This week, I’m enjoying the tail end of the northern-hemisphere summer by spending time with my family.
There are tremendously exciting updates in data science and machine learning happening at a faster and faster pace all the time, with potentially even artificial superintelligence being realized in the coming years and transforming all of society beyond human recognition.
It is exciting indeed. But work and technology aren’t everything! In the thumbnail graphic for this podcast, it lists “Machine Learning”, “AI” and “Success”. When I selected that final item, “Success”, four years ago, I was thinking only of career success, as in equipping you, the audience, with practical tips — both directly related to technical careers, but also more broadly to professional success and productivity as well.
There’s a voice from deep down in my psyche, however, that has become increasingly prominent in recent years and that prominence has accelerated in recent months. The voice conveys something so trite and so cliché that I was able to largely ignore it for the first two decades of my adult life, but it’s inescapable and it is impactful: Life is short and it is precious.
All things leave us. If not, then eventually we will leave them. Each breath is a gift, each sunny day, each rainy day. Success — I increasingly am able to not just realize, but also allow to actually change my behavior — is not just about accumulating wealth or working on exciting projects, it’s also about knowing when to take your foot off the pedal and appreciate the breaths, the days, the loved ones in your life. There’s an infinite amount of wealth and work out there that you could attain; you need a bit of both to meet your needs and be happy, but being consumed by wealth and work is a proven path away from happiness.
So, whether your summer is coming to an end or not, I hope you are appreciating the sweet, precious and wonderful gift of this day. Close your eyes and take a few deep breaths. Hug someone. Smile. Be complimentary. Tell a loved one that you love them. I know all too well that it's not always easy to feel this, but you are special: The odds that you would ever exist are infinitesimally small and, yet… here you are. In a vast universe of almost entirely emptiness, you were born and you were born at a time where humans enjoy a quality of life far superior to essentially every living thing in known history. And you have the great privilege of enjoying today: Unfathomable billions of years came before us and billions of years lie ahead; in almost all of those billions of years, you don’t exist but today, this special day, the unique and inimitable “you” is here.
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