Winning By Being a Tenacious Loser
Edition #057
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.
How to be a better loser
In this interesting article in Psyche, Blakely Low-Scott, a licensed Counseling & Sport Psychologist in San Antonio, Texas, writes about what it takes to bounce back after losing!
Here are some takeaways:
If your goal is to avoid the pain of losing entirely, you are more likely to refuse to take risks, steer clear of challenges, and ‘play small’.
Meet the pain of losing with mindfulness: A better loser, at its core, means reducing reactions and choosing responses instead.
Grant yourself the compassion you’d show a teammate or friend: Unfortunately, many of us speak to ourselves much more harshly and judgmentally than we would ever talk to a peer. Losing is already a difficult experience; if you heap additional criticism and shame on yourself, you are doing yourself a disservice. The next time you experience a loss, try shifting your self-talk by asking yourself what you would say to a peer who was going through the same situation.
Prioritise the most ‘workable’ thoughts about a loss: Try to focus your thoughts on the present moment, on the task at hand (what you are trying to accomplish next), and on your process (what you can do to set yourself up to be successful now and in the future).
Carefully review what went wrong after a loss – and what went right.
Focus on controlling the controllables.
Read the entire article here.
Chris Rogers On Working Backwards, Switching Off And Riding The Roller Coaster
In this conversation, legendary cricketer Shane Watson talks to Chris 'Bucky' Rogers, a run machine who was a left-handed opening batsman, compiling more than 25,000 runs and 76 centuries at first-class level, not to mention his 25 Tests in the Baggy Green.
In this conversation, Chris Rogers talks about:
How the mental side of batting is just as important as the technical side
The importance of working backwards in getting to the position where you are comfortable to play the ball as a batter.
Roger talks about mental routines and processes that enabled him to think clearly and tactically. He talks about pre-ball and post-ball routines.
The importance of getting over pre-meditation and focusing the mind.
How to prepare the day before in the night and the morning before batting, and the need to switch off.
A cricketer must ignore the noise on social media. Cricket is finally a game and will continue long after a cricketer is gone. So enjoy it as long as you play- An excellent piece for everybody.
Roger talks about what he could have done differently when it came to investing and managing money as a cricketer.
The importance of balancing roller-coaster life events - be it an accomplishment or failure.
Unlocking Creativity With Prompt Engineering
In this a16z episode, Guy Parsons talks about an emerging area of Prompt Engineering with the emergence of AI around us. Prompt engineers appear to be one of the most in-demand professions for 2023. Will the prompt engineer be more like the highly sought-after DevOps engineer of the present?
What is Prompt Engineering? AI prompt engineering is the process of designing and creating prompts, or input data, for AI models to train them to perform specific tasks. This includes selecting the appropriate data type and formatting it so the model can understand and use it to learn. AI prompt engineering aims to create high-quality training data to enable the AI model to make accurate predictions and decisions. It is an essential step in the development and deployment of AI systems.
A good prompt should be specific, open-ended, and easy to understand; it should provide enough information for the respondent to understand what is being asked and what kind of answer is expected. It also leaves room for creative thinking and interpretation.
How to write a good prompt: A prompt should be aligned with the research objective, question, or task at hand. It should be designed to elicit the information needed to achieve the desired outcome. A well-crafted prompt can help ensure the data collected is relevant and valuable for the intended purpose.
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, tweeted on February 20, "Writing a really great prompt for a chatbot persona is an amazingly high-leverage skill and an early example of programming in a little bit of natural language."
Finally, this is a great quote: “The hottest new programming language is English.”
Winning By Being a Tenacious Loser
When you are an individual, either playing a sport, running your own business or a professional like a lawyer, architect or doctor, you determine your destiny and losing can be challenging. It’s far harder to bounce back if you don’t have the right mental attitude and tenacity. However, when you work for a company, you always have the luxury to blame the company, your boss, management, or your colleagues for failure. Therefore, you need to take individual accountability and build an uncompromising mental attitude of sportspeople in your corporate work life to handle failures and losses. This can go a long way in helping you win.
Why is bouncing back difficult for sportspeople, athletes and professionals?
Here’s an example to ponder. In 2007/8, a young Under-19 team won the World Cup for India. Look at the XI players who helped win the Cricket Under-19 World Cup - Taruwar Kohli, Shreevats Goswami, Tanmay Srivastava, Virat Kohli, Saurabh Tiwary, Manish Pandey, Ravindra Jadeja, Sayed Abdulla, Pradeep Sangwan, Siddarth Kaul, Ajitesh Argal. Cut back to 2023, fifteen years later, and look at the players who have made the cut to the top. As a young Under-19-year-old, playing for India and winning the Cricket Under-19 World Cup is the ultimate dream, and your dreams begin to soar. In a few years, a few of them realise they will not make it to the top or even play in the team. It’s far harder to bounce back for these kids who would have given up or not done so well in school or college or planned any alternative career due to intense focus on cricket. They made it to the top Under-19 cricket players in India, which is no mean achievement, and only a few could breach the wall of being amongst the top cricket players in the world. It requires a different mental tenacity and attitude to bounce back and make it to the top again or even settle peacefully in their heads when things don’t go as they had planned or dreamt.
When you think about them, these are nothing compared to the failures or a few setbacks you may have in your career or a job you are currently doing. The hard truth is that you may not have built an intense regimen or discipline to be the best engineer, programmer, marketer, architect, or a finance professional in the world. But, when we see a setback in our career or job, most of us tend to give up. Imagine the pain of unfulfilled dreams for these Under-19 kids in their mid-30s now. Yet, they still find a way out with the right mental attitude and come back to lead a successful life. Can anything be more challenging than that for most of us?
The only alternative to winning is building the right mental attitude and process to bounce back. You have to take risks, back yourself to the hilt, follow a disciplined regimen every day to be the best in what you do, control what can be controlled by you and keep finding ‘new pathways to succeed’ despite many setbacks you may have during your professional or career journey.
Some of the lessons we learnt from this week’s mission:
Don’t play small. Losing and winning are a part of the game of life. Knowing how to bounce back strongly is critical.
Not just being technically competent but a solid mental attitude is needed if you have to be the best in your work.
Engineers of tomorrow have to develop the ‘power of context’ as a skill as AI takes over.