Education Has To Prepare People For Careers, Not Just Jobs.
Edition #140
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.
Is Higher Education All About Getting a Good Job?
In this brilliant article, Patrick J Casey, an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Holy Family University, writes about the arguments and discussions surrounding ‘Integrating AI’ throughout the university curriculum.
Here are some interesting thoughts for you to reflect on from this article:
A college education should generate graduates who are themselves generative. The aim is to produce not knowledge, but knowers; not thought, but thinkers; not creations, but creators.
We can compare academic work with weightlifting. If the purpose of lifting weights were to get the weights from one place to another, then it would be reasonable to use whatever means necessary to get them there. But if the point is to get stronger, then it hardly makes sense to use a machine to lift the weights for you.
If students export the writing process to AI, they lose one of the primary benefits of writing assignments—that is, developing their ability for creativity, crafting and expression.
If students can only do what AI can do, they have just made themselves redundant in the business world. Why pay a worker for what AI can produce for free?
The purpose of higher education is to create students who can think, write, read, know, synthesize, and be creative.
Read the entire article here.
The Practice of Groundedness.
This book by Brad Stulberg, from the University of Michigan’s Graduate School of Public Health, encourages you to return to fundamental first-principles thinking. It is available as an audiobook to listen to and also at the Amazon Book Store here.
Here are some thoughts and key takeaways for you from the book:
Accepting where you are today is vital to where you want to go.
It is essential to learn to be ‘present’ in anything you do, and being present improves your attention and energy.
We are wired to be impatient, but on the contrary, being patient will get you to your goals and ambitions faster!
Being vulnerable, in fact, will give you more strength and confidence.
Developing deeper community bonds can genuinely help you stay grounded.
A strong link exists between moving your body and keeping your mind refreshed and agile. Moving your body helps your mind stay grounded.
Qualities Of Great Design | Apple
When you think of design, defining what exactly is great design is always difficult. While this talk primarily focuses on the critical tenets of excellent app design, the broad principles apply to any design form. It is how we can adapt some of these principles to many types of design, such as software design, document design, product design, process design, communication design, etc.
Here are some excellent thoughts that are shared here, which you can apply to any design problem or solution that you are building:
Quality is something people can feel and experience. It’s hard to put a finger on it, but good quality makes you feel that somebody has thought of you already!
Design quality is not about the UI but the ‘moment’ - the memories and experiences it leaves you with.
Great designs leave you feeling that many things have been considered. They show that various ideas or components are organised and a thought process has taken place.
Great design involves thinking through every detail. It’s crafted with intention and near-zero variability.
Great design shows that you care about your audience and their experience.
Great design requires a lot of hard work and effort.
Great design is about simplicity - It doesn't try to do more than it needs to do.
Great design rewards curiosity.
Great design is about seeing the world through the eyes of those you design it for.
Great design involves breaking down assumptions and testing your ideas with prototypes. Ask yourself, “Should we put our energy into this idea?”
Putting more people doesn’t solve a creative problem. Great artists are patient.
Great design is about being mindful and modest and asking questions.
Click the above link to watch the video.
Education Has To Prepare People For Careers, Not Just Jobs.
Patrick Casey’s thoughts left an indelible mark, raising provocative thoughts, especially this sentence: “A college education should generate graduates who are themselves generative. The aim is to produce not knowledge, but knowers; not thought, but thinkers; not creations, but creators.”
What should our education system prepare people like us or students for?
Our education must prepare people or students for careers and jobs that have not been invented yet.
At the outset, it is essential to understand the difference between a job and a career. Many, often, don’t view careers and jobs differently. Here’s the difference for you to think about :
A job is an employment for a specific role or position for an identified period in a particular firm.
A career is a long-term professional journey that will last your entire life. It’s your lifetime work. In a career, you will leverage existing skills or competencies, but you will continuously improve your skills, knowledge and expertise to stay relevant and become a professional of repute over time.
Here’s the explanation of the difference with an example: If I am an accountant in a company maintaining a book of accounts, that can be defined as a job. I may be extremely good at it, but if I want to build a career in finance and accounts, I must become proficient not just with accounting rules & software but also in understanding how, say, a new area like fintech is changing the landscape of the finance industry. I must be aware of how it will change the face of finance and accounting functions and be prepared for this change by developing new skills all my life.
Imagine what AI will do to a relatively young industry like IT and software programming or a creative industry.
Too much of a job focus will make you stagnant over time, but a career focus will broaden your horizons, driving your personal and professional growth over the long term.
Therefore, you must ask yourself, “How prepared am I for a career which is bound to undergo disruptions due to industry transformation and new technology changes?”
Our current education system does not prepare us for all of this. Any education system may not be able to predict and teach those changes. However, what it could at the least prepare you for is make you career-ready. So, what does it take for our education system to prepare you for a career:
Our education institutions must act as a compass of where you could potentially grow over time in an industry or domain. It must set you on the path of discovery and exploration by making you curious and seeking answers to how various facets of the industry work and operate. The direction need not be clear, but it must draw a path for you to kindle your passion, interest and explore.
Our education must encourage inquisitiveness and curiosity. You must be able to ask discerning questions about why things work the way they work and question the fundamentals of why it cannot be done any other way in that specific industry through first-principles thinking. It must make you think of several alternatives to the same problem.
Our education systems must encourage you to experiment and make mistakes. Because that’s the only way you learn in the real world when the industry where you work gets disrupted many years after you graduate due to competition and new technology.
Our education must push you to strive for excellence, deep reflection and learning. Most of our education today encourages ‘peripheral learning’. Hence, very few people can break down fundamental concepts and dig deep into problems with focus, patience and intensity.
Our educational institutions must teach people to handle abstract concepts and ambiguity. They must throw many such situations at you in a class or during lectures. The problem definition may not be visible or very clear, but it needs your intellectual prowess to break it down to define it clearly and find workable solutions. That’s the way people learn in the workplace.
Our educational institutions must encourage interdisciplinary thinking and doing. For example, new industries are evolving at the intersection of two disciplines—biotech, fintech, etc. They must make students work in interdisciplinary labs, which can enable breakthrough thinking and innovation. If you study great Nobel prize winners, you will see that they apply interdisciplinary thinking to their research, leading to incredible discoveries.
Our educational institutions must emphasise consistency of practice and the effort put in, not just reward only the outcomes of tests or exams. They must take a leaf out of sports, music, and arts, where practice is given more importance even if they become top performers. Most of these top performers are lifelong learners.
When educational institutions prepare you for a career, jobs may come and go, but you develop the ability to relearn, adapt and stay relevant.
Some of the lessons we learnt from this week’s mission:
The purpose of higher education is to create students so they can think, write, read, know, synthesize, and be creative.
To stay grounded, one must learn to accept things as they are, be present, be patient, remain vulnerable, and have a deep sense of community.
Great artists are patient. Therefore, their design becomes timeless.