How did I learn to work with data?

I learned the basics of SQL in high school, I think. In university, I got most of my kicks from the extracurricular projects I worked on because doing so let me hang out with interesting people. As those people graduated, I moved to handling those systems on my own. Blogging have me another reason to explore data analysis, since I was curious about my stats. Eventually, with Quantified Self, I started collecting and scraping my own data.

I'm feeling a little more clear-headed at the moment – not as fuzzy-brained as before. Well, there's the slight matter of my ongoing cough and congestion, so I'm not quite all the way there, but I can think more easily than I did last week.

Cycling through different mental states (normal, squirrel, fuzzy, etc.) in quick succession has been helping me get better at differentiating among them, and I've been thinking about how I can make the most of them. In particular, I've been thinking about the consequences of considering one or the other as my "default" state, or of getting rid of the notion of a default state altogether.

If I think of clarity as my normal state and fuzziness as a short interruption, then when I'm sharp, it makes sense to make the most of it, and when I'm fuzzy, it makes sense to do the background work that will help me make the most of my next sharp period.

If I think of fuzziness as my normal state and clarity as a gift, then when I'm clear, it makes sense to invest a lot into building the systems, habits, and skills that would make fuzzy times even better. I'm not sure how probable this is, but I'm leaning towards it being likely, even though I tend to remember my past as clear. I'm basing this on the fact that many people around me have reported being relatively slower compared to their younger selves, possibly due to age and circumstances. On the other hand, I know a few people who are older than I am and who seem to be accelerating, so there's something to be said for that.

A mix of both strategies seems to make sense. I can spend some time putting the infrastructure in place to do well during fuzzy times, and I can also take advantage of quick sprints to make things happen when I have a clear idea.

So that might translate into the following:

When I'm sharp, that's the time to lean in on health and systems and skills, the time to act on ideas and explore questions, the time to come up with lots of ideas and define tasks that I can do while fuzzy. It's important to write, too, so that I can remember what it's like to be sharp.

When I'm fuzzy and don't feel particularly like pushing, that's a good time to focus on self-care and close relationships. It's okay to relax, to observe, to explore.

One of the nice things about being fuzzy is that it's easier to explore alternatives and develop skills; it's all right to do something you're mediocre at when you feel mediocre at everything, or too fuzzy to do things you're normally excellent at. <laugh>

And there's always the philosophical practice at being patient and dealing with challenges… It's good.

Hmm. What's a good way for me to tell whether I'm under-preparing, over-preparing, or getting the balance right?

• If I under-prepare for fuzziness while I'm sharp, then when I'm fuzzy, I'm stuck with low-value activities like video games. This is okay, but with some thought, I might be able to tweak it to get more value.
• If I over-prepare for fuzziness while I'm sharp, then I'm missing the opportunity to build momentum and get stuff done.
• If I under-prepare for sharpness while I'm fuzzy, then when I'm sharp, I end up spinning my wheels or doing things that I could have done when I was fuzzy anyway.
• If I over-prepare for sharpness while I'm fuzzy, I might prolong my fuzziness or feel bleah.

Hmm. It might be interesting to revisit my notes on the kinds of things I can do when I'm sharp and when I'm fuzzy (High energy and low energy activities). That might help me detect if I'm using my sharp time well.

Also, it's okay not to totally optimize this. =) I can be a little inefficient.

There's definitely more fuzziness in my future. It might be interesting to graph this to see when I'm majority-sharp and when I'm majority-fuzzy, but even without those patterns, it can help to start slowly thinking about how I can make this better. Hmm…

In sewing, the actual sewing–the stitching of layers of fabric together–seems to be such a small part of it.

There’s choosing a sewing pattern, or making one up.

There’s choosing the fabric, thinking of how it feels, drapes, stretches, handles, and washes.

There’s tracing, marking, and adjusting the pattern.

There’s cutting the fabric. Accuracy in this step makes everything else easier.

There’s marking and pinning. How you pin it together depends on how you want the finished piece to feel like.

Sometimes there’s lining, sometimes there’s interfacing. I haven’t learned how to really work with these yet.

And then – sewing! But just a little at a time, because…

There’s pressing, which is a little like ironing except with more time and pressure. This is what creates those creases and curves. It’s important to do this. If you skip it, your seams might pucker or puff. Things just don’t hang right without it.

Sometimes you trim things with scissors, or carefully rip threads and resew if needed.

And then more pinning, more sewing, more pressing, more cutting… So much of sewing is outside that narrow definition of “sewing.”

Cooking is like that too: choosing tastes, recipes, ingredients; preparing the ingredients; cooking!; adjusting the taste; serving.

What are the writing equivalents? Researching, outlining, writing, revising, packaging.

Coding? Planning, coding, testing… Maybe testing is like pressing – it helps make different pieces of code fit together neatly.

It’s like these activities have a part where you can say “This is it! I’m sewing/cooking/writing/coding!” But all the other parts might be even more important than that one bit. Hmm.

The trick, perhaps, is to enjoy those other parts as well, even if you don’t feel you’re making good progress, even if it’s not the part with the pay-off or the glamour. Doing the prep work well makes the main work more effective and enjoyable.

I wonder if life works the same way too…

When is it worth improving a skill you're already good at, and when should you focus on other things?

I started thinking about this after a conversation about what it means to master the Emacs text editor. Someone wondered if the additional effort was really worth it. As I explored the question, I noticed that skills respond differently to the investment of time, and I wondered what the difference was.

For example, going from hunt-and-peck typing to touch-typing is a big difference. Instead of having to think about typing, you can focus on what you want to communicate or do. But after a certain point, getting faster at typing doesn't give you as much of a boost in productivity. You get diminishing returns: investing into that skill yields less over time. If I type a little over 100 words per minute, retraining bad habits and figuring out other optimizations so that I can reach a rate of 150 words per minute isn't going to make a big difference if the bottleneck is my brain. (Just in case I'm wrong about this, I'd be happy to hear from people who type that fast about whether it was worth it!)

Some skills seem shallow. There's only so much you can gain from them before they taper off. Other skills are deeper. Let's take writing, for instance. You can get to the point of being able to competently handwrite or type. You can fluently express yourself. But when it comes to learning how to ask questions and organize thoughts I'm not sure there's a finish line at which you can say you've mastered writing. There's always more to learn. And the more you learn, the more you can do. You get compounding growth: investing into that skill yields more over time.

I think this is part of the appeal of Emacs for me. Even after more than a decade of exploring it and writing about it, I don't feel I'm at the point of diminishing returns. In fact, even the small habits that I've been focusing on building lately yield a lot of value.

No one can objectively say that a skill is shallow or deep. It depends on your goals. For example, I think of cooking as a deep skill. The more you develop your skills, the wider your possibilities are, and the more enjoyable it becomes. But if you look at it from the perspective of simply keeping yourself fueled so that you can concentrate on other things, then it makes sense to find a few simple recipes that satisfy you, or outsource it entirely by eating out.

It's good to take a step back and ask yourself: What kind of value will you get from investing an hour into this? What about the value you would get from investing an hour in other things?

Build on your strengths where building on those strengths can make a difference. It can make a lot of sense to reach a professional level in something or inch towards becoming world-class. It could be the advantage that gets you a job, compensates for your weakness, opens up opportunities, or connects you to people. On the other hand, you might be overlearning something and wasting your time, or developing skills to a level that you don't actually need.

When you hit that area of diminishing returns – or even that plateau of mediocrity – you can think about your strategies for moving forward. Consider:

• What kind of return are you getting on your time? (understanding the value)
• Is there a more effective way to learn? (decreasing your input)
• Can you get more value out of your time from this skill or other skills? (increasing your output)
• If you learn something else first,
  • will that make more of a difference in your life?
  • will that help you when you come back to this skill?

These questions are helping me decide that for me, learning more about colours is worthwhile, but drawing more realistic figures might not be at the moment; learning more about basic Emacs habits is better than diving into esoteric packages; and exploring questions, doing research, and trying things out is likely to be more useful than expanding my vocabulary. I'll still flip through the dictionary every now and then, but I can focus on developing other skills.

How about you? What are you focusing on, and what helps you decide?

Related: Good enough, good, awesome: Thinking about what I want to get to – March 2014

When I was coming up with a three-word life philosophy, learn – share – scale felt like a natural fit for me (Nov 2012). Learning and sharing were pretty straightforward. I thought of scaling in terms of sharing with more people, sharing more effectively, building tools to help people save time, connecting the dots among people and ideas, and getting better at getting better.

A recent conversation got me thinking about scale and the different dimensions that you can choose to scale along. For example, startups often talk about scaling up to millions of users; that’s one kind of scale. There’s saving people five minutes and there’s launching people into space; that’s another kind of scale.

What kinds of scale I see myself exploring? Here’s a rough categorization. (With ASCII art!)

Hmm. This is similar to those visions of wild success I occasionally sketch out for myself as a way to test my ideas and plans. Wild success at scaling up for me (at least along my current interests and trajectory) probably looks like:

• Learning about a wide variety of interesting things
• Writing, drawing, and publishing useful notes
• Getting better at organizing them into logical chunks like books and courses so that I can help more people (including people who don’t have the patience to wade through fifty blog posts)
• Reaching more people over time through good search and discovery in my archives
• Getting updates to more people through subscriptions and interest-based filters

What would an Alternate Universe Sacha be like? I’d probably keep a closer eye out for problems I run into or that people I care about run into, and practise building small websites, tools, systems, and businesses to solve those problems. I might start with trying to solve a problem for ten people, then a hundred, then a thousand, then ten thousand and more. I might look for medium-sized annoyances so that it’s worth the change. I might build tools instead of or in addition to sharing my notes. (After all, The $100 Startup points out that most people don’t want to learn how to fish, they just want to eat fish for dinner and get on with the rest of their lives.)

Hmm. Alternate Universe Sacha makes sense too. Since I’m doing fine in terms of Normal Universe Sacha and scaling up here is mostly a matter of gradual accumulation, it might be interesting to experiment with Alternate Universe Sacha sometime. Maybe during the next two years of this 5-year experiment, or in a new experiment after that?

It’s good to break down a word like “scale” and figure out the different dimensions along which you can make decisions. Are you working on scaling up? If so, what kind of scale are you working towards?