Filtering by Category: Personal Improvement

Daily Habit #9: Avoiding Messages Until a Set Time Each Day

Added on May 9, 2022 by Jon Krohn.

This article was originally adapted from a podcast, which you can check out here.

At the beginning of the new year, in Episode #538, I introduced the practice of habit tracking and provided you with a template habit-tracking spreadsheet. Then, we had a series of Five-Minute Fridays that revolved around daily habits and we’ve been returning to this daily-habit theme periodically since.

The habits we covered in January and February were related to my morning routine. In March, we began coverage of habits on intellectual stimulation and productivity, such as reading and carrying out a daily math or computer science exercise.

Daily Habit #8: Math or Computer Science Exercise

Added on April 4, 2022 by Jon Krohn.

This article was originally adapted from a podcast, which you can check out here.

At the beginning of the new year, in Episode #538, I introduced the practice of habit tracking and provided you with a template habit-tracking spreadsheet. Then, we had a series of Five-Minute Fridays that revolved around daily habits I espouse, and that theme continues today. The habits we covered in January and February were related to my morning routine.

Starting last week, we began coverage of habits on intellectual stimulation and productivity. Specifically, last week’s habit was “reading two pages”. This week, we’re moving onward with doing a daily technical exercise; in my case, this is either a mathematics, computer science, or programming exercise.

The reason why I have this daily-technical-exercise habit is that data science is both a limitlessly broad field as well as an ever-evolving field. If we keep learning on a regular basis, we can expand our capabilities and open doors to new professional opportunities. This is one of the driving ideas behind the #66daysofdata hashtag, which — if you haven’t heard of it before — is detailed in episode #555 with Ken Jee, who originated the now-ubiquitous hashtag.

Daily Habit #7: Read Two Pages

Added on March 28, 2022 by Jon Krohn.

At the beginning of the new year, in Episode #538, I introduced the practice of habit tracking and provided you with a template habit-tracking spreadsheet. Then, we had a series of Five-Minute Fridays that revolved around daily habits I espouse and that theme continues today. The habits we covered in January and February were my morning habits, specifically:

Starting the day with a glass of water
Making my bed
Carrying out alternate-nostril breathing
Meditating
Writing morning pages

Now, we’ll continue on with habits that extend beyond just my morning with a block of habits on intellectual stimulation and productivity. Specifically, today’s habit is “reading two pages”.

Daily Habit #6: Write Morning Pages

Added on February 21, 2022 by Jon Krohn.

This article was originally adapted from a podcast, which you can check out here.

At the beginning of the new year, in Episode #538, I introduced the practice of habit tracking and provided you with a template habit-tracking spreadsheet. Since then, Five-Minute Fridays have largely revolved around daily habits and that theme continues today. Indeed, having covered most of my morning habits already, namely:

Starting the day with a glass of water
Making my bed
Carrying out alternate-nostril breathing
Meditating

We’ve now reached my final morning habit, which is to compose something called morning pages.

I learned about the concept of morning pages from Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way. It may seem hard to believe now that I’m releasing two podcast episodes and a YouTube tutorial every single week, but five years ago I had staggeringly little creative capacity. I excelled at evaluating other peoples’ ideas and I could execute on ideas very well once they were passed to me, but I self-diagnosed that if I was going to flourish as a data scientist and entrepreneur, I’d need to hone my creativity.

Daily Habit #5: Meditate

Added on February 14, 2022 by Jon Krohn.

This article was originally adapted from a podcast, which you can check out here.

If you’ve been listening to SuperDataScience episodes for more than a year, you’ll be familiar with my meditation practice already, as I detailed it back in Episodes #434 and 436 — episodes on what I called “attention-sharpening tools”. You can refer back to those episodes to hear all the specifics, but the main idea is that every single day — for thousands of consecutive days now — I go through a guided meditation session using the popular Headspace application.

Daily Habit #4: Alternate-Nostril Breathing

Added on February 7, 2022 by Jon Krohn.

This article was originally adapted from a podcast, which you can check out here.

Back in Episode #538, I kicked off the new year of Five-Minute Fridays by introducing the practice of habit-tracking, including providing you with a template habit-tracking spreadsheet. I followed that up in Episodes #540 and 544 by detailing for you my habits of starting the day with a glass of water and making my bed, respectively.

Continuing on with my morning habits, today’s episode is about alternate-nostril breathing (ANB).

ANB is often associated with yoga classes so if you do a lot of yoga, you may have encountered this technique before. However, there’s no reason why you can’t duck into a quick ANB session for a couple of minutes at any time. I like having it as one of my morning rituals because it makes me feel centered, focused, and present; as a result, I find myself both enjoying being alive and ready to tackle whatever’s going to come at me through the day. That said, if I’m feeling particularly stressed out or out of touch with the present moment, I might quickly squeeze in a few rounds of ANB at any time of day.

Scaling Data-Intensive Real-Time Applications — with Matthew Russell

Added on February 7, 2022 by Jon Krohn.

This week's guest is indefatigable Matthew Russell. An Air Force veteran and author of four data science books, Matthew is now Founder/CEO of Strongest AI, a leading tech platform for fitness.

In this episode, Matthew covers:
• The tech stack he uses to make it possible to provide data from fitness competitions to millions of spectators all over the world in real-time.
• How he rapidly tests machine learning models for deployment into portable devices like the iPhone and the Apple Watch.
• Multi-objective ML functions and why they’re so widely useful in real-world applications.
• The three critical traits he looks for in anyone he hires.
• The values instilled in him by pursuing a military education.
• The key skills he wishes he’d learned earlier in his career.

A bit more on Matthew... he's:
• Founder and CEO of Strongest, the leading technology platform for global fitness events, which is growing into an application that uses ML models to make you stronger, faster, and fitter than ever before.
• Author of four books published by O'Reilly Media, including the classic "Mining the Social Web", which is now in its third edition.
• Prior to founding Strongest, served as CTO at several firms.
• Holds a BS in Computer Science from the US Air Force Academy as well as an MS in Computer Science and Machine Learning from the US Air Force Institute of Technology.

Parts of today’s episode, particularly in the first half, do get fairly technical as we dig into the open-source software stack that enables the scalable deployment of data-intensive real-time applications. That said, much of the episode will appeal to anyone who’s excited about physical fitness or commercializing A.I.

Shout out to Austin Ogilvie for introducing me to Matthew 😀

The SuperDataScience show's available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.

Daily Habit #3: Make Your Bed

Added on January 31, 2022 by Jon Krohn.

Back in Episode #538, I kicked off the new year of Five-Minute Fridays by introducing the practice of habit-tracking, including providing you with a template habit-tracking spreadsheet. I followed that up in Episode #540 by detailing for you my habit of starting the day with a glass of water.

So Daily Habit #1 was the meta-habit of tracking your habits. Daily Habit #2 is the morning water glass. That brings us today to my Daily Habit #3, which is another morning habit: making your bed.

Continuous Calendar for 2022

Added on January 24, 2022 by Jon Krohn.

This article was originally adapted from a podcast, which you can check out here.

All right, so the past two Fridays, I had episodes for you on daily habits. We’ll continue on with that habit series next week, but I’m interrupting the series today to bring you a time-sensitive message.

Back in Episode #482, which aired in June, I provided you with an introduction to continuous calendars — a rarely used, but from my perspective, vastly superior way of viewing your upcoming deadlines relative to the much more common monthly or weekly calendars.

Daily Habit #2: Start the Day with a Glass of Water

Added on January 17, 2022 by Jon Krohn.

This article was originally adapted from a podcast, which you can check out here.

On Five-Minute Friday last week, I introduced the life-transforming concept of daily habit tracking and, if you‘re keen to try it for yourself, I provided an example spreadsheet to get you up and running quickly on your own daily habit tracking journey. If you check out the YouTube version of last week’s episode, you’ll also see that I screenshared the final part of the episode in order to provide a hands-on demonstration of how to configure my habit-tracking template for whatever habits you’d like to track.

Starting with today’s episode, I’ll be recurringly using Five-Minute Fridays to cover the daily habits I track that are most influential in my life. Perhaps they’ll provide food for thought for you or maybe you’ll even try adopting some of them into your own life.

Daily Habit #1: Track Your Habits

Added on January 10, 2022 by Jon Krohn.

This article was originally adapted from a podcast, which you can check out here.

In September 2016, Konrad Kopczynski — who happened to be the guest on episode #465 of the SuperDataScience podcast — introduced me to the idea of daily habit tracking.

I appreciate that it’s easy to throw around an expression like “life-changing”, but tracking my habits every day really has been a dramatically life-changing experience. When you wake up every morning and report honestly to yourself on whether you did or didn’t perform a particular good or bad habit yesterday, you open up your eyes to who you really are in a way that our minds otherwise trick us into ignoring or exaggerating.

A.I. Robotics at Home

Added on December 13, 2021 by Jon Krohn.

This week's guest is mad genius Dave Niewinski, who creates A.I.-powered robots for use at home (e.g., cold beer retriever, flame-throwing weed killer) and to teach people A.I. robotics via his popular YouTube channel.

In the episode, Dave covers:
• The specific robotics hardware and open-source software incorporated into his wildest and most well-known robots
• Where machine vision algorithms, particularly deep learning models, are critical for enabling robot functionality
• His tips for folks who’d like to get started in A.I. robotics themselves
• How his interest in robotics led him to founding his Dave's Armoury Ltd. consulting business, which allows him to automate and improve real-world industrial processes with robots
• What excites him most about the societal impact A.I. robotics will have in our lifetimes

Specific robots of Dave's that we detail on the show include ones that:
• Play the sandbag-tossing game "cornhole"
• Defend his machine shop from kids by spraying them with a hose
• Exterminate weeds by throwing flames
• Carve pumpkins for Halloween
• Solve Rubik's cubes
• Use Lego pieces to create 2D artwork
• Race kids at assembling 3D Lego unicorns
• Bring cold beer from the fridge to wherever you are in the house

Thanks to Graham McCormick for introducing me to Dave! I learned so much from him and had such a good time hanging with him "on air".

The SuperDataScience show's available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com. You can check out the Dave's Armoury YouTube channel here!

The Normal Anxiety of Content Creation

Added on December 6, 2021 by Jon Krohn.

This article was originally adapted from a podcast, which you can check out here.

It has been two years since my first book, Deep Learning Illustrated, was published. The years I spent writing the book were filled with persistent darkness and anxiety.

I had a sense of dread that when readers got their hands on the book, they would find catastrophic errors or humiliating gaps in my writing. I feared that some unidentified issue or collection of issues with the book would be so massive that the book would be perceived as a joke or that I would be perceived as a fraud. (I've learned since that such fears are common amongst authors, particularly whilst penning their first book.)

Fail More

Added on November 1, 2021 by Jon Krohn.

Fail more! Failing is very very good. For Five-Minute Friday this week, I elaborate on why.

SuperDataScience episodes are available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.

Does Caffeine Hurt Productivity? (Part 3: Scientific Literature)

Added on October 25, 2021 by Jon Krohn.

For Five-Minute Friday yesterworkday, I concluded my three-part series on whether caffeine disrupts productivity by broadening from the experiment I ran on myself to the academic literature on the topic.

My Jupyter notebook of data and analysis of the caffeine vs productivity experiment I ran on myself is here.

SuperDataScience episodes are available on all major podcasting platforms and YouTube, and on SuperDataScience.com.

Does Caffeine Hurt Productivity? (Part 1)

Added on October 11, 2021 by Jon Krohn.

For Five-Minute Friday this week, I lay out my hypothesis that caffeine decreases people's capacity to focus deeply on work. Next week, we'll review the results of the months-long coffee experiment I ran on myself!

(If you can't wait to see the experiment results, you can head to jonkrohn.com/coffee to check them out.)

Listen or watch here.

Building Your Ant Hill

Added on September 30, 2021 by Jon Krohn.

Five-Minute Friday today features my 91-year-old grandmother sharing her insightful life philosophy that centers around an analogy of ants building ant hills.

Listen here.

Managing Imposter Syndrome

Added on September 6, 2021 by Jon Krohn.

The Five-Minute Friday episode this week is on Imposter Syndrome, including what it is and how to manage it.

Thanks to Nikolay for the episode idea and Micayla for doing most of my homework for it!

Listen or watch here.

Statistical Programming with Friends with Jared Lander

Added on September 1, 2021 by Jon Krohn.

This week's guest is THE Jared Lander! He fills us in on real-life communities that support learning about — and effectively applying — open-source statistical-programming languages like Python and R.

In addition, Jared:
• Overviews what data-science consulting is like (with fascinating use-cases from industrial metallurgy to "Money Ball"-ing for the Minnesota Vikings)
• Details the hard and soft skills of successful data-science consultants
• Ventures eloquently into the age-old R versus Python debate

Jared leads the New York Open Statistical Programming Meetup, which is the world's largest R meetup — but it also features other open-source programming languages like Python — for talks from global leaders in data science and machine learning. And Jared runs the R Conference, which is approaching its seventh annual iteration next week, Sep 9-10.

Jared also wrote the bestselling book "R for Everyone" and teaches stats at both Columbia University in the City of New York and Princeton University. And none of the massive responsibilities that I've just mentioned are Jared's day job! Nope, for that he's the CEO and Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics, a data-science consulting firm.

Watch or listen here.

P.S.: Jared is kindly providing 20% off admission to next week's R Conference off using promo code SDS20. See rstats.nyc for more details, including the first-ever live episode of SuperDataScience (with Drew Conway as guest)!

Yoga Nidra

Added on August 30, 2021 by Jon Krohn.

Episode 500 of the SuperDataScience podcast is live today! For this special occasion, world-class yogi Jes Allen guides us through a full, deep session of Yoga Nidra — a centering and transformative meditation-like experience.

I'm so excited to share this practice with you and can't wait to hear what you think of it! Thank you to all of you listeners — as well as of course SuperDataScience founder / 400-plus-episode-host Kirill Eremenko — for bringing this podcast to where it is today. And none of this would be possible without the hundreds of inspiring guests we've had over the years, the indefatigable show manager Ivana, and the awesome production team: Mario, Jaime, and JP.

I am honored and grateful to be able to serve all of you and walk alongside you in your data-science career journey. Keep on rockin'! 🎸

You can listen to or watch the episode here.