What do Jesus, Harriet Tubman, and Ray Kroc have in common?
They all had a Find Your Twelve mentality. They saw how life could be different, not just for themselves but for the world.
If they only did what they did for themselves, we wouldn’t even know their names. They would be lost to history.
Let me share their secret with you right away: they had an abundance mindset.
They were able to serve more people who served more people. Like an avalanche of change, their tiny bit of momentum swelled into gigantic movements that shaped the world as we know it. You see, abundance forces you to become more.
I first learned this lesson when I started my coaching practice. My mentors helped me see immediately that it’s bigger than me. I wasn’t in the business of helping one person at a time. I was in the business of reproducing myself in many, who will help many more.
My job was to trigger the trickle-down effect. Instead of focusing on meeting my own needs, I would focus on creating a thousand opportunities for many to change their lives.
I want to be clear—I’m not saying that you can’t be successful on your own. I’m just saying you’ll be a hell of a lot more effective with your twelve because an abundant vision mandates you have them.
Find the Right People with an Abundance Mindset
The first thing you’ll want to do is to find people who believe what you believe. Find the values you prize and the virtues you extol. Most of all, find people who want to make a crazy impact on the marketplace, just like you do.
In my life and business, the values I look for in my twelve are:
- Integrity. I need to know that I can trust and rely on them, whether I’m around or not. People who I know will do what they say they’re going to do.
- Personal responsibility. I want people who do their own pushups and who are intrinsically motivated to do the work.
- Competence. I want people who do the work and do it well, and who have the superpowers that complement mine.
- Good people and leadership skills. I want people who can both listen carefully and rally the troops when the time comes.
- A heart for service. I look for people who genuinely want to serve—the business, their partners, the mission, and the vision.
I want my twelve to have these values even though their superpowers and gifts may all be different. But these are the non-negotiables.
Once you find your twelve, you’ll have to spend a majority of your time off the bat working with them, mentoring them, and training them up. But once you have them up and running… look out, world.
Practice an Abundance Mindset
Trying to do everything on your own is living from a scarcity mindset.
To attain freedom, advance a huge mission, and build generational wealth requires an abundance mindset. The mindset of someone who is just looking out for their family makes that person miss the chance to better their whole community, country, and even the world.
Ray Kroc, the genius behind McDonald’s, saw two brothers with a bustling hamburger and shake stand. The brothers were content with one restaurant serving hundreds of happy, sugared-up customers. But Kroc saw it so much bigger. He wasn’t interested in serving hundreds; he was interested in billions. Decades later, McDonalds serves millions of people per day.
Finding your twelve is about thinking big. It’s about being a leader. It’s about growing yourself so big that you expand to the level of your mission. It’s about becoming so much more than you are today that you never have to talk about yourself, because people around you will readily tell your story.
Jesus’s self-assurance and belief in his grand mission to save the world was so powerful he didn’t have to give long lectures to his disciples. He showed up, dropped a, “Follow me…,” and led twelve ordinary men to turn the world upside down. This is because of all that he was.
Do More by Doing Less
To make this shift to a Find Your Twelve mindset means to do more by doing less. It’s not just thinking differently; it’s thinking oppositely. It isn’t about finding a fulfilling job; it’s about creating thousands of jobs and building powerful teams of twelve to facilitate it.
Jesus often would seclude himself up on the mountain, and even when he wasn’t “working,” the mission was being accomplished. Harriet Tubman didn’t build every safe house. But at night, hundreds were harbored from danger.
How? They found their twelve.
Whether you’ve thought about it or not, this is how we change the world: one mind, one vision, and twelve people at a time.