7 characteristics of a great mind
I cannot fathom why it is that so little attention is
given to developing the entrepreneurial mind
within youngsters at school, college and university.
After all, the entrepreneurial mind is responsible
for almost everything that we enjoy and take
for granted; from toilet roll to toothpaste. It
disturbs me that we may be raising a whole
generation who are lacking the three things that
can really make them rich, namely; ideas,
imagination and initiative!
Through mis-education we have developed
great workers, but not great minds! This is a shame
because we live in the age of job insecurity and
at the same time we are entering the age of
entrepreneurial opportunity, where your number
one asset is going to be the quality of your ideas.
It has been said that great minds think alike. Quiet
clearly they don’t all think about the same things,
but they do all think in the same ways as follows:
1. Great minds question assumptions –
Breakthroughs, inventions and discoveries
in science, medicine and technology are
usually the result of someone questioning
or challenging the existing assumptions.
The truth is that we would never know how
far we could go if someone didn’t first go
too far!
2. Great minds are future focused – Small minds
are often buried in the past while average
minds are usually pre-occupied with the
present, but extraordinary minds are always
focused on the future. They imagine what
could be then they make it their duty to find
out how it can be. They are always moving
towards a goal and working towards the
progressive realisation of a dream.
3. Great minds reject limitations – My friend,
Dr Stan Harris says that, ‘barriers are not
meant to hold you back; they are meant to
be broken.’ As a hall of fame martial artist
he knows that wood, ice and concrete
can all be broken by human hands if the
mind is in the right place. The right place for
Dr Stan is beyond the barrier. The martial
artist is never trying to break the barrier;
instead they are aiming for something beyond
the barrier and that is why they successfully
breakthrough the barriers in their way.
Great minds can imagine a life beyond the
existing barriers. Instead of encouraging
people to think within the boundaries of
their socio-economic experience, we
should nurture the imagination of a life
beyond those boundaries.
4. Great minds are solution oriented - You will
never get a great mind to obsess and whine
about a problem. Instead they will focus and
concentrate on finding a solution. Solution
orientation is the hallmark of a great mind.
Solution orientation is the same as asking,
seeking and knocking until the answer arrives.
My favourite book says, ‘everyone who asks
receives and whoever seeks will find and to
him who knocks it shall be opened.’ This is the
art of the entrepreneur; creating solutions for
people at their point of need!
5. Great minds ask extraordinary questions:
Extraordinary questions typically begin with
what if? Why not? How can we? These
questions are designed to induce a state of
creativity. For example, the creative scientist
would say, ‘what if we put in more of this
and less of that? A creative architect might
ask, why not build around it? A creative
entrepreneur may ask, how can we sell
twice as much in half the time? These
extraordinary questions awaken a state of
extraordinary creativity, which then leads to
extraordinary progress.
6. Great minds place the burden of proof with
the sceptics: Great minds believe that certain
things are possible, even though they have
no proof of this outside of their gut feeling.
However a great mind does not feel obliged
to prove their theory to everyone because
they are more concerned with manifesting
their intentions than they are with winning
an argument. Great minds insist that the
burden of proof lies with the sceptic. They
must prove that it is not possible and while
they are busy preparing their case, the great
minds will simply get on with the job of making
it happen!
7. Great minds leverage from failure: Failure is
ultimately an education that comes loaded
with lessons about what not to do in the
future. As such, it is life’s way of correcting
and perfecting you. Without failure, you would
be incapable of achieving success because
the greatest lessons you will ever learn about
your own success will come from your own
failures. The most important things that you
need to know about success will be taught
to you in the school of hard knocks. The trick is
to carry the learning with you into the future,
while leaving the pain in the past!
Limited thinking = A limited life!
The objective in mis-education is always to limit your
thinking. This is simply because freethinking people
are dangerous, difficult to control and difficult to contain.
They don’t make great workers because their
personal standards are often too high, their tolerance
for poor conditions is low and their goal is usually to
quit the job as soon as possible. These people want
more, expect more and demand more from life.
Mis-education serves to strangle the genius, limit
the thinking and stifle the creativity out of most
people who go through the system. This is done in
several ways:
1. By limiting your options – The majority of people
come out of the educational system as helpless job-dependents.
They have no knowledge, skills or tools
for making any money outside of an employer. They
leave school, college and university and immediately
join the race for jobs. Those who are unsuccessful
begin claiming government benefits or they sit at
home waiting for the phone call that never comes.
Self-employment is seldom promoted as a viable
and affordable alternative to employment, even
though the majority of high earners are all self-employed.
In this respect people have been grossly
mis-informed. The alternative to employment is
not un-employment (poverty, sitting at home,
crime or begging for government help); it is self-employment!
However, most people haven’t even
begun to explore this possibility because they have
been conditioned to concentrate on landing a
good job. So much so that they have no clue how
they would make any money without one.
2. By feeding your fears – Much of our education system
is based on the fear of unemployment. The suggestion
is that if you fail in education, you will become
unemployable or that you will at best enter the job
market at the lowest levels. Unemployment is then
cited as the root cause of poverty, crime, anti-social
behaviour, broken families, drug abuse and a host of
other dysfunctions.
However, it is the lack of a viable alternative to
employment that causes these problems and not
the lack of employment itself. It is ultimately job-dependency
that should be feared much more
than being unable to find a job. The lack of jobs
is a fact that we are all going to have to live with.
But the lack of an alternative to a job is something
we shouldn’t have to live with.
What would happen if instead of fearing
Unemployment; people feared becoming job
dependent? The answer is that they would
supplement the limited education of the schools
with the unlimited success education of mentors.
Thanks to mis-education, most people find out too
late that life really offers much more. That is why,
people should know from the very earliest stages
that there is a sensible and sustainable alternative
to employment – i.e. self-employment!
They should also know:
• That self-employment is more likely to deliver
financial freedom than is a job.
• That the richest people in the world (who
started with little or nothing), did not do well
at school and in some cases dropped out.
• That the new economic age has made it
more possible for more people to make more
money, working for themselves from home,
than they could working for somebody else.
• That there are few if any barriers to entry for
independent marketers and entrepreneurs.
• That there is no shortage of opportunity, and
that there are no limits on income for people
who play the new game by the new rules.
This sort of education does not produce great
workers, because it nullifies the fear of unemployment.
It does however, produce great thinkers by stimulating
the entrepreneurial mind and by awakening the
creative genius within.
3. By rewarding compliance: Mis-education
typically rewards the conformist and punishes the
non-conformist. It celebrates those who work hard
to achieve job security, whilst it merely tolerates the
presence of those who prefer creative expressions
like art or inventions. This system of punishment
and reward effectively sends out a message to
students that says; concentrate your mental energy
on getting a good job because anything else is a
waste of time! However, the sad experience of many
is that concentrating on job security has been their
biggest and most disappointing waste of time.
This is why so many people are so disillusioned when
they leave university with elite qualifications, but are
forced to do jobs that are not remotely related to the
subjects that they studied so hard for. Worse yet, there
are many who cannot land a job at all, and are
struggling to pay off a huge student debt. What
went wrong here?
These students were mis-lead into putting all their
eggs into one basket. They banked all their hopes
and dreams on landing a good job! No one told them
that the chances of landing a good job are getting
slimmer and slimmer everyday. No one told them
that with all the will in the world, they may not land
a good job. Worse yet, no one told them what to
do if the job thing doesn’t work out. They were not
prepared for the realities of life in the real world.
Had someone told them these facts, they may
have tapped into their innate entrepreneurial mind
to create a series of options, contingencies and
alternatives for success.
What would happen if we rewarded creativity,
initiative, enterprise and leadership in the same way
that we reward academic achievements?
Believe it or not, there are some cultures in the
world that require nothing short of self-employment
from children who make it through university. ‘You
must own your own business,’ is the mantra they
are exposed to on a daily basis. Even if they get a
job, they do so as part of their education to gain
practical experience before setting up their own
business. For these people, business ownership is
the point and the prize in education and a job is
merely an extension of that education.
