A Black Belt In Thinking

"Great!" Richard replied. "My assistant will sort out the details."

Richard was the founder & CEO of a $3.7 billion tech success story in Australia. The year was 2016. I was twenty-five years old and just starting my new business, CodeMakers.

I'd actually met Richard back in my university days when I was a starry-eyed nineteen-year-old with my fledgling tech startup, 99dresses. As a scholarship recipient, I was invited to one of the university's fancy award dinners along with their prominent alumni and supporters. Richard and I had been seated next to each other on a table with several other guests. I had no idea who he was or what he did, but he seemed very smart and lovely. We talked about various things together, then went our separate ways at the end of the night.

Nearly six years later, I received an email from him.

I replied, of course. It was lovely to hear from him after so many years.

And that's how I found myself in his office in 2016. We talked for a while, and then he gestured me over to his desk.

"You know, I wasn't always like this. I used to be a musician, back in the day". He showed me a picture of a younger Richard. Then I glanced out the office window to the vast open-plan area of desks, with people busily collaborating with each other and working together on his vision.

Richard directed my attention back to a graph on his desk. He traced his finger from the starting point, across about ten years of slow and steady growth. Then he tapped his finger at a steep inflection point — the moment everything changed, and his company began making quantum leaps. It was an incline so steep that venture capitalists would've scrambled to get a seat on board that rocket ship. Somehow, Richard managed to maintain a huge percentage of the company by the time it went public.

With his finger still tapping on the inflection point, he looked me in the eyes and said, "Nikki, this point right here represents the moment I learned how to think. I mean, really think."

He told me about a course he did in New Zealand called A Black Belt In Thinking. He told me it changed everything for him. It changed the way his mind worked. It changed the way he approached problems. He could see points of failure in huge complex systems with incredible clarity, just by applying rigorous logic. He could spot little fixes that had massive positive consequences. He could see problems as symptoms and trace them back to their root cause.

It changed his company, and it changed his life. It changed mine, too.

"Nikki," he said. "I'm sending some employees to this ten-day boot camp in New Zealand so they can learn the same thinking processes that I did. It's going to be intense — wake up at six a.m., go to bed at midnight, and train your mind in between. The boot camp is in two weeks. I want to send you, too. I'll pay for the whole thing, of course. Flights, accommodation, food — all taken care of. Do you want to go?"

I was a bit surprised. That wasn't what I was expecting, but of course I said yes. When a smart, forward-thinking billionaire offers to send you on a twelve-thousand-dollar learning adventure, you'd be silly to refuse.

"Can I ask why?" I said, after I'd accepted his offer. "Why me?"

"Because I have a feeling you're going to change things. I see something in you. You're going to make an impact."

It was fascinating how his mind worked. He just saw things with eerie clarity. I sometimes wished I had that foresight when I looked into a mirror and saw my own reflection staring back at me.