This article was originally adapted from a podcast, which you can check out here.
For the final episode of 2017, of 2018, of 2019, and of 2020, Kirill Eremenko — the founding host of the SuperDataScience podcast — provided a long guest episode that he called “1-on-1 with Kirill: What I Learned in the Past Year”.
For today’s episode, to cap off 2021, I’m going to do something similar. Instead of a long 1-on-1 guest episode, I’m doing it as a shorter Five-Minute Friday, recorded here as a blog post, because I had too many exciting guest interviews in the recording pipeline that I couldn’t wait to publish and share with you.
Like Kirill in his annual recaps, I’m going to go over a list of specific lessons. At the end of 2021, I’ve got five:
Consistency Leads to Results
Delegation is the Key to Successful Scaling
Remote Working Works
Real-Life Smiles Are Essential
All Work and No Play Makes me a Dull Boy
Consistency Leads to Results
All right, so let’s start with Consistency Leads to Results. This one is the kind of advice that sounds obvious, yet we often struggle to actually do it. If you want great results at some challenging pursuit, it ain’t gonna come easy. However, if you work at it with unwavering consistency, the gains do eventually come surprisingly easily and the gains build on themselves rapidly.
To illustrate this, I’m going to give you two examples with hard data to back me up. The first is on growing an audience and the second is on weightlifting.
Let’s start with growing an audience. A year ago, Kirill asked me to become host of the SuperDataScience podcast. There was no way I could say no to such a life-changing opportunity. Yet, at the same time, I had absolutely no extra time in my week. So, I thought about the parts of my week that I could delegate away and one of those was the marketing I do for my own personal brand. To help me with this, I hired two brilliant and dedicated friends of mine — a husband-wife pair, Sangbin Lee and Maria Lee — who have lots of experience with marketing, particularly social-media marketing.
In December of last year, we started publishing my content on a schedule. This means that almost every weekday in 2021, we published some kind of original content I created — be it a podcast episode, a YouTube video, or a longer post on LinkedIn — and then we shared that content on all of the appropriate channels of mine. For example, every single Tuesday and every single Friday of 2021 a new SuperDataScience episode was published and I shared it on my LinkedIn, my Twitter, and my personal blog. Similarly, every single Wednesday of 2021 I published a YouTube video on the mathematics of machine learning and we shared that via the same social-media channels.
So, there’s the data on how we were consistent about publishing content. Now here’s the data on the impact of that consistency. In one year:
My number of followers on LinkedIn has more than doubled
Likewise, my Twitter following has more than doubled
The number of subscribers to my YouTube channel has more than tripled
And the average watch time of my YouTube videos each month has sextupled
In addition, the podcast — which Kirill had already grown into a very popular show — has grown even more over the past year to become the most listened-to podcast in the data science industry with over 1.5 million downloads per year. So, there’s the cause and effect: If you want to grow the audience for content you create, unwaveringly publish on a schedule and growth is almost inevitable.
As a separate example of consistency leading to results, the big personal pursuit of mine over the past year has been weightlifting. When the pandemic first hit in 2020, gyms closed in New York for six months and my muscles atrophied significantly. When gyms reopened I made a commitment to being consistent about weightlifting like never before and lifting five times per week every single week, no matter what else is going on in my life. That consistency has paid off. After just one year of consistent weightlifting, in the past few weeks I broke my all-time personal bests across all of the major lifts — deadlift, back squat, front squat, clean, snatch, and jerk. That means that in one year of weightlifting consistently five times per week, I overtook the pre-pandemic strength that I’d built up through the much-less-consistent weightlifting I’d been practicing for a decade.
Delegation is the Key to Successful Scaling
My second lesson from 2021 is that Delegation is the Key to Successful Scaling. I already touched on this with lesson one: In order to add the SuperDataScience podcast into my life, I had to delegate something else I was doing — in this case, marketing my personal brand — to somebody else.
The trick with delegation is that you absolutely must find the right person to delegate to. If you don’t delegate to somebody who has the right skill set for the job, whom you can trust to execute independently to a high standard, and who is passionate about their work, delegation could end up creating more work for you while simultaneously lowering the quality of the output. To save yourself headaches, you might not want to delegate until you’re at least 90% sure you’ve identified the right person for the job.
Once you start to get comfortable with delegating, you can really scale up your operations. As further examples of this, I am extremely fortunate to be supported on the SuperDataScience podcast by our manager Ivana and editor Mario. Ivana is more organized and thoughtful about producing and publishing podcasts than I could ever dream of being. Mario is a prodigiously talented editor of both audio and video; if I were to practice at editing my whole life, I might not have the capabilities he does. By being able to trust in Ivana and Mario completely every single week that the podcast will be published at a world-class standard, I can focus my time on creating episode content.
As a bonus tip for this lesson, where possible put specific structures into place to delegate more effectively. If you already have a lot of experience at something then codify the process for doing it well in a document, in a private wiki page, or in code. By providing this documentation to whomever you’re delegating to, you’re making it much easier for them to get started on the right foot and to execute at the level you’re hoping they’ll be able to.
Remote Working Works
Lesson number three is that Remote Working Works. Prior to the pandemic I assumed that the only way I could efficiently manage my team of data scientists to create models and then work with software engineers to put those models into production was by working alongside them in an office. This seemed self-evident to me: Over the course of the day, people were always popping by my desk to ask me questions, I can read the mood of people more easily when I’m in-person with them, and I make gratuitous use of whiteboards both to track project progress and to explain concepts diagramatically.
I still yearn to be working alongside my colleagues on a more regular basis, and I do still think that some open-ended R&D ideation is more effective in-person around a whiteboard with no computers in the room, but by and large I’ve been proven wrong. Remote working absolutely works. The science and engineering teams at my company, Nebula, have been unbelievably effective at all aspects of creating software since the pandemic hit: from user research to wireframes to story-pointing to software development to deployment. Indeed, by leaving people uninterrupted for hours a couple of times each day, our team is net more productive than when we were working alongside each other all the time. And it isn’t just us. Academic research of remote working through the pandemic has quantified this productivity increase across a broad range of white-collar industries.
Real-Life Smiles Are Essential
Despite my comments on remote working, lesson four is nevertheless that Real-Life Smiles Are Essential. This is another lesson that seems obvious but I’d never experienced so vividly before. When the pandemic hit and I started sequestering at home, mostly only seeing people with masks on when I did venture out, my mood took a hit. This year, with vaccines rolling out, some mask mandates being rolled back and starting to have in-person work meetings and personal events again, I see those smiles and I love them! Smiles on Zoom are better than nothing, but the immediate reactivity when in-person and the actually physically being there in-person have a markedly more positive impactful on my mood. My goodness, like everyone else no doubt, I cannot wait for this pandemic to be completely behind us and real-life smiles to abound everywhere yet again.
All Work and No Play Makes me a Dull Boy
My final lesson from 2021 is that All Work and No Play Makes me a Dull Boy. Back in lesson one on consistency I shared some pretty remarkable stats on how consistency in both professional pursuits and personal pursuits has led to tremendous results. Well, there’s a dark flipside to this that I haven’t figured out yet and that is my #1 issue to resolve in 2022. Perhaps paring back my professional commitments or more thoughtfully delegating is the answer, but for more than a year now I’ve been burning the candle at both ends with my workload. I’m always just on the cusp of burnout but manage to stave it off by a day off here or there at exactly the right moment. By living like that, however, when I do get that rare day off, I’m exhausted. I don’t enjoy activities; I just kinda veg out and recover. This has got to change soon. Until recently, I’ve always enjoyed hanging out with friends, exploring the outdoors, performing music, and reading books. Since the pandemic hit, I haven’t had time to enjoy much of these — in the case of exploring the outdoors, playing music, or reading books, there’s been almost nothing at all and my soul is being whittled away.
Well, let’s get going on turning one of those deficiencies — playing music — turned around right here and right now. For those of you who’ve been watching the video version of the podcast on YouTube all year and seeing my guitar in the background, maybe you’ve been wondering if it’s just a prop! Well, for much of 2021 I’m embarrassed to say it really was little more than a prop. To cap off the year, I’ll end this podcast as I intend to go on in 2022. Here’s my favorite song to play on that guitar(and me playing it): Oh, Me!, a fun tune written by a band called the Meat Puppets. It’s a song about the limitless capacity you have within yourself to impact everything around you. Here we go…
Keep on rockin’ it out there folks, all the best in the new year, and catch you on another round of SuperDataScience very soon.