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. It also enables you to draw a blueprint for what it takes to get extraordinary things done. You can share your valuable thoughts and comments and start a conversation here.
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.
The Burnout Age: Real Pain Requires Real Solutions.
How do you define burnout? What’s the solution?
This article from MIT Sloan Review defines burnout using the work done by Christina Maslach, a researcher and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, as “a psychological response resulting from chronic stress in the workplace that shows up through three primary symptoms: feelings of exhaustion, feelings of cynicism and detachment, and a perceived lack of accomplishment.”
The article goes on to explain how burnout can be categorised:
First-degree burns — temporary, acute stress that comes and goes when we’re feeling overwhelmed. This kind of stress is typically followed by a quick recovery.
Second-degree burns — chronic stress and fatigue, leading to decreased motivation that persists.
Third-degree burns - a full burnout where even simple tasks can feel overwhelming, and emotions become difficult to control.
What’s the solution? Based on work by leading psychologist Nick Petrie, the answer lies in how you handle personal growth with personal balance.
Balance perform mode and grow mode - High performers operate in two distinct modes: perform mode (exploiting existing skills) and grow mode (exploring new territory). Across thousands of assessments, Petrie found that the average split is 61% perform mode and 39% grow mode. But many leaders and others who veer toward burnout skew heavily towards perform mode, to their detriment. They spend an extra-high percentage of their time doing what they already know, and too little time learning anything new.
Know your early warning signs - Common early warning signs from Petrie’s research include engaging in snippy behaviour with colleagues and family, feeling overwhelmed, and working weekends to “get ahead” for Monday. Figure out what puts you back in equilibrium.
Build healthy habits - Petrie explains the challenge very well. “..they got into roles where it was just too big,” and “the things which make you successful in your 20s — having an awesome work ethic, saying yes to everything, having no boundaries, being super responsive at all times — those are the things which burn you out in your 40s.” Perhaps the most powerful pattern is having activities that engage completely different parts of your brain and body than work. Petrie terms this finding your “opposite world.”
Read the entire article here.
Media M&A: Business Breakdown.
This conversation with Blake Saunders delves into the media business, its business model, and the future of the industry.
Here are some thought starters that Blake talks about for you to get interested in listening to the entire conversation:
How do you define media? “Media at a high level is effectively content that is monetized via subscriptions or advertising. It takes on so many different forms and continues to evolve. It started at the beginning with books and manuscripts, and that evolved to newspapers and then radio and then television.”
“A lot of large media companies have been trained to be slow movers.”
“Good stories and narratives can be reimagined in a lot of different ways.”
Successful media companies will be those that focus on the business, not just the content.
“Why would I go to a conference when I can listen to the same content on a podcast and just have it sped up one and a half times?”
Who are expected to be the winners? Individual content creators or upstarts who can build real connectivity with the audience.
You can also listen to the full episode on:
The Power of Creative Destruction.
This year, Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt won the Nobel Prize for their groundbreaking work on innovation-driven economic growth. Their research offers a critical insight - “Sustained prosperity is not a natural condition but a dynamic process, propelled by continuous innovation and the creative destruction of obsolete technologies and institutions.”
Here’s a snapshot of Prof. Philippe Aghion’s key highlights in this video:
Creative destruction is a process where new innovations replace old innovations. It is at the heart of economic prosperity, driving growth and reshaping entire industries.
He dives into the tensions between progress and resistance and explores how policies can maximize innovation while being aware of its implications.
Philippe Aghion introduces us to some key concepts like “Escape Competition”, “Diffusion of Knowledge” and the importance of policies for retraining workers in laggard firms as vital to help encourage innovation in companies and create a robust labour market.
What slows innovation? According to Schumpeter, first-time or breakthrough innovators will turn into entrenched incumbents and act as bottlenecks to innovation and growth!
Civil society must take an interest in ensuring that competition policies are enforced, as early innovators could collude with politicians to inhibit competition.
“If you punish early failure, people don’t take risks.”
You can click on the above link and watch the video.
How To Balance Perform And Grow Mode.
The MIT Sloan article on ‘Burnout’ and the Nobel Prize-winning work of creative destruction threw up some interesting but contrarian perspectives on personal growth that we know, have read about, and also have come to believe.
Setting the context
If you tend to exploit more of your existing skills, you are in a ‘perform mode’. You are in a ‘grow mode’ if you are exploring new territory. You will also veer towards burnout if you tend to lean more towards a ‘perform mode’. The question that you may be asking yourself is, ‘Should the opposite not be true?’ The reason is that if you excel in your existing skills, you're familiar with the details and nuances, which allows you to work more efficiently and reduces the likelihood of job burnout or becoming outdated. But why is that not true?
The reasons and how to get prepared to operate in both modes
The reason it’s not true is that you rarely look at your work from two different angles. One is your growth into new roles over time, and the other is the changing business environment over the longer period of your career, which could run into two or three decades. Let’s look at each one of them in detail:
Your career growth expectations will include financial growth and advancing professionally. The brutal truth is that you will not be paid more for your existing skills, regardless of how good you are at them. It can take you to a level, but after that, you will be expected to do new things, be conversant with emerging trends in your field, manage money, lead teams, work with clients, provide direction, solve problems that have not been done before, move to new markets, and lead new business units, etc. Therefore, you will need to keep moving into ‘grow’ mode, exploring all these new territories that you may not know enough or be uncomfortable with. It will require more time and effort to learn these new skills and the ability to experiment and try new things, which could lead to higher chances of failure. If you don’t fail enough and recover, you are not playing enough in your ‘grow’ mode. You must learn to consider these as a potential investment for the future so that when you are thrown into new situations, you are better prepared to handle them in comparison to others. By doing more of your existing skills better and better, you could end up becoming expensive over time, but also not affordable for your firm in that role and the value you bring in.
Let’s look at the changing business environment. When you start looking at your job or your skills, not from a short-term view of a couple of years( ‘I am the best at what I do today among my peers’ or ‘I work for the best company today’) but start to view it over a couple of decades, you will begin to realize the opportunities and gaps in your skills that you need to prepare yourself for. It will not allow you to remain complacent and will force you to move into the ‘grow’ mode rather than the ‘perform’ mode. Begin by identifying potential disruptors emerging on the horizon, both within your industry and job function. You will begin to prepare yourself for it by way of a completely new range of skills needed in a decade from today. Who would have thought that AI would transform coding the way it has in the last few years? Or the Media industry moving from Radio to Television to Cable to digital platforms like OTTs? If you were a media or a creative professional, you would have been forced to learn an entirely new set of skills if you had started in the industry a decade or two back. Or, if you are in the automotive sector, traditional combustion engines are being replaced by EVs and new distribution models. Or if you are in the energy sector, fossil fuels are being replaced by solar energy! This deep awareness of the changing business environment allows you to skew your work-related skills into more ‘grow’ mode rather than a ‘perform’ mode. Finally, as Prof. Philippe Aghion says, your life and work are at risk if your company leadership and management are in a ‘perform’ mode rather than a ‘grow’ mode. You'd better prepare yourself proactively for it - Case-in-point is Intel or GE.
You no longer have the option of being in only a ‘perform’ mode. You have to be in an ‘allotropy’ state with your work skills, by simultaneously being both in the ‘perform’ and ‘grow’ modes. It enables you to be versatile, resilient, and better prepared for any eventuality that may arise from business and technology disruptions.
Some of the lessons we learnt from this week’s mission:
Understand and address the root causes for first-degree, second-degree and third-degree burnouts.
A successful media platform builds real audience connectivity and learns to adapt as technology changes happen.
Creative destruction is at the heart of economic prosperity, growth and reshaping industries.
It's interesting how you immediately get to the core of burnout. That Maslach definition is spot on. I think many of us in demanding fields have felt all three 'burns' sometimes before cofee. It really is the burnout age, and we need those real solutions. So glad to see you tackling this head-on.