Learn About Success Or Achievement - From The Start Of The Journey
Edition #111
Introduction
Welcome to The ContraMind Code.
The ContraMind Code provides you with a system of principles, signals, and ideas to aid you in your pursuit of excellence.
The newsletter shares the source code through quick snapshots for a systems thinking approach to be the best in what you do.
The Code helps you reboot and reimagine your thinking by learning from the best and enables you to draw a blueprint on what it takes to get extraordinary things done. Please share your valuable thoughts and comments and start a conversation.
Take a journey to www.contraminds.com. Listen and watch some great minds talking to us about their journey of discovery of what went into making them craftsmen of their profession to drive peak performance.
Worth the Watt: A Brief History of the Electric Car, 1830 to Present
When an idea or innovation takes off, we tend to observe it close to the end of its journey and the phenomenal success it has achieved at that moment. However, we often forget the years of planning, toil and pain, failures, and experiments many people would have tried and contributed to where the idea or concept has reached today. We even do it with successful people or legends we admire, but we rarely look at their past and the pains they have gone through to get where they are today.
This article on Electric cars brilliantly explains how it has taken more than 133 years of constant dreaming, building, rebuilding and trying to where the idea of ‘Electric Transportation’ has reached today!
Here are some key takeaways when you look at some of the incredible minds who worked relentlessly on the Electric Car idea to get us where we are today:
Imagination and Aspiration need no capital: Scot Robert Anderson’s motorized carriage was built in the 1830s with a dream of being shown to people around: “Look! No horse nor ox, yet it moves!”
Holding your belief in the middle of opposition to your idea: This impressive performance of the electric locomotive in 1837 alarmed railway workers (who saw it as a threat to their jobs tending steam engines), and they destroyed Robert Davidson’s devil machine, which he’d named Galvani.
We underestimate the adoption cycle for an idea: William Morrison applied for a patent on the electric carriage he’d built, perhaps as early as 1887. Rice incorporated the Electric Vehicle Company (EVC) in New Jersey. He, in turn, attracted big-money investors and partners, and by the early 1900s, they had more than 600 electric cabs operating in New York with smaller fleets in Boston, Baltimore, and other eastern cities. General Motors kept experimenting with electric cars, and the 1966 Electrovair II was a result of that effort.
External events or shocks often drive accelerated adoption: When OPEC imposed an oil embargo in 1973, and per-barrel prices quadrupled to $12 overnight, electric cars started looking like a better idea.
Regulation and compliance can drive change and adoption(or non-adoption): The 1996 California mandate required automakers to sell a small percentage of zero-emission vehicles. Aside from true believers, people did not embrace it. About 800 cars were leased in Los Angeles, Tucson, and Phoenix between 1996 and 2003 (the last cars were built in 1999).
Outsiders disrupt insiders when it comes to disruptive innovation: Tesla Motors began production in 2008 with the Roadster. Tesla finally got enough people to start thinking of electric cars as attractive alternatives and replaced the Citicar as the image the general public brought to mind in response to the words battery, electric, and car. Introduced in 2012, the Tesla Model S made electric cars desirable, earning it a spot on our 10 Best Cars lists for 2015 and 2016. It’s both a large luxury car and a performance car.
Read the entire article here.
Ashish Kulkarni On State Capacity Libertarianism, Econ Principles for Everyone, And India's Unique Path Ahead
In this Inductive Economy Episode, Ashish Kulkarni, an esteemed faculty member at the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics (GIPE), discusses the state's role in economic matters and offers fresh perspectives on policy-making. He shares his ideas on price controls, unravelling how price floors and ceilings influence markets and affect various groups.
Here are some interesting thoughts from the conversation:
What India has not been able to do is use its state capacity in order to be able to develop global champions.
Economics isn’t a subject you master. Economics is a subject you apply.
“The Six Core Lessons of Economics (for Indians):
1. People Respond to Incentives.
2. There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch
3. The World is a Non-Zero Sum Game
4. If you want to communicate to the world at large, prices are an amazing way.
5. Markets sometimes fail.
6. You must, whenever possible, take the long-term view.”
You can listen to the entire podcast on:
Learning From A Barefoot Movement
In his TED Talk, Bunker Roy discusses his extraordinary school in Rajasthan, India, which teaches rural women and men—many of them illiterate—to become solar engineers, artisans, dentists, and doctors in their own villages. It's called the Barefoot College, and he shares how it works in his talk.
Here are some extraordinary points he makes that will make you think and wonder about your own purpose and mission in life:
Who is a professional? A professional is someone who has a combination of competence, confidence and belief.
If people want to come for the money, they don't come to Barefoot College. People come for the work and the challenge.
It's the only college that is fully solar-electrified. All the power comes from the sun. Forty-five kilowatts of panels are on the roof. It was built and installed by people who the world considers illiterate, but they have a knack for solving problems.
A school is for the convenience of the child; it's not for the convenience of the teacher—therefore, it is a night school.
Using a decentralized, demystified approach to solar-electrifying villages, they covered villages all over India from Ladakh to Bhutan - all solar-electrified villages by people whom the world considered illiterate but who had been trained.
Don’t look for solutions outside; look for solutions within. Listen to people; they have solutions for you.
You can watch the entire video by clicking the above link.
Learn About Success Or Achievement - From The Start Of The Journey
Most humans are creatures of instant gratification.
When you see a successful idea or concept, you see the hype and excitement surrounding the concept or the person behind the successful concept or idea and often assume it has been achieved overnight.
With success, we underestimate the effort or time it may have taken, potential risks and losses made until that point of success was achieved, and overestimate the benefits due to the recognition it garners—both financially and personally during that moment.
However, when it comes to failure, you overestimate poor errors of judgements one makes and question the crazy assumptions and hypotheses that led to the failure, the needless risk taken and, hence, the scale of loss incurred. However, you underestimate the risk the people were willing to carry on their shoulders, the time it must have taken for the idea to fructify into a commercially viable proposition, and the relentless faith and belief the people had to have in the idea to go back and try again and again, and people who subsequently again picked from where the earlier person left to try something different to make it a success or improve on them further.
Most schools and colleges don’t teach this, and most education systems don’t prepare you for this harsh reality. You are prepared for a ‘pseudo-success’ environment and situations, and you come out believing it does not take so much effort, time and sacrifice. Yet, ultimately, you may still not achieve what you want or the money you envisage you will gain. However, the truth is that many of them had to fail repeatedly before they succeeded.
Therefore, when you want to replicate or learn from the success of a person, idea, or concept, go to the beginning of the starting-up journey to trace what led the idea to where it is today or what took the person to reach where they are today.
You will realise the number of twists and turns the idea or the person had to take, the incredible amount of convincing and effort it needed, the number of years one had to patiently wait by the sheer grit of their teeth, the number of people who would have ridiculed and dismissed the idea or the effort, the number of failures that many people encountered or overcame, ones who did not get the due recognition in the path to the success of this idea or concept or what people or the idea had to go through can have incredible lessons to be learnt rather than the ‘Success Moments’.
‘The Curtains behind the Success Moments’ will teach you more than the ‘Spotlight of Success Moments’.
Some lessons we learnt from this week’s missions:
Ideas or innovations diffuse slowly, and hence, years of relentless effort are needed before the idea takes off. You may or may not be at the cusp of its take-off stage, but you must keep thinking, believing and evolving the idea better than before.
A professional is someone who has a combination of competence, confidence and belief. It’s not a degree or a paper certificate.
You will learn more about the nuances of what it takes to make an idea or a person succeed only when you see them from the start of the journey rather than when they get the spotlight.