The Invisible Mentor

Posts Tagged ‘Bill Gates’

I have been reading Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell for over two months, and it’s the first time I have ever taken so long to read a book that I actually enjoyed. I have read at least 20 other books during the two months, but I needed a lot of time to digest and process what I was reading in Outliers. When you hear about Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, the first thing that often comes to mind is that it takes 10,000 to master a subject. However the book is so much more than that.

According to Gladwell, “This book is about outliers, about men and women who do things that are out of the ordinary….People don’t rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage. The people who stand before kings may look like they did all themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn to work hard and make sense of the world in ways others don’t.”

Cover of Outliers: The Story of Success

Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell demonstrates to readers why some people succeed, while others fail even though both may put in 10,000 hours. Other elements are critical for success, it’s simply not only about putting in the hours and working hard. When I just started reading Outliers, I wrote the post Do Big Breaks, Mentoring, and Hard Work Equal to Success? to explore the idea. Gladwell says that to be successful, on top of hard work, you also have to get opportunities. For instance, Bill Gates worked hard writing computer programs, but he also had access to a computer which most people didn’t, which gave him an advantage, and then he also had the opportunity to use those programming skills.

Ingredients of Success

• Passion
• Talent
• Hard Work
• Opportunity
• Arbitrary Advantage

What’s this 10,000 hours that people are talking about?

Researchers have shown time and time again that to become excellent at mastering complex tasks requires 10,000 hours of hard practice. And the most successful people got the opportunity they needed to learn how to become an expert. For instance, The Beatles got numerous opportunities to play in clubs to accrue their 10,000 hours.  They recognized the opportunities and accepted them.

In addition, there were many transformative moments in history that helped to make millionaires, and timing was everything. For example, the industrial era in the United States, which was pre and post the American Civil War in the 1860s and 1870s, people like John D. Rockerfeller, Andrew Carnegie and Marshall Field were able to capitalize on that. Another transformative era was the personal computer revolution, which people Bill Gates and Bill Joy capitalized on.

Given all that has been mentioned, to be successful, work has to be satisfying because you’ll likely put in the necessary hours to gain expertise. There are three elements for satisfying work – autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward.

One thing that I had never thought much about, which the book gave prominence to is that “it matters where you’re from, not just in terms of where you grew up or where your parent grew up, but in terms of where your great-grandparents grew up and great-great-grandparents grew up…” It’s interesting that I have always been able to accept ambiguity, and I learned in Outliers that’s because of my Jamaican heritage.

A big takeaway from Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell is that, say for instance you are a surgeon, you have to understand what it really means to be a good surgeon, “when we understand how much culture and history and the world outside of the individual matter to professional success – then we don’t have to throw up our hands in despair…We have a way to make successes out of the unsuccessful.” And you can learn to remove cultural barriers that prevent you from being successful and living up to your true potential.

Five Great Ideas

1. Success is the result of “accumulative advantages.”
2. Success simple isn’t a function of individual merit, and the world in which we grew up in; and the rules we choose to write as a society does matter.
3. Success is a function of persistence, doggedness and willingness.
4. To become successful you have to master the art of standing up for yourself, and learn how to navigate systems and bureaucracies.
5. Power distance, which is concerned with attitudes toward hierarchy, specifically with how much a particular culture values and respects authority, plays a role in professional success.

I recommend world Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell. However, to get the most from the book, you have to allocate the time to reflect and contemplate on what you are reading. Please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

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Image via Wikipedia

Recently, I attended a book signing event at Indigo Books and Music where Walter Isaacson talked about his biography of Steve Jobs. Indigo’s CEO Heather Reisman did an excellent job interviewing Isaacson, and the audience got some deep insights into why Jobs was the way he was.

Isaacson remarked that kindness was not among Jobs’ top 100 traits – words he used to describe him include: Petulant, artistic, emotional, genius, mean, dual-personality, intuitive, control freak, liked to have his own way, had the ability to engender loyalty. If someone were eulogizing you, what would your top 100 traits be?

I’ve been thinking that I’m not always as grateful as I could be because there are times when I take things for granted. I also asked myself if I make the most of what I already have. Each of us is unique in our own way. We have talents that others don’t have, but are we using them well? Are we using them to serve others? When someone offers us their talents, are we gracious in accepting them, or are we dismissive? I am writing this post for you and for me.

Since attending the Isaacson event, I have been thinking how I can be of better service, and be gracious (gracious is one word that Isaacson used to describe Bill Gates) in the process. On The Invisible Mentor blog, I have added a page called The Mentors. On that page, I have placed all the Interviews and Profiles in Wisdom in one place where they can be easily accessed. The intent of The Invisible Mentor blog is to provide mentoring in a non-traditional way. I feature interviews I personally conducted, and profiles of wise people who have died, and that’s my unique way of connecting modern and ancient wisdom.

If there are blogs and other websites that you frequent and print their content, to strip away all that extraneous stuff so you don’t waste paper, download the Readability tool bar extension and click on it before you print. You’ll also notice that if you go directly to The Invisible Mentor blog, you’ll find a Print Friendly button at the end of each post. After you have used Readability to strip away whatever I have in the two outside columns you can print a clean copy of any post. In the mean time, I’ll research to see if there is a way to do that in one step.

Are you making the most of what you have, and how are you using it to serve the world?

How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

Interviewee Name: Evan Carmichael, Entrepreneur

Company Name: EvanCarmichael.com

Website: http://www.evancarmichael.com 

Avil Beckford: Tell me a little bit about yourself.

Evan Carmichael:  I’m the founder of a website called EvanCarmichael.com and we’re an online resource for entrepreneurs. We have 14 million people who check out the website and we try to give them motivations to keep going in their business and also some strategies to help them grow their companies. Before that I had a biotech software company, built it up, sold it then hooked up with a venture capital company and was raising venture capital for entrepreneurs and the started my website.

Avil Beckford: What’s a typical day like for you?

Evan Carmichael: I’ve done a lot with time management and try to chunk the tasks I try to do every day. I do most of my work between Monday and Thursday. Usually on a typical day I get in around 1 o’clock, go through all my emails – I’ll spend an hour-and-a-half on that. I’ll spend 90 minutes every day doing CEO tasks, and those are important tasks to build and grow my business. And the rest of the day I could be doing emails or other projects that we happen to have on the go.

Avil Beckford: How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?

Evan Carmichael:  A lot of entrepreneurs have challenges with this, especially if they are solo-entrepreneurs or working from home, it can be hard to keep it up and keep the energy going. For me, I really started my website around the famous entrepreneur profiles. If you go to the home page you’ll see stories about Oprah Winfrey, Donald Trump and other highly successful entrepreneurs and if you look at their stories and how they got started it wasn’t easy for them. They had a lot of hardships to overcome and they often doubted themselves. They didn’t know if they would be successful or not. And you think, “Wow that’s crazy, these guys were scared just like I am now.” They are human, they had all these challenges, and it makes it easier for me to keep going.

I also enjoy getting feedback from my readers and viewers. Every time I send out a newsletter or create a new video, I’ll get comments back from people saying, “This really changed my life, thank you so much. It’s a great resource.” And when you hear those types of things it makes you want to keep going and keep providing more information and ideas to help people out.

Avil Beckford: If you had to start over from scratch, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?

Evan Carmichael:  I don’t regret any of the decisions that I’ve made because they helped to get me where I am now. But knowing what I know now, when I first started my business, it wasn’t even a business at all. The website was called EvanCarmichael.com just off my name because it was more of a personal site. It grew organically. There wasn’t a plan behind it from the very beginning. So I would have started sooner on that front. I probably would have gotten into communicating with a audience a little bit better, so doing a newsletter sooner, doing social media sooner, getting my Twitter account and Facebook page and YouTube Channel all set up sooner. I’m really happy with how things are going now , but if I’d started that years ago, I’d be a lot further ahead now.

Avil Beckford: What’s the most important business or other discovery you’ve made in the past year?

Evan Carmichael: First I would encourage people to try to be genuine and try to help people. It might sound like obvious advice but a lot of people start off in business with the goal of making money and not necessarily following their passion and not really helping people out. So really try to help people as much as you can. Give advice, be the expert on whatever area you’re in and try to help them out as much as you can.

Tell your story. People like dealing with people. When I fist stated my site, I didn’t have my picture anywhere and people said, “It’s called EvanCarmichael.com, but I cannot see who you are.” So I started doing a lot more with my story and people wanted to find out a lot more about me, and people are interested in your story. As an entrepreneur you want to be properly telling that, and then try to reach more people.

And that’s what I have done more of in the past year. I’ve done a pretty good job of people who have come to me and needed help, they wanted me to help them with their business, or do an interview, or whatever it is. I try to keep my door open to entrepreneurs as much as I can. In the past year I have done it in a more open and public forum. So if people ask me questions, I may write an email back but I may create a YouTube video so many people can benefit from it and not just that single entrepreneur. And that has paid off in a lot of different ways, so that’s an important discovery I have made in the past year.

Avil Beckford: What are three threats to your business, your success, and how are you handling them?

Evan Carmichael:

1. We are dependent on people finding us through search engines. We are an online business so if people aren’t searching for our type of information online we wouldn’t have people coming to the site or if we got penalized for whatever reason we wouldn’t have a lot of traffic to the site. We try to do all the right things like link building, social media, and trying to provide relevant, ongoing valuable content that people would want to search for and not have spammy content.
2. We are dependent on advertising revenue, that’s how so we make most of our money. If advertisers had a hard time so they cut down their budgets and weren’t interested in going after small business owners then that would hurt our business as well. We try to diversify our sources so we are not dependent on one single source of advertising. If a really bad economy hit all advertisers then that would impact us, but if any one company didn’t do well we’d be okay.
3. We have a great core team and if for whatever reason they thought that I was a bad boss, or it wasn’t fun here anymore then that would really hurt my business as well. I try to provide a workplace for them that they enjoy what they are doing and feeling that they are being challenged. I also try to be a nice person – a lot of people don’t like their bosses and think they aren’t great people, and so to try and understand what they are going through really helps out a lot.

Avil Beckford: What’s unique about the service that you provide?

Evan Carmichael: The thing that started to differentiate us is the famous entrepreneur profiles so we have a lot of content for entrepreneurs. What we got known for are profiles of famous entrepreneurs like Oprah Winfrey, Martha Stewart, and Bill Gates and looked at how they got started. So how Bill Gates makes $1 million now doesn’t interest me. How did he go from zero with that idea to making his first million and what can I learn from that as an entrepreneur, I find that really interesting. So we have the largest collections of those famous entrepreneur profiles and stories online. And that’s how we started our niche going after those entrepreneur profiles and then other people wanted to contribute to our website and we’ve grown to have 6,000 people who contribute to the website. But it all started by creating this niche that we’re good at and that gave us awareness that attracted people who wanted to contribute.

Avil Beckford: Describe a major business or other challenge you had and how you resolved it. What kind of lessons did you learn in the process?

Evan Carmichael: It’s a challenge that a lot of entrepreneurs go through and that’s managing my life – my off-work time – with my working time and trying to create a happy work-life balance. I think that’s something everybody can relate to. I have a wife and I recently had a child, two years old now. That’s a great part of your life but limits what you can do in your business life. I’d often be pulled in both directions trying to figure out, “Well how do I manage this? How do I have a happy family and also a grow business?”

I sat down with my wife and figured out what times we wanted to spend together and how we can break this out during the days, and how can I make time at work more effective and more efficient. So most days in the morning I’m doing something with my family, and my wife has her own business teaching salsa classes, so she is usually tied up in the evenings. So we don’t get to spend evenings together so we try to spend the mornings together and do something. We’ll have lunch together, and then I’ll come into work at 1 o‘clock.

And then I start chunking out my time. I’m usually working from 1 o-clock to 6 o’clock and pick three main projects that I’m working on. One will be my email for the day, one will be my CEO task and another will be a project that I’m working on at the time. And I found that creating that schedule really helped me feel happy that I have a lot of time to work on my business and I still had a lot of time to spend with my family.

The lesson I learned is that communication is important, and that’s important if you are married or if you have a team. Instead of getting stressed out or feeling there wasn’t an answer, the best solution came from just being able to talk to my wife, sit down and come up with a plan. Also talking to my staff, we have a lot of remote working hours, it used to be that everybody came into the office and we all met here, but now people know what they are doing so we don’t need to see each other that much. So people can work at home if they want, they can come into the office if they want, so communicating that and making sure that everyone was on the same page was an important lesson that we learned.

Avil Beckford: Tell me about your big break and who gave you.

Evan Carmichael: For this business, how I started building my website after I sold my software company, I was being asked to speak at a lot of events – young entrepreneur success story. I just used my website to say, “Here is where I’m going to be speaking.” Then when I connected with a venture capital company I started writing content around how to raise capital and use my website for that as well as some famous entrepreneur profiles.

I didn’t have a big moment, but I think what really helped was as I built up content for my site, we started to get people who wanted to contribute as well, and at the time I didn’t have a revenue model behind it. It was just marketing consultants, business coaches writing to say, “Hey you have a great site, I’d love to add an article about business planning,” or whatever it was and I’d say, “Sure, “I’ll put it up.”

I thought it would be great for my readers even if there was no clear way that I was going to benefit from it. I thought it was useful and helpful information for my readers. Then we discovered that we could make money through advertising and we did a couple of tests using Google’s Adsense program and discovered that this could actually be a potential business where before I hadn’t thought of it that way. It was more about providing useful information and potentially generating some leads for the venture capital business.

I guess the big break came when we realized that this could actually be a business in itself making money through advertising and then I slowly transitioned my business to focus on that path.

Avil Beckford: Describe one of your biggest failures. What lessons did you learn, and how did it contribute to a greater success?

Evan Carmichael:  With my biotech software company we realized that we wanted to sell the business. The market was certainly heating up and we thought if we didn’t sell now we’d have to wait another five, ten years before we got another opportunity again. The mistake we made was try to identify companies that would be a good fit for us, who would buy us and what would be their incentive to buy us. We identified a couple of players and we spent most of our energy on the number one player and it turned out that they were not interested in us.

One of their competition, the number four player in the market was the one that ended up doing a lot of acquisitions and bought our biggest competitor and it was between us and them at the end of the day. We did our presentations and that other company got bought out for $40 million in cash, which was a great deal. Maybe if we had done a better job of preparing, and not gone after the number one player, we would have looked at some of the other companies that were starting to kick up some noise. We might have had a better chance of getting that deal.

So what I learned from that was a lot of times the number one player is lethargic and not as interested in growing. The smaller companies, two, three, six down the line are usually more aggressive and willing to take risks to try to grow because they want to be the number one company. So they’re more motivated, ambitious, so if you’re looking to form partnerships, and you’re looking to grow your business and get some credibility you might have a better chance going after the companies that aren’t number one, but want to get there and see you as the vehicle to help them get there.

Avil Beckford: What’s one of the toughest decisions you’ve had to make and how did it impact your life?

Evan Carmichael:  I think the decision to sell the business was a tough one. We had a good business going and there were three partners in the business and we had a good lifestyle and really enjoyed what we were doing. We went back and forth should we sell it, should we not sell it. A lot of the reason came from my partners wanting to move to the US and selling the business would help them get there, where for me I was happy where I was. I am based in Toronto, Canada. That weighed on my mind and at the end of the day we decided that the market opportunity was right, and if we didn’t do it now it would have to be much further down the line. If we waited too long the hotness would go away, it wouldn’t be as sexy a deal anymore, and it would be harder to sell for a good price.

That was one decision that we struggled a lot over, but eventually we made one that everyone was happy with. Starting a business is like raising a baby and you put so much into it that to sell it off can be a big challenge sometimes for people.

Avil Beckford: What are three events that helped to shape your life?

Evan Carmichael:

1. When we sold the business I started to get a lot of invitations to speak and a lot of media, and before then, I was just running the business. I was helping the customers but I was providing information to help entrepreneurs. Selling the business and being asked to make all these appearances got me thinking that I could try to help other entrepreneurs.  They can learn through my story and that helped shape where I am right now and the type of business that I do.
2. A great discovery we made with my first business was to think that we weren’t the first people to do what we were doing. We were a software company and when we started, I was 19 years old, still in university, didn’t know about what I was doing. And one day I said, “Hey we’re not the first company to try to sell software so why can’t we model success and see what other companies have done,” and then try to use their strategies that have worked out for them. So we looked at companies like Microsoft, Intuit, McAfee and looked at how they got started – from zero to a million in revenue, how can we get started. How can we copy some of their successes? And that’s been a strategy that I’ve continued to use, and that’s why I put on my website famous entrepreneur profiles. There are a lot of lessons there that you can take.
3. Getting married and having a child is another event that shaped my life. It definitely changes how you do your business and you have to restructure your life around it. It’s not just you, you have to plan for other people, and maybe you cannot spend as much time doing the things you were doing. You have to make sure you are working smarter and you may have to change your schedule.

Avil Beckford: What’s an accomplishment that you are proudest of?

Evan Carmichael:  One that came up which I’m really proud of is we created a program to support entrepreneurs in Africa through Kiva – a micro-lending program – and we’ve helped over 1,800 entrepreneurs get their businesses started, which I’m really happy with. Their businesses are really small, it could be for $1,000 so they can buy some chickens and build a fence and start a business, and that’s what they do. And then they can grow the business and hire a couple of people. It gets them to learn how to be entrepreneurial but also support themselves, and not depend on anybody else for their livelihood. To be able to help that many people get their business set up is great, it’s a feeling that you’re making a difference. When people tell you that you have made a difference in their lives it makes you feel good.

Avil Beckford: How did mentors influence your life?

Evan Carmichael:  We’ve had a lot of mentors. A lot of my mentors come from people who I have never met. So when we were selling the business, we had a number of people who helped us and gave us advice on what to do because they had gone through the process and it was brand new for us. We leaned on them a lot for advice on how to structure it and who to talk to, and what terms to ask for. But I think a lot of the mentors from the business side have come from people I don’t know so it could be from books that I have read, famous entrepreneur profiles and you read stories about how they have accomplished success and it gives you ideas. And I found a lot of success from doing that.

On the personal side, my parents have been great mentors, teaching me how to deal with people and to try to do what’s right. So the combination of both of those two things has had a big impact on my life.

Avil Beckford: What’s one core message you received from your mentors?

Evan Carmichael: From the personal side it would be to try to do the right thing. My parents always taught me if I am not sure what to do I should always strive to do the right thing wherever possible, and sometimes it’s hard to do the right thing. I may not be the best at doing that, but I always try to heed that advice.

From the business side of things, I think following your passion is definitely something that comes up a lot. It would be great for any entrepreneur to think about. Most entrepreneurs will start up a business because they think it’s going to make them a lot of money and they don’t really care about what they are doing. Those are the businesses that don’t succeed whereas if you look at the businesses that have really done well, it started with an entrepreneur that was really passionate about what they were doing.

You have to care about money, but it’s more about changing the way people do work, run their lives or whatever it is. They have a strong passion for making their companies successful, and that passion will help you to get through the dark days. Every entrepreneur has dark days when they aren’t sure if they are going to make it or not, and they get down on themselves. But if you’re really excited about what you’re doing – imagine what work you’d be doing if you weren’t paid to do it, things you love so much that you have to do it for free – then turn it into a business you have a good chance of being successful.

Avil Beckford: An invisible mentor is a unique leader you can learn things from by observing them from afar, in the capacity of an Invisible Mentor, what is one piece of advice that you would give to readers?

Evan Carmichael:  Follow your passion, that’s definitely where you want to start. From there I would look at how you can be as helpful as possible. That may sound super basic, but how can you help as many people as you can and be significant, so you want to make sure that you have a significant impact on their lives in whatever industry you are in. If you sell flooring, or you’re a personal coach, you want to try to have a significant, positive impact in the lives of the people you’re touching. And if you can do that, if you can have a significant impact then you can build a good business from it even if it’s a small market. If you are really making a difference and being super helpful, that can build you a little business. You can make that business go from a small business to a highly successful one by helping more people. So still being significant, still being super helpful, but trying to reach a wider audience, so go beyond your initial niche and try to meet more people.

So for our site, we started with the famous entrepreneur profiles. That’s what we got known for and we attracted a lot of people from that and we’ve since expanded to cover a wider range of topics that entrepreneurs are interested in to help more people and still be significant in their lives.

How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

Walter Isaacson is a biographer, and he came on my radar because he is writing an authorized biography of Steve Jobs due in early 2012. Steve Jobs is someone who I’m very interested in, and would like to learn more about. I decided to check out Walter Isaacson’s writing to see if I liked his style.

At the bookstore I had a few options, and narrowed it down to Benjamin Franklin: An American Life and American Sketches: Great Leaders, Creative Thinkers, and Heroes of a Hurricane. Since I had read the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, I purchased my other option, American Sketches which is a collection of previously written essays by Isaacson.

I felt really drained reading the first few sections of American Sketches and had to put the book down for a few days. I later realized that I was drained because the first few sections were about politicians, some of the choices and decisions they made, and the impact they had. And politics is also not something that I am particularly interested in. When I returned to American Sketches and slogged through the sections about the politicians, I really got into the book, enjoyed it and found it a worthwhile read.

American Sketches consists of nine sections, and each section includes several essays:

1. Franklin and Other Founders
2. Statecrafters
   1. McGeorge Bundy, the Brightest
   2. Kissinger and the Roots of Realism
   3. He’s Back
   4. Kissinger Reappraised
   5. James Baker, Wise Man?
   6. Madeline’s War
   7. Colin Powell, the Good Soldier
   8. George Tenet and the Instinct to Please
3. Reagan and Gorbachev
4. The Clintons
5. Albert Einstein
6. The Age of Technology
   1. In Search of the Real Bill Gates
   2. The Passion of Andrew Grove
   3. Our Century… and the Next One
   4. The Biotech Age
   5. Person of the Century
7. Journalism
8. Interlude: Woody Allen’s Heart Wants What It Wants
9. New Orleans, Mon Amour

Sections 2 to 4, which translate to pages 49 to 125 is what I found extremely draining. But if you enjoy politics you will appreciate those sections. Isaacson’s writing is very academic, and I would go as far as to say that for many sections of American Sketches, it would be easier to understand if the reader had at least a university degree. Isaacson is a trained journalist who has worked for The Times in the UK and Time magazine. He was also the managing editor of Time magazine, chairman and CEO of CNN, and is now CEO of the Aspen Institute.

Even though Isaacson’s writing is very academic, I appreciate his work because he is very thorough and whatever he writes is very well researched. The book had a feel of honesty about it, and I was more informed after I read it. While I read the essay about Bill Gates, which mentioned Paul Allen, Steve Ballmer, Nathan Myhrvold I found that I wanted to read Paul Allen’s memoir released recently to compare Allen’s impressions of Gates, Ballmer and Myhrvold with Isaacson’s.

In Isaacson’s essays you often get an intimate look at the people he writes about. He covers a topic through the eyes of a real person to bring the topic to life. You also get new information from him even if you are knowledgeable of the subject or the person. For a while there was an obsession with the public about Einstein’s religious beliefs. Some thought he was an atheist, others thought he was a pantheist, and Isaacson presented excerpts from Einstein records so you can see for yourself what Einstein really said.

And you saw that throughout the book. He presented a transcript of his interview with Woody Allen who was in the media at the time because he started to date Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn. Mia Farrow was Allen’s former lover. Isaacson asked Allen the tough questions such as, “How could you get involved with someone who was almost a daughter? But wasn’t it breaking many bonds of trust to become involved with your lover’s daughter? Did you really take nude pictures of Soon-Yi? Did you molest your daughter? Will your relationship with Soon-Yi continue? Do you consider it a healthy, equal relationship?” His personal feelings about how he felt about the situation did not cloud the way he behaved. For that moment in time, you got an intimate look at Woody Allen and the type of person he is.

Am I better off for having read American Sketches: Great Leaders, Creative Thinkers, and Heroes of a Hurricane? Absolutely! The best books are not necessarily the easiest to read, though it helps. I still didn’t enjoy the sections on politics, but I know that people who enjoy political science will appreciate the new insights in Isaacson’s essays. In the journalism section he presented models that he thinks would work for the future of journalism. Originally from New Orleans, his essay talked about the impact of Hurricane Katrina and how rebuilding slow was the best thing for the city, and based on his reasons you saw that as well.

A really good book transforms people, and at the very least, opens them up to a new way of thinking. I got a better sense of who the people were in the essays because of Isaacson’s thoroughness in the way he told the stories through the people. I recommend American Sketches: Great Leaders, Creative Thinkers, and Heroes of a Hurricane by Walter Isaacson and I am sure that a few of his essays will resonate with you even if his writing is too academic.

How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

How often do you spend time thinking? Were our teachers on to something when they told us to put our thinking hats on? This week we present Michael Hewitt-Gleeson founder of The School of Thinking where he teaches people how to think. If he could deliver one message to you, he’d like you to absorb the statement, “The current view of the situation, can never be equal to the better view of the situation.” So what does that mean? Say for instance you are facing a challenge, any challenge, there is someone in the world who has faced and successfully resolved that same challenge. If you are open, and accept the fact that your view of your current reality is not the best, you can use a search engine such as Google to discover what others have done in your situation. Choose the best option, and now you have a better view of the situation. This is a simple yet profound piece of advice.

As usual, while you are reading the interview, take notes, you will easily five takeaways to apply to your life. Let me know what your five takeaways are by writing them in the comment box at the end of the post.

Avil Beckford: Tell me a little bit about yourself.

Michael Hewitt-Gleeson: Apart from the fact that I’m incredibly good looking (A big smile comes through the headset), I’m Australian, born and grew up here but for many years I lived overseas, mostly based in New York and North America. I run the School of Thinking, which is the largest program in the world for teaching thinking as a skill.

Avil Beckford: What’s a typical day like for you?

Michael Hewitt-Gleeson: Like most people, while I’m still in my pajamas, I head straight to my computer and start looking at some of my emails that have come in, then I do about an hour’s worth of work on the website where I run The School of Thinking. (I’m running it from my iPad as well, which could be a trap because it means I could be taking it into my bedroom). After that, I make a cup of tea and depending on the day, sometimes I have meetings, which means I get ready and go to those. Other times I might be working from my office which is right across from the beach here in St Kilda in Melbourne. The typical day if I’m not with a client or giving a talk somewhere then I’m doing research, writing, and running the School of Thinking on the internet.

Avil Beckford: How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?

Michael Hewitt-Gleeson: It’s a very good question, but I am motivated because I like what I’m doing. There are odd days when you ask yourself if you are wasting your time, but overwhelmingly I like what I’m doing, it’s enjoyable, and it involves a variety of things. I get enough feedback from people around the world that makes me think that it’s worthwhile. I don’t have to do much motivating.

Avil Beckford: If you had to start over from scratch, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?

Michael Hewitt-Gleeson: I wouldn’t waste so much time. Always in retrospect, you can see the amount of time that you’ve wasted. The posting I just put on the website is about the amount of time every one tells me that they waste in business meetings. You go along to the meeting, the truth is never told, no decisions are ever made, you play along until the meeting ends, and then you rush off to your next meeting. Fortunately since I run my own show, I don’t attend a lot of meetings, but I do begrudge the amount of time that gets wasted. I try to look back on things that I’ve done and do them differently and not waste so much time. Maybe I’d spend more time at the beach, reading and enjoying some other things than just wasting time. But mostly I’m pretty happy with the way my life has progressed.

Avil Beckford: What’s the most important business or other discovery you’ve made in the past year?

Michael Hewitt-Gleeson: I’m still thinking about how I’m going to write about this, but the realization of how much of what we do is sort of looking in the wrong direction. For example, Jack Welch of General Electric once told me that he had to hide on the way up all of the skills he needed when he became chairman, otherwise he wouldn’t have gotten promoted. It’s sort of like the elephant in the room. Most of the time we are talking about a, b and c, when really it’s about x, y and z, and the older you get, the more you realize that so much time and effort is spent on the traditional standard belief, and ways of doing things. It’s obvious that they don’t work, but we go round and round. I’m trying to figure out how to write about this, and how to find an interesting and very clear way of working this out. This is what I am thinking about most these days. I talk to a very big mining company here in Australia where people have to make multi-billion dollar decisions about the big holes in the ground where they dig, and the sort of training programs that they go to, and the business school they attend, are all teaching stuff that doesn’t work, but how do you tell people this?

Avil Beckford: What’s one of the biggest advances in your industry over the past five years?

Michael Hewitt-Gleeson: In my industry which is education, the biggest thing is what you and I are now doing online, escaping from traditional places like classrooms. I just saw a quote this morning where Bill Gates feels that within five years most universities will become obsolete. In other words a $50,000 university education, most of those lectures, and probably better ones can be accessed online for less than a couple thousand dollars. So certainly since I’ve put the School of Thinking online in 1995, we send out more thinking lessons to 45 countries with only one or two staff. The rest is outsourced, and you are guaranteed about 100 times more effective training than when I was running a program in New York with 120 live instructors nationwide and doing things the traditional way. To me, in other industries, the internet, the worldwide web technologies and this kind of technology (Skype) with you in Toronto, and me in Melbourne, and these kinds of developments have been the biggest changes for me.

Avil Beckford: What are the three threats to your business, your success, and how are you handling them?

Michael Hewitt-Gleeson:

1. One threat is the lack of reliable information, and the amount of time and effort you have to put in to try and uncover the great truth than what is given. Most of the stuff you read in the media, and most of the stuff you get from people who set stuff up, are either flawed and incomplete, or flawed in intent and design. And you have to make to get past that, or remind yourself of that, and try to find out what’s really going on. The threat of disinformation in countries like Australia, America and England are dominated by a particular media and in many cases by one person. So it is trying to remember this and working around it, otherwise you’ll get caught up in disinformation.
2. Another threat is that I am getting older and don’t have as much energy as I used to have. There are ways to operate more efficiently and cleverly which helps.

Avil Beckford: What’s unique about the service that you provide?

Michael Hewitt-Gleeson: We teach thinking, and what I mean by thinking is the ability to escape from your point of view and find a better point of view. Most of the western educational systems teach you to defend your point of view because we use the Greek right or wrong system. Our parliamentary system have people on one side who think they are right and everyone else is wrong, and all the people on the other side think they are right and everyone else is wrong. In our educational institutions you are taught to get right answers and to avoid wrong answers. Well if you work in a business, and you go out and present offers to customers, you are taught to get yeses and avoid nos. So it’s the ancient 2,500 year old Greek right-wrong system that sorts information into boxes – that’s right, that’s wrong. We don’t teach that, we try to go beyond that and teach thinking strategies, and brain software based on science and things we now know about how the brain works. There are very few people who do that, and the other thing is that it’s free, so people don’t have to pay for it, and they find it very difficult to believe, so that is also unique about our service. We are independent and do not have corporate sponsors so we can actually say what we want to say. Most organizations have shareholders’ expectations to meet, corporate sponsors and religious affiliations, so it’s very rare these days to find an independent voice.

Avil Beckford: What do you observe most people in your field doing badly that you think you do well?

Michael Hewitt-Gleeson: There aren’t many people in my field who are claiming to teach thinking, although we have worked very hard to get on the school curriculum as a subject over the past 25 years, and it has become an educational fad and in the US and it is called critical thinking. It’s no surprise that it’s what they were already teaching. There is a feeling that we are teaching thinking, now isn’t that good, but in fact there is no change they are teaching what they were already teaching for the past 2,500 years. The problem is that they do not realize that they are doing that. And this is now happening in business schools since the global financial crisis. I’ve just read several articles that at Harvard and elsewhere, business schools are feeling the pinch, and less and less people are going to business schools because after all how could there be a global financial crisis if all our executives knew what they were doing. These executives went to business schools so there is a crisis of confidence in business schools so they are making changes and are going from teaching growth to teaching ethics and ethical leadership. There is a report just put out by the Melbourne Business School that they are going to teach Christian Ethical Leadership, now that’s the very system that has been used in business school for the past 50 years so how can you change things and go back and do the same things? I think it’s very difficult for them to change their point of view to something better.

Avil Beckford: Describe a major business or other challenge you had and how you resolved it.

Michael Hewitt-Gleeson: The challenge was to provide a global school that anyone, anywhere, any time can access the lessons that we teach on how to be a better thinker with as little impediment as possible. This is an ongoing challenge and the way I resolve it is through finding, learning about new technologies, testing, and experimenting with them and as they work I add them to the system that we use. This has been going on since 1995, but in a very deliberate way. We are also always thinking about how we can broaden access, keep it free and keep it interesting and in so doing we have evolved in different ways and we get more and more feedback. Our students tell us every day what they like and don’t like. We ask for feedback on a daily basis and we listen – we do a GBD, a good, bad, better, so what’s good, what’s bad and what we can do better, so this allows us to evolve a lot faster.

Avil Beckford: Tell me about your big break and who gave you.

Michael Hewitt-Gleeson: One big break was from a famous man in America, Professor George Gallup who started the Gallup Poll and invented market research. He is the fellow who discovered the statistical sample. If you measure a population you can get their point of view and of course that is difficult and expensive to do. If you measure a statistical random sample of 1,200 people, you get the same point of view as if you measured the population. And of course it’s possible to measure a sample and get a small deviation plus or minus. The Gallup Poll has predicted the outcome of every US Presidential Elections since the mid 1930s.

At a time when we needed some help and advice in getting The School of Thinking going, in breaking through the education system, someone of that stature as Professor George Gallup lent his name to it, and he said that what we were doing was possibly one of the greatest things in the world. He in a sense became my mentor, the supervisor for my PhD. He wrote the foreword for one of my books. He was a very nice and encouraging gentleman. He was in his 80s at the time, and I was a much younger man and he extended a hand. I was very gracious with his hospitality and would visit him at his farm up at Princeton. Looking back, this was a huge break and very practical one, and I’m very grateful because it led to a cover story on Readers Digest in 1993. It was an international edition with over 70 million readers which put the school of Thinking on the map. At that time, it was like being on Oprah today.

Avil Beckford: Describe one of your biggest failures. What lessons did you learn, and how did it contribute to a greater success?

Michael Hewitt-Gleeson: When I started the school, I started it with Edward de Bono, and we worked together for about seven years. We were very successful on a number of projects and ventures. We published the first book on thinking called Learn to Think and co-authored it, then we had a disagreement which was over a program we developed at the School of Thinking called Thinking Hats. Edward published the book Thinking Hats, which was his most successful book but did not give any attribution to the School of Thinking. This led to a disagreement and ultimately we split-up. We went separate ways and at the time that was certainly to me a disappointment, and it caused some distractions. Though we didn’t go to court, it was very close.

From my point of view I then developed a new syllabus for the School of Thinking. I couldn’t use the name Thinking Hats, and at the time the very first personal computers were coming out, and I was doing a lot of work for IBM, in the mid-eighties in Europe. It was a new development so I coined the phrase necktop computer, that’s a million times more powerful than a desktop computer, but what we don’t have is software. We are accustomed to using the old Greek logic software, that’s 2,500 years old. The importance of your desktop computer that you’ve got is the software, surely we need software for our brain. I wrote my book Software for the Brain, which became a bestseller. And in a sense because Edward and I became what you might say competitors, things worked out good not only for him and myself, but also for the market because competition is a good thing and now people have choices. So this is something that at the time I thought was a failure, it was distracting, negative, disappointing and hurtful, but it evolved into something that was stronger, and I was then able to run the school the way that I wanted to do it, and we do things quite differently. Both programs are quite useful for the people who use them, but they are quite different, and people now have a choice.

Avil Beckford: What has been your biggest disappointment in your life – and what are you doing to prevent its reoccurrence?

Michael Hewitt-Gleeson: As I get older, I realize the importance and value of friendships, love and relationships, loyalty and those times you sit with someone, whether you have a glass of wine or sit on the beach, listen to music or just have a chat with your friends, family or partner or anyone that you are close to. That’s what it is really all about. The upside is that when you form those relationships and you enjoy them, we all have them. Fortunately I have some longstanding friendships, but obviously if some of those relationships for some reason, you don’t nurture them or something goes wrong like what I just described with Edward de Bono – they are very disappointing and you always feel regretful that the relationships that were important sometimes bend or change. That happens in business and in every thing.

Avil Beckford: What’s one of the toughest decisions you’ve had to make and how did it impact your life?

Michael Hewitt-Gleeson: In the military and the trauma ward they call difficult decisions triage. When you choose one thing, you have to un-choose another. The whole process is selection and rejection. We’d like to eat our cake and still have it but we cannot. That means we have to give some things up. I always find that to be the most difficult decision, when you make choices. For example I had a career in New York, and it was getting better and better, and bigger and bigger and we had some very big breakthroughs, but at the same time, my father in Australia was getting older and I’d spent a long time away from home and was realizing that if I didn’t spend some quality time with him, in a few years time he would be gone, and I would regret it so I just packed up, left New York and returned to Australia. That was the end of that aspect of my career, and I’ve made a much smaller mark here. I spent seven years with my father before he died. He was the greatest influence in my life, so you have to give up one thing to get the other. It’s not a decision that I regret, but from a career, commercial or other point of view, I think we are all faced with decisions where you have to choose. The famous, terrible movie, Sophie’s Choice was the worst possible decision to have to choose between two children. So sometimes you have to make choice, whether it is to do this, or that, and often those choices mean rejecting another option and sometimes that’s very difficult.

Avil Beckford: What are three events that helped to shape your life?

Michael Hewitt-Gleeson: When I was about 20 in 1967, they put some marbles in a barrel in Australia, 366 marbles, one for every day in the year. They pulled the marbles out of the barrel and if you were a 20 year old man who was born on that particular day, May 22^nd, then you went into the army. In the US they call it draft of national service. I was drafted for the Viet Nam war so I spent a year in training and a year in Viet Nam, and at the time I was halfway through a degree at Melbourne. In a sense you were plucked from your family and life, and taken off on to a tangent to something that changes your life forever. Like anything in life, there are pluses and minuses. I received lots of training that very valuable – leadership training that has lasted all my life, which a young man at 20 wouldn’t normally get. It had a huge effect on my life, and there were negatives as well. I can’t honestly imagine what my life would have been like without that experience. That was one of the biggest events that changed my life.

Geographic location: I was going to work with Edward de Bono in Cambridge, England when I left Australia. I visited New York on the way, really for a weekend, but I ended up staying there for 14 years. I went on and did a PhD there, and also started the School of Thinking, but I also experienced the fun and pleasure of living in New York in the seventies and eighties. Living in New York was a huge change for me. Had I not lived there, I would have lived a completely different life. I was lucky to be there and enjoy it.

Technology: If the right tools are available at the right time, the computer, internet and more recently the iPad and the apps we are developing for our stuff that can have a huge impact on your life. Just like the printing press came along for Martin Luther, without it, no one would have heard of him. So different tools that have come along at different times in my life have had a big impact and directed which way I headed.

Avil Beckford: What’s an accomplishment that you are proudest of?

Michael Hewitt-Gleeson: It has to be the School of Thinking. One of the disagreements that Edward and I had was that I wanted to make the School of Thinking free to anyone and everyone at anytime, and the alternative is to have something that is quite expensive. There is no right or wrong here, I often buy things because they are expensive. I own a Bentley which is quite expensive so I see there is nothing wrong with charging money, especially if you provide value, and Edward does, but I thought the School of Thinking was something that should be available to everyone for free and that was part of the argument, and part of the reason that we split up. I took the School of Thinking and kept it going. I’ve worked hard and funded it myself out of the monies I earn from consulting, and it’s the first school on the internet. It’s the biggest and longest program for teaching thinking. It’s gone on for 30 years, sometimes it’s been easy and sometimes it’s been difficult, but I’m proud to say that it’s flourishing and doing well and still available to anyone in the world who can get online and it’s free of charge. It’s something that I meant to do 30 years ago and I’ve stuck with it for 30 years. I guess I’m proud of that.

Avil Beckford: How did mentors influence your life?

Michael Hewitt-Gleeson: There are people who come along, and sometimes they encourage you, or tell you what you do not want to hear. So one category are people who are wiser, often older and in a different circumstance, who are able to give you good advice, direction or point things out if you are willing to listen. Professor George Gallup and Edward de Bono were great mentors for me. Edward de Bono was my tutor for my PhD, he had one student, me. I am the only one in the world who has a PhD in lateral Thinking, and Edward de Bono and George Gallup were my examiners. They were two extraordinary individuals who spent a lot of time with me, and I have built a whole career around that.

Avil Beckford: What’s one core message you received from your mentors?

Michael Hewitt-Gleeson: From Edward, professionally the message was to escape from your point of view, what he calls lateral thinking. It’s a methodology that was invented in science by Francis Bacon and others and it’s called the scientific method. For the religious method, we have the truth, and much of the intellectual effort is defending the truth, and it doesn’t matter which religious truth it is, it is I’m right, you’re wrong and we’ll defend the truth to the death, my death or your death if necessary. So that’s one longstanding historical model that we are all familiar with. The scientific method is that there are no absolute truths, there are just truths that are more likely than other truths, and how do we know? They are based on measurements and observation. Science and technology move so quickly because a younger science will come along with better tools for measurement, and now we say that this truth is more likely than the previous truth so science can move ahead. Mr. Bono taught me that, and to put it succinctly, thinking is escaping from your point of view, finding one that is 10 times better, not defending it. That was a big thing that was given to me.

Avil Beckford: As an Invisible Mentor, what is one piece of advice that you would give to readers?

Michael Hewitt-Gleeson: The one sentence that has taken me my whole career to learn and understand, and the whole School of Thinking is based on this sentence, and my books are based on it, “The current view of the situation (CVS), can never be equal to the better view of the situation(BVS).” I’ve taught this for 30 years, and I’ve taught it to millions of people, and I have had a lot of feedback from around the world. I’ve seen the impact that it’s had on people, so I know that it’s not hollow motivation because I get the feedback, and whole companies have changed their way of operating, and relationships have been saved. So if I could only teach one thing, that’s what I would teach.

If you sit down and get your head around this, the current view of the situation can never be equal to the better view of the situation, so whether you’re caught up in a relationship, an illness, a business, and having a problem, someone has already solved the problem. Nations have solved problems that other nations are struggling with, if we could just escape from our current view and search for a better view, they are out there. But most of the time, we spend so much time defending our current view that we get trapped and we don’t escape. So in the middle of this sentence, which I have been teaching, a $20 billion search industry has popped up, so now all you have to do is press a button in Google or other search engines and find all sorts of points of view from all around the world and choose the one that is better, providing you escape from your point of view. Google only works if you write something in the box and press the button, but most of the time we don’t write things in the box.

You can download a free copy of Michael’s book  Software For Your Brain here.

How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

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