The Importance of Community, Collaboration, and Cross-Pollination
Last spring, I decided to start a Mastermind group in order to help me achieve my goals. The idea of the Mastermind group is first credited to Napoleon Hill in his 1937 book, Think and Grow Rich. As he described it, the Mastermind Principle is “the coordination of knowledge and effort of two or more people, who work toward a definite purpose, in the spirit of harmony.” When this is done, “no two minds ever come together without thereby creating a third, invisible intangible force, which may be likened to a third mind.”
Though Hill coined the term Mastermind Principle, the concept has been around for much longer. Many successful people have been part of these Mastermind groups:
- Benjamin Franklin put together The Juntoclub for mutual improvement in 1727,
- R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis would never have gotten as far as they did if they had not met regularly about their writings in the Inklings at the University of Oxford in the 1940s
- Henry Ford and Thomas Edison met in the Vagabonds in the 1920s
The benefits of a Mastermind group include mutual support, discovering different perspectives, access to more resources and networks, and a sense of accountability. Forbes described the many benefits excellently in this article.
In my group, we started out as four recent college grads with widely varying interests, but we were all on the same starting line with our eyes on the goal of becoming better innovators and entrepreneurs. Together, we set short and long-term goals, and met weekly over dinner to inspire, share achievements, and problem-solve.
At the end of the summer, though our group disbanded formal meetings as we grew out of our initial stages, our destinies are still largely intertwined. We are constantly on the lookout for opportunities for the group.
One of the initiatives that came out of our Mastermind group was BioTrep, whose aim it is now to create a larger Mastermind community of biotech student projects that meet each other on a regular basis to inspire, share achievements, and problem-solve.
The UVA community is full of leaders, but it is still lacking in the venues and events for collisions necessary to hit a critical mass as an innovation hub (like Boston). You don’t have to wait for this to happen on a large scale; seek out those around you who are on a similar path, and convene regularly with a purpose in your own Mastermind group.
For more detailed guidelines and best practices in how to form your own group, please see the article on Napoleon Hill Foundation’s website.
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