Teaching Risk-Taking And Failing Early
Edition#031
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.
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 Practice of Groundedness
A Transformative Path to Success That Feeds--Not Crushes--Your Soul
by Brad Stulberg
We all know achievement comes at a cost—Pain, Mental Health problems, Broken relationships, Anxiety, Energy Depletion etc. There are more issues, too, when there is an obsession to achieve. Often, this ‘Alway On’ culture ultimately takes a severe toll on your personal and professional life.
In this provocative book, Brad Stulberg questions widely held beliefs like speed, hacking growth, template-driven thinking and behaviour that we experience in our society and culture.
Brad writes about:
The importance of patience and why this is an essential factor - in work and life - if you want to go faster than where you are today.
He provides practical tips on how to develop patience.
Why feeling and being vulnerable is not a sign of weakness but a source of confidence and strength.
How a sense of belonging to the community, people, places and causes can make a big difference in being self-aware, empathetic and building genuine connections while this human connection can reduce burn-outs.
How to be a Founder
by Alice Bentinck, Matt Clifford
Alice Bentinck and Matt Clifford join Greylock general partner Reid Hoffman to discuss their book "How to be a Founder: How Entrepreneurs Identify, Fund, and Launch Their Best Ideas." and their vision for the future of entrepreneurship.
Here are some key takeaways:
Always leverage what knowledge you possess best from the past; that is one good way to start your venture or entrepreneurship journey.
Often the culture you come from acts as a barrier or a catalyst to your entrepreneurship dreams. Find ways to understand it more and address it.
It would be best if you remember “Ambition Attracts Resources”. So, it is not taboo to have a big ambition or break free from this thinking if you have one. Go and think big. Resources are sure to follow you.
Here’s a quick check to test if you have the DNA to be an entrepreneur -Entrepreneurs always think beyond available resources! Do you?
Don’t be afraid of failure. Willpower is a muscle that you need to build for resilience. There is a difference in approach between entrepreneurs who ‘Plan to Succeed’ and who ‘Plan to Avoid Failure’.
You can listen to this episode, and there are a lot of insights for you to take.
Here’s a collection of interviews which was a part of the story - ‘10 stories that define India’ from Founding Fuel.
These are some outstanding life lessons, especially from JRD Tata, Vilayat Khan, Jawaharlal Nehru, G R Vishwanath and Swami Rangathananda, to name a few. Just go ahead and watch them. Be ready to take some copious notes and learn from them. It’s an absolute goldmine!
You can watch the collection of all interviews here.
Teaching risk-taking and failing early
Going through this week’s book, podcast and videos, one thing that came out was risk-taking needs to be taught early in life.
From the time you start school, you are taught to minimise risk. You have a prescribed syllabus and are tested only within that boundary. You are not trained to answer ‘out-of-syllabus’ questions, but in the real world, anything you mostly do is out-of-syllabus! You are also told when you are young that failure is not acceptable. There is a social stigma to trying something new or doing something you don’t know and failing. All your study plans are about ‘Planning to avoid failure’.
Once you graduate and start working, every piece of work you do is ‘Planning to avoid failure’. You are rewarded for everything that you do right and penalised if you do something and it is wrong or ends up in failure. All performance management systems in companies are about rewarding successes. Failure is considered bad work in companies and can ruin your career.
But, in entrepreneurship, you have to think beyond available resources, which is not encouraged when you have a corporate job. Yearly budgets are built around available financial resources, available resources for that budget and doable plans. Your willpower muscle is built for this ‘stress test’ only. Again, everything you work for in a company is aimed at ‘Avoiding failure’.
So, if you want to take entrepreneurship, can this change overnight? The answer is an emphatic no. It’s decades of ‘avoid failure’ syndrome learnt both at school, work and in personal life that is at play. This needs deliberate practice and avoidance.
This is where patience and resilient behaviour come to the fore. When you are grounded, patient, practice self-honesty, and have a will to experiment and fail; you will be built of a different cloth.
We need a positive grading or an appraisal system for risk-taking and failure at school and work.
Some of the lessons we learnt from this week’s mission:
Traits like Patience, Vulnerability and Belonging/Connectedness are hugely underrated. These traits gather momentum and velocity over time which is often inexplicable but visible. Developing these traits brings a certain groundedness to our thinking and behaviour.
Entrepreneurs need to have both missionary and mercenary approaches or styles to succeed.
Detachment, Humility and Conviction - Thought leadership lessons from the great Indian business leaders of yesteryears.