🤔[DS Culture] The Lesson I learned too Late
I wasted too much time fighting battles that weren't worth fighting. Hopefully you can learn from me.
Before I get to my confession, let me get to the point:
Over the years I’ve learned a valuable lesson: limits increase my output and satisfaction.
Said another way: constraints breed creativity. Or, boundaries are good.
If you’re learning an instrument, you’re forced to learn to play the scales. Boundaries give you the opportunity to create structure.
A sport with no rules isn’t a sport. Every sport has a field of play and you don’t want to go out of bounds.
While we may feel limited by boundaries, if we learn to work within them, we learn to become masters.
Now, becoming a master at tennis doesn’t make you a master at golf. But becoming a master at something means you now know how to be really good at something. And I’m guessing a very talented tennis player could pick up golf faster than someone who’s never played any sport, right?
The Death Spiral of Todos
When I was just starting out my career, I had grand ambitions. I wanted to be involved in every aspect of my company, from marketing and product design to leadership and beyond. I thought that by being a jack-of-all-trades, I would be able to make a bigger impact and help the company grow faster. I thought I could apply data everywhere, or try to do everything.
I noticed I started feeling weighed down by never getting everything done. The voices in my head would echo:
Why can’t I get everything done?
Why is everyone so much smarter than me?
If I can just learn how to make this one more type of plot, or this one more algorithm, or process this data one more way, I’ll finally be a good data scientist.
Most of this is self imposed. It's quite easy for me to have a lot of ideas of what to do. I used to value the strength of my ideas as the quality of my skillset. More ideas means a few of them will be better means I’ll be better at my job.
Soon, the ideas outpaced my ability to implement them. This is common in any job. We have fast dreams of what the world will look like. Ideas are cheap.
Wisdom is knowing which idea to choose
“I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying 'no' to 1,000 things. You have to pick carefully.”
Steve Jobs
Obviously. Bruh, if you spend 5 minutes you can come up with 5 ideas that each take 30-120 minutes to do. But they’re not all worth your time. Very few of them will be. Why create for yourself a distracting, anxiety-inducing prison of todos?
The only thing that matters
To be candid, the only thing that matters in business is whether someone will pay you or not. If you don’t get paid, you don’t have a job. If your boss doesn’t get paid they can’t pay you. If your client doesn’t like your output then you can’t work at this company anymore.
That simplicity is more enlivening than depressing. This doesn’t mean you’re some fungible cog in a wheel (well, you kind of always are). But consider this reframing as liberating: you get to solve someone’s problem that creates enough value for them that they’re willing to hire you.
Clayton Christensen, a popular Harvard Business professor, put it like this: someone is hiring you to do a job. And you are hiring the things around you to do a job. What is that job?
What is my client/boss/etc. hiring me to do?
You don’t have to be amazing. You don’t have to be smarter than the people around you. You don’t necessarily need to know what a neural net is (unless you’re like building neural nets for your job or something). You just need to fulfill the job requirements. That’s it.
Don’t let this be depressing. Let it be liberating. Let go of the thousands of todos and self-improvement tasks. Focus more on what the business is hiring you to do. And treat your boss like your client: they want you to do a job. Treat your client like your client: they want you to do a job.
The customer is always right, even in data science. Whether or not you like the work you’re doing for the customer is another matter. Once you find a customer’s problems you like solving, make sure you simplify your life around solving them and stop keeping up with the Joneses/OpenAI’s.