Needing Resources Vs Being Resourceful
Edition #161
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 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.
Casual Viewing - Why Netflix Looks Like That.
There is always a lot of a ‘sense of wow’, hype and incredible stories around new business models that go on to disrupt old business models that have existed for decades. It always needs contrarians and deep-thinking minds who study and analyze some of these new models. They can unwrap some of the challenges, issues, and practices the majority might ignore in the excitement surrounding the success of such models. Will Tavlin does just that in this article.
Here are some powerful thoughts shared by Will Tavlin in the article:
‘Netflix doesn’t just survive when no one is watching — it thrives.’
‘Blockbuster collected nearly $800 million in late fees, accounting for 16% of its annual revenue. Internally, company executives described its business model as one of “managed dissatisfaction.”
‘Blockbuster punished customers for being forgetful; Netflix rewarded them for being mindless.’
‘A decade before Airbnb persuaded homeowners to transform their homes into hotels, Netflix convinced its users to turn theirs into mini Netflix warehouses.’
Netflix’s concern was scale rather than the cinema it was scaling. Movies….were merely a means to an end - acquiring subscribers who paid for access to Netflix’s entire library of content every month.’
‘Reaching seventy-two million households didn’t mean what it sounded like it meant. What it actually meant was that seventy-two million accounts watched at least two minutes of The Old Guard.’
‘by insulating their films from failure, the streamers have destroyed the meaning of success.’
Read the entire article here.
Creativity Vs Control: Where AI Fits In The Creative Toolbox.
How will creativity be redefined and transformed in the AI era? This a16z podcast provides a lovely perspective on this topic. Scott Belsky, a Partner at A24, previously served as Adobe’s Chief Product Officer and Chief Strategy Officer and EVP of Design and Emerging Products, and Founder/CEO of Behance.
Here are some key highlights from this conversation:
“One core conviction I have is we're going from the prompt era to the controls era of AI-based creativity. And what I mean by that is, you'll actually be able to generate assets with layers.”
“Every creator is inherently creative, so their workflows are diverse, unpredictable, and highly personal. But they also want magical, modern experiences.”
“We're all creative, but like creative professionals, they hold dear their ability to achieve what's exactly in their mind’s eye. And if you think about that, it's the antithesis of the notion of these generative AI models that essentially are trained on a discrete data set.”
“What makes creative content really effective is when creative content moves us in some way.”
“My thesis for the next 10 years, it's going to be that tastes will outperform skill. Because skill is going to be offloaded to compute.”
“And with the human labor you free up from that meticulous production work, you're going to come up with, instead of one campaign to test, you're going to come up with 100 campaign ideas.”
“What happens in periods of abundance for any item. So, when shoes become ubiquitous and commoditised, what do we end up doing? We end up seeking more scarce versions of shoes by buying higher price shoes that are branded.”
“Resources, when you have them, you throw them at problems like carbs. It feels good but dissipates quickly. Whereas resourcefulness is like muscle.”
“Customers do things in very strange ways. They won't use an enterprise product even if it makes their life better because they won't get as much credit with their boss.”
“If you understand me across platforms in a way that other products can't because they're only one platform, you're going to have me as your customer.”
You can also listen to this episode on:
One-Person Enterprise | World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2025
How far are we from a true one-person unicorn, and what does this mean for the future of employment and capital? This is an emerging viewpoint on how businesses don’t need to rely on traditional structures of large teams. By using technology like AI, nimble new companies will be created.
Here are some key takeaways from the conversations:
The high-performing companies of the future will have just one person at the helm, which will have profound implications for capital and entrepreneurship, displacing young talent in large companies and the higher-order skills people need to work on to thrive in such environments.
AI-native companies will have a significant advantage as AI systems will do the work of entire teams. They are bound to disrupt traditional businesses, as they can only achieve so much efficiency and innovation.
Redeploying existing AI agents for existing workflows is difficult, and hence, agents need to be reconceptualised. Delegating to an AI agent is also difficult and is quite a struggle for many people.
Adopting AI systems and agents allows one individual to do 10x the work. We will be the first generation to manage people and AI agents.
A ‘tech company’ scales with humans non-linearly, with productivity and output as a goal, while ‘AI-native companies’ scale with AI agents non-linearly with a human in the loop to start with and then move humans out of this loop. AI-native companies will look like some kind of a founder with some decision-makers, infrastructure, and some human experts in the loop.
We will need people who can rapidly adapt, have the ability to update their mental models, and not pride themselves in doing or mastering one narrow task but build the engine that does the tasks for them.
Think of AI as software tools that are custom-built for people rather than looking at them as replacing tasks and people in different roles. The most empowering view of AI agents is to look at them as one who allows everyone in the world to create their own software.
Each one of us should not just be ‘AI literate’ but ‘AI Proficient’.
Try to think of products that the current billionaires have that a middle-class teenager does not have. That’s where AI has the potential to disrupt.
You can click and watch the above video.
Needing Resources Vs Being Resourceful
As companies rapidly adopt new technologies, we will see a distinct transformation in how work is done. AI is only accelerating this process further, as its reasoning and context-led automation capabilities are only getting better every day, and the costs of deploying these models are falling rapidly.
Therefore, in the future, companies will not grow both in scale and resources simultaneously as they have in the last hundred years. So, to stay relevant in this era, you must understand the critical difference between resources and resourcefulness.
Resources can be defined as people and tangible assets that are in demand or needed when companies want to grow. Hence, a company’s growth always had a linear correlation with the demand for resources —the assumption being we will need more and more people and more tangible assets like offices, equipment, capital, etc., to sustain growth. However, the need for resources diminishes when technology and AI become core.
In the future, companies will scale up in terms of revenues, but they may not grow proportionately in terms of the need for human resources. If you work in such AI native or technology-first companies, you will not get more people to do the work as it was traditionally done or you have been used to. You need to learn to be more ‘resourceful’ to get the work done. ‘Resourcefulness’ means the same person having the ability to work with many AI agents or software to accomplish the task or goal. The head count may not increase, but output per person will increase dramatically. People who are not resourceful will get swept away in this AI or technology storm. ‘Resourceful people’ will know how to delegate or collaborate with AI agents, know how and where to access information and put it to use, and will know how to leverage and use expertise and judgement when needed while automating routine or non-value-adding tasks continuously.
With the advent of the industrial era, production tasks became automated for scale, which meant that more skilled craftsmen were not needed to produce more goods. It needed a new kind of craftsman who could share blueprints of products for production. Hence, more people with the skill and ability to operate machines were required.
In the AI era, knowledge tasks are being automated for scale. This means that companies will not need more knowledge workers but resourceful people who can leverage existing knowledge repositories, add value on top of them or create new knowledge repositories that will be widely available to scale. AI Agents are the new machines of the knowledge era.
If you are an individual, manager or leader hungry for more resources to do the work, it will soon make you redundant. You need to learn to build, leverage, and collaborate with ‘knowledge agents’ who will be around you. The companies of tomorrow will not be hungry for more ‘resources’ but will look for more ‘resourceful’ people.
Some of the lessons we learnt from this week’s mission:
When you insulate people or businesses from failure, it destroys the meaning and value of success.
Resources are like carbs, while resourcefulness is like muscle.
It is vital for each one of us to be ‘AI Proficient’ and not just ‘AI literate.’