Introduction
Welcome to The ContraMind Code.
The ContraMind Code provides you with the 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 helps you draw a blueprint on what it takes to get great things done.
The Secrets to Designing a Curiosity-Driven Career
Zainab Ghadiyali is a product and engineering leader at Airbnb and Facebook, with a strong background in identifying and driving opportunities in consumer tech.
In her interview with First Round Review, she shares some great insights into how she shaped her own career and what were the key beliefs that she had, when it came to building her career. She offers some good advice on what she learnt from her own career and here are a few highlights from her learnings:
Picture your career as a painting, not a ladder
Careers aren’t just about rocketing upward. Expanding horizontally, gives you a stronger foundation to pursue vertical growth.
Hire for hunger, not a checklist of qualifications.
You don’t need authority written into your title in order to exercise influence.
Surround yourself with “builders, not smushers.”
Don’t worry too much about building a resume. Focus on building your repertoire of skills, and most of all, on creating a really great life.
Reframe what it means to be “Qualified”.
Using Your Personal Brand to Escape the Rat Race
Karthik Srinivasan is one of India’s leading Communications Strategy Consultants and an expert in the field of Personal Branding.
In this conversation, Karthik talks about the differences between working for someone else versus working for yourself, on the pre-preparations before building a personal brand, the value of setting up your mental gym, personal branding as a conscious act amongst many other things.
Listen to the full episode on:
How to Start a Start-up
Sam Altman, is the CEO of Open AI and former President of Y Combinator, and Dustin Moskovitz, is the Co-founder of Facebook and Asana.
In this video, both of them teach ‘How to Start a Startup’ Course at Stanford University. Sam Altman talks about two of the most important pillars - Ideas, Products out the four needed to do a successful start-up, the other two being Teams and Execution.
Sam talks about why the idea should come first and the need in the person to start-up should come second. He also talks about how at its early stages, the company should feel like an important mission, answering the ‘Why Now?’ question, among many others.
Dustin talks about the critical importance of the start-up founders asking themselves some hard questions around reasons to do a start-up, harsh realities and truths about entrepreneurship etc.
Hard facts about Curiosity-Driven Careers
Thinking on the article and interview of Zainab Ghadiyali in First Round Review, it is important to realise that curiosity-driven career building is not for the faint-hearted and not for ones who are always looking for an endorsement from the world outside. It is always inspiring to read such articles and career journey stories but difficult to practice it, if there is no deep belief within.
If you decide to adopt the curiosity-driven career plan, uncertainty is certain in any career decision you will take. It may be about taking a new horizontal role in the organisation you are currently working for, while the widely held belief may be ‘promotion or moving-up the hierarchy’ is defined as success in a career. Many people tend to question and discourage your decisions but having self-conviction in yourself is critical.
Similarly, practicing a ‘creative mindset’ vis-a-vis a ‘reactive mindset’ where you are thinking about possibilities, solutions in times of uncertainty is very difficult. When you take decisions with a ‘reactive mindset’, there is a sense of fear, which leads to poor judgement, lack of readiness to admit honestly if the decision you take fails for some reason, not being ready to take-up new roles that you are not ready for because it puts a lot of pressure on you as an individual and many decisions like these lead to a stack of ‘decisions of compromises’. Little will you realise, the degree of risk in your career has only increased over time. Are you willing to live with this risk, if you are not pursuing a curious-minded career choice?
Also, when you grow to hire people, would you ‘Hire for hunger and not for a checklist of qualifications?’. This is the time when you need to defy pre-determined norms of your company - because you are looking for talent where your HR department is not ready to look at, backing that person once he or she comes-in as you will have to fight all odds surrounding your decision in the company etc. And for this you need to develop the inner strength and tenacity to hold on to these decisions. If your decision does not work well, you must be ready to accept the consequences it may have on your career.
Also, curiosity leads to restlessness in anything that you will be doing - especially when there is no learning in your current job, the work that you are doing is not challenging your intellect, your work is a mindless repetition or simply lacks challenges. This requires ‘Intellectual Honesty’ of a different order. The question to answer honestly is “Am I willing to change and put that effort to get into a ‘zone of discomfort’ in my career?”
Finally, as a curious-minded career-seeker, you must settle to the fact that success is relative. It may work or not work but if it gives you personal satisfaction of not being in a constant state of limbo or status quo or in a state of ‘locked in a company- frustrated-no option’ feeling but if you are at your creative best doing a job that you like with no benchmarks against others who may have worked with you in another company in the past, or your batch in school or college, is a good marker to measure against. The choice is yours.
Some of the lessons we learnt from this week’s mission:
Learning the art of building curiosity-driven career can make a big difference to how you start to feel, think and act at any work that you do.
Personal branding is key in an increasing world of similar-looking resumes, seemingly commoditised skills and competencies. But, there is a lot of hard work in building your personal brand.
If you want to do a start-up, it must be first about a great idea or business problem that we have encountered or facing and the potential solution for it. Starting-up a company dream cannot precede a clear defintion of a business problem and its solution.