Introduction
The ContraMind Code is published by ContraMinds Labs, which runs a successful podcast that explores thoughts and conversations around the DNA of purposeful minds. It helps you explore and discover what it takes to achieve personal excellence and professional fulfillment. It tries to decode what really goes behind the minds of people with a purpose, what are their motivations and inspirations, and attempts to understand the why behind what they do and how they successfully accomplish what they set out to do. It helps provide a mental framework, markers and a mind map for each one of us to learn and discover from their life purpose, their cultural ecosystem and their experiences. These conversations and thoughts will hopefully open your mind and help you put some of these thoughts to practice both in your life and career.
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Top 10 Reflections of 2025
Wish you a very happy and learning-filled 2026!
You may have been busy or travelling and therefore missed some of the ContraMind Code weekly newsletter editions in 2025. Here’s our pick of the top 10 reflections that were widely read and liked:
#10 The Magic of Unreasonable Time
The best people in the world, who are masters of their craft, always spend unreasonable time to excel in what they do. If achieving excellence were easy or straightforward, everyone would do it.
What does unreasonable time really mean?
It means motivation, obsessive practice, discipline, consistency, sacrifice, commitment to lifelong learning, a penchant for continuous improvement, staying accountable to oneself, observing and learning from role models, prioritising consistency over intensity, being patient to wait for desired outcomes, open to embracing failure, relentless focus, and allocating time for thinking and reflection.
#9 Why Is Transformation So Hard?
First things first, transformation requires conviction. In organizations, it is not restricted to the belief of one person who initiates the strategy or technology change but the conviction of many people who are either driving or participating in the expected adoption of a new technology, process and behaviour change.
In transformation initiatives, transforming minds is as important as transforming the technology within the firm.
#8 Start Small-Scale Experiments With Pretotyping
The challenge of small-scale experiments is their lack of ‘big company’ thinking. It’s boring, and you will often be ridiculed for thinking small. You will be told you need to be more ambitious and think big.
Alberto Savoia, Google’s first engineering director, calls this ‘Pretotyping.’ Pretotyping comes well before prototyping, and as Alberto writes,
“Pretotyping helps you fail fast, recover fast and leaves you plenty of time, money, energy and enthusiasm to explore new tweaks or ideas.”
#7 Don’t Manage Your Way To Irrelevance
Taking off from the brilliant quote in the article ‘Great companies don’t remain great companies forever, ’ it may also be worthwhile to give some thought to the following quote, which is an extension of the same idea -
‘Great leaders don’t remain great leaders forever. Great professionals don’t remain great professionals forever. Great managers don’t remain great managers forever.’
Have you ever explored the possible reasons why this happens?
#6 How Loneliness Can Help You Produce
Great Work
How to achieve productivity and serendipity with loneliness?
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.
#5 The Hidden Power Of Decision Pacing
What does decision pacing really mean?
It’s been a long-held perception that if you want to be a good and successful leader, you need to be quick, agile, and fast to make decisions. However, not all decisions need to be taken at speed and at a rapid pace as it is made out to be. Also, not all decisions need to be taken slowly, too.
If you want to be an ‘impactful’ leader, you should know how to set the tempo and pace. This is the exact nuance of decision pacing.
Poor decision pacing has ‘real human consequences’ at the workplace as it can suck people’s energy reserves and deplete them completely.
#4 Success Without Fulfilment Is Also Failure
When you look at the people around us or people who you believe have achieved something in life, you tend to correlate their achievement with their happiness, too. However, it is pretty insane to see how achievement, success and happiness are often not correlated.
At the end of it all, success is defined by what you personally want to accomplish rather than what others think is success in their dictionary. This leads to ‘fulfilment’ in what you set out to achieve at the outset. You are not running behind what others define as success, both in terms of money and recognition.
#3 Why You Must Avoid Being Transactional
With technology, many business processes and workflows are getting rewired and refined. In all of these, ‘intuition’, ‘ knowledge’, ‘ empathy’ and ‘expertise’ are things that can never be replaced by technology. When you are transactional, many of these don’t get developed and refined continuously.
You need to develop your own LLMs(Life Learning Models), which operate on top of LLMs(Large Language Models).
#2 More Tools Don’t Mean More Output
With the numerous tech tools and platforms we have been using (and more to come with AI) over the past few decades, has personal and company productivity or output actually increased?
We still discuss long, unplanned working days, organisational silos, unending meetings, last-minute product launches, and presentations, as well as a lack of data-driven decisions, poor service turnaround times from companies, and work chaos, despite the use of task organisers, calendars, schedulers, and various types of software.
#1 Be The Switchboard, Not The Operator
What do operators do?
Operators simply perform the tasks assigned to them. If you observe a ‘lift operator’, they simply take you to the floor that people want to go to.
What do switchboards do?