The Power Of Building Frameworks In Your Brain
Edition #043
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.
How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading
by Mortimer J Adler and Charles Van Doren
The book, written by Mortimer Adler, an American philosopher, was initially published in 1940. Adler co-authored the 1972 edition with Charles Van Doren.
It gives guidelines for critically reading good and great books of any tradition. Here are some key takeaways:
According to J. Adler, there are three stages of reading a book: Structural, Interpretive and Critical.
The Structural stage begins with understanding the book's structure and purpose and the problems the author is trying to solve.
The Interpretive stage is about understanding how the author is trying to build the arguments and how the author is supporting the arguments they are trying to construct.
The Critical stage is the need to develop a habit of critiquing the book, which helps judge the book's merit and accuracy.
It outlines the fact that due to shortcomings in formal education, it falls upon individuals to cultivate their abilities to read well by themselves.
The book highlights the importance of reading the books that influenced a given author before reading works by that author.
The highest level of reading is syntopical reading which is reading many books on the same subject and comparing them. This is the most challenging and complex form of reading.
Finally, there is a whole host of philosophical benefits of reading: the "growth of the mind."
Sajith Pai - Frameworks to Understand India
by Return on India, Colossus
Sajith Pai is a well-known investor and general partner at one of India’s leading early-stage venture firms, Blume Ventures.
In this episode, he talks about how India is a country of contradictions. And how the Indian Market is vastly different from that of a country like the United States.
Sajith Pai says there are four Indias:
India One - These are the 110 million Indians who buy from Flipkart, and Amazon, etc., watch Netflix, have coffee at Starbucks, etc. Have an average per capita of $10,000 and contribute to a third or 40 % of India’s GDP. Think of it like a Mexico within India.
India Two - Is the emerging India. This 100 million population got the internet about 5-6 years back with Jio’s entry. Not comfortable clicking coloured boxes! More comfortable with voice search(28% of India’s search is voice!). Have an average per capita of $3000. Think of them as the Philippines within India.
India Three - This is the rest of India's vast population. About 1.1 billion people with an average per capita of $1000. They are just about thriving with subsistence levels of income or, most often, not enough income to support their daily living. Think of them as Sub-Sahara or Africa minus South Africa within India.
India Alpha - A smaller sliver of India One. About 25 million people. Comfortable with English and think of them as a cross between Taiwan and Poland and have a similar per capita as these countries.
The conversation then goes on to talk about venture investments in India, start-up business models, India-first models, public infrastructure, employment in start-ups, gig working class, funding and valuation waves in India, SaaS India story, Indian vs India success contradictions and how fluent founders are going behind these different Indias, the challenges, growth opportunities etc. India has.
How do our brains process speech
by TED-Ed
This brilliant TED-Ed Video series explains critical facts about how our brain processes words, their meanings, and the context as we hear the words or sentences spoken by others. Did you know that an average 20-year-old knows on an average 27,000 to 52,000 words, and by the age of 60, it averages 35,000 to 56,000 words?
It also beautifully explains how our brain matches words and their meanings, what happens when we come across new words and how it gets weaved into the brain's cortex with other words we already know.
The Power Of Building Frameworks in your brain
One common thread that came across this week’s learning is the importance of building frameworks. What frameworks do in thinking and understanding problems?
Our brain has limited capability to remember millions or zillions of ideas, thoughts, information or data atoms. Therefore, this information gets lost if you remember them as atoms. It also puts tremendous pressure on remembering them as statistics/ data points and creates an inability to explain them simply for others to understand. Also, you will get lost in the flood of atoms of information leading to confusion and complexity. This leads to a virtual brain shut down due to too many concurrent information access requests to your brain and creates information overloading to the ones listening to you too.
However, when you box them into strands of frameworks, it helps you understand overriding information, trends, themes and ideas very well in a framework of containers. For example, when reading multiple books or articles on different subjects, you can create a ‘Visual and Word’ framework of what you are reading to remember them differently and access them when needed. The visual graphs may have interconnected words and vice versa. Hence, it enables you to dig in to retrieve many of the ideas and concepts you may have read a while ago but allows you to access them quickly through a ‘Visual and Word’ framework.
Similarly, you can create your own framework for remembering emerging trends, consumer lifestyles, financial trends, technology trends, leadership, decision making etc. and have some interconnected thoughts or word strands between these containers of frameworks to access them quickly. This requires a ‘Practice of Abstraction’ in anything that you read and do. You will get better at this only through constant practice.
Frameworks allow you to articulate your thoughts with clarity and precision. It also enables you to connect hitherto unconnected areas and helps you get others to see the bigger picture very well.
Some of the lessons we learnt from this week’s mission:
Reading has stages and nuances that you should be mindful of. One must cultivate the habit of reading by themselves, as it provides stimuli and growth of the mind.
India is a land of contradictions and opportunities. There are four different Indias within India. They provide new start-up business ideas and India-first models that can be leveraged globally.
The cortex and hippothalamus part of the brain play an important role in learning new words, matching existing words and their meanings during speech.