The Integrative Power Of Stories, Solving Problems and Intuition
Edition #113
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.
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.
Letters To A Young Founder: Vinod Khosla
In this lovely piece of newsletter, The Generalist, by Mario Gabriele, he and Vinod Khosla delve into Vinod Khosla’s life and the stories behind them. The format is in a lovely form of a letter written by Mario to Vinod, which gets answered again in the form of a letter from Vinod.
Here are some key takeaways from Vinod’s letter:
If you are a venture partner or funding startups, think of yourself as a ‘Venture Assistant’ who helps founders build big, impactful companies. It’s not the money alone but the valuable business insights and strategic support which will make a difference to these founders.
When young, it’s the heroes and the stories that they encounter which will inspire them to dream and do the impossible. Make it accessible and available to them. Allow them to build ‘Castles in Air’.
If you are not taking risks, then you are not doing something significant and impactful. Vinod writes that founders often act against the wishes of their family and friends to build their businesses. He encourages you to take risks. Careers are fraught with risks whether you are a founder or not. If you are doing something in your comfort zone, you must examine the long-term consequences of losing relevance over time and getting disrupted in your job and career many decades later.
Failure does not matter. Vinod writes, ‘The most important thing is to try—something many people don’t dare to do.’ All through your life, you are told not to fail. Hence, you play in the middle, which often leaves you in the middle of nowhere.
This is a subscriber-only article, but you can find it here.
The Intelligence Of Intuition With Gerd Gigerenzer
Gerd Gigerenzer is a German psychologist, behavioural scientist, statistician, writer, and educator, and in this conversation with Martin Reeves, Chairman of BCG Henderson Institute, he shares some of his thoughts on the power of intuition and why it is increasingly becoming important in the age of AI.
Here are some ideas from this conversation to think about:
Logic is a good tool for some problems but not for all problems.
Intuition is a form of unconscious intelligence that is based on years of experience. It gives you intuitive ideas quickly, based on your consciousness, that help you do something or not. You learn or develop intuition by learning something by the rules explicitly, and then it goes into the unconscious.
In many professions, people learn by looking at something, often with the help and support of an experienced colleague who points them to observe and see the nuances involved. In the beginning, you don’t see it; over time, you start to see the nuances.
Listen to this conversation on:
Apple Podcast | Google Podcast
Leadership Vs. Management: What It Means to Make a Difference by Seth Godin
In this brilliant presentation, Seth Godin, legendary thought leader, speaker, and marketer, shares some nuances that differentiate leadership from management.
Here are some key insights from the presentation:
Big factories are built to be productive and efficient. People are told to work to a template. Big factories and big companies is where management thrives. However, when the world changes, management fails.
Leadership is about taking responsibility and accountability, whether anything that you do or suggest succeeds or fails. It’s about ‘your’ conviction rather than ‘others’’ conviction.
Schools were invented to create compliant workers. This industrial-era concept needs a complete re-haul, as it doesn’t teach people to solve interesting problems. Today’s schools build managers, not leaders.
We now live in an era where quality is relatively easy to achieve, and management does a great job of that. Excellence is the hard part to achieve today.
Leadership is solving interesting problems. Take decisions.
Attitude will become increasingly important than skills, as skills can be acquired, but attitude needs to come from within.
There’s a lot more nuggets here. Just click the link above and take time to watch and learn from this presentation.
The Integrative Power Of Stories, Solving Problems and Intuition
We all live in a world with a tried-and-tested formula for everything. We go through the motions without spending time analysing whether our actions or efforts will make a difference and create an impact. This restricts us from looking at alternatives and trying new experiments and often discourages us from failing and learning. We, therefore, end up getting a run-of-the-mill, middle-of-the-ground, average outcomes.
What stories do is power the unconscious brain. They light up the brain cells and help us imagine and create images of possibilities in our minds. It provides a canvas for us to dream and build connections of possible permutations and combinations of opportunities and plausible solutions, helps develop our own hypotheses and theories, and creates our narratives of what can be done. It also creates mythology-like heroes in our minds about certain people, their stories and their achievements. All these stories leave a lasting impact on us for the rest of our lives.
As a consequence, stories help us actively seek solutions to problems and develop a lot more curiosity when we observe things around us and see how they operate and are done by others. These stories help us develop a problem-solving mindset, and all these problems can be solved only if you develop a great sense of intuition.
What good intuition does for you is to help you:
Keenly see and observe things
It allows you to do things and learn from them continuously.
It creates inside you a ‘sense and respond’ mind.
It creates a repository of ‘unconscious knowledge and learnings’, which you then start to apply to different problems that you encounter from time to time.
This creates an unbeatable infinite loop of problem identification-solving problems-learnings that live in the form of stories and experiences within you to apply to the next problem you identify.
This integrative loop of stories to problem-solving to intuition is what differentiates the excellent people from the average ones. They are much more passionate, involved, engaged, and open to learning and growth vis-a-vis the rest.
Some lessons we learnt from this week’s missions:
The heroes and stories you encounter when you are young will inspire you to dream and do the impossible.
When solving unexplored or unexplained problems, a balance of intuition and logic is needed.
Leadership is solving problems and taking decisions. Management is about working to a template and trying to be compliant.