The Power of Forum and Peer-Support Groups

We love the story of the lone genius.

Einstein scribbling equations in a patent office. Tolkien hunched over a desk in Oxford, conjuring Middle-earth from nothing. Steve Jobs in a garage, dreaming up the future of computing.

It's a beautiful narrative. Romantic. Inspiring.

It's also wrong.

Einstein didn't develop the theory of relativity alone. He had the Olympia Academy, a tiny group of three friends who met nightly in his apartment in Bern to argue about physics and philosophy. Conrad Habicht, a mathematician. Maurice Solovine, a philosophy student. They read Hume, Mach, Poincaré. They challenged every assumption Einstein held. When Einstein later needed to extend relativity into a general theory, it was his old classmate Marcel Grossmann who provided the mathematical framework he couldn't reach on his own. And it was Michele Besso, his closest friend and colleague, who served as the daily sounding board. Einstein called Besso "the best sounding board in Europe." The sole acknowledgment in Einstein's most famous 1905 paper? Besso.

Tolkien didn't write The Lord of the Rings in isolation either. He wrote it inside a group called the Inklings, a handful of writers and scholars who met twice a week at Oxford. Thursday nights in C.S. Lewis's rooms. Tuesday mornings at a pub called The Eagle and Child. They read their unfinished work aloud. They offered encouragement and blistering critique in equal measure. Lewis pushed Tolkien to keep going when he nearly abandoned the manuscript. Tolkien pushed back on Lewis's theology in The Chronicles of Narnia. The creative friction between them sharpened both. Without the Inklings, it's an open question whether either body of work would exist as we know it.

And Jobs? The garage story conveniently leaves out Wozniak, who actually built the thing. It leaves out the broader network that shaped Apple's trajectory at every critical turn.

This pattern repeats across centuries.

Benjamin Franklin founded the Junto in Philadelphia when he was a young printer. A small group of tradesmen who met weekly to discuss ideas, challenge each other's thinking, and improve together. Franklin credited the Junto with sharpening almost every major idea he ever had. The Bloomsbury Group in London included Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, and E.M. Forster, all meeting weekly at Vanessa Bell's home, trading ideas across art, economics, and philosophy. The PayPal founders went on to build Tesla, LinkedIn, YouTube, and SpaceX, and every one of them has pointed back to the culture of that original small group as the thing that catalyzed what came after.

The pattern is so consistent it should be considered a law: behind nearly every breakthrough attributed to a lone genius, there was a small group of trusted peers who made it possible.

You want your lone-genius breakthrough? Get a group.

Not a network. Not a conference. Not a loose association of contacts. A tight, sustained group of people who trusted each other enough to share unfinished thinking, challenge sacred assumptions, and push each other past the point where solo effort stalls.

Here's what's interesting about those groups.

They were small. Rarely more than a dozen.

They met consistently over long periods. Not once. Weekly, for years. Trust and quality of exchange compounds over time.

The members in them weren't there to network. They were there to think. To create. To be changed by the collision of ideas they couldn't access on their own.

That's the part nobody talks about. These weren't social groups. They were cognitive environments. The right people, in the right configuration, over enough time, produced thinking that none of them could have reached individually. A curated intimate group. Not a weekend. Not a conference. Sustained, structured interaction designed to create the conditions these group stumbled upon by accident.- Steven Kotler.

My own professional growth and development has been shaped by my YPO Forum – a group of eight peers. CEOs of their respective businesses in non-competing industries. We meet 6-8 times a year, in a structured, agenda-driven format. We also have an annual multi-day retreat to deepen the reflection and learning from each other.

As an executive coach, I also encourage my clients to form their own peer support groups and I provide guidance on how to set them up. CEOs, entrepreneurs and business leaders need that space to reflect, learn and grow – without judgment and without the pressure of day-to-day decision-making that can keep us stuck in the present without a way to create meaningful breakthroughs in performance.