Now that you’ve got a full head of steam and you feel you are running on the right track, a couple of logical questions begin to gnaw on your brain. Where did this thinking come from? Where is this thinking taking me? The truth is that you passed multiple points in getting here and a destination, by definition, is a singularity – the goal of this thinking journey.
Here’s where the first part – how you got here – is tackled with your expanding mind. You think to yourself – these three ideas came from somewhere and I ought to know where that is for several very good reasons. For myself – it would make me feel more comfortable to know that I didn’t just pull these ideas out of the air. For other people – I should be able to explain how I got to this thinking and maybe defend the ideas better if I had to.
The Rule of Seven
Most importantly, as I think about from whence these ideas came, I might be able to sharpen, clarify, and even revise the three thoughts with which I started. But how do I do this without opening up a can of worms? How do I go through all the stuff that got me here as efficiently and as rapidly?
This is where the Rule of Seven comes in spectacularly. Based on the available empirical knowledge, the opinions of scientists, educators, and psychologists – not to mention my own body of work – you need to do the same for this part of your thinking that you did for the three ideas. If you don’t need any more than three ideas to make sense of something, how many supporting points do you need?
If it is true that three ideas are what you need – neither more nor less than three ideas to make information understandable and useful—then (based on everything we talked about earlier) the number of support points needs to be seven. Nobody, including you yourself, are likely to be able to embrace, process, and remember more than seven supporting points for any issue.
At the same time, if you can’t come up with seven supporting points then either the issue is far too simple for this process so you don’t need it….. or you just aren’t taking this seriously enough. Either way, it’s going to be very difficult to defend any ideas unless you have “enough” to back up your thinking. Seven supporting points are enough, fewer are too few. Welcome to the Rule of Seven. Write them down.
These points do NOT have to be in any particular order. You don’t need to sweat out prioritizing them. It is enough that they exist as “explanation” of why your three ideas make sense.
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