Creating a Master Mind Map

Posted by Faizel Mohidin on Nov 22, 2009 in Mind Mapping, Mind Maps at Work, Mind Maps in Education, Personal Mind Maps | 0 comments

I’ve been constantly trying to convey to you that your ability to learn faster is a great competitive advantage. For this reason, our Learning Management Programme was developed.

I’ve also written about a simple philosophy for success – find a passion and become good at it. This article was written nearly a year ago, as part of my motivational material for 2009. Have a look at it. If you had applied those principles, where would you have been now? It’s not too late. Start now!

These two skills will give you an advantage by making you the best you can be in your chosen profession. To complement this strategy, a Master Mind Map can be used to document your growth and serve as a roadmap of the knowledge base that you are creating on your subject.

Tony Buzan, the inventor of the Mind Map, recommends creating a single, Mega Mind Map that covers your whole body of knowledge. I’ve tried this and it simply doesn’t work for me. I found that my page simply ends up being too small. I ended up looking for bigger and bigger pages for my Mega Mind Map; to a point that the mere size of it became unmanageable.

The Master Summary Map

I then started to experiment with a Master Summary Mind Map of the Main themes and individual Mind Maps for each of the themes. If you do this, you will end up with one Master Mind Map containing the main themes and each theme at the centre of a new Mind Map. Each theme of those Mind Maps could then become the centre of another Mind Map. This could probably go on forever.

The MindMapTutors we’ve been creating are based on this principle.

Try it

Before going further, take a few minutes of your time and try it. If you are not sure how to make a Mind Map, look at the articles and examples on MindMapTutor.com.

• Take a topic and create a Mind Map of that topic.
• Only put five to seven key concepts on the Mind Map.
• Now create five to seven new Mind Maps, one for each of the topics on that Mind Map.
• Draw five to seven branches on each of those topics and put one idea on each of them.
• You should end up with a set of six to eight Mind Maps on your chosen topic.
• Each Mind Map should be relatively simple compared to one big Mega Mind Map.

Now don’t get me wrong, many people use the Mega Mind Map to great success, as they find having everything on one page to be hugely advantageous. I just find it too complex and therefore started to created a set of related Mind Maps that are simpler to digest and memorise.

If you fill in details for each of those Mind Maps, you will already be miles ahead of most people and have the first framework for building a clear roadmap of your subject.

Organic Growth

You will soon find that your Mind Map starts touching on other subject areas. Many people feel that their knowledge is becoming too scattered at this point and may even feel that their knowledge structure is disintegrating. What is really happening is that your knowledge is becoming so deep and extensive that it is beginning to relate to other areas of knowledge.

Mind Maps enable you to take new knowledge and integrate this into your existing knowledge. The relationships between things become clearer and you develop more insights and even greater meaning leading up to that Eureka moment!

When developing our Learning Management Programme we found exactly this happening. We originally wanted to help people to learn faster and easier with Mind Maps. We looked at various study methods and tested them. We took the Mind Map Organic Study Technique (MMOST) of Tony Buzan and the SQ3R method generally proposed by many learning institutions and combined the two to for a ‘new’ method.

We then found that having a good study method is only a part of the solution. Without motivation and goals you don’t have a purpose. So we developed the Motivation Module. You can be motivated and have your goals set, but if you don’t sit down and do it, it’s useless. Out of this, the Time Management Module was born. We eventually ended up with eight modules.

You will find the same thing, if you embark on a lifelong study of your chosen profession or topic.

Both Jasmine and I have used this method of Mind Mapping in Post Graduate Studies and in the workplace to great effect, but managing the Mind Maps became a problem.

Paper Mind Maps are difficult to manage and sometimes difficult to add to or change.

Mind Map Software

Once we discovered Mind Map software though, everything changed! Mind Map software allows you to change and rearrange your Mind Maps as often as you want. Most of them also allow you to create hyperlinks to other Mind Maps. You can therefore use the method I am proposing to great effect. You can always ensure that your Main Mind Map is clear and uncluttered, but you can also add as much detail as you want in the other Mind Maps.

If you wanted to print them, you could do so at any time. You could also print a single Mind Map as you need it. As each Mind Map is a complete Mind Map, you could simply print the ones that you want to focus on at a point in time.

I’ve given my opinions on some of the software that I use in other articles on this site. As I am not affiliated to any of the commercial software, I won’t propose any of them, but I recommend that you give Xmind, an opensource product, a try. Once you have some experience with the free software, you could either upgrade to the premium version or try some of the commercial ones. Nearly all of them let you ‘try before you buy’.

Reviewing your Mind Map Notes

By reviewing your Mind Maps regularly, you will find that you can not only recall the details on each of them, but also recall related information that is not on the Mind Maps. The Mind Maps will trigger the recall of other topics, as the brain works by association.

A good way to review your Mind Maps, is to do a quick-fire five minute Mind Map burst of the topic before you review it the next time. You will soon be surprised how much you remember without any assistance.

You will then be well on your way to awakening the genius in you. And I would have done my job!

Benefits of the Master Mind Map method

• Build up a consolidated, integrated picture of your subject
• Use less space – hundreds, even thousands of pages can be summarised on a handful of Mind Maps
• Use centrally focused structure for each of your themes to integrate your knowledge
• Increase your brain’s hunger for knowledge
• Relate and integrate existing knowledge with new knowledge
• Quickly and efficiently review your knowledge
• Enhance your memory and understanding of books, lectures & presentations
• Excel in any course of study