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speaking about his book Principles. Fascinating talk.

That is a question I ask myself every day. The answer, quite often, is “I don’t know. Maybe I won’t”. And so I don’t.

A few weeks ago, a colleague spoke at a meeting about feeling like an impostor. I think that is a feeling that I have lived with all my life. I know I don’t know much, & I’m afraid all the time that I will be found out. So I say, or do, very little. And I suspect – no, I KNOW – that this fear has cost me an enormous deal.

Instead, I’ve been writing in my journal most days for the last 9 or so years. The journals I write in are a cheap ruled notebook I picked up in bulk for the kids to write. The words are banal, & describe very often my rather routine boring day. Other times, I’m caught in the emotion of the day, or the previous day, & it shows in my writing. The vocabulary changes. The handwriting changes. I just have to see the slant on the page to know how I was feeling that day 🙂

Over the last three years or so, I’ve gone back to my school days, & what I loved doing most – calligraphy. That focus has found itself showing up in my everyday handwriting. 

What’s the point of this post?
Really, there was absolutely none. It was just a feeble attempt to get the words flowing again.

A large part of problem-solving is the ability to see a problem in its true form. If you're able to describe a problem in a sufficiently clear and precise fashion, most of the solution will become evident.

Writing helps. Write about your problems. It's more precise than thinking

— François Chollet (@fchollet) April 22, 2018

It must be a common trait – we begin doing something, & before long, it is left by the wayside,

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Ironically, I started writing this first sentence a few months ago, & didn’t do any more than those words!

For someone who works in finance & commercial, Microsoft’s Excel & PPT are the glue that hold most organisations together. Forget the multi-million dollar BI implementation approved, ironically, by the CFO, when some analysis is required, its ‘open an Excel spreadsheet’ time every single day.

This week I found myself talking to a grad in my team about the tools worth getting familiar with, & I shared with her how my thinking has evolved over the last two decades:

Stage 0:
What’s this Excel thing? And who on earth needs a million rows & 256 columns?

Stage  1:
Wow, I can get some pretty decently presented tax computation worksheets. The IF statement, especially those 6 nested conditions cover nearly all my likely needs.

Stage 1.1:
Why didn’t someone tell me I could use VLOOKUP  instead of those nested conditional statements?

Stage 1.2 to 2:
There’s so many more formulas? And you can combine them?

Stage 3-7:
Whoa!! Alt  + Ctrl + Shift + number keys + arrow keys + Page Up/Down keys can move me around the worksheet/ workbook faster than moving my hand to the mouse & then clicking!
Ok, time to learn to touch type because I can do things at x times the speed of mouse clicks.
Formulas, referential indexing, Data Analysis add-in.. holy f**8!!!! Pivot Tables, External Data, connecting to databases, MSSQL, formula auditing, charting……  there’s more stuff here that will make my reporting life easier than ever..

Stage 8:
What’s this ‘macro’ thing? It’s totally pointless, does all sort of nonsense when I record something & then push play..

Stage 9:
I can take someone else’s macro & copy it & then change it to suit my needs? I can integrate it with OLE & ODBC & SAP & Hyperion & other VBA reference libraries to automate some of my daily tasks? What am I going to do with all this spare time?

Fast forward several versions of Office release later, & all the power I need for my day job at my finger tip memory (PowerPivot, PowerQuery, PowerBI),  – there’s no need to learn anything else… & well, Tableau came along that made visual analytics easy as point & click (grrrr, no finger memory possible, but I think that is deliberate to make you think while you click around dimensions & measures)

So if you’re starting out in your career, it’s probably best to get really good at three things with your tools:

1. Touch Typing (there’s probably reams written on why this is important). Keyboard shortcuts in Excel will save your a$$ at midnight when all you want to do is shut the damn thing off instead of reaching for the mouse once again. My experience is that you will not even be working at midnight once finger memory takes over.

2. Navigation shortcuts using keyboard.  Get as familiar as possible with:

• Windows application keyboard shortcuts (that Win key + numbers can fire up the application you need)
• Excel keyboard shortcuts (and don’t bother memorising these – watch the screen light up when you hit the Alt key). 
• Any other application – before you start playing with the application, read through the help file for keyboard shortcuts  (yes, even Tableau has a few!)

A lady sat down next to me on the train this morning. She was already on the phone when she got on the train. I knew because she had a distinct voice that carried. She was ‘coaching’ someone, from what I could overhear one side of the conversation.

Two things stood out: In the course of her conversation, she advised her ‘mentee’ that someone had to just go out & talk to people, & just do some work. There was no question about why that was needed, just that something needed to be done.

The other was her story of a conversation she had with someone a few years ago, on dealing with stress. The person in question worked at a hospital, & would walk around the place, to get a perspective that whatever was causing them stress wasn’t causing people to die.

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I’ve been putting off doing an assignment on the Deep Learning course because I simply couldn’t get my head around what seemed a basic concept. The lack of motivation in the last couple of days was partly that too, perhaps?

Anyway, after dinner, & reading to the 6yo, I approached the problem using paper & pen. It took an hour or so to draw out the concept, & about 10 minutes to get through what seemed to be the hardest part of the assignment.

Which reminds me, I used the same technique at work today to design a report that I’d been putting off.  Broadly, the #Tableau report needed to keep track of where each customer lay on a price curve, with the price table axis at irregular intervals. Writing out the steps in full make it amply clear where the problem was & how to solve it.

Toastmasters had their World Championships of Public Speaking last week, over a 3-day period. Congratulations to Manoj Vasudevan, who won the third place in 2015, won this time round. I’ve not heard the other speeches, but Vasudevan used the same speech again, with a different title. The same speech on the world stage twice – I’m not sure I agree with the strategy, but clearly the judges thought otherwise. 

Pessimistic? or cynical? Or healthy skeptic?
Or as George Bernard Shaw pointed out: “The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who don’t have it”.

also related; consultants – help or scourge?

A great interview: Om Malik talks to Louis Rossetto of Wired fame
https://pi.co/louis-rossetto-cofounder-wired-magazine/

Leonard Cohen. His magic with words.

Cartoonists. Their ability to use so few words yet get their message so sharply across.

Motivation.

Happiness.

Speeches. Good ones. Not so good ones. The ones that shouldn’t have been done. Others that should have.

Internet arguments. Their futility. Actually, the futility of all arguments.

Time. And how it’s running out. For everyone.

Kids. and this quote from C.M Wallace: ‘If you don’t listen eagerly to the little stuff they tell you when they’re little, they won’t tell you the big stuff when they’re big, because to them all of it has always been big stuff’.

and this post on addictions by Seth Godin “we needed the eggs“: “Just because it appears productive, just because you bought it in a store or got promoted for it at work doesn’t mean it’s not addictive and worth managing.”

The week gone by was peculiar.

Someone apparently thought it worth their while to comment on the speed (or lack thereof) of my work. It got me a bit flustered because I usually get commended for turning around pieces of work fairly quickly. Having done many of these tasks previously, I’ve a fairly good sense of how much time something will take, traded off against how often that task will need to be done again (and that has been a recurring theme, pun intended).

What made the feedback troubling was that it was from someone who, on several occasions, been one of the commending folks. What changed was apparently behind the scenes.

C’est la vie

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Both my kids have their speeches ready for their class contests – written, polished, read and memorized. It will be an awesome week, regardless of how they place in those contests.

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I’ve signed up to Andrew Ng’s Deep Learning course on Coursera. It’s challenging because it is outside my domain expertise, and it’s exciting because I am picking an understanding of things that made little to no sense even a few months ago. Neural Networks built using Python – a snake gotten into my brain.