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“One map to bind them all…”

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Adam Sicinski, well known to readers of this blog since the Great Hand-drawn Mind Mappers’ Face-off, has come out with a jaw-dropping mind map that some people could probably run their lives with.  Cleverly called the “MasterMind Matrix” it comes either as a PDF or a laminated A0 poster (that’s A0, as in 33 inches x 47).

I corresponded with him about this to dig out the back story, and the more I learned, the more I realised that it was a tale worth telling.

Adam Sicinski is a coach – a Life Coach – and he told me of a several year search for the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything (not his words, I’m just a Douglas Adams fan) involving 150 books from Amazon, CDs, DVDs and seminars.  He kept diaries about interactions with others, and obsessively watched recordings of reality-TV shows so he could pause and resume while making notes about what people said, how they said it and what happened as a result.

Although he knew of mind mapping back then, to him, it wasn’t the indispensable tool he finds it now. He started organizing this material into OneNote in what he would probably admit is a pretty non-visual way:

This took several weeks of full-time organization of years’ worth of materials.  Suddenly, he had one of those ‘Aha!’ moments: He had become a mere Information Collector (his caps) and it was getting him nowhere –  action was what he needed.

So he started formal study at the Life Coaching Institute of Australia to get practical experience and this pushed him over the ‘action’ hump.  He told me that this was when the idea for a MasterMind Matrix began to take its first form one night in 2006, because he saw he had many disparate pockets of deep information with not much tying them together – there were gaps that he wanted to fill in and links to be made.  He sent me a snap of an early version, and if I’m guessing rightly, I think he was using Inspiration at that stage – not at all in today’s Sicinski style.

He tells me that piecing this together filled his evenings, nights and the early hours for twelve months, but as it grew he went into another round of research and reading.  By now his target was to present all this information in an easy to understand format that linked everything.

Then it got interesting – by early 2007 the chart had grown out of control.  He even had it all over one bedroom wall and contemplated it before sleeping and when waking up.  It was rough around the edges, which is hard to imagine if you look at it now.

Getting it to its present state took another 2 years – moving right into 2009 and its release a week ago. 

I tried to squeeze something out of Adam about his process for making this type of mind map, but he’s staying tight-lipped.  With a unique style like this that’s probably wise, though I’ve heard that he plans some courses around the technique.

So what does it look like?  (and just bear in mind that it’s normally nearly four feet wide)

To get the value from this, it’s clear you’ll be studying it for a long time (click for a larger image).

Here’s a free version of the MaterMind Matrix and Adam’s own information about this map.

Roy

Disclosure – Adam sent me a pdf of this without charge because I’ve shown enthusiasm for his work in the past.  He did not ask me to blog about it.

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