Success Without Fulfilment Is Also Failure.
Edition #183
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.
7 Insights From Interviewing More Than 200 Brilliant People.
This is an amazing article with a storehouse of learnings from clearthinking.org. Clear Thinking is an organisation that works with a mission to improve decision-making, boost critical thinking, and make positive behaviour changes. They have tried to summarize the key takeaways after conversations and interviews with over 200 brilliant people across the world. Some of the key takeaways are simply fabulous:
Good decisions require good “decision hygiene”: Nobel Prize Winner Daniel Kahneman emphasises the need to assess the quality of an option amongst the choices that you have in front of you before making your judgment. He stressed the need for structured methods to prevent errors, even when you don’t know what mistakes you’re avoiding.
Negotiation works best as collaboration: Often, negotiation is looked at from the perspective of who wins and who loses. Raffi Grinberg suggests moving away from this mindset.
Success stories can mislead you: Studying success sometimes blinds you. Elspeth Kirkman insists that real insight can be gained only by asking what you cannot see!
Blame ruins relationships: Often, it is easy to get into a defensive mode and blame others for the problem. David Burns reiterates that taking responsibility and being open can heal relationships.
Lasting happiness isn’t about achievement: When you search for meaning, connections, and act with authenticity, you can achieve deeper happiness, according to Stephanie Harrison.
You can read the entire article here.
Navigating The Long And Messy Midlife.
In this conversation on the Play To Potential Podcast, Deepak Jayaraman is in conversation with Ravi Venkatesan, Social Entrepreneur, Business Leader, Writer, about Midlife, a critical period in life where many of us find ourselves pulled in multiple directions—across work, home, health, friendships, and hobbies.
Here are some key highlights from the conversation:
“Transitions come with uncertainty, transitions come with anxiety, transitions come with fear. (Transition)requires a sort of a certain comfort with ambiguity, a certain comfort with being fluid about your identities, a certain comfort with how you experiment and take chances.”
“One lens through which we can look at transition, which is how we evolve, how our mind evolves.”
“Be a little more open with our identities and very often, people around us see us better than we do.”
“Potential often is limited by our imagination, our beliefs, sort of based on constraints we place on ourselves. So technically it could be infinite.”
Here’s another brilliant definition of potential: “I want to be remembered as he did what he could with what he had.” - Thurgood Marshall, the first African American Chief Justice in the US.
“You can't work to your potential, you can only play to your potential.”
“Success often is about leading life in a certain way, and then often success takes care of itself.”
You can also listen to the entire episode:
Your Intensity Of Focus Will Reward You.
When you have focus, along with intensity, these skills can help you outshine most people who might be incredibly intelligent, talented, and competent and may even be better than you.
Just imagine the number of people who crack and pass out of the Ivy League institutions like Harvard, Stanford, Cornell, the London School of Economics, IITs in India, etc. There is a small, minuscule number of people who become the best in what they pursue or take up. The ones with intense focus win, but as Robert Greene highlights in the conversation, success comes over time.
Here are some incredible quotes that are extremely powerful from this conversation:
“When you focus on something, the world just kind of opens up.”
“When you decide, because you want money to go into something, (over the years)the wheels will start going slower and slower because you're not interested in it… (because) you're not connected to it.”
“If it doesn't come from within, then you're going to be floundering for years and years and years.”
“All that money, the people you envy(about) are not doing nearly as well as you think, so don't let that influence your decisions in life.”
“Focus means saying no to something that you with every bone in your body think is a phenomenal idea, but you say no to it because you're focusing on something else.”
“Keep telling yourself that you're doing something that your brain is going
to reward you with several years down(the line).”
You can click on the above link and watch the video.
Success Without Fulfilment Is Also Failure.
The article in ClearThinking.org, where Stephanie Harrison talks about happiness vs. achievement, and Robert Greene's conversation on focus sparked many thoughts, as both of them seemed connected.
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. Also, Robert Greene talks about bringing focus into your life and telling your brain about reaping the rewards of this later in your life. Let’s explore for a moment how focus, achievement, success, and happiness are in way intertwined and connected.
The underlying foundation of focus is clarity and conviction. When there is no clarity and conviction, it is very hard to be focussed. Even little bottlenecks and hiccups can cause you a lot of emotional stress and volatility, and you can end up giving up too fast, too soon. With conviction comes the resilience to stay the course, regardless of the initial or final results. It gives you all the required cognitive energy to overcome any landslide wins, substantial setbacks, or slow acceptance of your ideas and concepts. Also, even early wins do not get you excited, as you know, this is not the end state you want. Hence, it allows you to still stay focused despite early success. What it does is that it generates a ‘neutral feeling’ irrespective of the recognition, results, or outcomes.
Therefore, with focus, achievement is more of an ‘internally-driven’ feeling rather than an 'externally-driven’ feeling. An ‘externally driven’ feeling always seeks validation and approval from others. Hence, when no such signals are coming back from the outside world, the intensity starts to stagnate and decline over time. When it is ‘internally-driven’, there is more purpose and meaning in what is being done, and all actions are done with great authenticity. Also, conviction drives consistency, and the outcome of that is focus.
At the end of it all, success, therefore, gets 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. Therefore, achievement has a deeper meaning and purpose, allows you to be focussed, and you don’t get swayed by successes or failures. This leads to happiness, regardless of the outcome, as you will know deep inside you, you gave it your very best. You then allow nature to take care of the rest.
There are some fantastic examples of people who have done this. In the early 1900s, the great mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, who probably did not get the recognition he deserved in his lifetime, because the world around him did not understand his groundbreaking theorems. In the words of Hans Eysenck, "he tried to interest the leading professional mathematicians in his work, but failed for the most part. What he had to show them was too novel, too unfamiliar, and additionally presented in unusual ways; they could not be bothered." Yet, Ramanujan independently compiled nearly 3,900 results, which are still being researched and worked on. The one question you should ask is, “Was Ramanujan a Success or a failure?” If he did not work with focus, purpose and meaning and with a certain amount of authenticity, he could not have left behind what he did. The work he did and left behind was defined as success in his own mind.
Let’s take another example of Kenneth Lay, who was the founder, chief executive officer and chairman of Enron. He had an impeccable career and was one of America’s highest-paid CEOs. Yet, Kenneth Lay was disgraced and shamed for the Enron accounting scandal. Again, this is a great example that when you don’t have purpose and meaning along with authenticity, no amount of focus and intensity can help you reach or stay at the top. More recently, there was the Lehman Brothers collapse under Richard Severin Fuld Jr., one of the longest tenured CEOs on Wall Street. All the achievements, success and recognition he built over 40 years were down in a flash during the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. The unfortunate truth in both of these examples is that success breeds power, and it surrounds you with a lot of ‘yes’ men, and also, power corrupts. To stay authentic is hard, and this again requires a deeper sense of purpose, meaning and achievement, which is often key to fulfilment.
In his brilliant book, How Will You Measure Life, Prof. Clay Christensen after having seen his brilliant students graduate from an Ivy School like Harvard and tracking their careers for over two decades, had this as a final quote - “Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success.”
This is precisely what one of our guests in Contraminds, a leading Ayurvedic doctor, Dr. Vignesh Devraj, had to say - “Success Without Fulfilment Is also Failure.”
Therefore, at the core - focus, achievement, success, and happiness are intertwined and connected. If one breaks, it affects the others.
Some of the lessons we learnt from this week’s mission:
It is vital to have meaningful conversations with some great minds regularly, as it becomes a storehouse of great learnings for you.
Focus demands attention and intensity upfront. It also needs an attitude and willingness to enjoy the fruits later.
Focus, achievement, success, and happiness are intertwined and connected.