How Loneliness Can Help You Produce Great Work.
Edition #178
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.
How To Get Better At Doing Things Alone.
We live in a world where ‘Loneliness’ is touted to be one of the biggest epidemics. One of the reasons for this is the emergence of digital devices and social media platforms over the last few decades. According to research, face-to-face communication is more important than digital communication for better mental health and improving relationships.
However, not all loneliness is bad. There are benefits to doing things alone as well. It can be transformative, according to this article in Time, which highlights some of the benefits, such as:
Solitude can act as a means of self-care and self-exploration.
Solo time boosts happiness, curbs stress, and improves life satisfaction, making you more productive and creative.
The best way to start is to take a low-stakes outing.
Doing this alone allows you time to learn from your reflections, if you plan it well.
Ironically, spending time alone can help you appreciate your moments with your friends and family more!
Read the entire article here.
Ask Yourself “What If” With Milk Bar Christina Tosi.
This is a brilliant episode for many reasons. It’s not a ‘run-of-the-mill’ typical corporate conversation about business, personal success and growth, etc. Simon Sinek brings out all the traits that are necessary to be your best in his conversation with Milk Bar’s founder, Christina Tosi, as they bake a cake! It’s an incredible idea to pick up these nuances from different industries and owners of businesses who necessarily may not have all the corporate jargon, but pretty much ‘live it’ in the way they run their business every day.
There are so many concepts and ideas that you can relate to and learn, starting with the power of experimentation, the importance of challenging the status quo, benefits of failure, among many others.
It’s best seen as a video, but the lessons will remain the same! There’s a link shared below for the video episode, too.
You can also listen to the entire episode on:
Steve Jobs In An Internal NeXT Video (1991).
Imagine you are about to launch your product, a startup, or a new business unit within a large company, competing against a major competitor.
So, what are the top questions that should be at the top of your mind, which you have to address, articulate them with clarity and get your teams to think about them the same way?
Here are a few to consider:
What is the segment you want to operate in?
What are the reasons why you believe you have the ‘right to win’?
What are the compelling reasons potential customers or prospects must choose you over your competition?
How do you educate your teams to tell the same story as a founder or a business unit leader, or a product leader, so that they can communicate the ‘value proposition’ as well as how you feel or believe?
This video is a masterclass on how to answer many of these questions that may be crossing your mind. Be ready to watch it intently, have a pen and paper to take notes. Also, spend some time asking the same or even more questions and finding answers for these questions as you decipher the impact, outcome and results you want for your products or business.
You can click on the above link and watch the video.
How Loneliness Can Help You Produce Great Work.
Loneliness can be scary. Especially when you have been individually tasked to create something, such as a report, a presentation, a solution deck, or a design idea or incubate a business. Working in groups can be a wee bit easier as you feed off each other’s energy, ideas and thoughts. But working ‘lonely’ is far tougher, as you carry the burden of conceptualisation, thinking deeply through the problem, crafting and articulating the idea or solution, getting your team’s buy-in, and finally executing it to perfection. At every stage of this exercise, you are likely to feel very overwhelmed and stressed, as it has a high probability of you getting stuck, or having a rejection or failure. At the same time, there is an equal and also a high probability of acceptance and breakthrough.
Simon Sinek uses a lovely phrase, ‘Creativity is finding order in chaos,’ and loneliness creates a sort of chaos in your mind. Your ability to manage this chaos productively can make all the difference. If your thoughts are channelled in the right manner, especially when you are lonely, it can be very effective and fulfilling.
How to achieve productivity and serendipity with loneliness?
When you are lonely, your mind tends to gallop, and it’s here you need to master the art of slowing it down. When you slow things down, it allows you to see and consider different perspectives, evaluate alternatives and then come to a deeply considered decision. Sometimes, loneliness pushes you to speed up your conclusion, but you need to find ways to deliberately slow it down. That can help you get phenomenal ideas and results. Sleep over the decisions you want to take and relook at the problem and your decisions the next morning. You are abound to have a refreshing take on it!
Loneliness allows you ‘time’ to get into a continuous cycle of ‘reflect -refine-reflect’ loop and this can be unverving at times. However, this can generate powerful breakthrough ideas and thoughts. John Steinbeck, who won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, in one of his quotes, implied that it requires a period of isolation and deep reflection to create or achieve something significant. Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, a polymath, reiterated the importance of solitude. It is also true that some of the world’s greatest masterpieces were done in isolation. It includes some great names like Albert Einstein, Issac Newton, Picasso, Charles Darwin, to name a few. So, find time to regularly disconnect yourself from the world. And also, cut-off yourself from the crowded workplace or workstation chatter around you, if you want to find innovative solutions to some of the problems that you observe or ones that are thrown at you to complete, at work. Not all problems can be solved working in a group or a team.
By secluding yourself, in loneliness, it gives you time to read more, write more and also allows you to think more about what can happen or what happened in the past and what you could have done better. It is a well-known fact that Bill Gates, Co-Founder and ex-CEO of Microsoft, reiterated the importance of solitude and deep thinking in his childhood, which contributed to his success. Also, he was known to take a week off from regular work called the ‘Think Week’ where he would take with him a bunch of books and technical papers to read. That would give him a lot of fodder for new thoughts, reframe problems, and come up with new ideas and solutions.
Therefore, after all, loneliness is not as bad as it is made out to be. You need to find the ability to cultivate the fine art of both working in solitude and with teams.
At work or in your personal life, finding pockets of time to be lonely helps you create the ‘much-needed’ space to think, reflect and act rather than just keep doing things transactionally. Solitude helps you build fortitude and the attitude to look at problems holistically and in a new light.
Some of the lessons we learnt from this week’s mission:
Loneliness helps you to learn from your reflections.
Creativity is the art of finding order in chaos.
Execution and alignment of teams towards a goal or objective require you to master the art of articulation, than just a strategy alone.