The Cycles of Becoming A Great Data Scientist

Published by Thom Ives on August 25, 2020

https://integratedmlai.com/the-cycles-of-becoming-a-great-data-scientist/

Thom’s most powerful disciplines and lessons …
           learned the hard way almost too late in life

Editors: Manpreet Budhraja and Danny Ma

Triage Time with Ta

Ta instant messaged me on Monday at 5:15 PM, “Thom, can you talk on the phone?” That was unusual. Ta almost always wanted to instant message instead of talk. I was a bit worried. I replied, “Call me now.” I answered and our typical pleasantries were exchanged, but I could hear the stress in Ta’s voice.

Ta: “Thom, remember that project I told you about?”
Thom: “Yes.”
Ta: “I’ve become clueless! I don’t know what to do next.”
 It’s Monday night … kinda late even.
Thom: “Ta, did you take off this weekend?”
Ta: “No, I’ve been feverishly trying to figure this out all weekend. I’m really scared that there’s no way to solve this.”
Thom: “I want to see if I can guess what you’ve been doing. You’ve only sat and ate in front of your computer screens. The only breaks you’ve taken are to sleep, and you’ve not done much of that.”
Ta: “OK, you’re prophetic. How did you know all that?”
Thom: “I’ve been there … several times! You want my best advice?”
Ta: “Yes!”
Thom: “Is the weather good on the sound?”
Ta: “Yes.”
Thom: “Load up your kayak. Go to the sound and paddle out to that island you like. Take something to write ideas on.”
Ta: “But Thom, the connection on the sound and the island is nonexistent!”

Oh this is funny. These cloud babies – do they ever think about pen and paper?

Thom: “Ta, have you heard of pen and paper”? Ta knows that I’m teasing.
Ta: “Yeeees.”
Thom: “Take a big zip lock bag to keep your paper dry. Kayak to that island. Send me some new pictures. As the ideas come to you, keep them high level. Then work down to details. But keep it all conceptual. You can work out the details in the code. Remember to kayak too. OK?”
Ta: “I am really doubtful about this. Are you sure this will help?”
Thom: “Do you have a better idea right now?” Ta stops objecting. We’ve been here before.
Ta: “OK. Right. I am going kayaking.”

Ta is actually relieved to be taking a break, because he couldn’t bring himself to do it.
Thom: “Call me when you’ve verified that your breakthrough thoughts work in code.”
Ta: “How do you know I’ll get to breakthroughs?”
Thom: “You will. Bye for now Ta.”
Ta: “OK. Talk to you later.”

And we do talk later. At the end of this post, which explains what Ta needs to learn ASAP.

Growth Happens Through Cycles

How do we live? We live through days, weeks, seasons and years. All life on our planet lives in time cycles.

Our lives are individual stories that we have a large part in writing. The older we grow, the more we become aware that our lives have chapters. They also have paragraphs, sentences, and words – moments of various lengths. We can improve the way we live through each cycle. 

If your current chapter of life is college, you will have paragraphs of courses, sentences of assignments and tests, and words of individual problems and exercises. If your current chapter is your first job, you’ll have long and short paragraphs of projects, sentences of project phases, and words of phase tasks.

You don’t need to take this analogy too literally. Simply put, there are cycles within cycles in the stages of your life. It’s healthy to rest and celebrate between each of them. Then, get back to work! 

The wisest among us are great planners that grow in their planning skills and write out their plans. They continue learning their entire lives. Their initial plans weren’t great, hence they became great planners and revisionists of their plans.

Give into cycling. Learn from the cycles in your life. Plan how to handle the cycles better each time they repeat. Life in cycles is universal. Don’t fight them. Work with them.

Consider our four seasons:

• The summer heat makes things grow just like the heat of learning something new or the heat of an important project makes us grow.
• The fall is the time that celebrate our harvest when we realize the fruits of our labors – the joy that we have over our new understanding or over our new creation that’s now serving out teammates.
• The winter is a time of deepest rest and is a time of mysterious renewal. Love winter! Embrace it! REST! It’s a time to grow closer to your family, your friends, and your new friends.
• The spring is new life – new birth! Spring cannot happen without winter. Spring is new thought – improved insight – that we could NOT have gained without having first gone through the other seasons of our work – our life. 

A healthy growing life will have these seasons: summer heat, fall rejoicing, rest as deep as death, and new beginnings that are made possible, and are built upon, the previous seasons of your life. 

Have you ever seen a surfer try to fight against the cycles of the waves? They carefully paddle out and dive under the larger waves. They rest from their paddling at the launch point. They study the cycles of the waves. They wait for a wave they like. As they surf, they work “with” the wave. A single surf comes to an end. They go again and again. They love it! Repeat the same analogy with the components of your life.

It is obvious that we need to work with cycles for our health? Our eating and drinking are done in cycles. Our sleep occurs in cycles. Our physical training is should be done in careful wise cycles. If we improve the way we cycle in all areas, we can become far more effective overall.

What are important cycles that aren’t as obvious? Mental growth, social growth, and spiritual growth. Like the surfer working with the cycles of the waves, it’s wisest to also see our growth in these areas cyclically. 

When I say spiritual, I am not subversively trying to convert you to some specific type of theism. Take me to mean your philosophical or world-view, or your logic or your own brand of Theo-logic. Regardless of your spiritual beliefs or philosophical beliefs, I am merely encouraging you to take serious “cycling” time to consider those things that are beyond you.

Maintenance is Integral to Cycling

What things do you most need to avoid? What things do you most need to seek? 

The things that you don’t want to be in my experience are:

• Burned Out
• Imbalanced
• Obsessive
• Diluted (Thom’s biggest weakness still)

I get excited by so many things, and I want to do them all, and I want success to come to me fast and easy in each area. Growth and success do not occur this way. UNLESS you’ve been preparing for years first and you answer when opportunity knocks. 

Therefore, seek to be:

• Steady
• Balanced
• Calm
• Focus 

Regarding focus, a book in my personal library helped me with this greatly. It’s “The One Thing” by Gary Keller. It’s my second most read book in my library, because, as a geek-aholic, it helped me to stop diluting my energies …over time!

Identify the weaknesses that debilitate your success and effectiveness the most. Work to eliminate those weaknesses with a vengeance!

The Components of Cycling

As geeks, you have seen, or you soon will see:

1. the power of separating systems into components
2. understanding how the components interrelate
3. understanding how the interrelations contribute to the whole. 

Look at any system or analysis, and you will see that all technical disciplines (all areas of STEM) rely on developing best practices of relating smaller components to one another. STEM = Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. In light of this great best practice in all areas of STEM, let’s explore the cycling components of an effective career data scientist. 

Component 1: Continual Learning

This is food to the effective data science geek. Be careful to focus on both depth and breadth. Data science techniques are growing faster than anyone can learn them. Therefore, you must choose carefully what you learn and why. Fail to focus correctly on the why, and you could hurt the performance in your current chapter of life.

Component 2: Implementation

Knowing theories and applying them to analysis is great. However, implementation is where your knowledge is truly tested. Implementation has its own special set of skills that can be outside the realm of the theory you’re seeking to implement. 

If you haven’t yet learned the principles of object oriented programming (OOP), I will tell you now that you are in for a philosophical treat once you do. Engineers practice this principle all the time without necessarily realizing it. We’re talking about designing something once, and reusing it often. The other concepts of OOP are also worth understanding.

We strive for elegance = the simplest and most intuitive ways to achieve the required functions. Intuitive solutions are more easily sold. Elegant and intuitive are more likely to be used and reused. Use and reuse leads to success. 

But don’t paralyze yourself trying to achieve perfect design (Thom’s 2nd greatest weakness). Do good design cycles using best practices. Then start a good set of build cycles also using best practices. 

Start by building and testing base components. Then make small combinations of those components and test those. Approach the whole (i.e. integrate) in small careful steps. This will make troubleshooting easier and will make your development faster. Find the wisest integration cycles. Over the years, collect best practices from yourself and others. All of this is hard work. Pace yourself.

Component 3: Recovery

What’s the most important component? Recovery. It’s paramount! The time you take to rest from your hard studying and implementation is the time when growth actually happens! Athletes train hard. This training breaks down their bodies. It is through excellent diet and rest that their bodies recover to a new stronger state.

Regard the development of your mind similarly. When you rest from study and implementation, your mind strengthens without your awareness. It’s an invisible transformation like what happens to a caterpillar in its cocoon. Let your brain rest and recover. You will be amazed as you get better at recovery. 

Think of it this way also. You are facing a challenging problem. You need to learn and master a new concept, or you need to solve a problem in your work. In each situation, your mind must be at it’s very best! Will a rested mind solve the problem better, or will a mind that’s being driven by its owner to not take a break until the answer is found do better? Just so you know, that was a rhetorical question. A fresh mind is a strong mind.

Component 4: Revelation

It’s silly to me when people provide wise analogies using movie references. Allow me to be silly. In the movie, “Men in Black 3“, agent J travels back in time to help agent K in the past. K is trying to agent J from the future to rest his mind and emotions. K introduces J to the practice of “The Pie“. J is not getting it and is not even trying to get it. K is patient with him. Long story short, during the mental and emotional recovery of “The Pie”, J has a revelation that helps them solve the case. This SCENE is just a portion of “The Pie” scenes.  Watch the movie during a recovery period!

Those scenes are not real life, but such things do work in real life. It’s been one of my hardest and most helpful lessons for me to learn.

Much like the Men in Black, we are sort of Geeks in Black. We seem to our friends to deal in alien concepts. One of my wife’s friends told her, “We all see Thom’s job like Chandler’s job on the show Friends. None of use really know what he does.” These are smart people, they’re just not STEM people. My wife confesses that she can’t explain what I do either! 

The way we STEM geeks learn to think and do things seems alien to many people. The more you learn to process data and to make predictions with it, the more alien you become to the general public. It’s OK. Embrace the transformation, but remember to return to Earth and eat some pie!

Component 5: Revision

The revelations that happen after our mental and physical breaks are AMAZING! Those revelations and insights are inexplicably wonderful! It makes all the long hours of hard work worthwhile. Following those times, we can experience long periods of taking larger safe steps with little review, and quick implementations using familiar tools that lead to rapid success. These are rewarding times too and thicken our understanding and hone our skills. But those enlightenments that you feel when you truly master a new area, not just understanding of the concepts, but also applying them repeatedly on an ongoing basis, are magical.

Along the way, we will want to revise our growth plans. Hindsight (i.e. looking back on these revelations) is 20/20 (i.e. perfect vision). Think of this as the safer practice of interpolation. Integrating the good knowledge from these past revelations into the future requires some foresight and is more risky. This is much like the less safe practice of extrapolation – we don’t want to extrapolate too far. When we carefully integrate our past lessons with reasonably wise step sizes, our planning of next steps is more sure.

The Application of Cycling

As you integrate your learning from past cycles and step forward, those smaller step sizes are safe, but they are also time consuming. As you get into a paragraph or chapter of your life, experiment with larger step sizes. What’s a set of best practices for this? I am still trying to master that. Here’s what’s helping me thus far.

Just like with physical training, learn to warm-up. Then seek to establish a healthy pace. Push too hard, and you tire too quickly. Push too little, and you fall short of your potential. Relax mentally and emotionally and keep working to wisely optimize your pace.

Occasionally, not very often, GO ALL OUT = SPRINT = SET A PERSONAL BEST RECORD. Just like with physical training, this can propel you to the next level. BUT, remember to seek more recovery following these times. 

In all of these disciplines, be patient and gentle with yourself. In all of these disciplines, be patient and gentle with others. What’s the power in those attitudes? One of the more vivid stories from my childhood was The Hare & the Tortoise. If you’re from a different culture, and you’re not familiar, please READ IT. My take on that story? Start slow. AVOID BURNOUT WITH A VENGEANCE! Keep going. For all of us, I invite you to also accelerate to higher speeds as you are able, but to do so carefully.

High Power Cycling

What’s the secret sauce to becoming a high powered cycler? Care about helping other STEM geeks like yourself! When you help others with what you’ve learned, it accelerates your mind in inexplicable ways. You will gain unique insights when you truly take the time to help others understand concepts that you recently mastered or even ones that you mastered years ago. I can’t oversell how powerful the growth in perspective is when you help others. And hopefully, these people will become your learning partners. By helping them, and them learning to help you and others, and you both helping others together, you are building a powerful learning community. If some do not contribute back, that is, unfortunately, their loss.

Follow-Up Time with Ta

Tuesday, 10:00 AM. Ta instant messaged me, “Thom, I know it’s work hours, but can you talk briefly?” I already know the outcome, and so I say, “Call me now.” 

Ta: “How did you know?”
Thom: “Because I’ve lived it so many times. Tell me the whole story in chronological order.”
Ta: “I loaded up the kayak and my gear, and I even provisioned for an overnight on the island. Since I didn’t need my laminated navigation chart, I flipped it over to the back side which is blank and white, and I carried a grease pencil in my life vest bib to write on it. But, I also packed paper in a Ziploc bag and put a clipboard with my gear. I had literally been paddling for about 10 minutes when I couldn’t contain my excitement with the good ideas that were flowing through my mind. I had to stop paddling in the middle of the sound to take notes with the grease pencil on the back of my chart. Then, I started to paddle again. While I came near to the island, a pod of Orcas swam by only 10 yards away from me. If I hadn’t gone out, I would have likely missed the revelation AND the Orcas! Once I was set-up on the island, all that you advised me to do started to make complete sense. I can’t wait to try my new plan to get around my current hurdles. Thanks Thom!”
Thom: “I think I may be more happy than you to hear this! And Dang! I wish I had been with you. Those Orcas must have scared the crap out of you!”
Ta: “There are no known Orca attacks on kayakers, but that doesn’t stop the adrenaline from rushing through you like rapids once you are that close to them.”
Thom: “I am very happy for you Ta. Just a little caution. Your revelations may not work perfectly, but I am sure that they are at least a step in the right direction. They will at least help you get over your current hurdles. So, be cautiously optimistic, but this power that you’ve experienced will grow, and there is a good chance that your ideas will get you over your current hurdles.”
Ta: “I get what you are saying. Really, this has happened to me before, but I didn’t really realize it at the time.”
Thom: “Right. It’s more obvious this time, because the challenge and the pressures were bigger than ever before. Embrace this lesson Ta. Add it to your growing list of best practices!”

And then, I begin to explain the rest of the above principles to Ta.

Closing

Who is Ta? Ta is a conglomeration of all of you = Tamen (the plural of Ta)! I am very honored, after having made so many major mistakes in my career, to know that I have been helping Tamen as much as Tamen seem to indicate. If the amount that these principles have helped me is any evidence of how much they will help Tamen, then I am excited for the power these principles will bring to Tamen’s growth in data science and more!