Long before I ever tried to reach a room of disengaged students, I fell in love with science myself. I was eight years old, in my parents’ kitchen, with nothing more than a family cooker and a dish of soapy water.
I’d found that if you passed the gas from the pilot light through soapy water, it bubbled beautifully. Then I held a flame to the bubbles as they popped. To an eight-year-old, that was spectacular. I never forgot it.
Decades later, as a lab technician, I found a use for it I never expected.
The Disengaged Students Nobody Could Reach
One of the science teachers had a remedial group, five disengaged students who’d completely checked out. Noisy, rude, out of control, and utterly uninterested in anything science-related. He was frustrated, and he asked me what I could do to get them to at least settle down long enough to teach something.
I had a decent rapport with most students, and I thought back to that soapy water and that pilot light. If it had captured my imagination at eight, maybe it would do the same for a room of teenagers who’d given up caring.
So we recreated it, properly this time. A large trough of soapy water, a rubber hose run from a gas tap with the Bunsen burner itself removed, gas bubbling straight through the soap. I hadn’t accounted for one thing: the bubbles didn’t just sit on the surface. They rose into the air.
Someone put a flame to one, mid-air.
It was even more spectacular than I would have thought of.
It Worked. Perhaps Too Well.
It got their attention completely. For the first time, the teacher had a room quiet enough to actually explain what was happening. Why the gas burned the way it did, what was going on chemically while it happened, all of it finally landed. That part was exactly what we’d hoped for.
What I hadn’t planned for came afterwards, in three separate, escalating problems.
First, the lab ceiling started collecting soot. Those Victorian labs had ceilings high enough that the flames took a few seconds just to reach them, and once the soot was up there, it stayed. Too high to safely clean, it remained on that ceiling for years, right up until the building itself was demolished.
Second, that single lesson became the only thing those students wanted. Not science generally. Specifically “Mr Leader’s Great Gas Experiment,” repeatedly, whether it made sense for the lesson or not.
Third, and this is the one that actually caused real problems: the flames were visible from other labs, and from the humanities block. Lessons in those rooms had to stop. Students lost concentration, distracted by whatever was clearly happening next door. And when it was eventually their turn for a science lesson, they wanted the same thing too.
Questions got asked. We stopped doing it not long after.
What I’d Do Differently
Looking back, this is exactly the kind of moment a mastermind group would have caught before it became a problem. I didn’t run the idea past anyone. I had a good instinct, tried it, and it worked, brilliantly, in the room it was meant for. What I didn’t have was a second pair of eyes asking the obvious question: what happens to everyone else in the building while this is going on?
That’s the thing about solving a problem entirely on your own. You can be completely right about the solution and still miss the consequences sitting just outside the room you’re focused on. A room full of teachers critiquing each other’s experiments would probably have spotted it. Even just one colleague asked “what do you think might go wrong here” would likely have caught the soot, the distraction, and the flames visible next door, before any of it happened. If you want to see what that kind of critique structure actually looked like in practice, I’ve written about it elsewhere on this site.
I’d still do the experiment again. I’d just talk it through with someone first, and I’d probably check current CLEAPSS guidance before I did.
Hundreds of students must have looked up at that ceiling over the years without ever knowing why it was there. I saw it several times a day, for years. Every single time, it reminded me of that small group of disengaged students, and the moment they finally became teachable, if only for one afternoon.
Around 1990, long before I’d ever heard the phrase mastermind groups, a new national curriculum landed on every science department in the country at once. Somebody had to retrain the teachers who’d be delivering it in our borough. That somebody wasn’t me. It was the borough’s science adviser, a man who’d occasionally turned up on television science programmes and never once mentioned it himself. You’d never have known it from how he carried himself. He didn’t lead like someone with anything to prove.
He picked me to run the practical side of it.
I was a Senior Laboratory Technician at a school the authority had already scheduled for closure. That only mattered for one reason: it had lab space sitting available, so that’s where everyone met. The school had built its labs in Victorian times, and the benches were heavy English oak, varnished and stained. They carried decades of history in them.
Burns, scratches, old ink stains, carved graffiti here and there, someone’s initials, the odd declaration of love scratched in years before any of us arrived. I recognised some of those burns even then, an overturned tripod here, a Bunsen burner flame left too close there. Physics, chemistry, and biology all had their own labs like this. The newer labs never had quite the same character. I loved working in those labs. Every old bench had a story sitting under the varnish before you’d even switched anything on.
Every old bench had a story sitting under the varnish before you’d even switched anything on.
The teachers who turned up weren’t from my school at all. They came from right across the borough. All of them needed to get to grips with practical work under the new curriculum before it landed in their own classrooms.
The Mastermind Groups I Had to Build Before I Could Run One
Here’s the bit that doesn’t get mentioned when people talk about mastermind groups: sometimes you need one just to organise the one you’re actually trying to hold.
I had a handful of my own lab techs working under me. Before a single teacher walked into a lab, we had to mastermind the logistics ourselves. What equipment across how many benches. What materials would actually get used versus what would sit untouched. How resources would flow from a request at a bench, through me, down to whoever on my team could source it in time.
None of that existed until we sat down together and worked it out. It’s the same way any mastermind works. Several people bring what they know, argue it into shape, and land somewhere better than any one of them would have got to alone.
Sometimes you need a mastermind just to organise the one you’re actually trying to hold.
A Week of Circuses, Rotating Through Every Lab
The whole thing ran across a full week. We set up experiments in circus format, several stations running at once across three or four labs. Each lab had about fifteen benches, with small groups of three or four teachers apiece. Teachers worked through an experiment, discussed it as a group once it finished, then rotated to the next station. Once one lab’s circuit was complete, the rotation continued to the next lab.
Nobody appointed a leader at each bench. One emerged anyway, every time. That’s simply what happens when a handful of capable people are given a real problem and left to get on with it. Each lab also had its own leader, someone who moved from bench to bench rather than staying fixed to one group. They checked in on how each discussion was going and fed anything urgent back to me directly.
Resetting equipment between rotations was an enormous amount of work for my lab techs and me. Keeping several simultaneous experiments running and properly stocked, repeatedly, across an entire week- that’s the part of the story nobody sees. The teachers experienced a single afternoon’s rotation. We reset the whole thing behind them, over and over, for five days straight.
The Right Answer Didn’t Come From Science
One afternoon I was walking past a bench on my way to have a quick word with the adviser. I overheard a group stuck on something. They had a piece of apparatus hanging from a length of string, and partway through the experiment the string kept unwinding. It was throwing off their results. They were still working out how to fix it when I stopped.
Before I worked in schools, I’d been an electronics wireman. I built wiring harnesses held together with lacing cord, a nylon cord with a rubberised coating that doesn’t unwind under tension. I happened to have some in stock, left over from reworking Victorian equipment for other schools taking kit from the closing building. It was safe to pass on. I suggested it for their string problem. It solved it outright. These days, cable ties do that same job in a wiring harness, but back then, lacing cord was exactly what a wobbling piece of suspended apparatus needed too.
Why the Structure Mattered More Than the Chemistry
The actual science being critiqued mattered; obviously, that was the entire point of the exercise. But looking back, the structure is the part that’s stayed with me. Nobody designed it to be a mastermind. Nobody in that lab would have called it one. It was simply the most sensible way to get a room full of teachers through a genuine skills gap. Trying to personally retrain every one of them myself was never going to work at that scale.
That’s the thing about mastermind groups that I keep coming back to. They don’t need a name, a manifesto, or anyone in the room deciding “right, this is a mastermind now.” They just need a real problem, the right-sized group, and a structure that lets useful information move in more than one direction. A handful of people at a bench, a lab leader circulating between them, or three lab techs working out logistics before any of it starts. The shape holds at every size.
Looking back, I don’t remember much about the official training materials. I remember the conversations. I remember teachers solving problems together, lab technicians quietly keeping everything moving, and expertise turning up from places nobody expected. That’s what stayed with me. Years later, I realised I’d spent a week watching mastermind groups form without any of us calling them that.
If you want the fuller story of how I built my own mastermind group from scratch, I’ve written about that elsewhere on this site. The practical guide to running one that lasts is there too. Napoleon Hill wrote about the same underlying principle decades before any of us in that lab had heard of it.
People ask me how I learned to set up mastermind groups as if there was a master plan from day one. There wasn’t. I built my first one because a problem kept showing up, and nobody was solving it.
I was a Senior Laboratory Technician for the London Borough of Waltham Forest. Science technicians in schools are an odd professional group. Every school has one or two, tucked away in a prep room, solving problems that nobody else in the building understands. Broken equipment, awkward risk assessments, exam board quirks. Each of us figured it out alone, in isolation, and as a result we were often re-solving a problem that a technician two miles away had already cracked the year before.
That waste bothered me. So I decided to set up a network of my own. Nothing grand. I simply asked around to find out who else was doing this job in the borough, and started getting us in a room together once a term.
How I Set Up Mastermind Groups, Step by Step
I should point out at this stage that none of this was clever. It was simply persistent.
I found the other technicians. There was no list. Waltham Forest had around 200 schools, so contacting all of them myself would have been a massive job. Instead, I asked a handful of volunteers to each take on a handful of schools themselves. That one decision was a huge time saver, and as a result the network started life as something built by several people, not just me.
I picked a low-pressure first meeting. No agenda beyond seeing if this would be useful. I didn’t want anyone feeling obligated to attend a second one.
I made the value obvious early. I came with a genuine problem I was wrestling with, and consequently others did too once they saw it wasn’t a trap. That’s the bit people skip when they try to set up mastermind groups of their own: it only works if the first session proves its worth, rather than just promising it.
I kept the rhythm light. Once a term. Often enough that people remembered why they came, but infrequently enough that it never felt like a burden on top of an already full job.
I let it grow on its own terms. Word spread, and the network reached around 250 members eventually, which is a huge number for what started as a handful of people in a prep room comparing notes.
Where It Got Interesting
Here’s where it gets interesting. Once the network had numbers, equipment suppliers noticed. They wanted access to 250 technicians as a sales opportunity, but I saw it differently: as free training.
I turned their product demonstrations into proper training sessions. The supplier provided the trainer and covered the cost of lunch, so we got hands-on time with the latest scientific equipment, in our own laboratories, at no cost to anyone. Not every school could release staff for it, but twenty or so technicians would turn up each time, and the knowledge spread from there through the rest of the network.
It wasn’t all supplier-led, either. Some technicians had specialised knowledge of their own and were happy to share it, leading training sessions for the rest of the network on whatever they knew best. I led several of these myself. That’s the bit that made it a proper mastermind rather than just a training calendar, because the expertise was coming from inside the group, not only from outside suppliers.
We also ran an annual group purchase of science equipment. By aggregating everyone’s individual orders into one collective buy, I negotiated a discount that none of us could have got alone. It’s a simple idea, but it’s only possible because the group existed and was organised enough to act together.
My manager backed the whole thing from the start, and the department benefited directly, with better-trained technicians, fewer repeated mistakes, and faster fixes. Eventually the borough’s Design and Technology departments asked me to come in and advise on setting up something similar for them. That worked too.
Sometimes One Session Is Enough
Not every mastermind needs 250 members or years to prove its worth. One of the most useful I ever took part in lasted about twenty minutes, solved a real problem, and never happened again.
It was activities week, just before the summer break, when the curriculum gets suspended so students can dig into whatever they’re actually interested in. I loved those weeks. We’d set up drop-in sessions for experiments, and two students wanted to design their own, looking at photosynthesis in Elodea. It wasn’t scheduled or planned, just an ad hoc conversation that happened because the problem needed solving there and then.
Good idea, but I could see a problem coming before they could. They wanted a constant light source, which meant the lab’s old-style bulbs, and those bulbs heat water.
So I pulled in the head of science, and the head of physics, and the five of us worked through it with the students there and then. The fix turned out to be simple: a second tank of water acting as a heat buffer between the lamp and the students’ tank.
Solved on the spot, by exactly the right five people being in the room together. My head of department reckoned it was one of the most useful discussions he’d sat in on that year, and the students got more out of it than the experiment alone would ever have taught them. Sometimes a mastermind doesn’t need a name or a membership list. It just needs the right people noticing the same problem at the same time.
The Bit Nobody Talks About
There was something else going on underneath the training and the discounts. One of the technicians once described her own role to me as ancillary, as if she were an afterthought to the school’s real work. That word stuck with me, and for the record, it’s wrong. These were skilled professionals, and the network gave them a forum that proved it. Some of them went on to train teachers on the equipment they’d once felt apologetic about handling.
I didn’t set out to fix anyone’s sense of professional worth. That happened as a side effect of giving people a room where their knowledge mattered, and it’s a huge part of why I think masterminds work, beyond the practical wins.
What I’d Do Differently If I Were to Set Up Mastermind Groups Again
This beggars belief, looking back, but I built the entire thing around myself without ever planning for what happened when I moved on. I didn’t rotate the organiser role, and I didn’t keep a shared record of contacts and notes that lived anywhere other than in my own head. When I eventually left that role, the network didn’t have a clean handover plan, so a lot of momentum that had taken years to build relied on no one else stepping up.
If I were starting again, I’d build succession in from month one. I’d rotate who organises each term, and keep a shared document rather than a personal inbox. A group that depends entirely on one person is fragile, no matter how well that person runs it. I cover this properly in the build one that lasts article, and it’s the single thing I’d change about how I ran the Technicians’ Network.
The Looser Version: Martin Avis’s Lunches
Not every mastermind needs that much structure. The most informal version I’ve taken part in was a series of business lunches in London, organised by my good friend Martin Avis, who has a knack for getting the right people into the same room.
We met roughly every two months, and Martin charged a modest fee that covered only the food. The lunch itself was structured enough, but the real value happened afterwards, in the hotel bar, when people hopped between tables and the conversations got specific. Martin steered the first few gatherings gently, and then it took on a life of its own, which, in hindsight, is exactly the succession point I missed with the Technicians’ Network. He built it to survive without him steering every session.
Several joint ventures came out of those lunches. A handful of the people I met there are now very well known, and a few are self-made millionaires. I was even approached by a well-known online author to write software converting old websites into what was then a brand-new platform called WordPress. I didn’t have the bandwidth to take it on, but the fact that the ask happened at all tells you something about the calibre of people in that room, and the trust that builds when a group like that runs for long enough.
If you want to go back to where this idea originally came from, Napoleon Hill’s foundation still maintains a good archive of his original writing on the mastermind principle at naphill.org. It’s worth a read once you’ve got the practical side sorted.
What It Actually Takes to Set Up Mastermind Groups
Looking back across both groups, the pattern is the same. Find people who genuinely understand your world, and give them a reason to show up that has nothing to do with politeness. Keep the rhythm light enough that it survives busy working lives, and build it so it doesn’t depend entirely on you.
You don’t need permission, a budget, or a grand plan to set up mastermind groups of your own. I certainly didn’t have one. You simply need a handful of people willing to contribute, and somewhere to put the next meeting in the diary. Once you’ve got that sorted, the rest tends to build itself, so just make sure someone other than you knows how to keep it going.
A professional mastermind group is one of the most useful things you can build in your working life. A room of peers who understand your world, share their knowledge freely, and help you solve problems you’d otherwise face alone. No consultants, no courses, no cost. Just people who do what you do, willing to show up and contribute.
Here’s what makes these groups genuinely powerful: the group’s wisdom is greater than the sum of its parts. One person’s experience combined with another’s perspective and a third person’s technical knowledge produces something none of them could arrive at alone. That’s not motivational poster language. That’s just how collective intelligence works when the right people are in the same room.
Most of them fail for the same reason. Not a lack of interest, not a lack of talent, not a lack of goodwill. They fail because one person was holding the whole thing together, and when that person moved on, nobody else stepped up. The group dissolved quietly, and everything it had built went with it.
I’ve seen it happen. I’ve also seen what happens when you get it right. This article is about getting it right.
If you want the background on why mastermind groups work and where the idea comes from, read my review of Think and Grow Rich first. I built my first professional mastermind group instinctively, before I even knew what one was called. What I want to cover here is how to deliberately build one.
What a Professional Mastermind Group Actually Is
Strip away the business-speak, and a professional mastermind group is simply a group of people in the same field who meet regularly to share knowledge, solve problems, and support each other’s development. That’s it. No mysticism, no membership fees, no motivational speakers.
The keyword is professional. This isn’t a networking group where people hand out business cards and hope for referrals. It’s a peer group where people show up prepared to give as much as they take. The value comes from the collective knowledge in the room, and that only works if everyone contributes.
“Napoleon Hill’s original writing on the mastermind principle remains worth reading. The Napoleon Hill Foundation at naphill.org is the best place to start.
Who Should Be in the Group
Same field, different employers. That’s the starting point. You want people who understand your world — the specific problems, the specific pressures, the specific language of your profession — but who aren’t in direct competition with each other. Colleagues from the same organisation rarely work well in this format because internal politics get in the way.
Aim for between eight and fifteen members. Fewer than eight and you lose the diversity of experience that makes the group valuable. More than fifteen, and it becomes difficult to give everyone a proper voice in the time available.
Look for people at roughly the same stage in their careers but with different specialisms or experience. The person who has solved a problem you’re currently facing is worth their weight in gold in this setting.
How to Get It Started
Start smaller than you think you need to. Invite five or six people you already know and respect, explain what you’re trying to build, and ask if they’re interested. A founding group of genuinely enthusiastic people is worth far more than a large group that showed up out of obligation.
Your first meeting has one job: establish that there’s value in the room. Come prepared with a real problem you’re facing and invite others to do the same. If people leave the first meeting having learned something useful, they’ll come back. If they leave having sat through a formal agenda and a round of introductions, they probably won’t.
Meet regularly. Every six to eight weeks works well for most professional groups. Often enough to maintain momentum, infrequently enough that attendance doesn’t become a burden on busy working lives.
What to Do at Meetings
Keep it practical. The most effective format I’ve found is simple: each member brings a problem or a question, the group discusses it, and between you, someone usually has the answer or at least a useful perspective. Rotate who goes first so the same voices don’t dominate.
If your group is in a trade or technical profession, there’s another option worth considering. Equipment and service suppliers often want access to a group of professionals in your field. I turned those approaches into training sessions: the supplier provided a trainer and covered the cost of lunch, and we got hands-on training with the latest equipment at no cost to anyone in the group. Everyone won. It’s worth thinking about what your group can offer that others might want access to.
Once a year, we also made a group purchase of science equipment. By aggregating our individual orders into a single collective buy, I was able to negotiate a group discount that none of us could have achieved alone. It’s a simple idea, but it’s the kind of thing that only becomes possible when you have a group organised enough to act together.
Keep meetings to a fixed length and stick to it. Two hours is usually enough. People with busy working lives will commit to two hours. An open-ended afternoon is harder to protect in a diary.
The Professional Mastermind Group Leadership Problem
Here’s the thing: most articles about mastermind groups don’t tell you that leadership is the single biggest reason these groups fail.
Every group needs someone to organise the meetings, chase attendance, keep things moving, and hold the whole thing together between sessions. In the early days that’s usually the person who had the idea. The problem comes when that person moves on, burns out, or simply loses the time to do the job. If nobody else is willing to step up, the group dissolves.
The solution is to plan for succession from the beginning. Don’t build a group that depends entirely on you. Rotate the organiser role every year so that multiple people develop ownership of the group. Make sure the administrative side is light enough that it doesn’t feel like a burden. Keep a shared record of members, meeting notes, and contact details that isn’t stored only in one person’s head or inbox.
A group with shared ownership survives the departure of any individual member, including the founder. A group built around one indispensable person rarely does.
What Makes These Groups Worth Joining
The obvious answer is knowledge sharing. The less obvious answer is professional confidence. When you’re part of a group of peers who take your work seriously, who ask for your opinion and act on it, your relationship with your own profession changes. You stop seeing yourself as isolated and start seeing yourself as part of something.
I watched that happen in the group I built. People who had never had a forum for their expertise, who had been quietly solving problems alone for years, discovered that what they knew was genuinely valuable to others. That changes how you carry yourself at work. It changes what you ask for. It changes what you think you deserve.
That’s not a small thing. For some people, it’s a very big thing indeed.
A Final Thought
You don’t need permission to start one of these. You don’t need a budget, a venue, or an official mandate from anyone. You need a handful of people willing to show up and contribute, a regular meeting time, and someone prepared to keep it going.
