DRAFT — assembled from the store. Every element is read from the library; the video is cued to a coded passage.
Exponential Entrepreneurs

The 97  ›  Mindset

9 Forms of Thinking

The point

Analytical, critical, divergent, convergent, holistic, creative, abstract, concrete, sequential, strategic. The majority of people I meet are one. Master all of these and it's the same thing as the 10 x 10 x 10.

Jay Abraham · Two Day Rapid-Result "Instant Immersion" — Day 2 Cued to 5:47:25 2 min 20 sec loading…

Why it matters

Every decision you made last year passed through one instrument you never examined. There are nine ways to think about the business you already own — analytical, critical, divergent, convergent, holistic, creative, abstract, concrete, sequential — and a tenth, strategic, that governs the rest. You run on one, usually analytical. Almost nobody is holistic, few move between abstract and concrete, almost no one is sequential or strategic.

The tactician asks how to dig faster. The strategist asks whether you are digging in the right place, for the best material. You can dig faster than anyone alive and come up with nothing. The better answer waits behind the better question: raise it clearly, weigh the evidence, then test your conclusion against it.

A new idea is never summoned on demand. It is assembled from raw material, allowed to gestate, then forgotten — and when it surfaces you write it down, make it your prisoner forever, and put it to work in the cold morning after. Linear thinking locks into a fixed sequence of steps; three-dimensional thinking pulls perspective in at every stage, from outside the expected sources.

The most dangerous knowledge you carry is what you know is true and isn't — one instrument never catches it. Add ten per cent of each form and they multiply rather than add, 10-10-10 applied to the mind. Merely competent across all nine, you double or triple the capacity of the organ every other strategy depends on.

The mistake almost everyone makes

You will read the nine, recognise yourself in two, and quietly file the other seven as traits you were not born with. They are skills, and the bar is not mastery — ten per cent of each, competence rather than genius, is what multiplies.

The test: Say out loud which form you used on your last significant decision. If it was analytical, and analytical the time before, you have been digging faster in the same place.

Where it shows up — 8 worked examples

WhoWhat happened
GraybarConcrete thinking: employees bought the firm in 1928, then stocked deeply enough to ship 98% of customers within 24 hours.
ChariStrategic thinking: bought Karny.ma, the ledger app 40,000 Moroccan shopkeepers already opened daily, rather than competing for their attention.
Christy NgConvergent thinking: pulled the shoe label onto one platform with automated fulfilment; order processing fell from two days to one hour, revenue rose 400%.
Chuckling GoatCreative thinking: a Welsh farm with 50 goats turned its milk into kefir sold direct to more than 200,000 customers, reaching £4 million yearly.
CombiliftDivergent thinking: the whole category carried long loads forward, so Moffett and McVicar turned the load sideways, selling into roughly 85 countries.
Cooperative Home Care AssociatesHolistic thinking: making the aides owners with a voice in scheduling cut turnover below 24 percent against a national median of 82.
Creative ConnersSequential thinking: 10-unit batches re-sequenced into one-piece flow, shaving 10 hours off each assembly and about $70,000 a year in labour.
DKSHHolistic thinking: sells brands the whole Asian chain — registration, marketing, sales, delivery — rather than one link, lifting revenue to CHF 11.1 billion.

What it solves

The words a business owner uses for this before anybody has told them the name of it. If one of these is a sentence you have said out loud, this is your strategy.

  • Every decision comes out the same“I look at every problem the way I look at a spreadsheet, and lately the answers all come out looking like last year's answers.”You name the ten forms, mark the one you actually use, and decide in the next seven days through two you never touch.
  • Working hard on the wrong problem“We are moving faster than we have ever moved, and I have a nagging feeling we are pouring all of it into something that was never going to work.”The tactician digs faster and the strategist digs in the right place, so you check the place before the pace on whatever is taking most of your money.
  • Waiting for the big idea“I keep waiting to have a genuinely original idea about this business, it has been years, and I am starting to think I am not the creative type.”A new idea is assembled rather than summoned: gather the raw material, let it gestate, forget it, and write it down the moment it surfaces.
  • Answers that never get better“We hold the same meeting every month, we argue it out well, and we walk out with roughly the answer we walked in with.”You raise the vital question clearly before anybody answers it, because the better answer waits behind the better question and nowhere else.
  • Indistinguishable from the competition“A customer could put our proposal beside three others and honestly would not be able to tell which one was ours.”Three-dimensional thinking pulls perspective from outside the expected sources, so you become special and advantageous in the eyes of the person buying.
  • Client will not change how they decide“My client takes my recommendation, runs it through the same instincts that created the problem, and hands it back looking exactly like what they already do.”You get the sentence that ends that loop — problems are not solved by the thinking that created them — and ten named forms to walk your client through.

The challenge

Run one live decision through two forms you never use

Take the decision sitting on your desk — the hire, the price, the product you are about to kill. Write the ten forms down one side of a page and mark the ones you actually used. Then work the same decision through two you never touch, 20 minutes each, in writing. Holistic asks what else this touches. Concrete asks what it looks like on Thursday at 9. Creative gathers the raw material tonight and reads it cold in the morning. Decide when the page is full, not before.

How you will know it is done One page carrying the ten forms, the ones you already use marked, and a written answer from each of the two you avoided.

The AI layer · second pass

Once this is working, here is what to multiply

Improve the system first. Then multiply it. This panel is the second run at the strategy above, and it is deliberately useless until the first run is done.

Before you point anything at this You have run one real decision through all nine forms by hand, on paper.
What it multiplies Running the same decision back through the divergent, abstract and sequential readings you would never reach unaided, so the strategic question arrives with nine answers rather than one.
The trap Renting eight forms of thinking instead of growing them. The ten percent you were meant to add to each form never gets added, because the machine performs each one on request and the organ every other strategy depends on stays exactly the size it was.