Master Your Mindset Series (#6)
Melinda Gates, My Imaginary Board Member
Last week’s MYM article was about one of my favorite books, Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. In that article, I shared one of several exercises Hill provides to promote creativity and mindset growth for the purpose of customizing one’s perfect life with an emphasis on career success.
The exercise is to create your ultimate, dream team: a board of directors from anyone in the world, living or deceased. I committed in that piece to highlighting my own dream board throughout the coming weeks.
My first board member would be Melinda French Gates. She was exceptional even as a child, was valedictorian, and later became a brilliant online marketing strategist at Microsoft supporting major platforms like Expedia (which I use practically every time I travel). I hold her in the highest regard for her abundance of philanthropic work globally to tackle health issues, combat poverty, and empower women.
Two common themes that will be easy to identify in all my imaginary board members are their belief in mindset and commitment to philanthropy. Melinda Gates, along with Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, founded the Giving Pledge. I can’t speak higher of any other mindset concept. The purpose of the foundation is to provide a forum for billionaires to literally write out a personal pledge to donate at least half their wealth to charity.
Reading the letters these individuals craft, willingly and graciously giving away their fortunes, reminds me that the world is, in fact getting better and the extremely wealthy take charity very seriously and have causes they are especially interested in supporting so much that they give away their fortunes. Warren Buffett even pledged 99% of his fortune! Ms. French Gates is also an author of a book I recently read, The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World. This book details the philanthropic works of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which personally pledged about $30 billion to tackle large world issues related to health. The statistics of the lives they have saved through their efforts are staggering and the unintended effect was empowering women. It’s altogether heartwarming that people of such tremendous wealth spend so much of their time figuring out how to use their wealth to make our world better.
As a strong independent woman, I also respect her decision to leave a marriage she no longer felt connected to. I have tremendous respect for the way Melinda has lived her life and for being such an incredible role model for us all. A world of Melindas would be a utopia!
In my “board meetings,” I ask Melinda to guide me with online marketing strategies to reach my ideal customers and provide them with exactly what they need from my platform to contribute to designing the future they desire and to show me new ways to ensure that my business practices and extracurricular activities are working in ways to make the world a better place, one person at a time.
Have you created your imaginary board of directors yet? If so, share them in the comment space on our social networking pages. Tell us any changes you have noticed since doing this exercise.