Looking Back To Look Forward

Edition #98

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.

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The Munger Operating System: How to Live a Life That Really Works

In this brilliantly written note by Shane Parrish about Charlie Munger, he summarises how to lead a purposeful life and what principles can be learnt from Charlie Munger that can make it count for us.

Here are our top 5 picks which you can take to practice in 2024. You can spend some time on these ideas and thoughts for reflection and action:

• You’ll be most successful where you’re most intensely interested.

• Be reliable. Unreliability can cancel out the other virtues.

• Learn the all-important concept of assiduity: Sit down and do it until it’s done.

• Use setbacks in life as an opportunity to become a bigger and better person. Don’t wallow.

• Learn to maintain your objectivity, especially when it’s hardest.

There are a lot more such ideas in the article here.

Best of 2023: The ContraMinds Podcast

It’s been a phenomenal year having conversations with some of the best minds across the world in the ContraMinds Podcast.

Here are some key takeaways for you to think, reflect and learn.

• ‘Don't be a startup that grows too fast, too soon’ - Rajesh Jain

• ‘Why the best performers ignore job descriptions’ - James Bellerjeau

• ‘Brands should learn to get comfortable with Silence’ - Pooja Jauhari

• ‘Schools are cultivating a 'Loser Mentality' in Children’ - Dr. Annirudha Malpani

• ‘Building Ed-tech for the real ‘Rural India’ needs a different level of Effort, Intensity and Purpose’ - Premkumar Gokuldasan

• ‘ Practising Storytelling can help improve learning’ - Ravishankar Iyer

• ‘ Work to master the art of ‘Speaking in the Moment’.’ - Matt Abrahams

There are more powerful ideas and thoughts from other guests, too. You can listen to the entire episode here:

Apple Podcast | Google Podcast | Amazon Music

The Super CMO Podcast - Looking Back At The Best of 2023

The Super CMO Show is the Locker Room of the Marketing World. The Super CMO Show brings various marketing thought leaders to share their experiences and thoughts.

This Best of 2023 Episode encapsulates the learnings from the best marketing minds who shared their ideas and thoughts on how marketing is changing or transforming. Watch this curated summary episode, and don’t forget to take some notes to put them into practice in 2024! Take a look at what’s inside this episode:

• Strive for Humanized Growth - The New Blueprint for Marketing

• The need for marketing technologists is only going to increase in the future.

• Marketers must reskill, reboot and recalibrate continuously if they want a seat on the CEO’s table.

• Think Marketing Accountability, not just Marketing Impact or Reach.

• The ‘Mad Men’ of marketing and advertising will have more ‘Math Men’ around them to plan their marketing strategies.

• Semiotics act as a catalyst for marketers to understand people, culture, symbols and beliefs.

• Leveraging first-party data and dynamic content to build personalised experiences on owned outernet media is expected to transform Out-of-Home businesses.

You can watch the entire episode by clicking the above link.

Looking Back To Look Forward

Over the past few weeks, we have been looking back at all the work that we have done over the year. In a way, we were looking back at what we had accomplished over the year and what we had learnt new, and it left us with some fantastic insights.

When you look back, it can throw some delightful and hard truths in your face. Some of the questions or discoveries that may hit you could be as follows:

• ‘How did I manage to do so many things given the push and pull I faced during the year?’

• ‘Could I have done more, or am I at the brim of my own productivity and output?’

• ‘I thought I had maxed out my time and effort last year, but this year, I seem to have breached my own estimates of what I have accomplished.’

• ‘Did I learn or do anything new over the past 12 months which I had never done earlier?’

• ‘When I place all the things I have done on the table over the last 52 weeks, it’s sometimes hard to accept the thought that I did a lot less than I had planned to do or assumed I had done!’

• ‘ I could have done this work differently and much more efficiently than the way I did it.’

• ‘Is bandwidth and capacity of what I can do restricted by my own mind?’

• ‘Am I seeming to be doing more the same?’

• ‘How many initiatives or ideas I had started I could consistently do over the year?’

• ‘What habits do I find hard to overcome or change that affect my plans?’

You may come up with many more questions, but these serve as a benchmark of what you must do going forward. But how do you start to do things better going forward?

Get the right balance of Introspection and Extrospection.

You may often do a lot of introspection, but that may sometimes pull you down if not applied in the right measure. You will start to beat yourself too hard, which may not be good mentally and physically.

Also, try to do extrospection - which is not frequently spoken or written about - look around you and take on the factors and challenges that are posed by your external environment - it could be the people around you - their attitude, ambition, drive and competencies, your current personal and work environment that may need fixing, look at your support ecosystems that take a toll of your time, misaligned external expectations of the people who you work with and your internal needs etc. Don’t blame only the outside elements when you do extrospection but look at them genuinely and put a plan to repair and fix them.

Assuming you are honest enough to do an unbiased introspection of yourself and your work ethic or habits, extrospection will help you fix a few of the external elements that often come in the way of helping you achieve your dreams and ambitions. It could lead to shutting a few of them off completely, rejigging your responses to situations or people or deprioritising a few things or finding new connections and networks that can act as a catalyst for achieving your plans as you may find an alignment in them with what you want to accomplish.

If you find the right middle between introspection and extrospection, when you look back next year, you will be surprised by what you have accomplished and done.

Some of the lessons we learnt from this week’s mission:

• Practice simple yet grounded life sessions to lead a successful and fulfilling life.

• Take a moment to look back to help you look forward.

• Bring in the right balance of introspection and extrospection to accomplish your plans.