Refinement vs. Meandering
Edition #025
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.
Building Negative Capability
The poet, John Keats, used this term when he wrote a letter to his brothers George and Tom in 1817.
Keats lost most of his family members to an infectious disease, tuberculosis, that would take his own life eventually. In the same way, the COVID-19 pandemic turned many people's worlds upside down, and the poet developed a deep sense of life’s uncertainties.
What is Negative Capability?
According to Keats, “….Negative Capability is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, and doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason….”
In the article in Psychology Today, Grant Hilary Brenner, MD, writes about the importance of developing Negative Capabilities to unlock our hidden potential.
Here are some top takeaways on why this is important -
Negative capability builds reflective function: It allows us to accurately understand and interpret our own and others’ mental experience.
Negative capability helps build ‘inhibitory control’: Good executive function requires the ability to tell ourselves "no!" also known as inhibitory control.
Negative capability is the embodiment of curiosity and creativity: Negative capability allows us to reflect, with evenly-suspended attention, upon whether ideas which come to us are novel or repetitive.
Negative capability builds the capacity for thinking: Through exposure to one’s own inner processes heard out loud and spoken to another human being, we learn a lot about how our own mind works.
Negative Capability helps us get less constrained by reason and logic: Logic is wonderful, and reason is a powerful tool. Yet there are times in life when they are insufficient. Sometimes we need to "turn off the targeting computer" and get in touch with deeper experiences.
Read the article here.
How to Achieve Flow State
Rob Orman, MD, is a certified executive coach who works with physicians to build resilience within their medical practices, deconstructing ideas and strategies to live and work with intent.
He received his medical degree from Emory University and completed emergency medicine residency at Denver Health Medical Center, where he served as Chief Resident. Rob spent the next 20 years as a Community Emergency Physician and now works full-time as a Physician Coach.
In this podcast, he talks to performance coach Jason Brooks, PhD who breaks down the steps to achieving flow and how to get it back when it slips away.
Here are some salient learnings from the conversation:
Being in a state of flow has most to do with mental performance without having a feeling of a result attached to it.
The more time you spend refining a skill, the more likely you’ll get into a flow state.
Self-doubt is an internal distraction that disrupts performance and can kill flow.
To achieve a flow state, be aware of what distracts you and ensure that your external environment is as distraction-free as possible.
Go back to the basics and keep reviewing the elementary level of understanding of a topic, as this will help you get back on track to mastery.
How Behavioral Science Is Shaping The Core of Product Development
Connor Joyce is the Co-Founder and executive committee member of the Applied Behavioural Sciences Foundation (ABSA).
In this episode, Connor talks about:
Difference between Behavioral Science, Data Science and User Experience
Difference between User Stories and User Outcomes
Attributes of a Behavioural Scientist
Information synergy between a Data Scientist, Behavioral Scientist and a UI and UX Designer
Importance of Culture in Behavioural Science
What the Apple Watch got right
Refinement vs. Meandering
Often when you want to achieve flow state, the importance of continuous refinement of your skills is recommended. It requires the discipline of practice every day. The little nuances of perfecting every little skill needs keen observation, self-awareness of the strengths and weaknesses of your current skills, and humility to accept that there’s still a lot to learn and improve.
Conscious Refinement of your skill is not taught or practised at the workplace as much as it is done in professions like medicine, music, art etc. If you are in sales, one question you should keep asking yourself is, ‘Am I better off at negotiation or closing a deal today than yesterday?’ Or if you are software, ‘Are you better off writing the code yesterday than today?’ So, is the case with any job role you are doing now. Also, how you refine your skills and get a feel that you are improving in these areas is not an easy task. It is not like earning a degree or a qualification or getting a certificate of completion. Some of these are not quantitive measurements, but it is more about qualitative measures, which require heightened self-awareness of how you perform using your work skills every day. It is also about critical evaluation of how quickly you understand the problem, linking it to past issues you have handled, connecting your varied experience across situations of solving different problems over the years and then closing in on the solution quickly.
As you improve this skill, biases build in your behaviour and decision-making. Quickly coming to conclusions become a problem. That is when the need to ‘meander’ becomes important. As you see a problem, thinking of alternative ways of solving an old problem and dissecting the new problem in new ways differentiates the ‘best’ from the ‘good’.
To get this in perspective, think about why you feel one doctor is better, one teacher is better than another, and one architect is better than another. The skill they have gained and applied through hands-on experience can never replace their educational qualification, as all doctors, engineers, architects, or teachers are the same - when they are seen through the lens of educational qualification.
As you keep getting ‘near perfect’ in your skill, build your negative capability muscle as it can make you more reflective, curious and creative. More than ‘the speed of answer’ or giving a ‘quick correct answer’, the need to look at the same problem differently, meander and discover new alternative solutions become more critical.
As you get better at your skills, you don’t need a ‘Certificate of Completion’, but you need a ‘Certificate of Contemplation’ taking your mind to less familiar paths but can give you the joy of discovery and put a clear purpose to what you do.
Some of the lessons we learnt from this week’s mission:
Negative Capability can help you move away from an SOP or ‘operator manual’ mindset.
To achieve flow state, keep refining your skills and attempt to become the best in what you do.
Behavioural science, Data Science, and User Experience can create immersive User Journeys. Marrying the ‘rational’ with the ‘irrational’ is essential.
