The ContraMind Code
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.
IN DEFENSE OF GLOBALIZATION
In this article, Harold James, Professor of history and international affairs at Princeton University and an IMF historian draws some interesting learnings from history on how some key events and transformative technologies impacted the world, leading to global trade growth and subsequent inflation effects.
Prof. Harold puts forth his argument that it was the steam engine that opened up continents with railroads and oceans with steamships. Following the 1970s, shipping containers sharply reduced the cost of transporting goods.
Read the entire article here.
How To Build Your Second Brain
In this fantastic podcast, Tiago Forte of Forte Labs and Spencer Greenberg talk about how we can get more productive while taking notes. Tiago highlights some common mistakes people make while taking notes, suggesting some quick and easy tips to store, retrieve and access the information from our notes when needed with ease.
Here’s a quick snapshot of what can be learnt and you will find valuable:
The PARA method of organising digital information - Every piece of information that we read can be categorised into Project, Area, Resource and Archive. Project is something you are working on right now, Area is information that you want to be responsible for and know over the long term, Resource information that is of interest to you in the future, and Archive is items that are inactive from the other three categories.
CODE, a method of using this information in - Capture - write down things that are important to you, Organise - the content that is important to you, Distil - boil it down to the most important points, Express - Use the information to express our story and thoughts
There is a lot more here, and you can listen to the entire conversation by clicking the above link.
Prof. Peter Fader on Customer Base Audit: The Why and How of Customer Behavior
In this conversation, Prof. Peter Fader, from Wharton School, talks about how, even today, companies do very little to leverage and understand their most important asset: Customers. He recommends a framework and methodology to do that and has written all that in his book Customer Base Audit.
Here are a few highlights that you may find valuable in this conversation with Prof. Peter Fader:
The Importance of Hard Skills for Marketers
How to run diagnostics on Customer Behaviour
The Marketing Department of the Future
The new blueprint of Customer Centricity
You can watch and take copious notes from this great conversation by clicking the above link.
Recovering from Information Overload and Knowledge Blackouts
The internet has created a unique problem that was not there in the world over the last twenty-five years - Information overload and Knowledge Blackouts.
Substack, one of the most successful platforms for subscription-based newsletters, receives 29 million visitors monthly compared to about 18 million in May 2021. They had 50,000 paid subscribers in July 2020, hitting 250,000 in 2020, 500,000 in 2021 and nearly 1 million in 2022!!
There are more than 600 million blogs out of 1.9 billion websites worldwide, and 77% of internet users read blogs. In addition, as of February 2023, there are over 5 million podcasts with over 70 million episodes between them. This phenomenal growth is due to online users’ insatiable need for information and knowledge.
People, on average, subscribe to 20 to 30 newsletters. However, if you look at the click-through rates, a rate of over 20% is considered fantastic. What this means is that just 1 in 4 people open these newsletters. This is out of 319.6 billion emails that are exchanged every day! In addition, people, on average, spend about 7 hours on podcasts every week.
In the future, your competitive advantage is not having the information alone, as information is now a commodity, but how you store, organise, synthesise and access information when needed. It is no more enough if you read or collect information. A host of tools help you get the most out of the knowledge you gain daily. Some of them which you can use are Evernote, Microsoft One Note, Notion, Google Keep, and many more.
But, the critical value is how you organise, connect and synthesise this information from these apps. Also, you need to use this knowledge regularly at work or something you are passionate about outside work. Finally, you need to find ways to use this information using multiple sources and use them to express your thoughts and ideas regularly.
Remember, the rate of decay of this information in your head and wherever you store it is rapid. Therefore, it needs to be organised and appropriately used.
Some of the lessons we learnt from this week’s mission:
Information and usage productivity can be multiplied when we efficiently organise, store and use our information. It is similar to how we keep work documents in our files and find it difficult to access them when we want them.
A company’s customer base is the most essential asset under-leveraged today despite so much data being available to companies about them. So, rather than aim for the moon, taking small, simple, easy steps is essential.
Turning information into knowledge on demand will be the competitive advantage of the future.