Multidisciplinary Mindset: Building a Latticework of Knowledge.
Pratik Ratnaparkhi
Hypebrand® | Aru's Food Co. | Worthy Essentials Co. | Host at Hustle Nation. #Hiring for multiple mid-management IT roles, send your CV to: pratik@hypebrands.in
When I first questioned why a doctor has to be a doctor his entire life? what if deep down he always wanted to be a lawyer instead? or Why we cannot accept people starting their careers in their 30s, 40s, 50s, or even 70s?
I had to deal with people questioning my sanity.
This further strengthens my belief that If society can help eliminate the social stigma that is associated when we see someone changing their career choice in their 30s, 40s, 50s we could have an even better society.
when I asked this question people from different groups, including doctors, engineers, and labor workers either thought I was stupid or gave me vague replies that could be summed up as:
This is just how society works.
My argument is that people often forget that the very core of the social fabric of society has been built by humans, and we have changed it whenever it was necessary or helped optimize for a better life.
By nature, people dislike change, and there is always friction when it comes to accepting change. This friction can range from failing businesses to full-fledged wars that result in the loss of millions of lives.
Today, the democratization of access to the world's knowledge has allowed us as a community to outperform what we could achieve in the past 600+ years and at a speed that wasn't possible before.
Understanding Knowledge:
Our learning process begins as soon as we have developed enough cognitive ability in the womb. The process continues as we build competencies in many areas of our lives, which help us become smarter and wiser as we grow. As we gather a better understanding of the world around us, the more smoothly we can adjust and shift when our situation evolves.
by Charles Darwin's theory, evolution eliminates the weakest and in this information age, it’s the uninformed who gets put to the bottom of the food chain.
Ironically, human minds were not designed to process the amount of information that we deal with every day today. The breaking news, your phone notifications, 24×7 emergencies, Instagram reels, YouTube shorts, and random facts are injected straight into your skull with headlines and titles that make you click. This is creating nothing but an attention deficit pandemic worldwide. FAANG and a few others are the absolute manufacturing hub of this devastating pandemic. I’ve covered more on this here.
To say that I can easily sum up the entire day of an average person revolving around 5 to 7 apps on a loop is scary.
Internet helped us access the entire library of Alexandria at our fingertips, but killed the individual’s attention span, and ability to focus, consume and apply the learnings. The on-demand culture met with brains constantly needing unnecessary stimulation at all times had taken over the path between focus and quality work.
Before I decided to be very conscious of the type of media I consume, I was in the same boat.
Action Item:
Try to keep your phone away for a full 90 minutes during active non-working hours of your day. If you manage to do it, that’s good. Doing this exercise will force your brain to consciously avoid the need to:
As you’re breaking the pattern your brain has been familiar with for a while now, the most important thing to consciously observe in this experiment is to measure the number of times your brain creates anxiety if you do not check your phone. Because that’s the source and holy grail of overstimulation dopamine releases that’s somehow we have normalized.
I’m jealous of the fact that this technology-induced anxiety which also leads to stress was non-existent for people who lived up until the 80s. Life was simple back then.
How do we solve this?
Considering the overwhelming amount of random information we consume, the first step is to control and filter the information you feed into your brain. You’ll be as wise as the quality of raw information you let your brain process.
The only exception could be your controlled leisure time with friends/family/loved ones etc. Identify if you’re consuming the knowledge that aligns with your goals and how much control you have over subconsciously going down the YouTube/Instagram/Netflix, etc. rabbit hole.
Our body reacts to different types of food we eat and as a result, we know:
– Eating a lot of cheese makes us fat.
– Consuming fried junk food will make us chronically ill.
– Drinking a lot of soda can make you diabetic and so on…
Similarly, our brain consumes information we expose it to and it heavily shapes our beliefs of the world around us and our actions in our day-to-day lives. This reminds me of a quote by Epicurus:
“Human beings are pulled forward toward and by nature seek pleasure, whereas they flee from and reject pain."
Epicurus (Greek philosopher, 341-270 BC)
Taking Control
It is important that you should be directly in control of when and for how long you should be exposing your brain to mindless content that doesn’t require it to work.
Anything that requires mindless scrolling or watching endless loops of random events in short intervals(YouTube shorts, Reels, etc.) causes havoc on the biochemical functioning of the brain. Resulting in anxiety, lack of focus, ADHD, uncertainty, stress, etc. This is concerning.
The first step to get out of this is to acknowledge that you are a part of it. Take the 90-minute test during active non-working hours as mentioned above, and experience it yourself.
The second step is to have a Personal Information Management System(pIMS or IMS) to get a visual understanding of where you stand and build a visual mindmap of your knowledge base. This helped me tremendously to cut out the noise and be laser-focused on my goals.
My goal was to have a multi-disciplinary mindset that would allow me to think better, make the right decisions subconsciously, and live a better, rationally optimistic life.
Let me show you what worked for me:
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For basics, I identified my long-term goals, I started by dividing my long-term goals into Master nodes.
if you want to build a great body? that's a master node.
Generate wealth? That's a master node.
Build a thriving business? - that's a master node.
Master nodes are supposed to be goals that often are very intensive and would require a lot of undivided attention, dedication, and patience to achieve them.
I often avoid or become very considerate before I choose to open up a master node to work on. Remember, every master node is going to require a time commitment.
Nodes:
Each master node consists of subsets that could be skills or actions that I make which would contribute to my respective master node being stronger.
For Eg: I opened a master node in my brain for Building Wealth:
I will then identify skills, behavioral changes, or high-impact actions I need to take that could contribute to the larger goal, we call them Nodes.
My daily decision-making is now much more than just deciding something, every decision helps me to either strengthen my nodes and the master node as well.
Nodes could be skills, behavioral changes, or high-impact actions I need to take that could contribute to the larger goal.
Once you have the 5-7 master nodes identified, the next task is to think about what tools, actions, or skills are needed to make the master node stronger and add the nodes. Somehow this is also influenced by Steve Jobs’s commencement speech at Stanford where he says:
You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
Steve Jobs, Commencement Speech, Stanford.
This is what the fully built latticework of knowledge or pIMS foundation would look like, this goes way deeper in notion, if that is something interests you, let me know and I will write another dedicated post around IMS:
These master nodes lay the foundation of having a multi-disciplinary mindset which enhances my probability of making better and efficient decisions. Effortlessly.
This allows me to think and make decisions in a way that wasn’t possible before.
The best part? the nodes could be interconnected with other nodes in a different master node.
For example, The strengthened node in the ‘Become a Better Orator‘ master node may help you to, directly or indirectly strengthen multiple nodes in ‘Building Wealth’. As the benefits can now be clearly visualized through my latticework, I was able to make better choices like:
Either sleep 2 extra hours or wake up early, hit the gym, and listen to Lex Fridman…
Clearly, I chose to do the latter, as there is so much more to achieve my just waking up 2 hours early.
I strengthened my master node of staying healthy and listening to Lex Fridman at the same time.
Either to watch Netflix or spend time reading…
I make exceptions if its a leisure time to be spent with family, friends, or loved ones. But if I am alone, the opportunity cost is very expensive for me to binge-watch the entire season of a series, with little or nothing to gain from it.
I am working to make this system even more advanced, but this system acts as an automated wise decision-making machine helping me reach my goals, effortlessly.
Building this system worked for me and moved me one step closer to becoming a better, clear thinker.
I hope it helps you too,
Build Better,
Pratik.