Correlating Indexed Careers And Developing New Habits
Edition #060
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.
The Index Mindset
In his excellent article, Bob Seawright writes about John Luttig’s brilliant construct called the Index Mindset. Bob writes that the idea comes from the success of index investing, whereby investors eschew active management of their portfolios (searching for big winners) to own an entire index of stocks, providing a mechanism for (mostly) not losing big.
So, what is an Index Mindset?
An index mindset favours average results over extreme ones, a bird-in-hand over two in the bush, relative over particular truth, function over form, quantity over quality, mandate over merit, efficiency over exploration, passivity over action, predictability over tails, determinism over freedom of choice, mistake avoidance over smart decisions, evolution over revolution, adaptation over reformation, safety over risk, diversification over-concentration, preservation over creation, velocity over due diligence, optionality over decisiveness, the general over the specific, and growth over profit.
The index mindset is about risk mitigation rather than ambition. The index mindset is all evolution and incrementalism but no revolution.
The index mindset gets an MBA, takes a salary, and goes into consulting (best case). Even college and career choices have become indexed and hedged.
The index mindset increasingly dominates our cultural milieux. Diversification and risk avoidance now generally rule the day.
The index mindset is being comfortable – avoiding decisions requires the least amount of effort. But if you index across every domain, you lose any differentiating features, becoming little more than an average of everyone else.
Regret is more often a product of not doing something than of doing something that doesn’t turn out optimally.
We lust after certainty in a highly uncertain world. Satisfaction requires risk, concentration, and perhaps a leap of faith. The index mindset is sedative, a substitute for conviction.
Read the entire article here.
Why Marketers Need to Recalibrate, Reskill and Reboot
In this conversation with Amit Tiwari, Global Head of Marketing Demand Centre, Tata Consultancy Services, he discusses how marketing needs a new script, story and act.
Here is a summary of the areas he spoke about:
Why a ‘Unified Brief’ is the need of the hour to run marketing campaigns.
Why CMOs need to move from being just a marketing head to thinking like a business head.
The importance of having the right balance between marketing metrics and business metrics
How marketers can practice agility
You can also listen to the entire episode on:
The 1-minute secret to forming a new habit
In this thought-provoking TED video series, Dr. Christine Carter, who was executive director of UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center (GGSC), where she remains a sociologist and Senior Fellow, talks about the secret to forming a habit.
Here are some key takeaways:
Build a ‘Better than Nothing’ mindset and discipline first to develop a new habit.
What the ‘Better than Nothing’ mindset or discipline does is that it overcomes the motivational barrier of performing that habit every day.
So, what is a ‘Better than Nothing’ mindset or discipline? Just do the habit you want to develop for 1-min every day. For example, if you want to exercise or write, do it for 1-min every day but do it every day.
The secret of building a habit is learning to do it consistently every day, which creates new neuro pathways in your brain. So, find a way to do it for 1-min but get it done daily.
Don’t set big, audacious and ambitious goals when you want to develop a new habit. Instead, set achievable and mediocre goals that allow you to perform that habit daily but consistently!
Remember, you are not trying to impress anybody else or earn a brownie point when developing a new habit. However, it is essential to overcome the motivational barrier and requires you to perform the habit every day.
Consistency leads to habit formation rather than big audacious goals you cannot keep up with daily.
Correlating Indexed Careers And Developing New Habits
As human beings, we are comfortable with certainty. Therefore, our parents, too, were comfortable over-indexing and planning for the least risk-prone education options for us as children. As many of us got into jobs, most of us seek to index our career again with the least risk-prone options - find a career that most of the others are taking up, pick up a job with the best bank, the top CPG firm, the best consulting firm, the best investment bank etc. It is a deeply held belief that having a job in these firms is safer; therefore, education and career paths have all been over-indexed to this belief. However, the world is increasingly becoming an uncertain place than ever before. Just take a look at some of these trends and data:
In 2020, the average lifespan of a company on Standard and Poor's 500 Index was just over 21 years, compared with 32 years in 1965. There is a clear long-term trend of declining company longevity on the S&P 500 Index, which is expected to fall even further throughout the 2020s. In 2030, the average life span of an S&P 500 index company is expected to be only 17 years!
A 2009 study from Columbia University showed, alarmingly, that “employees who had been laid off during the 1982 recession showed that 20 years later they were still earning 20% less than peers who had kept their jobs.”
According to many studies, the idea that wages will inevitably rise in an industrialised economy in step with productivity isn’t necessarily true.
Gartner - a leading research and advisory firm, predicts that in the future, ‘The most high-value work will be cognitive in nature. Employees will have to apply creativity, critical thinking and constant digital upskilling to solve complex problems. In addition, the digital economy demands new ideas, information and business models that continually expand, combine and shift into new ventures. Employees must consistently refresh their digital dexterity to meet these needs.’
The keywords to look here for are dexterity, creativity and upskilling, which require new habits and skill formation. When many of you follow indexed career paths and job roles, you are prone to less risk-taking, average career growth and pay, search for easy job portfolios with less effort, and you will soon find that you need more hands-on skills as you gain experience and start to grow in senior or newer or never-before-existed roles and job profiles.
Here’s where the correlation of the 1-min idea of habit or new skill formation can come to play to break the indexed career mindset. Initially, if you want to develop a new habit, mindset, or skill like risk-taking, creativity etc., it will be hard, slow and painful. So rather than having ambitious career upskilling goals, it is essential to identify critical skills, thinking and habits needed over the long term and practice them every day - start with a couple of them for 1-min and over time, consistency will drive habit change or enable new thinking, dexterity, skills and habits in you.
Some of the lessons we learnt from this week’s mission:
Index Mindset is dangerous in an increasingly changing VUCA world. When the business environment and company ecosystems were steady, it may have worked, but it may not anymore. So we have to find ways to get out of that mindset.
Marketing Metrics must closely shadow Business Metrics if Marketing has to earn a seat on the table.
‘Better than Nothing’ thinking and discipline are vital in forming new habits. Practice a new habit for 1-min daily; soon, consistency will enable habit formation.