Learn To Notice The Ordinary.
Edition #165
Introduction
Welcome to The ContraMind Code.
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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.
Tony Fadell: How To Reinvent The Ordinary.
Thanks to Kevin Gee, who referred to this article in his newsletter, which was simply amazing. Tony Fadell is an American engineer, designer, entrepreneur, and investor. He was senior vice president of the iPod division at Apple Inc. and founder and former CEO of Nest Labs.
Tony Fadell asks a very simple but profound question: ‘How do you take something mundane that most of us overlook and turn it into something attractive and compelling?’
Here are some lovely perspectives he has shared in this article which will make you think:
“To improve the ordinary, we need to notice it.”
“It’s also important to recognize the difference between a painkiller and a vitamin. Vitamins represent small steps forward. Painkillers are giant leaps.”
“..how Apple succeeded…We didn’t just make a great mp3 player. We made a beautiful one.”
“There’s a reason so many ordinary, annoying things stay the same for so many years. Noticing them is hard.”
Read the article here.
Does Your Business Know Where Is Your Money Going?
BCG’s The So What podcast covers a vital topic that business leaders seek answers to: “Where is my money going, and can I trim my costs where they are unnecessary and don’t add real value to my operations?”
Karin von Funck, BCG’s global lead for zero-based transformation, explains why great cost transformation must go beyond spreadsheets. Here are some highlights from his conversation:
Treat cost as a strategic element rather than a tactical element.
You must have the visibility of what you are actually spending your money on and your time as the starting point.
Cost is just not seeing it from the lens of expense but what’s the value of everything you do as an organization and where do you actually put your money.
Ask yourself one question - “Am I deriving the ultimate value of the money I am spending?”
The best leaders don’t just talk about cutting costs, but they try to understand what drives value for their business and which ones help them win and which ones don’t.
Take waste out, and don’t take value out.
Understanding and practising cost transformation, not just cost management, is vital.
Re-question and re-challenge budgets every year. Look at the value of every dollar of money spent in terms of what it creates or has the potential to create.
You can also listen to this episode on:
Sam Altman On Miyazaki’s Thoughts On Art, Design Jobs, Indian AI, Is Prompt Engineering A Job?
Varun Mayya is in conversation with Sam Altman, where they discuss a whole bunch of stuff around image generation models, the potential threat of AI to different jobs, India’s rapid adoption of AI and usage, AI and its impact on creativity, and career evolution, amongst many other interesting topics.
“AI will be a case of a new tool where people will become more productive and work at higher quality.”
AI can potentially eliminate customer support jobs as it can do that end-to-end.
AI will change the workflow of a graphic designer.
“Have your own conviction on what things are going to be like…just because something is not historically valuable or a high-status job, does not mean it will not be in the future….”
“The democratisation of creating content has been a big net win for the society.”
‘The power of technology is giving people more tools, making things easier and lowering the barriers to entry for more people to contribute..”
“I am more interested in how a coder can become 10x productive, which can happen this year.”
“There will be a lot more demand for software to be built in the future. Therefore, someone who can write a code at some value can write code or create software at a much higher value.”
Be responsible for your own career success. Make sure you are learning and getting exposure to these tools.
You can click on the above link and watch the video.
Learn To Notice The Ordinary.
In our fast-paced lives, where we jump from one meeting to another and keep thinking about what we must do next, we tend to lose the ability to notice the mundane and ordinary. Tony Fadell’s perspective is indeed true.
Today, we own or are surrounded by many devices and tools that compete for our attention. Much has been written and spoken about the ‘Attention-Deficit’ economy that we live in. But, when you think deeply, our bigger crisis may not be ‘Attention Deficit’ but ‘Observation-Deficit.’
A vast majority of people around you go about their lives mechanically. The reason could be either a lack of interest, time, curiosity, or genuine intent in what they are doing. If you dig a bit deeper into this behaviour, you will discover they don’t apply themselves sufficiently in what they are doing. When this happens, they lose their ‘sense of play’ in what they do.
A ‘sense of play’ allows you to be aware and think about what you do or are asked to do, consider alternatives, question pre-existing ways of doing it, and look for hacks to do it better. When you lose the ‘sense of play’, your eyes may be open, but your ability to see through the ‘mind’s eye’ is shut. This is the root cause of the ‘observation deficit.’ that plagues people and our society.
To Notice the Ordinary, You Need To Observe, Not Just See.
What’s the difference between seeing and observing? When you recognise what is apparent, you are seeing. However, you begin to observe only when you recognise what is not apparent. You start to look at a few levels beneath what you see to understand why it is happening.
Uber is an excellent example of the problems of local cab travel that people experience in their daily lives.
Airbnb is another example of redefining the definition of stay as it existed then with hotels, resorts, etc.
Closer home, UPI(Unified Payment Interface) is a brilliant example of reimagining payments and questioning the current ways people and businesses accept payments.
Observing requires seeing everything through the ‘Mind’s Eye.’ What this requires you to do is to ‘consciously slow down’ whenever you are doing something, ‘be aware’ of what is going around you, learn to look at the ‘root causes of behaviour’ rather than the behaviour per se, ‘involve yourself in what you do’ rather than merely ‘do what you do’, learn to get a sense of the ‘unapparent’ instead what is ‘apparent’ and develop a ‘sense of play’ in anything that you do. When you begin doing this, you will start to notice the ordinary and the mundane.
To reinvent the ordinary, learn to understand the difference between ‘observing’ and ‘seeing’.
Some of the lessons we learnt from this week’s mission:
To improve the ordinary, we need to notice it.
To build value, move from cost management to cost transformation.
Rather than just eliminate jobs, AI has the potential to make people more productive and do high-quality work.