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 here.
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 Multitasking Drains Your Brain
In his article in MIT Press Reader, renowned neurologist Richard Cytowic highlights the downsides of multitasking. Often, multitasking capability in people is seen very positively, and those who exhibit it are usually celebrated as productive and efficient. Richard Cytowic argues against this thinking, and here are some emphatic points he makes on why multitasking affects your brain.
Here are some key thoughts that have been shared by Richard Cytowic in his article:
‘We lack the energy to do two things at once effectively, let alone three or five. Try it, and you will do each task less well than if you had given each one your full attention and executed them sequentially.’
‘In a different setting of 257 nurses and 3,308 pediatric intensive care patients, medication errors occurred when a text or phone call came in on a nurse’s assigned institutional phone “in the 10 minutes leading up to a medication administration attempt.’
‘A growing proportion of the population seems to be drifting through life, looking at their screens but not seeing what is going on around them.’
‘By living in a rich social environment, our neural networks self-calibrate, self-assemble, and adapt to stimulation, experience, and context.’
‘An adult human brain accounts for merely 2 per cent of the body’s mass yet consumes 20 per cent of the calories we ingest..’
‘For maximum efficiency, it turns out that between 1 and 16 per cent of cells should be active at any given moment. We do use 100 per cent of our brain, just not all of it at the same instant.’
‘The high energy cost of cortical activity is why selective attention — focusing on one thing at a time — exists in the first place and why multitasking is an unaffordable fool’s errand.’
Read the entire article here.
How To Build AGI Future: Bob McGrew
Bob McGrew, former Chief Research Officer of Open AI, discusses the lessons he learned from his time at OpenAI, scaling laws, his advice for startups, and what all of this means for the jobs of the future.
Here are some key takeaways from the discussion for you to think and reflect on the ideas shared by Bob McGrew:
The seed for innovative breakthroughs, like AI, begins when you get a bunch of bright, super-talented academia and researchers and throw a problem at them. However, for great products to come out, there needs to be a balance between allowing the freedom to figure out versus a research leadership having an opinion on the problem and guiding the team with their ideas.
Academia has a lot of obsession with credit, which prevents them from collaborating. To achieve breakthroughs, it is important to build a culture of putting the organisation ahead of individuals when it comes to papers, citations, taking credit for early ideas, etc.
For accelerating AI adoption, the problem is not the data or the intelligence that it can bring but the UI, the software that makes the person really want and need it.
The jobs of the future will be two-of-a-kind - a genius and a manager. One will be lone geniuses working on their computers, and the other ones will be managing their firms with their AI agents!
Some interesting questions to think about as to what happens when disruptions like AI occurred in the past:
‘What happened to artists when camera and photographic films came out?’
‘What happened to all the farmers(as they were 97% of the society) in the 1880s when steadily industrialization progressed?’
We are getting into a future where we don’t know what the jobs of our grandchildren will look like.
You can listen to this episode on:
Reskilling for the Intelligent Age | World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2025
This is a thought-provoking conversation about the reskilling of people and the workforce needed for the future. It highlights the issues we face —opportunities and challenges, excess and scarcity of people with specific skills, and more.
Here are some interesting takeaways from this conversation:
Cracking the technology is the easy part. The more challenging dimension is the leadership part! We need people who are agile who are critical thinkers.
It's the leadership skills that are actually more challenging to develop than the technical know-how.
We need more generalists who can communicate with engineers and technicians, understand the market, and create products.
It’s important to consider whether our traditional legacy educational systems can produce such people. That’s the real enormity of the reskilling challenge we face today.
Too much dependence on AI is also not good, as AI assumes that the past will mirror the future.
We need people who are ‘dot connectors’ who can synthesize patterns.
AI will take over repetitive tasks that humans have done many times before, but more skills related to human judgement and decision-making will take precedence.
Empathy and interpersonal skills will become important.
Teaching people how to start ‘learning to learn’ seems to be gaining more importance.
We are moving to an era of skill-based hiring rather than formal degrees.
You can click on the above link and watch the video.
The Difference Between ‘Hearing’ Vs ‘Listening’ And 'Looking’ Vs ‘Seeing’.
Richard Cytowic’s in-depth research and impact on multitasking are truly eye-opening. The subtle nuances of some observations about what happens to the brains of multitasking people are genuinely revealing.
If you are a leader or a manager, these nuances could be your ‘blind spots’, which you want to reflect on. If you are somebody working under one such leader or manager who is constantly multi-tasking, these could be the root causes of mistrust and misunderstanding.
What are the nuances that we are talking about?
Richard refers to a couple of these as appreciating the difference between ‘hearing vs. listening’ and ‘looking vs. seeing’. When leaders or, managers, or executives are compulsive multitaskers, they are in a constant state of urgency. Their calendars are loaded with back-to-back meetings, and they are impatient about wanting things to move. They remain in a ‘hurried state’ in discussions, exhibiting a paucity of time under their belt, jumping to conclusions, or sometimes making decisions too fast or too soon. Also, they keep switching between one issue over another. They have too many interruptions during discussions - external, sometimes self-made, not allowing them to focus intensely on the task at hand. This often leaves the other person or persons exasperated.
This is where the subtle nuance and downside begin to show up due to multitasking:
The leader, manager, or executive is already thinking about some other problem, the next meeting for which he or she is already running behind schedule, or the consequences of the earlier meeting and its actions, etc. This then starts to have a cascading effect on the current conversation or discussion. The person is not ‘listening’ but just ‘hearing’ what is being said. Listening requires active cognitive involvement in bringing various past contexts, scenarios and experiences together in the discussion, but the conversation turns ‘peripheral’ and ‘transactional’ if the leader or the manager starts just ‘hearing’. This difference between ‘hearing’ and ‘listening’ can affect how teams and individuals engage with their leaders and managers. And how deeply problems and issues are discussed and analyzed between them. Multi-tasking acts as a considerable restraint if leaders or managers who are multitaskers don’t understand this.
Similarly, ‘looking’ and ‘seeing’ is another interesting take that affects when people are multitaskers. When dealing with people, we tend to connect with them when we look into their eyes and have a conversation. Like listening, seeing requires more active cognitive involvement and focus. We often have to observe people’s body language deeply, sense their feelings, understand more what is not said than what is said, etc. When people multitask, these nuances are lost. When compulsive multitasking leaders and managers take a cursory look at the people in their hurry to move to the next meeting or task or ignore the non-verbal cues, these leave a telling impact on people and their morale. Also, decisions tend to go wrong as some of the unsaid behaviours are missed by these leaders and managers.
Great leaders and managers focus intensely on one issue at a time while juggling many tasks. Their ability to devote all their attention to the problem and to the people they work with shows in the thoughtfulness, planning, and detailing of their work. This also increases the commitment and engagement of the people and teams they work with.
Multitasking gives a false sense of productivity and efficiency bias. To do any job well, focus on one thing at a time and give all your attention to it.
Some of the lessons we learnt from this week’s mission:
Humans lack the energy to do two things at once effectively.
The jobs of the future will be two of a kind - A genius and a manager.
Leadership know-how will become more important than just technical know-how.