# Decision by design reflection: 11-28-2021 ### Initial Brain Dump Recently, you have been critiquing yourself on not being prepared for a role that you did not want. Realize how crazy that is. Never once during the past ~3 years have you wanted to dig into reinforcement learning. You didn't look at a single news letter related to a Deep Learning advancement. You didn't take another course, build a new model, experiment on your own. No. Instead, you spent *thousands of hours* building up your mathematical acumen, your ability to think abstractly, think about real world business problems, understand a wide variety of computer science and engineering problems and skills. You grew more during these past two years that you have in your entire life. What has your goal always been? To ensure that you are growing, learning new skills, solving problems. You have done that to an incredible degree. Now, that does not mean that you could now set out with a new goal, a new area of greatest interest! It simply means that you should not judge yourself based on someone else's scoreboard. You built your own scoreboard, carefully determined what was important, what you wanted to focus on, and then you went out and did it. Now, suddenly an interesting opportunity has come along that has its own scoring system that may not be in line with the one you created. If that is the case, so be it. However, that type of a change will take time. It is unhealthy to suddenly expect Some general ideas that I know I need to sort out: * Do I want to become a craftsman? Let systems be the next large area that I dig into, while always keeping my love of math? Systems could be my thing. Truly combining all of the things I am interested in, tied directly to the real world, forcing me to always think about how things are connected... * Do you want to do AI (your current role doesn't really dig into that...) or do you just want to make sure you are always solving problems and building up engineering and science skills? * Do I want to stay *broad*, always remembering the beautiful concept of [Preparation-over-Prediction](Preparation-over-Prediction.md), or find an area that I want to focus on above all else? A niche. A sweetspot. * A theme that keeps coming up is that you want to build up your skill set of solving hard problems *simply*. * I am beginning to find my sweet spot: * Systems and Architecture (i.e. how does everything fit together to accomplish some large problem). This takes you into complexity theory, evolution, etc.. * Modeling (understand the situation as it exists in the world and determine how to effectively model it, in a system, with data structures, etc) * Algorithms (how to interact with our modeled space in a computationally feasible manor) * Mathematics (does our modeled reality have constraints)? * You have just received very powerful information: You wrote 50+ deep blog posts on ML and RL, but after not looking at them for 2+ years, you are rusty. This leads me to a few things: 1. You need to lightly review things more often. Obsidian should help with that. 2. You are much stronger in modeling at this point than you are in algorithms. This is likely okay, but something to keep in mind. 3. Your goal now more than ever needs to be to simply keep learning about a wide variety of things that all contribute towards the same goal. * Another bit of information that you just received that is powerful: * You get a high from solving a hard problem or understanding something in a beautiful way. The problem is, it isn't a guarantee to achieve that feeling when digging into something (even if it's meant to be easy). So how do you balance? * You need a way to let that go. Let go of that feeling of frustration and anxiety if you can't solve a hard problem. Let yourself come back to it. Likely the solution will be a mix of meditation and movement in order to not let it bother you. * You need to figure out a better way to enjoy weekends and time off. What is truly *recharging*? You should leave a break/time off feeling motivated, driven, full, not zapped. An idea would be to have a few new rules for "staycations and weekends". Namely: 1. Reduce expectations 2. Stick to solid nutrition and sleep 3. No super technical courses, no deep deep coding. 4. Follow curiosity 5. Synthesis! Craftsmanship! You have 1,000 blog posts you could write. Start there. 6. Reflection. 7. Have each day roughly planned the day before, but allow yourself to change your mind. 8. What is it that you *want* to do? Is there a *rich* course that you are interested in and could take? A book that is calling your name? The **key** goal here is that you aren't trying to make a ton of progress! You are trying to stoke the curious fire within. You want to give yourself something to lightly think about. Then go for a walk. 9. 2 walks a day. Let your brain really marinate during this time. 10. This time is meant to be a *deload* for your brain. Do the things that are *good* for it that you may not frequently do. Meditate daily. Walk daily. Read something that is well written and will spark your mind. Light problem solving, a little math puzzle if you wish. Think of this as "play" for the mind. There isn't a goal other than to follow that curiosity. 11. A great way to accomplish this is to have this time be a period of *reflection* and *synthesis* other than books you are reading or if you must, a course that you are *super interested in*. In general, if you have a blog post ready/content to write, you should be able to get pretty far with it, reflect, synthesize, feel accomplished, get your brain in order, and leave feeling great about yourself, instead of exhausted. * Taleb talks about being a rational flaneur, meaning that you opportunistically reassess the decisions that you are making at each step. The challenge here is that it leaves you needing to make more decisions than ever. Is that what you really want? Can you handle that? If not, why? This seems in direct opposition to Tim Ferris approach (one that I love) of limiting decisions as much as possible. Find one decision that removes 1000. * How can you incorporate Tinkering? * Do you eventually want to be a Flaneur? Getting more time back? Consult, read, write, etc, etc. * Challenges? Having enough money to travel and afford the lifestyle Dom and I want * What does it mean to own my time? Is the stress I find in my field worth it? * How could I really venture off on my own? ### Decision By Design Tools **The Root Problem** What is my [Root Problem](The-Root-Problem.md) here? To start, what are some of the symptoms I am running into? 1. Feeling spread thin. No consistency. Constantly feeling inadequate. 2. Feeling as though I am not loving what I am working on at Unsupervised, but it still is worth learning. This creates internal tension since I don't really want to do it and it is taking me away from the things I am most interested in 3. I both *want to be* and *don't want to be* an expert. You never want to just dive deeply into one area. You want to learn them all. That is what makes you tick and stay excited. Yet, you want an area that you are very good at. But what would that area be? * Systems and Architecture (i.e. how does everything fit together to accomplish some large problem). This takes you into complexity theory, evolution, etc.. * Modeling (understand the situation as it exists in the world and determine how to effectively model it, in a system, with data structures, etc) * Algorithms (how to interact with our modeled space in a computationally feasible manor) * Mathematics (does our modeled reality have constraints)? * Solving problems simply. * Part of my problem is that I don't know who I am or what I want to be getting better at. I have been super vague by saying: "I want to be a good problem solver". That can realistically refer to anything. * Part of my problem is that I am not internally aligned. I say I want to be very skilled in regards to all of the above bullets, but I don't want to then have the (unnecessary) stress associated with some of these roles. So what do I want? What am I shooting for? * This is a key part of the problem. On one hand I don't really know. I think this leads to fear and uncertainty. I am not sure if I am just walking into a trap, a situation where I can never get out to work on my own. * I know that I want my time to be *mine*. I want to spend it on things that I am genuinely interested in. What am I genuinely interested in? Solving real world problems. There are a ton of components that go into that. But if that is my interest, deep in my core, then I am spending my time "working" doing things that I really want to do * Part of my problem is that I am isolated and alone and put a ton of the burden on Dom * What is my important path? What is the path that means something, to show up and do the work? If you follow this approach of being a rational flaneur and keeping optionality open, you need *something* to anchor you; to keep you from spinning; a north star. * Keep in mind that you very well *are* doing *this* and *that* right now. You have a great, rich life. You like what you do. Get to travel, explore. Make good money. So what is it that you are craving? Those things can't be problems...so what are problems? On one hand you could say that you want to fully own your time. You could do that. But then you would likely be in a financial bind and have more constraints than you do now. So, given your context and current life, this may very well be the best you can do. It may help to have an exit strategy in mind (save $100,000 and be ready to go off on your own at some point?), but more realistically, your goal would be to be on a small team and go off together and form a consultancy. Regardless, something that may help is the knowledge of how that could happen... **The Most Important Thing** **Owning the Frame: Find a 3rd Option** ### Notes on Kover option * In a sense you can think of this as a real world applied thesis, getting to build an end to end machine learning system that a business highly depends on. It will require a ton out of you, just as a thesis would. However, in most scenarios you are either making minimum wage or *paying* to write the thesis. Here, you are making $230,000 per year. ### Things to think about and prep for for Kover * General thinking and problem solving: The Great Models project * Leadership: Bill Walsh book, https://fs.blog/knowledge-podcast/randall-stutman/, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAtkKpq4PzE, https://fs.blog/category/leadership/, https://www.audible.com/pd/Summary-of-Principles-Life-and-Work-Audiobook, ray dalio overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1OoWdqbKdg, principles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9XGUpQZY38 * Focus: Deep work (get the audio book), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KX_2a_jsGYw, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bzk9ndLfA8, https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2020/04/20/cultivating-a-deep-life/, https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2020/04/20/more-on-cultivating-a-deep-life-mindset/, https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2020/03/17/the-deep-life-some-notes/ * New learning gameplan * want to always be learning new things that could help with the job. Not stuff that is off in the middle of nowhere. But staying up to date on new techniques, papers, etc. You are *the guy* here. You are going to need to stay up to date on certain things... * Find an AI or ML newsletter, podcast, etc. This week in machine learning looked good. Likely also want one about ML ops. * Fresh asana * ### Values, practices, habits and more for 2022 * Practice gratitude. Do nice things for people you love, weekly, while being *present*. Being present is crucial. * Do less, do better, know why * Do Less * **slow down.** Focus on one activity at a time. Do less total activities. Be willing to pass through occasional interludes of full non-productivity. * Do better * focus on meaningful activities. **direct your focused energy toward quality activities, when possible** * Know why * What is your most important thing? What is your goal? Why are you doing all of this? What are your values? **get at the very core of the deep life mindset.** Working backwards from your values to determine your activities creates a lifestyle dramatically more meaningful than working forward from whatever seems appealing in the moment. It’s the difference between resilience and anxiety; satisfaction and distraction. * Four big things to focus on * **community** (family, friends, etc.) * **craft** (work and quality leisure) * **constitution** (health) * **contemplation** (matters of the soul). Thoughts about the future * Eventually your goal should be to have *multiple streams of income* so that you don't need to *lease out your time* (see [Naval tweet](https://twitter.com/naval/status/1002103670400417792?s=20)). ### Resources [New-Daily-Plan---2021](New-Daily-Plan---2021.md) [Daily Plan Template](Daily%20Plan%20Template.md) --- Date: 20211128 Links to: Tags: References: * []()