Don’t Waste Time Doing a Data Science Project for the WRONG Reasons
There’s only ONE reason you should be doing a project.
The ONLY reason you should begin working on a data science project is to develop mastery.
Not to get a job.
Not to get noticed.
Not to write a blog about it.
You do a project to become a master in the craft of data science.
You do it because you want to get to a point where you don’t need to think about what to do next.
It becomes automatic.
That way when you’re faced with a new project at work, a take home assignment during the interview process, or a personal project you won’t fear it.
You won’t be stuck and in a confused state unable to proceed.
In his book Mastery, Robert Greene talks about the apprenticeship phase, which I think is appropriate to discuss here.
Robert mentions that the goal of an apprenticeship phase is not money, a good position, a title, or a diploma, but rather the transformation of your mind and character — the first transformation on the way to mastery.
To get accelerated returns on the path towards mastery, you must choose places of work, full time positions, or personal projects that offer the greatest possibilities for learning.
This means that you move toward challenges that will strengthen your intuition as a practitioner and improve you.
Where you will get the most objective feedback on your performance and progress.
Avoid jobs, projects, or apprenticeships that seem easy and comfortable.
And to get there you must understand some basics about skills.
Begin with ONE skill that you can master
Robert Greene makes a crucial point in Mastery:
“First, it is essential that you begin with one skill that you can master, and that serves as a foundation for acquiring others. You must avoid at all cost the idea that you can manage learning several skills at a time. You need to develop your powers of concentration, and understand that trying to multitask will be the death of the process.”
— Robert Greene, Mastery
And a key to success here is to stop trying to boil the ocean.
Avoid trying to do several things with your project at the same time.
If you’re a data analyst, it could be performing exploratory data analysis and reporting back the insights, or it could be testing a hypothesis and reporting your findings.
If you’re a data scientist, it could be prototyping a predictive model for classification, it could be comparing and contrasting the performance of several different algorithms on a particular dataset to report which one performs better against some baseline.
It could be taking a raw dataset, and performing feature engineering to assess the effect of one specific algorithm’s performance.
If you’re a data engineer, it could be building an automated pipeline that pulls data from an API endpoint, does transformations, and loads it into a cloud SQL database.
The possibilities are endless.
Push through the tedium
The initial stages of learning a skill will involve tedious work.
You’ll experience pain and boredom, but if you push through that it will strengthen your mind.
The pain is a challenge your mind presents, and you need to focus and move past the frustration and boredom.
You must meet any boredom head on and not avoid or repress it.
In your work as a data scientist you will encounter tedious situations, and you must cultivate the ability to handle them with discipline.
“… Rather than avoiding this inevitable tedium, you must accept and embrace it. The pain and boredom we experience in the initial stage of learning a skill toughens our minds, much like physical exercise. Too many people believe that everything must be pleasurable in life, which makes them constantly search for distractions and short-circuits the learning process.”
— Robert Greene, Mastery
This is your brain on mastery…any questions?
When you start something new, a large number of neurons in the frontal cortex (the higher, more conscious command area of the brain) are recruited and become active, helping you in the learning process.
The brain has to deal with a large amount of new information, and this would be stressful and overwhelming if only a limited part of the brain were used to handle it.
The frontal cortex even expands in size in this initial phase, as we focus hard on the task. But once something is repeated often enough, it becomes hardwired and automatic, and the neural pathways for this skill are delegated to other parts of the brain, farther down the cortex.
Those neurons in the frontal cortex that we needed in the initial stages are now freed up to help in learning something else, and the area goes back to its normal size.
In the end, an entire network of neurons is developed to remember this single task, which accounts for the fact that we can still ride a bicycle years after we first learned how to do so.
If we were to take a look at the frontal cortex of those who have mastered something through repetition, it would be remarkably still and inactive as they performed the skill.
All of their brain activity is occurring in areas that are lower down and require much less conscious control.
This process of hardwiring cannot occur if you are constantly distracted, moving from one task to another.
In such a case, the neural pathways dedicated to this skill never get established; what you learn is too tenuous to remain rooted in the brain.
It is better to dedicate two or three hours of intense focus to a skill than to spend eight hours of diffused concentration on it.
You want to be as immediately present to what you are doing as possible.
Once an action becomes automatic, you now have the mental space to observe yourself as you practice.
You must use this distance to take note of your weaknesses or flaws that need correction — to analyze yourself.
It helps also to gain as much feedback as possible from others, to have standards against which you can measure your progress so that you are aware of how far you have to go.
People who do not practice and learn new skills never gain a proper sense of proportion or self criticism.
They think they can achieve anything without effort and have little contact with reality.
Trying something over and over again grounds you in reality, making you deeply aware of your inadequacies and of what you can accomplish with more work and effort.
If you take this far enough, you will naturally enter the cycle of accelerated returns.
As you learn and gain skills you can begin to vary what you do, finding nuances that you can develop in the work, so that it becomes more interesting.
As elements become more automatic your mind is not exhausted by the effort and you can practice harder, which in turn brings greater skill and more pleasure.
You can look for challenges, new areas to conquer, keeping your interest at a high level.
As the cycle accelerates, you can reach a point where your mind is totally absorbed in the practice, entering a kind of flow in which everything else is blocked out.
You become one with the tool or instrument or thing you are studying.
When you practice and develop any skill you transform yourself in the process.
You reveal to yourself new capabilities that were previously latent, that are exposed as you progress.
That’s it for this rant. I’ll see you all in the next one.
Let me know what you think. Leave a comment below, let’s open this up for conversation.
I‘ve also got a free, open Slack community where I’m happy to bounce around project ideas with you!
And remember my friends: You’ve got one life on this planet, why not try to do something big?
