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. I mean that literally: it is what happens when Simon puts a visual model on the wall in front of a group.
Simon talks about wisdom the way I do: wisdom is earned through use, at any 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, also posted on his Facebook wall. I want to respond here, because it is a clear case for “Champion the Past.”
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 shred the entire archive and keep everything that counts. The value lives in the theme that runs through your masterwork.
Champion the Past
Your past is yours to champion. Every experience, triumph, and lesson learned has made you who you are today. In the Masterwork360 Mastermind, we honor your journey by helping you bring out the wisdom in your decades of experience and turn it into insight you can act on.
What Simon describes looks like decluttering. It is a story about Assemble, the first movement in the ACT sequence: Assemble, Cultivate, Transmit.
Assembly goes past organizing the past; it reads it. Few people get that reading, because few stand in front of 140 boxes and face the question 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.
The archive revealed how Simon 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.
That distinction decides 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.
Where Are Your 140 Boxes?
Simon's email ends with a question worth asking yourself:
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.
Few people ever see 140 boxes lined up in a storage unit. A career 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.
The move Simon describes, that instinctive, repeatable, difference-making thing that runs through every project you are proud of, is more than a personal insight. It is the foundation of what you can Cultivate, and ultimately Transmit. Order counts here. You cannot teach what you have not seen, or scale what you cannot yet describe.
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 the training ground for a method Simon now sees in full. 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. Every file served the method; the paper was only the by-product.
This is what Masterwork understands about a career at full length. The decades of livelihood, the clients, the projects, the accumulated practice, feed directly into what comes next. They are the archive, and the archive, read with care, reveals the asset.
Simon is doing exactly that now: finding his method and building a repeatable teaching around it. Finding yours, and developing your masterwork from it, is what Masterwork360 makes possible.
— Sherrie Rose
Trusted Masterwork Advisor & Author, The Masterwork Years
