Successful people are very reflective. They evaluate everything. They understand that experience is not the best teacher — it is the hardest teacher, it's not the best teacher. Evaluative experience is the best teacher. So they understand that they have to reflect because reflection gives insight into experience. Without reflection you get no insight. Some people just move from experience to experience to experience. Never grow from it. What causes another person to go from experience to experience and grow? It's the reflection. So successful people reflect, unsuccessful people have a tendency to not reflect. Those eleven thinking skills are the eleven major differences I think in thinking between successfulness and unsuccessful.
Preaching: You've got a statement in the book that says, "If your thinking is limited so is your potential." How do you think that plays out in the life of the church?
Maxwell: I think it is everything in the life of the church. First of all, where there is no vision people perish. From our biblical roots we understand that the size of your vision or the ability to have big thinking or big dreaming is going to determine the size of your congregation. The greatest limiting factor in a person's life is their thinking. If I don't think or if I don't think good thoughts I am only going to be a recipient of what is given to me.
John Cotter has written some great change books in leadership. We were talking about some of this stuff and he said, "John, the vast majority of people don't make their life — they accept their life." And I thought this is so true. People with no thinking skills or limited thinking skills, they just take what is handed to them. They have no other option. When I limit my thinking, the smallness of my thinking is going to always determine what I receive from it.
Preaching: If you were talking to young pastors, how would you advise them to become big thinkers?
Maxwell: I had to do it myself. First of all I grew up in a small denomination of 225 churches. The largest church would have been 500. Very negative, very legalistic, hyper-critical, most of the churches didn't have one professional in the congregation. That was my environment. I very quickly assessed my situation and said, "I'm in prison here. How am I going to get out?"
What I did back in 1971, '72, '73 is I got a list of the pastors of the ten largest churches in America. That was the first awareness for me that there are some churches that are huge. In fact, I think in '72 the 10th largest church in America was Charles Blair's church in Denver, Colorado; if I am not mistaken he either had 1800 or 2000. The tenth largest church. Today there are 10 churches in Orlando that are made up of 2000.