is the “Coordination of knowledge and effort, in a spirit of harmony, between two or more people, for the attainment of a definite purpose.”
According to Hill, this is the principle that allowed people like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford to build their massive business empires.
Of course, this is not amazingly new. We all talk to people who can help us see problems from a different perspective and create new insights. But during these times of social isolation, I began to use a modified version of Hill´s MasterMinding, and it is turning to be extremely helpful.
Have you noticed that we are usually better at solving other people´s problems than our own? We are good at advising people about what to do when facing challenges but not as good to advise ourselves.
This discrepancy was confirmed by Michigan and Waterloo Universities. Their researches concluded that when we are advising other people, we are more analytical than when we are trying to solve our problems. When helping others, we look at the situation from different perspectives and spend more time pondering about alternatives. So we make better decisions for others than we make for ourselves.
They also proposed that one way of improving our decisions, is to pick someone we respect in that area and ask ourselves: what would this person do in this situation? Or you could imagine what kind of advice you would give a friend going through this kind of problem.
So bringing together this idea with the Master Mind concept, I created the following tool to help me decide:
When faced with a difficult question or decision, I create an imaginary group of experts and write down the answers each one of them would probably give me.
I start by creating a table on Evernote and writing the problem I have to solve, or the decision to be made, as a question in the first column.
Then I pick five or six people I admire, people I believe that could help me answer the question, and write their names in the next columns. They are usually authors of books I read, people I spent a fair amount of time learning from, so I have some familiarity with how their thinking goes.
And then my Master Mind starts. For each person there, I write down what I believe would their advice be regarding that problem or question.
Recently, I was struggling to decide how to use my time amidst all the uncertainties brought by the coronavirus crisis. So I wrote down my question and assembled my Master Mind with Charlie Munger, Elon Musk, Daniel Priestley and others.
I was expecting to spend a long time thinking hard about what they would “tell” me, but amazingly, the answers were all there, immediately available in my mind. I quickly began to write their responses to my question under their names.
Probably what was going on is what Carl Rogers, the founder of the client-centred approach to psychology, affirmed regarding the work of the counsellor. The answers are already there, in the mind of the client. The work of the counsellor is to help the client find it by asking the right questions.
My next step was to evaluate and try to bring together the different answers I got. Again, I was surprised by how easy I found this task. Probably because as they all came from my thinking, there was already some alignment between the ideas. I rated each answer from 0 to 10 based on its usefulness and picked the best ones to build a short plan of action.
Next day I decided to revise the answers. I then fired a couple of members of my MasterMind 😊😊😊 and replaced them with people I believed could help me better. They did.
Well, by now, you may be thinking I should seek psychological help. I don’t blame you, but I found the whole thing extremely helpful. I got answers I was not expecting and managed to create a plan of action much better and faster then I would without this trick.
If you decide to try it, please let me know how it goes.
Recent Comments