The ContraMind Code
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.
Why Oppenheimer has important lessons for scientists today
Here’s a different perspective on this much talked about Christopher Nolan film - Oppenheimer by Nature.
Atomic bomb historian Richard Rhodes had a conversation with Nature about how researchers fare in the film and what it gets right and wrong. Here are his views:
‘Now, I want to point out something that was not referred to in the movie: Los Alamos officials thought that the people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be in their bomb shelters when the bombs were dropped. They did not go to the shelters, and therefore many more were killed by the firestorm that followed than would have died otherwise.’
‘I don’t know whether it could or couldn’t have been done without Oppenheimer. But it certainly could not have even remotely happened without Groves. Groves operated on a scale that just defies imagination.’
‘I think scientists are clearly good guys in the movie — or, at least, most of them are.’
‘If there’s anything that I missed, it was a little more emphasis on the conclusions that Oppenheimer and the group at Los Alamos came to after [physicist] Niels Bohr arrived [in 1943] — which was basically Bohr’s idea of complementarity, a concept he originally devised to try to understand the phenomenon that led to quantum physics.’
Read the article here.
Your Children Are Schooled To Be Factory Workers | Zach Lahn
Dr.Jordan B. Peterson and Zach Lahn discuss the Wonder School, a Socratic-based education system. Zach Lahn is the Co-founder of Wonder, a learner-driven school in Wichita, Kansas, with the mission of helping young people find their calling and preparing them to change the world.
Here are some key ideas and thoughts from the conversation:
The present schooling system is built around ‘being obedient factory workers’ and finding a standard way to ‘Institutionalise Potential’. This is completely broken and does not yield any results or outcomes needed for the modern/current era.
The Socratic- based education system is heavily embedded in stories and narratives.
Kids are distracted because they are bored to death in the conventional classroom. It is essential to have different learning objectives for different school levels.
Gamification helps achieve learning goals.
Why the importance of reading must be reinforced at the elementary level. Most people don’t even read.
It is essential to understand the difference between teaching and learning.
The power of apprenticeship in middle school(at age 11) and what difference it can make to kids & their career aspirations. And how it goes to make an impact at the High School level.
You can listen to the entire episode on:
2040s: A Lookback | Vinod Khosla
In this brilliant presentation, Vinod Khosla, Entrepreneur, Investor, Technologist and Founder of Khosla Ventures, talks about his view of the future and his prediction of what 2040 will look like.
Here are some key takeaways:
The year 2020 taught us the dangers of the concentration of manufacturing power in a single country like China and how there is a need to diversify our risks.
The speed of developing a vaccine was simply unprecedented and has never happened before in the world.
How the Ukraine war is transforming Energy Transition across the world.
These changes represent a massive opportunity for Entrepreneurs - To build innovations around products that can solve climate crisis problems, AI-driven industry disruptions and business models.
Across decades, Vinod Khosla mentions, significant innovations have not come from large institutions but from individuals who dream the impossible.
AI will drive a significant change in society where humans will transition from ‘Need To Work’ to ‘Want To Work’.
Job displacement across professions will happen, but there will be much greater rewards at the other end.
We underestimate how fast change can happen.
Click and watch the above video.
The Power of Apprenticeship
One thing that got stuck listening to the conversation with Zach Lahn of Wonder School is how poorly we leverage the power of apprenticeship. Thinking about it increasingly, it sounded like the perfect platform to test and try for yourselves for careers you want to take up.
In an interesting research study in March 2021, Cambridge University found that 10.5% of older workers change their profession! That’s after over two decades of working! A Gallup Millennials report found that only 29% of millennials are engaged at work, meaning only about three in 10 are emotionally and behaviourally connected to their job and company. Just imagine the quality of professional work that will be done by these people.
Doing an apprenticeship at an early age exposes you to a profession, the professional work you will need to do and if you will genuinely enjoy doing it all your life. But, the way we approach apprenticeship today is transactional. Either it is recommended by your parents or some reference, but there is no deep thought if it is the kind of industry you want to work for or a company you would like or a profession you would like to pursue. This indifference gets carried all the way to the job many people perform. There are four stages in the apprenticeship model which can get you ready to become a world-class professional:
Middle School Apprenticeship: This is a period of discovery where you must explore which profession you would like to pursue, and it starts with listing them down and finding your heroes in those professions. Then experience a couple of them, and the kind of work it involves makes you decide whether it is worth considering or shortlisting. The person must be personally involved and engaged in this discovery rather than being forced by others.
High School Apprenticeship: In this stage, it is a little deeper where you will need to learn and apply some of the skills related to the profession and test if you have the knack or talent for it, develop and practice some skills and see whether you like it or not.
College Apprenticeship: Here, it is a stage where you hone in on the profession you want to build mastery around. You must develop a list of skills and competencies to excel in that profession. You then work further on that continuously and keep improving through mentors, guides, and companies that give you that exposure. More than companies, it is the person who you will work with that can make a difference in developing your expertise.
Job Apprenticeship: In this stage, you are starting to do a job and being paid for some early skills you have built. Again, picking the person you will be working with rather than the company will make a lasting difference in your professional success. Here, you not only learn the specific technical skill which you will keep getting better at, but the work discipline, work ethic, structured thinking, approaching and handling complex problems, working with people etc., that you will be exposed to, will prepare you to be the best at what you do.
Professional Apprenticeship: This is a critical stage of transition where you move from doing a job to becoming a professional. This is a stage of lifelong apprenticeship. This happens when you spend a decade or a little more in a job. You will need to work with professionals within and outside your company who set high standards of expertise for themselves and not the ones who get a job done. It’s no longer about your reporting boss or the company you will work for. You must join professional associations, subscribe to professional magazines, learn and network with the best professionals in your industry, and keep yourself up-to-date about your profession or function. You must have the self-drive to develop mastery and work hard to constantly get better at what you do. Think of yourself as a chartered accountant, doctor, or architect running your practice. They don't have a thriving practice if they are not good at what they do.
Remember that your apprenticeship never ends if you want to be a world-class professional.
Some of the lessons we learnt from this week’s mission:
Education systems need an overhaul to keep pace with how work is transforming.
When the transition from ‘Need to Work’ to ‘Want to Work’ happens, an apprenticeship model of thinking can play a significant role as a catalyst in making this transition happen effectively.
We, as humans, need to pay more attention to how fast changes can happen. It happens faster than we imagine.