I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my entrepreneurial career, and at one point I asked myself a simple question: what is the primary cause of success, the source of the wealth and power of the greatest entrepreneurs in history? The answer that convinced me most I found in Napoleon Hill’s books, and it’s called the Mastermind Group — the Law of Mastermind Alliance. Understanding it changed the course of my life. But to really explain it, I have to do something Hill didn’t: separate the intuition, which was right, from the mystical language he wrapped it in.
The Law of Mastermind Alliance, according to Napoleon Hill
Hill introduced the idea in the 1920s, first in “The Law of Success” and then in “Think and Grow Rich”: an alliance of minds forms when two or more people work in harmony toward a definite objective. So far, nothing to object to. The problem is how he explains it: he speaks of a “third, higher mind, intangible and invisible,” and of energy drawn from an “Infinite Intelligence.” It’s a suggestive image, but it remains a metaphor — not a mechanism. Hill was a pioneer of personal development, not a scientist, and much of the mastermind world inherited this almost spiritual tone from him. The interesting thing is that, beneath the mysticism, there was something true — and today we can measure it.
The science of collective intelligence
In 2010, a team of researchers from MIT and Carnegie Mellon (Woolley and colleagues) did to hundreds of small groups what is usually done to individuals: measure their intelligence across a battery of different tasks. They found that there is a “collective intelligence” factor that is a property of the group itself, not of the individuals who make it up. And here is the finding that overturns common intuition: that factor is only weakly tied to the average — or maximum — IQ of the members. What matters far more is how the group interacts: the social sensitivity of the people, and whether everyone contributes rather than a few dominating the conversation. In other words, Hill’s “third mind” isn’t a spirit, it’s a real, documented phenomenon — and it doesn’t come from putting the smartest people together, but from putting together people who listen to one another.
Why we aren’t enough on our own
There’s a second reason, even more uncomfortable. We aren’t good at judging ourselves. The classic study by Kruger and Dunning (1999) showed that those who are least competent in an area also tend to overestimate themselves the most, precisely because they lack the tools to notice their own mistakes. The blind spot is yours exactly because you don’t see it. A group that acts as a mirror — different people, with different experience, ideally who know more than you about something — is one of the few concrete ways to see what escapes you on your own. It’s no coincidence that the same principle returns when I talk about risk and decisions, for example in trading psychology: the most effective antidote to overconfidence is not deciding alone.
My first experience
When I discovered all this I was fascinated, and I wanted to live it. I told a few entrepreneur friends; almost none paid attention, except Angelo Maria Riccardo Venditti and Alessio Vastano, who embraced the idea enthusiastically. We decided to unite our minds for a mastermind alliance: three days immersed in nature — between desert, ocean, and volcanoes — made of brainstorming, walks, and sea bathing, disconnected from the outside world. The result was surprising: we generated ideas that would never have come up in an office, and above all we exchanged years of each other’s experience — study, attempts, wins, and mistakes — saving time, energy, and money. I felt no “supreme mind”: I felt, very concretely, collective intelligence at work. I’ve never stopped since, because the learning process, when it’s shared, never ends.
It’s worth debunking a myth that gets repeated often. The story goes that Henry Ford was “poor, illiterate, and ignorant” and rose from nothing to become the richest man in America: an exaggeration that Hill himself helped spread. Ford did have little formal schooling, that’s true, but the real point is another, and it’s documented: his most fertile years coincided with the exchanges and friendships he had with minds like Thomas Edison and Harvey Firestone — the three of them, together with the naturalist John Burroughs, set off each year for long trips into nature. The source of the power was the bond, not the solitary genius.
Fortunate is the person who learns to master this law — not as a magic formula, but as a practice: choosing carefully the minds to surround yourself with, and working with them, in harmony, toward an objective. I’ve written about it in the book The Power of the Mastermind Group, and it’s experienced live at my mastermind events. When you’re surrounded by people who challenge and inspire you, you can do things you wouldn’t do alone.
