My father grew up in Georgetown, Ohio, during the Great Depression. Ever industrious and a hard worker, he always found jobs. As a teenager, he managed to get work running errands for the only three wealthy families in town. And during his employment with them, he made a life-changing discovery. The members of those three families thought differently than his own family and differently than all the other people he knew in town. What was more, the thinking habits of the people in those three families were similar to one another. While still in high school, he came to this conclusion: successful people think differently than unsuccessful people.
That conclusion drove Dad to study successful people, to read books that would help him to think positively, and to work at increasing his ability to think effectively. And he taught those lessons to my brother Larry, my sister Trish, and me, and challenged us to become good thinkers.
As a result of Dad’s encouragement and my own study of successful people, I’ve come to the same conclusion about good thinking. I believe success is difficult, if not impossible, to achieve without it. That’s one of the reasons I’ve written so much about it. It’s foundational. In fact, I opened my book Thinking for a Change with some thoughts about thinking that I’d like to share with you. They will help you understand why I believe thinking is so important:
1. Everything begins with a thought.
Life consists of what a man is thinking about all day.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON
2. What we think determines who we are. Who we are determines what we do.
I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.
—JOHN LOCKE
3. Our thoughts determine our destiny. Our destiny determines our legacy.
You are today where your thoughts have brought you. You will be tomorrow where your thoughts take you.
—JAMES ALLEN
4. People who go to the top think differently than others.
Nothing limits achievement like small thinking; nothing expands possibilities like unleashed imagination.
—WILLIAM ARTHUR WARD
Whatever things are true… noble… just… pure… lovely… are of good report, if there is any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy; think on these things.
—PAUL THE APOSTLE
Like other high-energy people and most leaders, I have a natural bias for action. And success in achieving goals certainly requires action. But a bias for action has its limits. I discovered a long time ago that if I wanted to increase my overall success capacity, then I needed to increase my thinking capacity.
Here is the process that I use to expand ideas and improve my thinking on a daily basis. If you can learn this process, it will make your thinking more thorough. As your thinking improves, the number of good ideas you have will increase. And as you take action on those ideas, your life will become better. Great lives are created by taking good actions on great ideas.
Most people do not recognize the value of good thinking. They have thoughts, but they let them go and don’t do anything with them. However, when you value good thoughts, it makes all of your thinking more valuable. That is the starting point of increasing your thinking capacity.
Because I value good thinking, I am constantly asking myself questions to help me discover and develop ideas, such as:
Becoming a better thinker means having the right mind-set. Two people can see the same things, go through the same experiences, have the same conversations, yet one walks away with a flurry of great thoughts and the other without a single new idea. To increase your thinking capacity, you need to become an idea digger. That’s how I think of myself. I’m always looking for ideas and trying to mine them. To me, when two things happen, it’s a great day: when I’ve added value to someone and when I’ve found a good idea.
A lot of people come across an idea, and recognize that it’s a good idea, yet don’t do anything with it. They don’t follow through. That’s a shame, because ideas are like muscles. You use them or lose them.
I remember back when I was leading a church in San Diego, I was mentored for a few years by Charles Blair, who led a church in Denver, Colorado. Charles once talked to me about the importance of first impressions, and he said, “I build this church on good first impressions.”
What a great idea, I thought. How can I use that? It forced me to think about how the first impression of my church wasn’t even in the church. It was in the parking lot. So I made sure the parking lot attendants were fantastic. I equipped them with the idea, “You are the first impression for everyone who comes to the church.” When you get a good idea, you need to think to yourself, How can I use it?
There isn’t a single idea that starts out as good as it can be. Every idea can be taken to another level and can be applied in a way that maximizes it. Going back to that same experience I had with Charles Blair’s advice, we ended up maximizing the idea of the first impression by using it to improve a lot of things in the church. We retrained all of our ushers so that they would make a great impression. We looked at our buildings and the impression they made on people. We retrained our children’s workers. We maximized the idea by helping people in every area of the organization present themselves better and give visitors a positive experience.
Any time you have an idea that can add value to others, you should take note of it and plan to give it more thought. Ask yourself, “Where can I maximize that idea?” If it will help your organization, apply it there. Also pay attention if the idea meets you where you are in your life journey, if it will help you become better in one of your strengths, or if it will help you to grow and get better. When you get one of those ideas, pay attention, and prepare to go to step two.
University president and United States senator S. I. Hayakawa believed, “Learning to write is learning to think. You don’t know anything clearly unless you can state it in writing.” I think there’s a lot of truth to that. Writing makes you think things through. It forces you to articulate the thought. And it makes your thoughts visual.
That doesn’t make it easy. Nobel Prize–winning novelist Ernest Hemingway is famous for saying how bad the first draft of anything is. It may take you multiple tries to get something coherent written. I know that was usually true for me when I started my writing career. When I wrote my first book, Think on These Things, I threw away ten pages for every one I kept. But trust me: putting your ideas down on paper will be worth the effort.
Do you know what people’s number one time waster is? It’s looking for things that are lost. That’s why you need a good system for capturing your ideas. And it’s why my first goal when I have a good thought is not to lose it.
As I mentioned in a previous chapter, I’ve been an avid filer for most of my career. For years I always kept two books in my briefcase: whatever book I was reading, and a notebook to capture my ideas. Today, I still carry a book, but I use my iPhone to capture and review my thoughts.
While I’m at it, I want to also encourage you to find a place to find your thoughts. What do I mean by that? You need to condition yourself to think in certain places. Early in my life, I had a thinking rock. As I got older, I wanted a place that was a little more comfortable, so I designated one particular chair in my office as my thinking spot. It doesn’t matter where it is—just pick your place, spend time there, and good thoughts will show up.
That reminds me of a story I once heard about Charles Kettering, the founder of Delco. He once bet a friend of his one hundred dollars that he could make him buy a bird. The friend thought the idea was absurd, so he agreed to the bet.
That Christmas, Kettering bought the friend a beautiful, elaborate, and very expensive birdcage and had it delivered to the man’s house. It was set up right by the front door so all his guests would see it.
The friend understood Kettering’s strategy, but he had no intention of getting a bird for the cage. However, every time that guests visited the man at his home, they would admire the cage and remark about how beautiful it was. And they would always ask, “Where’s the bird?”
Finally, the friend got so sick of the question that he gave in and bought a bird. The moral of the story? When you have a designated place for something, whatever it is, there is the sense within you that it needs to be filled. And you’ll find yourself doing what it takes to fill it. That holds true for your thinking.
The next step is perhaps the most critical of the thinking process, because this is where you cull the bad thoughts and set the good ones on track to be improved and become great ideas. Have you ever awakened in the middle of the night with an idea? It happens to me all the time. Before smartphones, I used to keep a special pad of paper next to my bed that had a light and pen incorporated into it. When you pulled the pen out of its holder, the little light would come on automatically and shine on the paper. I thought it was fantastic, because I was able to write down my ideas without waking up Margaret. Now I record those ideas in the Notes app on my iPhone.
While I love having a system for capturing thoughts I get in the middle of the night, there’s still a problem: looking at what I’ve written again in the morning. A lot of times, the idea isn’t nearly as good as I thought. In the light of day, most of my midnight ideas are not worth pursuing. But that’s okay. The only thing worse than not having a way to capture great ideas, and thus missing them, is capturing a bad idea and trying to make it work. If it’s not good, let it go.
Most of the time, I have pretty good instincts about whether an idea is any good. The good ones still speak to me after twenty-four hours. The bad ones don’t. If you’re not certain how to evaluate an idea, ask yourself these questions. They work for me:
• Does the thought still speak to me?
• Will this thought speak to others?
• How, where, and when can I use this thought?
• Who can I help by delivering or implementing the thought?
If you don’t have positive answers, the idea’s probably not worth taking to the next step of the thinking process.
To get the most out of an idea, you need to not only think it through, but you also need to talk it out. Both are necessary, but the order in which you do it depends on how you’re wired. For example, I like to think things through first. Some people may be surprised by that, because I’m known as a communicator. But I’ve always wanted to think something through completely before presenting it. That got me into trouble when Margaret and I first got married. She wanted us to discuss and solve problems together. I wanted to solve problems and then tell her about it afterward. I had to learn to express what I was thinking earlier.
Early in my leadership career, I also held on to ideas and didn’t talk about them until I had solutions all figured out. Like many young leaders, I didn’t want to share a problem without offering a solution because I worried that I’d look dumb to the people I was leading. What I didn’t realize was that if my solution wasn’t any good, I’d look dumb anyway.
I’m still learning about the need to talk through ideas. For two decades, I’ve worked with Charlie Wetzel on my books. Most often I write outlines for the chapters of a book and give them to Charlie. He does the wordsmithing, adds original stories, and takes the book through the entire editorial process with the publisher.
Charlie is similar to me in that he likes to solve problems on his own. Early in our working relationship, when he came up against a problem while writing a book, he’d work too long on it in isolation. I had to insist that he call me to talk it through, which he now does. Verbalizing the ideas brings them into great clarity quickly for us.
A couple of years ago I discovered another level of value in talking through ideas. It occurred when I was working on my book Intentional Living. I wrestled with the idea of that book for two years while trying to land the ideas. And at one point I hit a wall. During that season, I was fortunate to meet Laura Morton, a writer and television producer who has worked with many celebrity clients on their books. I spent hours with her interviewing me. Her questions drew out stories and forced me to articulate ideas that really helped me with the book.
If you want to take your ideas to another level, you need to talk them out. Here’s why:
Writing about an idea gives your thinking intellectual weight. It creates clarity in your thinking. Talking about an idea gives it emotional weight. It connects your thinking to your heart.
Have you ever noticed that you can think about a tragic time from your past pretty rationally, but when you try to tell someone else about it, you get flooded with emotion and get choked up? That’s the heart connection that occurs when you express those ideas.
Many times when you try to elaborate on an idea verbally, you expand it. You give it greater life and clarification. Some of that comes from having to express it. Some comes from the nonverbal feedback you receive from listeners when they don’t understand what you’re saying. Some comes from answering questions people ask you about your idea. All of these things help you improve your idea. They also help you expand your thinking capacity for the future.
Are you wired as a natural talker or a natural thinker? Start with whichever comes naturally to you. But be sure to include both solo thinking time and talking time with others to get the best out of your thinking capacity.
As I mentioned, early in my career I was reluctant to share unformed thoughts with others because I thought it was the leader’s job to solve all the problems. But as I gained leadership experience I made a discovery. I didn’t have the capacity to think great thoughts all by myself. This became painfully obvious when I attended an idea exchange of leaders in my field. The older and more experienced leaders were very open, sharing both ideas and problems, and as they put their thoughts on the table, others helped them come up with better ideas.
This process may seem obvious to you, but it was a eureka moment for me. It was at that time that I began sharing my ideas and asking others for help. It transformed my leadership and greatly expanded my thinking capacity. It was like adding one plus one and coming up with three!
It has become rare for me not to bring a thought to the table and share it with members of my team. For example, when I wrote The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership in 1997, I took the concept to a small group of good thinkers, and we batted around ideas on what constituted a law of leadership. And once we landed on a list of laws, I got their feedback on the wording for each. We worked on the choice and wording of the laws for five months before I wrote a single word of the book. And without their help, the book would not have been nearly as good or successful.
I want to encourage you to share your thinking with others to take it to another level. To do that, follow these steps:
• Bring a good thought to the table. It doesn’t have to be a great thought, but it needs to be a good one.
• Share your desire for others to improve on your thought. You need to want better thoughts more than you want the credit.
• Ask everyone to participate. People should know that they’re either at the table or on the menu.
• Ask questions. Nothing stimulates improved thinking more than questions.
• Let the best idea win. When the best idea wins, you win!
When you bring a good thought to the table with a small group of good thinkers, they will always make your thoughts better. Just make sure you bring good thinkers to the table, and as my friend Linda Kaplan Thaler says, make sure you have one person who can recognize a great idea. Do that, and you’ll always walk away with a better idea.
Once an idea has been put on the table and improved by a key group of people, it’s time to take the idea out and let more people see it. I think of this as being like taking a dog for a walk in the park. People see it, react to it, and make comments.
I do this a lot in my speaking. When I have an idea that I’ve been working on, I’ll take it out and practice it with an audience. I did this when I was thinking about the idea of failing forward. People responded so positively to that phrase that it became a book. More recently, I said to an audience, “Everything worthwhile is uphill.” There was an audible response from people and I could feel the energy in the room go up two notches.
You learn a lot when you present an idea to people who don’t know you or who won’t automatically give you the benefit of the doubt. If the only person who ever hears your ideas is your mother, you’ll think all of them are good. Present them to strangers and skeptics, and you’ll find out where you really stand.
A few years ago, I was working on a concept for a book that I just couldn’t land with people no matter how hard I tried or how I contextualized it. The idea was transformation. Nobody got it. To be honest, I had a hard time defining it. I just couldn’t seem to define it in a way that made sense. Finally that idea turned into intentional living. I was able to describe it as taking actions intentionally to add value to others, and that made sense to people. They also understood that if what they did aligned with their purpose, they could achieve significance.
It’s always easier to think an idea than to practice it. An idea always sounds better when it hasn’t been challenged. But an unchallenged idea is rarely able to live in the real world. That’s why you need to take it for a walk and see what happens.
I explained earlier in this thinking expansion process how we need to evaluate our thoughts by asking if they still speak to us after twenty-four hours have passed. Now at this point, it’s important for us to question our thinking again.
After practicing a thought, it’s time to ask, “What did I learn from practicing it?” and to judge whether the idea is still viable. We should never be so in love with a thought that we don’t question it.
A couple of years ago, one of my organizations partnered with a popular magazine to coproduce a digital resource to help people become more successful. As we developed the idea, both organizations thought it was a million-dollar idea. But it never gained the traction or had the impact we’d hoped for. Perhaps we didn’t ask enough questions on the front end. However, after the launch and the disappointing results, I guarantee you that we started asking questions. We wanted to discern why we missed the mark, learn from our mistakes, and change the way we did things in the future. My discovery? The more questions you ask on the front end, the fewer questions you have to ask on the back end.
Why was that so important? It was more than just avoiding a future failure. The process of questioning expands your thinking, your capacity, and your potential. We now know a few things we should do and a half-dozen or more things we shouldn’t. And we’re better for having gone through the painful process.
Something powerful happens when a person moves from believing in an idea to owning an idea. Believing in an idea can be good, but it’s very limiting. When you believe in an idea, it’s like investing in an endeavor with someone else’s money. You give it a try and you hope it works. However, when you own an idea, it’s like putting your own money into an investment. You do what it takes to make it work. The greater the investment, the more you feel that it has to work.
In 2015 when I launched my book Intentional Living, I wanted to get it into the hands of people any way I could, because I believed that it could change their lives and transform communities. To do that, my team and I got creative. We hired outside marketing companies. We created Intentional Living programs to help people and included a free book with them. We invested in technology platforms. And we gave thousands of books away. All of that cost a tremendous amount of money and time.
Why did I dedicate so much energy and so many dollars to the effort? I owned it. I wanted to do everything I could to get out the message that intentional actions coupled with the desire to add value to people would make a difference and lead to a life of significance. I believe it down to the bottom of my soul.
I believe in the message of intentional living so strongly that I’m still investing time and money to share it. In 2016 with the help of my organizations, I led an effort in Paraguay to train eighteen thousand people to lead roundtables (small discussion groups) on values and intentional living in their communities. To accomplish that, two hundred John Maxwell Team certified coaches and I went down to Paraguay, paying all our own expenses, and volunteered as trainers of Paraguayans in businesses, government organizations, educational institutions, and communities in and around Asunción.
As I write this, more than seventy thousand people have gone through roundtables in Paraguay to learn about intentional living, and that number is growing every day. I hope to launch similar efforts in other countries in the years to come. But that process would never have happened if my organizations, a group of my coaches, and I hadn’t fully embraced the idea and taken ownership of it.
When you launch an idea, you need to be clear about what you want people to know and what you want people to do. When I described to the coaches the things we would be doing in Paraguay, I also included the launching of the idea in my description. The people knew what they were supposed to do, and they did it.
The launch is the greatest test of any idea. The implementation demonstrates an idea’s real value—or lack of value. When it works, it’s powerful, because everyone sees it. That was true in Paraguay. Virtually everyone knew about it. The coaches’ efforts were shown on the news and written about in the papers. And people all over the country, from the president’s office, to the chambers of congress, to the neighborhood restaurants, were talking about it. And it also started grabbing the attention of people in other countries.
Launching an idea is very rewarding. But the results come with the landing. It’s similar to the way gymnastics are scored. I’ve watched quite a few gymnastics competitions over the years because two of my granddaughters competed, and Ella, Steve and Eli’s younger daughter, is particularly talented and was ranked pretty highly. At a meet, the tumbling passes and the aerial vaults of the best gymnasts always got lots of oohs and aahs from the audience, but their twists and turns in the air didn’t bring high scores unless the athletes stuck their landings.
The landing always matters. Not too long ago, a group in the military offered to let me skydive with them. I have to say, I was intrigued by the idea. I thought it would be very exhilarating. However, I was more concerned about the landing than I was the jumping. I believed they would keep me safe on the jump. But I have bad knees, and I wasn’t sure I could take the impact of the landing, so I had to pass.
By the time you’re reading this, we will know whether all our efforts in Paraguay have landed. We’ll know if we were able to transform communities and help the country become better. I certainly hope we’ve added value to them, and they will be in a better place to help one another.
When a thought lands and makes a positive difference, the temptation is to celebrate and move on. I’m all for celebrating. Wins can be hard to come by, and when we do experience a win, we should thank the people who helped to make it happen and give them the credit they deserve. But if we do that without looking for a way to upgrade the thought, we’ve missed a great opportunity.
Growth requires your thoughts to be continually upgraded. I’m always trying to get better. The better I get, the more I have to give. My desire is that what I am teaching today will be better tomorrow.
As I mentioned, people in other parts of South and Central America are watching what’s happening in Paraguay. And they’re sending me invitations to come to their countries to train people to promote values and intentional living. I hope to accept many of those invitations. And when I do, I hope we will have already upgraded the ideas we used in Paraguay, and they will make the process even better.
If you want to increase your potential, maximize your capacity, and be successful, develop your thinking. High thinking capacity and the ability to sustain your thinking will give you a higher return than being smart or working hard. The difference between average thinkers and good thinkers is like the difference between ice cubes and icebergs. Ice cubes are small and short-lived. Icebergs are huge, and there is much more to them than meets the eye. Their capacity is enormous.
1. Do you have a system for capturing your ideas? If yes, how well is it working for you? If not, what could you do to begin recording your ideas so you don’t lose them?
2. Who are the people you bring to the table to improve your ideas? How well are they helping you? What can you change to get them to help you more?
3. Do you have a greater bias toward action or toward thinking? What would happen if you were able to harness both?