The Invisible Mentor

Posts Tagged ‘School of Thinking’

Big Breaks + Mentoring + Hard Work = Success? 

I am reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success and it got me thinking about interviews that I have conducted, so I decided to explore an idea. I still haven’t gotten further than a third of the book so far, but when you ask most people about Outliers, they’ll mention 10,000 hours to become an expert at a craft. But from what I have read so far, hard work doesn’t equal success, you also need opportunities and talent.

I have taken five of The Invisible Mentor interviews that I have published on the blog, and extracted the responses to big breaks, mentor influence, and steps to success. Today, I’m focusing on five men, yesterday were five women. As you read the responses, what ideas and thoughts come to mind? Are there ways you can create your own opportunities if you haven’t had your big break as yet?

Name:  Michael Hewitt-Gleeson

Big Break:  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.

Mentor Influence: 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.

Steps to Success:  I make sure that I do something that I enjoy doing. And I do them every day. In other words, from the point of view of virtuosity, it takes a long while, you cannot just pick up a book or video on something and become an expert. Some people think you can, but you can’t. It may take 10 years, and you can do 10 years if you love what you are doing so it’s a combination of loving what you are doing, and doing it every day. Enjoy success as you go and do the 10,000 hours it requires to achieve virtuosity, and then enjoy that kind of success as well.

Name:  Steve Kayser

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

Steve Kayser: Just one? I have had big breaks all my life. Every day. Every month. Every year.

Tom Nies gave me my latest big break. He asked me to run PR for Cincom Systems North America. When I told him I didn’t know anything about PR he said, “Read this book – you’ll be fine.” The book he gave me was “The Death of Advertising & The Rise of PR,” by Al Ries. I read it. Then called Al Ries. Explained my situation and asked his advice and also asked him to contribute to a fledgling online E-Zine I was developing called Expert Access. He did become a contributor and we went from 5,000 subscribers to 25,000 in about 1 month because of it. Al Ries (and his daughter Laura Riesnow) have done several interviews and articles with me … And,  Al Ries was also one of the first guests we had on Expert Access Radio — http://radio.cincom.com.

One of the lessons I took from that — People at the top value great thinking. They pass it on. If you take advantage of their thinking (in this instance Al Ries’ book) it can change everything for you. But you have to teach yourself – learn yourself. No handholding allowed.

It’s the biggest thing I would look for in new employees or partners now. Are they autodidacts? Can they teach themselves new things – continuously?

Mentor Influence:  Wow – where to start. See above. Some of those guys were. But I also read 3 to 5 books a week and find great mentoring there.

Steps to Success:  Stumbled. Staggered. Fell.  Those are kinda the steps.

No failures = no success

To succeed you have to fail at some time. No way around that I think.

Since I’ve literally reinvented myself 5 times during my life and am in the process of doing it again – I can only say what steps seem to be common in all of those endeavors:

A Joie de vivre  – a joy for living & loving life, learning, re-learning. I need to throw a quote in here.

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

Name:  John Kremer

Big Break:  Probably the thing that had the biggest impact for me is that Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen loved my book and recommended it to everybody. I was successful before but I sold a ton of books based on their recommendation. They took my book 1001 Ways to Market Your Book and basically put it up on a wall and did the things that they wanted to do. The Rule of Five is one of the strategies that they took from my book, which says that you should do at least five things every day to market your book, any book that you still love and want to have sold and that helps you to be successful marketing your book.

Mentor Influence:  I haven’t had any real mentors who sat with me that much, but I’ve had many mentors through books. I have been mentored by people who I have read like Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers and people like Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen through their books, and also by marketing people like Jay Conrad Levinson.

Steps to Success: The main thing that I did was study and learn and keep observing what other people were doing that was working and follow what I noted when I watched people. I have a lot of people that I learned from and not just the gurus but my customers who tell me what works and doesn’t work for them. Much of what I know about book marketing comes from people sharing with me what works for them, and all I do is essentially pass on that information.

Name:  Kevin Popović

Big Break:  There is a gentleman named Bob Friday, and he had a company called TGIF Productions that did video and event production. While I was a struggling entrepreneur, and trying to figure out where I was going to fit in this communications business, I had to take a part-time job in retail. Every so often Bob would come in to the store and buy something new for his office, and he’d share a story and I would chime in about what I thought about his story. We started communicating back and forth.

I ended up offering to help him with these projects on the side to gain experience, and after four or five months of this he started paying me to freelance and after six months of that he brought me on in a full-time position as assistant producer. For four years I traveled all over the country learning about video and event production and how to deal with clients.

I saw how he ran his business and I also saw what I did not like about how he ran his business. So I attribute one of my big breaks to Bob Friday, and thank him for the opportunities he provided and the lessons that he taught me. Many of which are things that I knew that I did not want to do. My father taught me a long time ago to learn from my mistakes and I’ve tried to apply that to everybody I’ve worked with. As much as I have learned from them about what to do, I’ve also learned what not to do.

Mentor Influence: I’ve had a couple of mentors. My father has been a good mentor to me as a professor of marketing. My grandmother has been a mentor to me. She sold shoes for 30 years. Michael Bosworth, sales legend and author of Solutions Selling, Customer Centric Selling and Story Leaders has been a mentor to me in the way that I approach sales and how I present myself, or professional opportunities.

Steps to Success:  I’ve always tried to keep moving forward, lateral at worst, never backwards.

Name:  Andrew Warner

Big Break:  There were lots of big breaks, but here is one. I went to downtown New York, not too far from my office to talk to a customer of mine. On my way out of there, I heard this guy say, “I’m sorry guys I have to run, I don’t have the time. I have to go and look at an apartment uptown. I can’t help you guys today, maybe tomorrow.” So I recognized the guy and said, “Mike, I’ve got a car downstairs, my brother and I will give you a ride up to your apartment and you can get there on time.”

So we’re driving up to the apartment and the whole time I’m thinking, “I should be at my desk, I should be working, what am I doing, just kind of hanging out, what’s wrong with me here, I’ve got to be more efficient,” but I’m enjoying the conversation so I continue, and Mike and I are having a great conversation with my brother, and it’s terrific. I pull over and let Mike out in front of his place and he says, “Thank you! By the way I know that you’re trying to build up your business Andrew we have this customer called Life Minders, they have been buying lots of advertising from us, if you email or contact them and mention my name they’ll buy from you. Alright, goodbye!”

He leaves and I’m sitting there stunned, the guy just handed me a customer, one of his best customers he just introduced me to. That would never have happened if I was just sitting at my desk. It would never have happened if I didn’t get to know him, if I didn’t have this conversation. I called up that Life Minders, and they ended up buying from me. The very first cheque to me was for over $300,000. I looked at it with my brother. We had never seen that much money in the business. I don’t think either of us has seen that big a cheque ever in our lives. It turned around our whole business. We were deep in debt at the time. We could barely pay the bills at the time. That cheque turned things around.

The next cheque from them was for I think $1 million, the next one was for $2 million in advertising and it turned around our business. And what I learned from that was to just go out and have conversations with people and get to know them and really learn from them. That kind of information would never have been on a blog, would never just be on the internet somewhere, and would never have been advertised. I had to get to know Mike to get that kind of information.

Mentor Influence:  I didn’t have enough of them unfortunately and I wish that I had more along the way. I know that there were times when I couldn’t see that having four or five big clients was dangerous for my business. I had them, I was doing well, I turned away other customers because I couldn’t fit them all in. That was a big mistake, then a few of them went out of business, and if three of them went out of business, 60 percent of my revenue was shot.

If I had a mentor, he would have looked at it and said, “Look Andrew, I know you are doing well but you’d be better off with less money but securing your future by locking in multiple sponsors,” or they would have said, “Andrew, you should diversify away from this business and have other product lines,” and I just didn’t have that. That was a big mistake.

Steps to Success: Showing up every day. Even when I started out as an entrepreneur earlier on, my friends who didn’t have jobs, or happen to have a day off would ask me to go and hang out, and I remember saying, “I’m working, why are you even asking,” and they’d say, “Because you’re not really working, you’re working for yourself, you don’t have a boss. There is no reason for you to show up today, you can show up tomorrow. You can always make up for it the next day. Or do work on the weekends or in the evenings.” And if you start doing that you never really catch up. But if you show up for every single day, and you think about your job as a mission then you do grow every day. And everyone around you starts to respect what you’re doing, as you respect it yourself.

From what you have read today and yesterday, do Big Breaks + Mentoring + Hard Work = Success?

How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? 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.

Further Reading

Michael Hewitt-Gleeson Interview (Part I), (Part II)

Steve Kayser Interview (Part I), (Part II)

John Kremer Interview (Part I), (Part II)

Kevin Popović Interview (Part I), (Part II)

Andrew Warner Interview (Part I), (Part II) (Part III), (Part IV)

Book link is affiliate link.

This is Part Two of Michael Hewitt-Gleeson‘s interview. There are many lessons embedded in this interview, and many takeaways. Relationships are very important to Michael and that comes through in this interview. His responses are very detailed so you can sink your teeth into the information. Enjoy the interview and let me know what you think by writing a comment in the box at the end of the post.

Avil Beckford: How do you integrate your personal and professional life?

Michael Hewitt-Gleeson: In my case, I have worked from home for a long period of time so it’s all rolled up in one. I don’t mind that because I like what I do. I’m my own boss so I can spend my days the way that I want to. I still have to do my work and get things done but I’ve learnt by now how to manage it well so I have a lot of flexibility. If something is happening in my personal life with family or friends, I can probably go along and be there rather than saying, “I cannot go because I have to travel here or there.” Because the business is online, and I have the technology that follows you around makes it pretty easy. I have done this for a long time so I have been able to balance my personal and professional life pretty easily but I don’t have to do it by doing 9-to-5 for one and 5-to-9 for the other, I do it as I go along.

Avil Beckford: What’s a major regret that you’ve had in life?

Michael Hewitt-Gleeson: I don’t really regret what I’ve done and the way things worked out. I don’t regret that I was called up for Viet Nam because things would have been different. Whatever happened has happened. The one thing that I regret even though it has worked and brought a positive in its outcome, is the disagreement that I had with Edward de Bono. It was very negative and it keeps popping up once in a while. We were very fond of each other and it’s one of those things that you wished never happened, even though it’s probably better for us professionally, and for the people we teach. But since you ask me what I regret, I do regret that.

Avil Beckford: What are five life lessons that you have learned so far?

Michael Hewitt-Gleeson:

1. Don’t waste time. I don’t mean don’t sit on the beach staring at the sunset. I mean don’t let other people waste your time. Don’t go to meetings that other people set all the time. Don’t wake up 20 years later and find that all of your time was spent by other people. So be conscious of time and don’t waste it.
2. Have humor in your life and laugh a lot. Don’t let it go too long after you wake up in the morning before you are laughing. Notice things that are odd and funny and have some belly laughs until tears are running down your face.
3. See the other side of things and enjoy them. I was lucky to have a father who was like that, and so we were raised that way. To me, life wouldn’t be the same without that.
4. There are things to enjoy in life like a glass of wine. I especially like to share it with a friend. I love chocolate and movies. I often go to movies during the day when it is not busy. You can overdo these treats, but it is my experience that people tend to under-do them. It’s about savoring the things that give you great enjoyment.
5. Don’t have regrets. Don’t spend your life too much in the past. Learn from it and the present is here to be enjoyed, and we don’t know how much of a future we have. It could only be a tiny amount. Try and choose while you are in the present what future you would like to be into, rather than looking back and staying stuck in the past.

Avil Beckford: When you have some down time, how do you spend it?

Michael Hewitt-Gleeson: That’s not a problem for me, I can have down time any time I want. I like to read, I like movies, I like music and I play it all the time. I like to go for a walk or ride my bike. I like switching things, escaping from what I am doing and doing something else. So if I’m riding my bike then I want to get back home and do some work, so an active way to describe it is to say that I like changing.

Avil Beckford: What process do you use to generate great ideas?

Michael Hewitt-Gleeson: The main thing is to generate a lot of ideas because you cannot know if an idea is great until after the fact. You cannot generate a great idea, you can only see after the idea has been generated, whether or not it turns out to be great. You know when you buy a CD that’s a compilation of all the bestsellers from last year, you can only pick the best songs from last year after you have all the songs from last year to choose from. You have to generate a lot of ideas then choose the best. I learned that, that’s a very deliberate thing and I do it very deliberately. I generate lots of ideas and write them in books, and every once in a while I take a look and may see things repeating themselves. Sometimes circumstances change and I go back and try something and experiment with it, and in retrospect sometimes it turns out to be a great idea. Sometimes it occurs quickly and other times it takes quite a while. One of the things that I teach people is to multiple things by 10, and get into the habit of doing so. I used to do a lot of work with the Actors Institute in New York, and some of the actors would go for an audition and there may be 50 people there for that part and clearly only one person out of 50 is going to get the part. If she didn’t get it, she would be depressed and go back to the apartment and smoke dope, fall into a heap and do nothing for two months and then go and do another audition. I would say to multiply the number of auditions you do by 10, because all you can do is go to auditions. You are not the director, or the producer, so you can’t decide who gets the past, but you can decide how many auditions you go for. It’s developing the attitude of multiplying by 10 that can give you an edge. If you want to have a great idea, have 10, then look back and see which ones are the better ones. That’s what I would do.

Avil Beckford: What’s your favourite quotation and why?

Michael Hewitt-Gleeson: I’ll give two, and one is obviously the favourite one because it’s the one I say most often. And it’s the one I mentioned before and that’s “The current view of the situation can never be equal to the better view of the situation.” Since this is my quotation, I probably shouldn’t say it, but it’s the one I use the most. If I chose a quotation from someone else, I would choose Albert Einstein’s “If an idea cannot be written on the back of a postcard it hasn’t been thought through properly.”

Avil Beckford: How do you define success?

Michael Hewitt-Gleeson: Happiness! Having a $1 billion and being in jail or having your family turn against you, or devastating the planet to me isn’t my idea of success. Possibly having no money in the bank and having a partner who cares about you, or kids who love you, or being able to sit and have a nice long lunch with a group of friends, that’s what success is because you only get one life. There is no reason why you cannot earn a good income and still be happy. Finding the balance is difficult but it’s worth striving for.

Avil Beckford: In your opinion what’s the formula for success?

Michael Hewitt-Gleeson: Something that involves the word now or today. I think a formula can be different things, but if you are doing something now, or at least today that makes you feel happy and successful then that’s success. Everyone writes about success, there are bookstores filled with shelves of books about how to be successful, four hours a week, or this or the other, so they are all there but unless it involves today, now or within the next hour, I think that’s what I would draw attention to. Some things do take 10 years and 10,000, hours but you do have things today and Steve Jobs in his address to Stanford students at their graduation a few years ago told them to stay young and stay foolish.

Avil Beckford: What are the steps you took to succeed in your field?

Michael Hewitt-Gleeson: I make sure that I do something that I enjoy doing. And I do them every day. In other words, from the point of view of virtuosity, it takes a long while, you cannot just pick up a book or video on something and become an expert. Some people think you can, but you can’t. It may take 10 years, and you can do 10 years if you love what you are doing so it’s a combination of loving what you are doing, and doing it every day. Enjoy success as you go and do the 10,000 hours it requires to achieve virtuosity, and then enjoy that kind of success as well.

Avil Beckford: What advice do you have for someone just starting out in your field?

Michael Hewitt-Gleeson: My advice to people starting out in the field of cognitive science is to ensure you get at least two things:

1. A good teacher  -  someone who is in a position to ensure you are learning the most verifiable information in your field, and
2. A good mentor – someone with a great deal of recognized experience and preeminence in the field. Otherwise, you may waste your time learning information that is just not true and without a mentor you will only have your own experience to go on which is limited and slow.

Avil Beckford: If trusted friends could introduce you to five people that you’ve always wanted to meet, who would you choose? And what would you say to them?

Michael Hewitt-Gleeson:

1. Marcus Aurelius
2. Pope John XXIV
3. Professor Elizabeth Blackburn
4. Sir Tim Berners-Lee
5. Charles Darwin

I would ask them for their answers to the same questions in this interview.

Avil Beckford: Which one book had a profound impact on your life? What was it about this book that impacted you so deeply?

Michael Hewitt-Gleeson: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius

Avil Beckford: If you were stranded on a deserted island, what are five books that you would like to have with you and why? Summarize the book in two sentences.

Michael Hewitt-Gleeson:

1. Encyclopedia Brittanica – The Index: Encyclopedia Brittanica is designed to be a map of human knowledge. The Index is the framework of that map and would remind me of all the different things I could think about.
2. The Oxford English Dictionary: Similarly as a summary of the English language, it would supply me with plenty to think about and keep me interested.
3. The Green Beret Guide to Survival: Would give me many tips and ideas to increase my chances of survival on the island. It has tips on shelter, food, first aid, Morse Code and other practical necessities.
4. The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Like the Bible it is a handbook for living only more interesting and more practical.
5. The New York Yellow Pages: Plenty to read and think or dream about. It has over 1,000 pages which could also be used for fuel and other uses.

What one music CD and movie would you like to have with you (on the deserted island) and why?

Michael Hewitt-Gleeson: For the music CD, I would have a compilation of Bossa Nova music from the 60s with the original artists and musicians – for example, Antonio Carlos Jobim’s The Wave and so on. It’s music that always puts me in a happy mood and I have never tired of it. For movie, I would have My Fair Lady for the music, the story and the visual escape and pleasure.

Avil Beckford: Have you read any books that inspired you to start a business, service or invent “something”? If yes, which book?

Michael Hewitt-Gleeson: My own book Software for Your Brain inspired me to build an online school and provide the chapters as free email lessons on thinking.

Avil Beckford: What excites you about life?

Michael Hewitt-Gleeson: The things I mentioned before such as having a glass of wine with friends, going to the beach, movies and so on.

Avil Beckford: How do you nurture your soul?

Michael Hewitt-Gleeson: I don’t technically believe that there is such a thing as a soul but it would be enjoying every day and doing things that I like. Helping other people and having chocolate and red wine.

Avil Beckford: If you had a personal genie and she gave you one wish, what would you wish for? Or, if I gave you a magic wand, what would you use it for?

Michael Hewitt-Gleeson: I would wish for another 10 years.

Avil Beckford: Complete the following, I am happy when…..

Michael Hewitt-Gleeson: I am happy when I laugh. I am happy when I wake up in the morning. I am happy when I see a smile on my partner’s face.

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.

Photo Credit: Zemanta Image Gallery

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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Michael Hewitt-Gleeson:

The most successful people have mental and verbal abilities that would delight any philosopher of yore. How did they become that way? One book and one word at a time. To be smarter than your peers requires  setting aside time everyday to develop your mental and verbal powers.

1. Learn a word a day
2. Read a book each week and choose books that make you think
3. While reading record interesting phrases to use as quotations in your written communications to make them shine
4. While reading always be on the lookout for ways to apply the information to your work and life
5. Connect the new information to what you already know. Never read in a vacuum
6. Join the Great Books Foundation
7. Join the Center for the Study of Great Ideas
8. Sign up for the School of Thinking‘s newsletter
9. Subscribe to book summaries
10. Join an online book club

If you consistently do the above 10 things, in no time people will not only notice, but also admire the change in you.

Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please comment. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the left side) by email or RSS Feed. I created a Mini Learning Toolkit and you can grab a copy by clicking here.

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