Why these seven

People sometimes ask me why Mindset Mastery teaches seven mindsets. If mindset matters so much, they say, why not find the single most important one and train that?

It's a fair question. For more than forty years I've worked alongside the entrepreneurs who build the future, at XPRIZE, at Singularity University and at my Abundance Summit, and I've come to believe something simple about the ones who achieve extraordinary things. Take away all of their wealth, technology and relationships, but leave them their mindsets, and chances are they would succeed again. What I noticed about those mindsets is that they travel together. The people who see exponential change also tend to see abundance, ask better questions, know their purpose and aim for moonshots. Their opposites cluster too, and that clustering is the reason the program teaches seven.

The old settings hold each other in place

I think of a mindset as the operating system of your brain. Most of us never chose ours. Our parents, our teachers, our friends and the news installed them when we were young, on top of much older wiring that evolved for fear and scarcity in a world that was local and linear.

Those default settings lean on each other. If you expect tomorrow to look like today, you'll assume the good things in life are limited, and you'll guard what you have. When resources look limited, asking new questions feels like a luxury, and you spend your attention defending what you already hold. Without new questions you drift, your goals shrink to whatever feels safe, and you stop planning beyond the next few years. And when nothing in your future looks much bigger than your past, you stop noticing what you already have.

That's why changing a single mindset on its own is so hard. Tell someone who still thinks linearly to be optimistic, and the advice sounds naive, because nothing they can see supports it. Tell someone stuck in scarcity to aim ten times higher, and it sounds reckless. Each old setting quietly vetoes the new one.

The upgrades hold each other up

The seven mindsets replace those defaults, and they support each other in the same way. I teach them in order, because each one makes the next one believable, but none of them holds for long until the whole set is in place.

It starts with seeing the world clearly, which is the job of the Exponential mindset. Thirty ordinary steps take you about thirty meters. Thirty steps that each double the last take you a billion meters, twenty-six times around the Earth. Our brains are built to predict the first walk, and technology is taking the second. Once you see that curve, Abundance becomes believable, because you start noticing how much is getting better. Extreme poverty has fallen from most of humanity in the 1800s to about one in ten people today, and that rarely makes the front page.

A world that keeps getting better is worth being curious about. When an AI can answer almost any question in seconds, the scarce skill is knowing what to ask, and Curiosity keeps the questions coming. The questions you keep returning to often point to what you care about most, which is where Purpose begins. At the very first Singularity University program in 2009, I asked a room of brilliant people to raise a hand if they knew their purpose in life, and only about a third did. The best definition I know is that purpose is what you enjoy in the service of others.

Purpose gives you a direction, and a Moonshot gives that direction a number and a date. A goal ten times bigger is rarely a hundred times harder. A small goal keeps you polishing the old approach, while a big one forces you to find a new approach, and that is usually where the leverage is. Taking a car from 50 to 55 miles per gallon calls for better tires and lighter materials. Taking it from 50 to 500 means starting over.

A moonshot can take twenty years, which makes the length of your healthy life part of the plan. That's the Longevity mindset. I often ask what Albert Einstein or Steve Jobs might have accomplished with thirty more years of healthy life. If you expect thirty more productive years yourself, you plan differently, and a moonshot stops looking like a race against the clock.

My coach Dan Sullivan, the founder of Strategic Coach, taught me the last piece. If you measure yourself against your ideal, you'll always feel behind, because the ideal moves away like the horizon as you walk toward it. Dan calls that living in the gap. If you measure backward, against where you started, you see how far you've come, and he calls that living in the gain. That habit is Gratitude, and it's what keeps you going for the long haul. A big goal pulls you forward, and seeing the gain keeps you from burning out on the way. Counting your own gains is also abundance turned inward, the same habit of noticing what has improved, so the last mindset feeds back into the second.

That's my answer to the question I started with. Each of the seven depends on the others, and if you take any one of them away, the rest start to lose their footing.

Where to start

The seven grow with practice, about fifteen minutes a day across the program, and practice works best when you know where you're starting. That's why we measure them. The Mindset Signature Test shows where each of your seven mindsets stands today, so you can choose where to begin, and in the free Introduction you'll meet all seven before you go deep on any one of them. I've always believed that the best way to predict the future is to create it yourself. I teach seven because one on its own doesn't hold, and the Introduction is the quickest way to see how they fit together.

— Peter Diamandis