The Importance Of Expertise, Judgement And Creativity
Edition #112
Introduction
Welcome to The ContraMind Code.
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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.
Gotcha! These Are History's Most Outrageous April Fools' Jokes.
National Geographic carried a thoroughly enjoyable article about April Fools’ Day. It featured some of the most brave and clever jokes or pranks played on people or by companies over the last many decades:
One of the most popular theories about April Fools’ Day has to do with changing calendars in the 1500s. Other historians have linked the trickster tradition to ancient European spring festivals where people dressed in costumes to fool each other.
Bathing lions: The earliest April Fools’ Day hoax on record was in 1698, says Alex Boese, curator of the Museum of Hoaxes. “People in London were told to go see the annual ceremony of the washing of the lions at the Tower of London,” he says. “They showed up at the Tower of London, but”—alas—“there was no annual lion-washing ceremony.”
In 1905, the Berliner Tageblatt, a German newspaper, reported that thieves had tunnelled underneath the U.S. Federal Treasury and stolen all of its silver and gold.
On April 1, 1957, the British Broadcasting Corporation told viewers that there had been an “exceptionally heavy spaghetti crop” in Switzerland that year, partly due to “the virtual disappearance of the spaghetti weevil.” The BBC showed footage of spaghetti harvesters diligently picking noodles from trees.
National Public Radio’s piece on Nixon’s 1992 presidential run is one of its most famous April Fools’ Day pranks. Not only did people believe it, they were outraged.
In 1996, Taco Bell ran a newspaper ad announcing it had purchased the Liberty Bell. The ad was “a risky thing to do because it annoyed a lot of people,” says Boese, but it proved to other companies that “you get a huge bang for your buck if you pull off a stunt that everybody talks about.”
Read the entire article here.
Dr. Vignesh Devraj On Ayurveda’s Holistic Approach For Modern Living
Dr. Vignesh Devraj is a fourth-generation Ayurvedic healer. He is the founder and chief physician of Sitaram Beach Retreat in Kerala, a space for authentic healing and transformation.
Here’s a quick summary of the ideas, insights and thoughts that Dr. Vignesh Devraj shared during the conversation:
Ayurveda is a holistic system of medicine that views health as an interconnected balance between the body, mind, and lifestyle.
Emotional well-being plays a crucial role in physical health. Stress, emotional imbalances, and an unhealthy relationship with food can manifest as physiological disorders.
Developing emotional resilience and a healthy relationship with food is essential for overall well-being.
Ayurveda and modern medicine can complement each other. Ayurveda provides a holistic approach to lifestyle management, while modern medicine offers acute interventions when necessary.
Listen to the entire episode here:
Apple Podcast | Amazon Music | YouTube
Will Automation Take Away All Our Jobs?
David Autor is an American Economist and Professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In this TED Talk, he discusses one of the most debated topics today: how automation will affect jobs.
Here are some of the key takeaways from his talk:
The introduction of ATMs did not reduce the number of human bank tellers, but they have roughly doubled!
Many machines invented to substitute human labour, like tractors, assembly lines, and computers, have not reduced the demand for human skills compared to what was required 125 years ago!
So, why has automation not reduced the number of jobs - the reasons are human genius and creativity and human insatiability.
David emphasises that to do any job, we need a multiplicity of skills, and automating one means that it gives the opportunity to get better at the rest of the skills, and every link to get the job done needs to work better together. He calls humans the O-rings in any automation initiative.
Technology increases the importance of human expertise, judgement and creativity.
Automation creates time to invent new products and services, which spur consumption. New industries are created and which become bigger over time.
Can you believe that people today need to work only 17 weeks a year to attain the average living standard in 1915? Material abundance has never eliminated perceived scarcity.
The real truth about automation is not the lack of jobs but the lack of qualifications to do those jobs. This needs a new movement and institutions, like the high school movement of the 1900s, which prepared people for new skills as the US moved from an agrarian economy to an industrial economy.
You can click the above link and watch the video.
The Importance Of Expertise, Judgement And Creativity
Every wave of automation has brought with it transformative changes in the society in which we live - be it new industries that crop up, new skills that are needed and become available, changes in the employment mix between dominant industries of the earlier era and new era, new needs that market creates demand for and fulfils etc. These changes happen over time until the entire transformation of the society and the very nature of how people live and earn change. One thing that seems to be common in all of these waves of automation - is the ingenuity of humans and their insatiable need for new products and services as they get invented, become accessible, and affordable, and that, in turn, spurs consumption.
Therefore, the need for cognitive skills with every wave of automation will only continue to expand. What are cognitive skills:
Cognitive ability is a general mental capability involving reasoning, problem-solving, planning, abstract thinking, complex idea comprehension, and learning from experience.
Cognitive ability provides the foundation for people’s innovative capabilities.
Cognitive abilities include intelligence, perseverance, creative thinking, and pattern recognition.
Therefore, try to answer these five questions for yourself:
Are you doing an increasingly automatable job, and is the need for cognitive capabilities(as defined above) continuously decreasing?
Does the rate of expertise needed to do your job decreasing over time? [ For example, even with the advent of digital music instruments, composing music still requires human expertise.]
Does your job demand creativity and judgement more than coordination and management of resources?
What is the mix of thinking vs physical vs mental effort in your current job?
What is the proportion of existing skills vs new skills that you have to apply in your current job?
Human cognition beats automation in every wave. Getting prepared for it is vital.
Some lessons we learnt from this week’s missions:
Good health is interconnected through an optimal balance of your body, mind, and lifestyle.
Technology increases the importance of human expertise, judgement and creativity.
Start by assessing what percentage of your job requires cognition skills and how this percentage has changed over the years with the advent of automation or new toolsets.