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.
“Never Give up on Your Dream”: Steve Howe, Legendary Guitarist
Steve Howe, one of the legendary guitarists, shared the habits that have made him a legendary, stylistic and technical virtuoso. There is much to learn from these principles and habits to achieve excellence in your professional work and career.
Here are some of the habits that he spoke about:
Don’t Practice. Play! - ‘You’re supposed to play the guitar. It’s supposed to be fun; it’s not supposed to feel like drudgery. They did a scientific study about leaving the guitar unplayed for periods of time. What they discovered was that the dynamic range was much less until somebody had played it for 10 minutes or 15 minutes.’
Get Fingerboard Knowledge- ‘Even after all these years, and sometimes I’ll play an inversion and think, Wow, I hadn’t thought about that one. I guess you can always pick up manuals as a starting point. It’s like cab drivers learning their way around London- They need a map – or at least they used to. However, if you choose to familiarise yourself with the fingerboard and all it offers, you want to end up feeling unchallenged – like, no matter what you want to play, you’ll know where your fingers should land.’
Find Your Ideal Playing Posture- ‘Growing up, I never thought about my posture or how playing the guitar could hurt my back. You need to look into ways that you can play without doing yourself any harm. You might need to make certain adjustments between the way you play electric or acoustic guitars because the two instruments are so different – their weight and how they fit against your body.’
Trust Your Guiding Ear -' For the first ten years, learning an instrument is a physical exercise. You’re learning how to make notes and how to move your fingers. That’s all important, but after that, then what? The answer is you need to follow your guiding ear. That’s what’s going to lead you toward your musical direction. You need to attune yourself to how you hear sounds and what they’re telling you.’
Research All Guitarists and Styles - ‘When I was young, I didn’t leave any stone unturned. I wasn’t just a guitar fan; I was a guitar researcher. I read all the mags and bought the records. I listened to radio shows. I just had to know about everything that was going on.’
Read the article here.
Remember More, Forget Less
Shankar Vedantam is an American journalist, writer, and science correspondent. His reporting focuses on human behaviour and the social sciences. He is best known for his Hidden Brain family of products: a book, podcast and radio program.
In this episode, Shankar talks to cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, about the mysteries of memory: How it works, why it fails us, and how to build memories that stick.
Some interesting takeaways:
We often think we know things, but we come short when challenged to produce that knowledge or information.
Confidence comes with familiarity, having seen a problem or a person before. We jump to the conclusion that we know about it too soon. However, our brain retrieves connected information, using memory cues, about that problem or that person more slowly than we can imagine. And therefore, familiarity can lead us astray.
Hence, the need to practice and engage our memory without the notes in front of us is critical. Also, when we learn, the need to practice and fail many times helps us remember things better as we tend to observe the gaps or weaknesses in our knowledge, which is a little harsh to accept but helps build stronger memory about that content.
Assume we learn and understand something, thinking that we will remember it lifelong, is a myth. We grossly underestimate our capacity to forget! We assume the state of our memory now will be the same as the state of our memory in the future. This is, again, a completely wrong notion.
If we want to overcome our ability to forget about a particular subject or topic, we must overlearn them! This is because overlearning protects us from forgetting.
Students in their early years are not taught how to study, take notes etc. and not taught how their memory works. When it comes to memorisation, they gravitate towards strategies that feel effective ‘in the moment’ and are also the ones that are not that difficult. Strategies that work to strengthen memory are not satisfying or productive.
Meanings and interconnections of facts related to the topic are essential to retaining what we learn in our memory.
The importance of asking questions, probing the broken links, and understanding the weaknesses in our knowledge of topics is key. That is effortful and requires ego strength to accept the reality of the limitations of our knowledge and work on it all the time.
Why you procrastinate even when it feels bad
This TED Video dwells deeper into the science of procrastination. It explores what happens in the brain to trigger procrastination and what strategies you can use to break the cycle of this harmful practice.
Here are some key takeaways:
What is Procrastination- Procrastination is a task we avoid, which we said we would do, but we don’t do them for no good reason despite knowing it can bring us negative consequences.
Interestingly, we procrastinate because the body thinks of the task we seek to do as threatening! So the brain triggers the task as an incoming threat.
Our Amygdala kicks off a set of neurons involved in emotional processing and flags it off as a threat by releasing hormones. This overpowers the impulses from our prefrontal cortex.
Our prefrontal cortex is the one that regulates our long-term thinking and our emotions. However, in this is specific case, it is blocked by hormones released from Amygdala.
Hence, we react to the task with a freeze, flight or fight response. Therefore, we respond by turning to less stressful tasks.
We, most often, procrastinate on tasks that evoke negative feelings.
People with a lower capacity to regulate their emotions or with more proletarian self-esteem struggle are likelier to procrastinate.
Procrastination’s root cause is not laziness, as it is widely believed. Laziness is more to do with no energy and general apathy. Most procrastinators are likely to suffer from anxiety and depression.
Most procrastinators care too much, and they have a high fear of failure! Therefore they put off the work as it will not live up to their high standards.
Increasingly, strict discipline and time management are not the critical habits to cultivate to procrastinate less! Instead, being less hard on ourselves helps us procrastinate less, evoking fewer negative emotions.
Try breaking tasks into smaller elements, or journaling or removing distractions next to us can help break the cycle of procrastination.
Being more forgiving of ourselves can reduce the procrastinating habit.
Power Of Purpose, Meaning and Play in Learning and Doing
While reading, listening and watching the above ideas or thoughts, one thing that stuck was the interconnection and importance of the three elements - Purpose, Meaning, and Play when it comes to learning and doing anything. The interplay of Purpose, Meaning and Play can help us in our journey of excellence.
Here is a list of some underlying reasons:
When we develop a purpose in anything we do, we are more mentally engaged in our work. There is a sense of milestones and destinations in what we need to achieve. There are markers for progress and benchmarks of people and skills that we want to emulate and surpass.
When we seek meaning in anything, we break down the work into components and reasons for doing them. They are not seen as drudgery or not as something being thrust on us, but we know and appreciate the underlying motivations of why we need to do it and what benefits will accrue when we do them.
Meanings also create a certain connection in the brain, which allows us to enjoy the job that we are doing. Meanings also create an interim sense of purpose on intermediate tasks as the purpose has an all-encompassing end goal that may be achieved in the future. But the interconnection of the intermediate tasks to the end goal allows us to develop deeper inner meaning and helps us work on them better and better.
When we find meaning in what we do, there is a sense of play in how we do the work. What we mean by play is developing a feeling of involvement in the work, building practice and rituals that enable drive an work ethic towards building excellence, and continuous improvement in the dexterity and skills needed to be the best in what we do and having an intrinsic motivation to do them instead fuelled by external forces of thrust and pressure.
There is a natural momentum towards striving for expertise and excellence when there is an interplay of purpose, meaning and play. This helps develop deep memory imprints of patterns of how to do things in our brains due to better mental engagement and long but sustained hours of practice, as there is a sense of play and enjoyment in what we do as the path to a larger purpose is clear and visible both in the mind and action.
When there is such an alignment, what we learn and do is of a higher order. This becomes the foundation for well-ingrained knowledge, skills that act as a base against any self-deception or feeling of being the best, a heightened awareness of weaknesses, drives the quest for continuous learning, reduces any sense of procrastination needed for any strict practice or discipline and creates a stronger embedded memory to access this stored knowledge at speed when required.
The interplay of Purpose, Meaning and Play leads to habits for developing expertise and excellence.
Some of the lessons we learnt from this week’s mission:
The habit of expertise and excellence involves intense physical exercise first and then sharpening the mental faculties next.
Memory is a bundle of interconnection of thoughts and meanings. We must find ways to build this interconnection for impregnable memory skills.
Strict discipline and time management are not the solutions to procrastination. Instead, being less hard on ourselves and forgiving can reduce the habit of procrastination.