In my current mastermind group, we’re using Napoleon Hill’s ‘Think and Grow Rich’ as a springboard for focusing each week’s session. This week’s chapter is ‘Imagination: The Workshop of the Mind’ (incidentally, the fifth of Hill’s thirteen Steps Toward Riches). It’s a great chapter, full of examples of individuals coming up with a single idea and running with it because they successfully engaged their own imaginations. Instead of seeing the problems and all the reasons why a thing can’t be done, they sought to find solutions, ways round seemingly insurmountable obstacles, and thus brought their ideas into reality.

One of my favourite stories in the whole book is in this chapter, where a clergyman has a great idea to set up a new college that taught skills to young people via a ‘learn by doing’ approach rather than the academic norm, opening up education to all, not just those who liked textbooks. The project would cost 1 million dollars (in 1937- an enormous sum), but he had no idea how to get that amount of money, and so for two years he did nothing except think about it and say ‘my idea is a good one, but I have cannot do anything with it because I do not have the necessary million dollars.’ Then one day, he just had enough of thinking and he decided there and then that he would get the money he needed to do it within a week. And of course he gets it and he sets up the Armour Institute of Technology. (To find out how he raised the money, you’ll have to get curious and read the book!)

The point is, what would you do with a million dollars right now? Or 10 million? Or 100 million?
Try asking this at your next Mastermind Group session and see where it goes. Do any of you have a million dollar idea? When I say a million, I don’t mean the amount it will cost, or the amount it will earn, but in the ‘million dollar’ value (ie. beyond money value) that it will have to other people – the ones who will benefit as a result of this idea. Don’t think business or start-ups or ROIs for a change. Start a lively debate, generate ideas together, play – have some fun with this one and truly engage your imaginations – let them fly.

Hill reminds us “Through the faculty of Creative Imagination, the finite human mind has direct communication with Infinite Intelligence.  It is the faculty through which “hunches” and “inspirations” are received.  It is by this faculty that all basic or new ideas are handed over to us. It is through this faculty that “thought vibrations” or “influences” from the minds of others are received.  It is through this faculty that one individual may “tune in” or communicate with the subconscious minds of others.”

By asking the Million Dollar question and taking ‘real’ money out of the equation, the session could lead in all sorts of directions, go anywhere – that’s the amazing thing about Masterminding – it all depends on the sparks between you and the energy you can co-create.

First published on www.evancarmichael.com in November 2008.