Agreed. Top CEOs at "top" companies tend to be outliers anyway, so basing how you grow your business on those few unicorns is never a great idea to begin with. A solid mastermind group can to wonders for nearly everyone else. They can take beginning business owners and make them better business owners and offer support for struggling, or even not struggling, business owners.

This strikes me as another one of the many, I didn't do this thing so you don't need to do it either articles.

The book "Good to Great" was based on this idea. I understand I am in a minority opinion here, and may be wrong, but a large portion of that book seemed based on that one fallacy.

The idea of a community of people facing similar struggles and problems meeting to help each other perform better doesn't seem that outrageous. But paying thousands of dollars to some guru for the privilege does.

I think this kind of thing used to happen "organically" on the golf course or at the country club. But at least there you get a round of golf for your money, not just the privilege of being in the same room.

Choosing to spend money instead of spending time, when your time is worth a lot of money, is entirely reasonable.

You'll never be Warren Buffett or Bill Gates if you do X because neither of them did. Which misses the point that it's incredibly unlikely that anyone would ever be as successful as either. Most people probably won't be a Warren Buffett or Bill gates and optimizing for that statistically unlikely outcome could be suboptimal for the vast majority of people.

It also makes the mistake of assuming it's an "if and only if" argument. One becomes a Warren Buffett or Bill Gates, if and only if, they don't do X. But there's no proof given for X preventing becoming a Warren Buffett or Bill Gates. The lack of X in some small sample isn't enough to prove this implicit part of their argument.

Their argument fails on multiple levels. Maybe Masterminds aren't great for everyone. But that's orthogonal to their argument.

No, the argument is not flawed from the start.

The burden of evidence is on whomever asserts the positive. There is a dramatic lack of evidence that these mastermind groups lead to success. And therefore we should view with suspicion anyone who says you should pay many thousands of dollars for something with no evidence of effectiveness.

First what defines success in your comment?

Second, how would you go about measuring success?

Since it's hard to measure the efficacy of a mastermind, especially against a nebulous definition of "success", putting on an economist hat, find a near approximation and measure that.

Turns out, a mastermind is essentially like a fitness trainer that people hire to lose weight.

So does hiring a fitness trainer lead to better weight loss outcomes?

Let me turn the question around.

People join mastermind groups because they hope to get specific benefits that the groups advertise that they may give. This is an implicit declaration of success.

For which of these forms of success is there evidence that the group works? When you have to pay to be a member (particularly for celebrities like Tony Robbins), is there strong evidence that it is actually worth the money? Note, there are strong psychological biases that makes us tend to justify money we've spent, whether or not it was actually worthwhile. I'm looking for external evidence.

There is considerable evidence for benefits for various kinds of mentoring and peer groups. We can see that because people who put their money where their mouths are, like venture capitalists, encourage those behaviors. But I'm not aware of any independent evidence that highly paid "masterminds" are actually worth the money that people pay for them.

And, given the burden of proof, it really should be on them to provide that evidence. They don't.

Now to fitness trainers. There are lots of kinds of fitness trainers, on lots of kinds of business models. But it isn't hard to find fitness trainers like https://www.homeexercisecoach.com/personal-trainer-guarantee... who guarantee your results or you get your money back. That's pretty strong evidence that at least some fitness trainers know how to do things that really work. And I'd personally be willing to pay a premium for someone who is willing to provide a guarantee of results over someone who isn't.

> We can see that because people who put their money where their mouths are, like venture capitalists, encourage those behaviors.

This is definitely selection biased, but I have not seen VC's offer advice that is categorically more amazing than the advice you can crowd source elsewhere.

> But I'm not aware of any independent evidence that highly paid "masterminds" are actually worth the money that people pay for them.

I agree, but my definition of highly paid, and yours may different. At $5k-$10k to attend I would not consider that to be highly paid, and have seen (as noted below) what appears to be satisfaction with the results.

> And, given the burden of proof, it really should be on them to provide that evidence. They don't.

Anecdotally, that is not accurate. The limited experience I have with masterminds (I've never paid for their services, but have worked with a few directly, and many many of their clients) is that they do encourage their paying members to actively post about their individual success via social messaging. And as part of an on-going content marketing strategy, will often have successful members take part in a "hot seat."

Edit to add: at $100k for attendance, that already selects a certain individual with a certain level of success. While you may not see evidence that a mastermind attendee has had "more success" after attending than they would have had they not, you also don't see evidence that a mastermind attendee has had "less success" after attending. It appears that masterminds are filling some unmet need, and their clients are willing to pay.

> This is definitely selection biased, but I have not seen VC's offer advice that is categorically more amazing than the advice you can crowd source elsewhere.

A lot of the "crowd sourced" advice is essentially digested and regurgitated advice that ultimately comes from high quality sources like Y Combinator and Steve Blank. Therefore it would be hard for venture capitalists to have better generic advice than that.

But the fact that they are willing to pay large amounts to be in a position to offer specific actionable advice to those that they invested in (eg by being on the board of directors), can be taken as a good sign that the VC believes that they are likely to wind up being able to give valuable advice that is specific to a given company's situation. And THAT you really can't crowd source from elsewhere.

> Anecdotally, that is not accurate. The limited experience I have with masterminds (I've never paid for their services, but have worked with a few directly, and many many of their clients) is that they do encourage their paying members to actively post about their individual success via social messaging. And as part of an on-going content marketing strategy, will often have successful members take part in a "hot seat."

That's not necessarily evidence of anything.

First, as you note, any such report is an anecdote. The plural of "anecdote" is not "data". Doubly not with such an active selection bias.

But, more importantly, anyone who is familiar with cognitive dissonance will be aware that the act of publicly saying how great X is will find it hard to later question whether X was actually beneficial. Therefore paying members who have posted about their success are likely to convince themselves that the program was more beneficial than it truly was. As well, the program clearly benefits from the advertising.

Therefore such anecdotes do more to remind me that some of these programs have cultlike elements, than it does to convince me that they work particularly well.

> Edit to add: at $100k for attendance, that already selects a certain individual with a certain level of success. While you may not see evidence that a mastermind attendee has had "more success" after attending than they would have had they not, you also don't see evidence that a mastermind attendee has had "less success" after attending. It appears that masterminds are filling some unmet need, and their clients are willing to pay.

If I accepted evidence of this type, then I'd have joined Scientology many years ago.

> If I accepted evidence of this type, then I'd have joined Scientology many years ago.

Or parrot the virtues of Venture Capitalists.

> Or parrot the virtues of Venture Capitalists.

Touché.

That said, I think I'm on more solid ground to judge VCs. First, I personally know a number of people who they helped make rich. Second, I've seen enough cases where they had useful advice, connections, and so on to have personal respect. Not because of their advertising, but because of their results.

That said, there are problems. First, VCs are not all created equal. And the bad ones do their best to sound the same as the good ones. Plenty of VCs just "follow the herd". And, of course, VC returns are dominated by a few hits. So they will push founders to "swing for the fences" - a gamble which is in the VC's interest far more than the founder's.

Even there the success metrics vary widely between customers. I hire a fitness trainer to increase functional strength and prevent sports injuries, not to lose weight. The whole area is so subjective that there can't be any common agreement on key metrics.