45 Professional Excellence And Leadership Principles Learnt In 2024
Edition #151
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.
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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 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.
Wish You A Very Happy New Year And A Fantastic 2025!
As we enter 2025, it’s a good time to reflect on the lessons learnt in 2024 and prioritize a few professional excellence and leadership principles you could work on and practice in 2025.
Looking back, the last 52 weeks have been an incredible year of learning and growth! Here’s a summary of the ‘Contramind Code’ principles learnt from some of the best minds in the previous 12 months.
You can shortlist the ones that inspire you, explore them further, and work diligently on them. These can serve as the start of your journey in 2025 towards personal excellence and professional fulfilment.
Get comfortable to play your own game. Create and find your own turf to play. Explore more here.
If your behaviour is not in alignment with your values, simply walk away or refuse to compromise. Explore more here.
One of the fundamental factors in building an enduring habit is the conviction of purpose that you have in what you want to do or achieve. Explore more here.
Those who have achieved greatness or excellence put in incredible effort and practice, even before they get their money’s worth or value. Explore more here.
With success, you tend to underestimate the effort or time it takes. Explore more here.
When you are emotionally engaged in anything you do, you get an incredible source of energy. Explore more here.
Peak performance can only be achieved when your work capacity triumphs over your potential. Explore more here.
Deep work needs deep investment. Explore more here.
Develop a ‘non-conformity’ muscle in you. Over time, norms that force you to conform start to restrain your behaviour and act as a huge bottleneck to express your views or do things freely. Explore more here.
Frugality is essential when you want to chart a path not taken by many. Explore more here.
Skill gets a score. However, values don’t. Explore more here.
Bring your ‘whole self’ to your work to achieve mastery. Explore more here.
The quality of your work and results show when you take personal accountability. Explore more here.
Best people develop an ability to have insanely long attention spans. Explore more here.
Be a contrarian to see possibilities. Explore more here.
Accept reality, even when it's unpleasant or uncomfortable. It will help you make better decisions and navigate challenges. Explore more here.
To succeed in the future, you must bring your cognitive and non-cognitive skills to play at anything you do. Explore more here.
Add a layer of deep sensing on top of what you are seeing. Explore more here.
Don’t hesitate to ask questions. Finding ways to hone this skill can help you do things with a reason and purpose. Explore more here.
Understand the difference between a job and a career. Explore more here.
To succeed at work, you must have a founder and manager mentality. Explore more here.
Learn to delineate ‘Professional Failure’ from ‘Personal Failure’. Explore more here.
Don’t confuse recognition with improved capability in your job. Explore more here.
‘Timeless Good-to-Feel’ work environments are not for real. Explore more here.
Creating blocks of unproductive time helps you set the foundation for hyper-productivity. Explore more here.
To trigger imagination and curiosity, add the power of factographics to see facts in a new light. Explore more here.
Practice and deploy iterative improvement while you make decisions. Explore more here.
Develop pattern thinking to innovate, drive growth and create value. Explore more here.
Learn critical tenets of holistic design to balance ‘radical’ and ‘empathetic’ design thinking. Explore more here.
Use metaphors and analogies to enhance people’s understanding. Explore more here.
Become an ardent observer of human psychology to discover new opportunities. Explore more here.
With network behaviour, you must be able to separate the signal from the noise. Explore more here.
Don’t manage people and work as transactions. They don’t create human scale. Only inspiration does. Explore more here.
When hiring, look for people who have gone through both successes and failures at work. Explore more here.
Be perfectly at ease being vulnerable in front of your colleagues. Explore more here.
Leadership grooming is also a long, patient and arduous journey. There are no overnight outcomes. Explore more here.
Set up the right context and destination early in anybody’s learning journey. Explore more here.
Scaling people is as important a strategic goal as scaling a business. Explore more here.
Successful career transitions are not just about competency-capability fit - life’s priorities and aspirations also play a significant role. Explore more here.
Keep evaluating if the rate of expertise needed to do your job decreases over time. Explore more here.
Prepare proactively to navigate a decline in your career as you age with experience. Explore more here.
The core challenge in successfully adopting disruptive technologies is the people and culture surrounding them. Explore more here.
People will outlive companies. They will increasingly become “partners” of companies rather than full-time “employees”. Explore more here.
Truly great leaders continue to be leaders long after their leadership tenure. Explore more here.
Be a true mentor, as true mentors have a lasting impact on one’s life. Explore more here.