I have known Simon Bowen for ten years. In that time I have watched him take a body of capability that spans Defence, education, infrastructure, government, and small business, sectors with almost nothing on the surface in common, and hold them together as a single coherent thing. His method makes complexity stand still. That is not a metaphor. It is a precise description of what happens in the room when Simon puts a visual model on the wall.
Simon talks about wisdom the way I do: as something earned through use, not granted by age. In fact, The Wisdom Model™ is based on my work with Simon. The Wisdom Model serves as a dynamic tool, guiding individuals and organizations in leveraging wisdom to align actions with their desired legacy, an interactive concept that brings The Three Wisdoms to life through intentional choices and impactful actions. Compare the hand-sketched visual model further down this page with my model, and you will see the same structure.
Recently Simon sent an email broadcast and posted on his Facebook wall. I want to respond here, because it makes the case to "Champion the Past" as an excellent example.
Three weekends ago, I started going through 140 archive boxes. Yesterday, a truck took 60 of them away to be securely destroyed… Going through them was slower than I expected. Ten to twenty client files in every box, and as I sorted, the range of it brought all the key moments of my working life back to me… Somewhere around the second weekend, I saw the thread. Every one of them came down to the same thing — getting a group of people to simplify something complex, agree on it, and then commit to an outcome bigger than they'd walked in believing was possible. The central methodology — every single time — was a visual model… As the truck pulled away, I expected to feel a pang of regret, but I didn't. The asset — the method, the models — was never in the storage unit in the first place. It was always within me.
— Simon Bowen, Founder of The Models Method & Creator of The Genius Model®
You can destroy the entire archive of your work and lose nothing. The value was never the paper. The value exists in the theme of your Masterwork.
Champion the Past
Your past is not something to overcome, it's something to champion. Every experience, triumph, and lesson learned has shaped who you are today. In the Masterwork360 Mastermind, we honor your journey by helping you extract wisdom from your decades of experience and transform it into actionable insight.
What Simon describes is not a story about decluttering. It is a story about what Masterwork calls Assemble, the first movement in the ACT sequence: Assemble, Cultivate, Transmit.
Assembly is not simply organizing the past. It is reading it. Most people never get that reading because they never stand in front of 140 boxes and ask the question that the boxes force. Simon got three weekends and a shredding truck. Most people get a résumé, a LinkedIn profile, and the polite amnesia of moving on.
What the archive revealed was not what Simon had done. It was how he had done it, identical across 25 years of wildly different contexts. Defence and small business. Infrastructure and education. Different stakes, different conversations, the same move. A visual model. Complexity made to stand still.
The paper was residue. The method was the asset. It was always within him, waiting to be seen, not discovered.
That distinction matters enormously to what happens next. Simon did not acquire his method during those three weekends. He saw it, perhaps for the first time at full scale, laid out in boxes containing the physical residue of 25 years of application. The seeing is what Assembling makes possible.
Most People Never Get the Truck
Simon's email ends with a question I want to carry forward here:
What's the thing you do, in every piece of work you're proud of — the thing that makes all the difference — the move you make so instinctively you've stopped noticing it?
That question is what "Champion the Past" makes visible. It is the question Masterwork is built to help you answer before the truck arrives.
Most people never get 140 boxes lined up in a storage unit. The work disperses across decades, contexts, organizations, and industries. That particular kind of looking is what the Masterwork Years are built to support, while there is still time to act on what you find.
Because the move Simon describes, that instinctive, repeatable, difference-making thing that has run through every piece of work you are proud of, is not just a personal insight. It is the foundation of what you can Cultivate, and ultimately Transmit. The sequence matters. You cannot teach what you have not seen. You cannot scale what you have not named.
What the Boxes Were For
I want to say one more thing about Simon's story, because I think it is easy to miss.
The 60 boxes that went to secure destruction were not wasted years. They were the training ground for a method that Simon now has full sight of. The paper was residue, but residue is what remains after real work has been produced. Those files, those client folders, those projects across Defence and education and infrastructure: they were the conditions under which the method was being developed. The work was never pointless. The point was just never the paper.
This is what Masterwork understands about a career at full length. The decades of livelihood, the clients, the projects, the accumulated practice, are not separate from what comes next. They are the archive. And the archive, read correctly, reveals the asset.
Simon is doing exactly that now: finding his method and building a repeatable teaching around it. Finding yours, and building the same, is the whole point of what Masterwork makes possible.
— Sherrie Rose
Masterwork Advisor & Author, The Masterwork Years
