SDS 325: 1-on-1 with Kirill: What I Learned in 2019

Welcome to the SuperDataScience Podcast. My name is Kirill Eremenko, Data Science Coach and Lifestyle Entrepreneur. Each week we bring you inspiring people and ideas to help you build your successful career in data science. Thanks for being here today and now let’s make the complex simple.

Welcome back to the SuperDataScience Podcasts everyone. Super excited to have you back here on the show for this final episode of 2019. Well final long episode of 2019. I think we have one more FiveMinuteFriday to go in this year. How quickly did this year pass by? It’s already end or it’s… December is ending and the year is almost through. I did not expect to fly this fast. That’s what happens usually. You look back and it’s gone. With the years it gets faster and faster, it’s also, it seems… Vsauce has a great video about this on… Michael from Vsauce has a great video about this on YouTube.

Why every year that passes it seems to be flying faster and it has got to do with our perception that in the first year you live one year of your life, which is like that’s your first year. Then after that in your second year of your life you add… you live another year and effectively add 100% of what you already had. Then in your third year you live another year. It looks like a year but you’re adding only 50% of what you had. Then your fourth year you live a year but you’re only adding 33% on top of what you had.

Every time, even though you’re living a year, you’re adding a smaller percentage to the amount of years you’ve already lived on this planet. Therefore, it just seems to fly faster. The amount of experiences, new experiences, amount of new events in your life, amount of just new things happening. Novelty is less and less and less all the time and therefore routine takes over and recurring things take over all the time. His recommendation was to… in order to feel that you’re living a longer year every time is to have more experiences, do more new things to discover the world, to discover yourself, discover nature, things like that. Because remember that time when you first… had you first kiss or imagine when you’re seeing your child walk for the first time, things like that. They are aged into our memories. Whereas, if you have days which don’t have eventfull things like emotional things for you, then the years seem to fly by fast.

That’s one theory. Anyway, so it is 5:15 AM in Australia. I’ve got my tea and ready to go. Today we’re going to be talking or I will be recording an audio just by myself. No guest today. The purpose of this audio is… in case you’ve been with the podcast for less than a year and you haven’t heard the ones from previous years. The purpose of this audio is to share my knowledge or my learnings, my top seven learnings from this year, that’s passing by. That’s finishing now in order to… actually, in order to document them, mostly for myself, so that I can look back on this and see, “What is it that I learned in 2019 and how do I not make those mistakes again or how am I living those learnings now in 2020 or 2021 or and so on.”

Yeah. That’s the point of all of this. One of my favorite ways to document things now that I’m doing the podcast is to record an audio. I thought maybe this can be useful for others as well. If you think this might be useful, then welcome. I’ve been doing this for three years now. This is the third year. The first time was 2017, this time it’s 2018. I mean last year was 2018, today is 2019. Let’s go through them. We’ll start with… like an index I guess, of all of the learnings.

By the way, we found a way to add timestamps into the podcast apps around the world that you might be listening on. They might be listening on Castbox or iTunes or whatever. Even this is available on Spotify as well. There might be a… there should be links in the description where you can actually click on each one and we’ll take you in the audio right to that spot. We just learned how to that add that recently, hopefully that’s available for this podcast as well.

Learnings. Learning number one will be about dichotomies. Learning number two will be about FOMO, specifically F*ck FOMO. Learning number three will be full circle stress. Learning number four, letting doors close, five is managing my energy as an introvert. Six, no coaching. Seven, feelings. Okay, let’s go.

Let’s do it. If you’re interested in a specific learning, jump straight over to it. Otherwise, we’re going to go one by one. Dichotomies, learning number one, what is dichotomies? What are dichotomies? At the start of this year, I read a book… actually listened to the audio book version of this book called The Dichotomy of Leadership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin. Amazing book. Life changing book. Really loved it. Audio version is great. You may know, I love listening to books that are audible because that lets me drive and do other things like especially on road trips and or be in a plane or whatever else. Basically I don’t have to stress my eyes. I love that. Sometimes you get a good audio book, sometimes not. This audio book is read very well. It’s read by the authors themselves. So great read, highly recommend.

What is this book about? This book is about leadership being a dichotomy. I always thought that leadership is a thing you can learn. Like a science, like a math equation, you can just sit down, get yourself together and learn it, maybe over time. All right, maybe over time you get better and better and better at it. Then you’re a master of leadership because you’ve learned everything there is to learn or 80 or 90% of it. So you know how to act in pretty much any situation, how to lead a company, how to lead people, how to lead yourself, how to lead a relationship, how to lead your friends, how to lead your family, how to lead your brothers and sisters. Pretty much how to lead strangers, how to lead in any kind of circumstances or almost any circumstances.

But what I found from this book and then reflecting on my own experience in leadership, I actually found that leadership is not a science. Leadership is more of an art. Anything can be or any activity can be categorized into one of the other, science or art. Science is very structured and you can learn it. Art is case by case type of basis. You got to just be a master, a virtuoso and just be comfortable with it, live it in order to be successful at it. Leadership falls into the art camp. Why is that? Because leadership is actually a series of the dichotomies. That’s what this book describes. It goes through 12 dichotomies. Who are these guys? Jocko Willink and Leif Babin. These are ex military, Navy SEALs who served in Iraq and they… actually, Jocko was there twice. I’m not sure about Leif, how many times he was there. 

They learned a lot from their training as Navy SEALs and then from being parts of Navy SEALs teams. Then also through leading Navy SEALs teams and platoons and things like that. I’m not that great with the terminology but basically they are… And also I might have said that wrong. They’re not necessarily from the army, they’re from the military. I realize in the U.S. these are different things. They’re from the military and specifically they’re from the Navy SEALs. There you go. They were in Iraq in the book. They learned a lot from that. Then they’ve applied those principles elsewhere. For instance, Jocko after finishing his career in the military left and then started… he was also training people back in the U.S. but that… again, after leaving the military he started a consulting business where he helps businesses and companies and leaders and companies to become better leaders.

They use the principles from what they learned in leading teams to apply to business. Then they wrote this book where the book is structured in an interesting way. For area of the 12th chapter, it has three sub-chapters. The first sub-chapter is they demonstrate… they don’t name… or they don’t describe the principle that they’re talking about in detail. They just showcase the situation they had in the military when they were in Iraq, like in a war zone. They described some very graphic sometimes or even very realistic situations. They were right there. They described them very realistically on what was happening, who was shooting and whom, where they were walking, where the ambush was and so on. They described that part. You got to get a gauge for the principal yourself, which is interesting.

It’s spikes curiosity and makes you wonder. You know the name of the principal because of the name of the chapter but you like, “How is it playing out here?” Then in chapter… in the sub-chapter number two, they described the principle in detail. They explain what was happening, how they learned this principle, what are the takeaways? Then in sub-chapter number three they show how this principle can be applied to business basically on based on Jocko’s experience. Consulting many businesses in many industries, he can pull real examples of mining company with operations all around the world and they’re losing money and they need to let go people or a construction business here or something else. What is actually happening in business today. They pull a real example. Of course, they are all anonymized and some of them are combined examples of different clients but it really illustrates the principle.

That’s how the book is structured. For instance, some of the examples here, like the names of the first three chapters, chapter number one is balancing people. How close do you get to your people? If you’re in the military or if you’re leading a business, how close do you get to people? You need to be close, you can’t be too far away. You can be somewhere there flying around or completely not talking to your team. Feeling very… them feeling very alienated from you because then they’ll feel like mercenaries doing their job rather than part of a bigger team with a great leader. But on the other hand, you can’t get too close. If you get too close to your team, then it will be very hard for you to send them off to battle. For instance, in the military because you know they might die there but that’s a job that needs to get done.

But it will be hard for you. You’ll get too attached. Same in business, you will get too close. It will be hard for you to delegate tasks to them, to give them assignments and things like that because you’ll care about too much about them not working extremely hard or you want them to have more rest and be more relaxed and just have a fantastic life. But there’s a business that needs to be run. You might be thinking, “We just talking about business in military, this doesn’t apply to me.” Actually, in a few seconds we’ll talk about how this applies to all areas of life. I’m just going to give two more examples. Chapter number two is called “Own it all but empower others”. This is about how much do you strategize and how much do you micromanage.

You don’t want to micromanage people. We’ve all heard that that’s really bad, indeed it’s true. If you micromanage someone, then they just stopped caring about their tasks because they have no autonomy and they just doing exactly what you told them to do. You might as well just do it yourself and you have to double check everything. They lose that sense of autonomy and that they have a say in what they’re doing or they have a way of doing it in their own way. They feel just mechanical. On the other hand you… so you want to micromanage less but on the other hand you don’t want to step away completely because you will… if you give people too much autonomy, like ultimate uncontrolled autonomy then… there’s no strategy, there’s no vision behind it. You don’t basically… don’t give people a vision at all, then they don’t know what to do.

They don’t know what goal they’re working towards, where they’re going and so on. It has to be a balance. In the first case you need to balance between being close and being the leader. You somewhere you got to find that balance in between. On the other hand, being completely alienating as a leader. On the other hand with this own it all but empower others, you got to on one hand, not micromanage people and give them autonomy but on other hand, you got to not also give them too much autonomy and still give them a vision. You’ve got to find the balance between there, between vision, between absolutely no control and then too much control. Principle number three is about resolute and not overbearing. This is a dichotomy between on one hand balancing how strict you are about enforcing the decisions and guidelines that you have come up with or as a team you’ve come up with.

On the other hand, how… when do you let things go and when do you not enforce them? Very interesting chapter. They talk about a principle of leadership capital and you don’t want to… you only get a certain amount of leadership capital in a given period of time, whether it’s a week or a month or a day. If you run around the business or your military unit or whatever else it is. Telling everybody how they… that they should be following rules, that they should be doing this this way or we have guidelines for this, this should be done like that. You don’t want to expand your military leadership capital on unimportant things, then when it comes to like a strategic or business critical part, then you won’t have any leadership capital. People will be tired of listening to you.

They will not follow you as well or at all. You got to be wise about how you use your leadership capital and there are things that are worth just letting go and but there are things that are very important to enforce. Those are the three examples of the first three chapters. There’s nine more and of course lots more detailed to what we just discussed but just probably gives you a taste for the book. Also in general, that there are lots of choices that need to be made in leadership. It has to be a balance. As mentioned, leadership is not actually just about business or military, there’s plenty of places where you need to be a leader, whether it’s with your significant other. You might be the leader sometimes. They might be the leader other times but in the times when you’re the leader, you need to make certain decisions.

For instance, if they’re upset, when is the right time to give them care and loving and nurture or when is the right time to give them some motivation and inspire them to grow a metaphorical kick up the butt. You got to find the balance between the two. When do you do either of those? You can… it’s not just a single answer. If you give them always just loving a nurture then they might become dependent on it and not see… not get enough inspiration to grow further. If you’re always giving a kick up the butt and motivation and as men actually we do a lot of this. We so try and tend to solve problems, then you… they’re not going to feel enough love from you. Leadership with friends. How close do you let a specific friend into your life? To close and you will feel exposed, too little and the friendship will feel superficial.

Leadership of yourself. How much work do you take on in a given day? To take on too little and you will become lazy or you’ll get bored and take on too much and you’ll burn out. Another one is how much do you train at the gym or in a sport? Too little and you won’t progress, too much and you’ll hurt yourself or you’ll actually lose interest because you’ll dread going back to the gym. You’re going to push yourself too hard. Very interesting principle. Leadership comes up in many situations in life. Many aspects of life. Whether you want to or not, life will test you and make you be an effective and efficient leader or it will see how effective and efficient you are. Knowing these principles is very valuable. I highly recommend the book called The Dichotomy of Leadership. All right, that was quite a long one. Let’s move on to learning number two.

Learning number two is a F*ck the FOMO and I’m not supposed to curse on this podcast as far as I know. We will just call it No more FOMO. FOMO is a fear of missing out. It’s an abbreviation of fear of missing out. Not to be confused with YOLO, which is your only live once. FOMO is an interesting phenomenon that is becoming more and more prevalent as the world becomes more and more full of abundance. If back in 40, 50 years ago you went to shop, you wanted to buy a pair of jeans, they only have three sizes. You tried them on, one of them fit but kind of fit but didn’t fit perfectly. You walked out of the shop with a non-perfect fitting pair of jeans and you’re happy that you got a pair of jeans and they look good and they almost fit. That’s it you can now use them.

Or you’re going to go tailor them a little bit and then you’ll have a great pair of jeans. Fantastic. You are happy. Now you go to a shop and there’s like 50 million pairs of jeans, all different colors, all different styles, designs, size is… whatever size you want 30, 31 and 31, 31 and a half, 32, 33 whatever size you want. Not only waist sizes is… recently I found out that there’s waste sizes and also a length of leg sizes. It might be a 32, 30 and might be a 32, 32, might be a 30, 30. Basically we live in a crazy world full of abundance. Which is good if you… on the surface… if looked on the surface, it’s actually a good thing. We live in a world of abundance.

We have everything. We’re using… And not like… Of course, it’s bad when it comes to an expense of the environment but or we’re starting to use more and more solar energy, renewable energies. We’re recycling materials and so on. It looks very good on the surface. But psychologically if you dig deeper, it’s a very dangerous thing. Because when you have so much choice, you have choice paralysis. You don’t know what to choose and then you walk out of that store with a perfect fitting set of jeans that are exactly your size and they look fantastic on you. They’re a beautiful color, style, whatever else but you’re unhappy. Why are you unhappy? Because you’re thinking, “Did I pick the right ones?” No. Sometimes you might be happy for sure but a lot of time people walk out, they’re like, “Did I make the right choice?”

Or two days later they’d be thinking, “Did I make the right choice there? What about those other ones and that other color or that other design or that other style, I really liked those too.” Oftentimes people will walk out there with two or three pairs of jeans, which they don’t really need. Now, that’s called wasteful. We live in a world that’s full of abundance but also where this abundance leads to a concept called FOMO. A fear of missing out. There’s so much choice, you can’t choose a particular thing because you fear missing out on others. I found for myself. How did I find out about that I have severe FOMO? I was sitting in Bali at to one of this… the 10 day fasting I was doing. On one of the days in the morning I was working and which you’re not really supposed to do but I had a lot of work to do, so I was also working during this retreat and I… next time I hope I will take those 10 days off.

But anyways, I was working and everybody was going to yoga, so there’s a group of 10… this time I think it was like 12 or about eight people. Everyone’s going to yoga, sometimes in the mornings they do yoga, everyone is walking there and I’m like, “I’ve got to finish this thing. I’m working on it. I’m actually pretty excited about where I’m working on.” But then they’re going to yoga. I’m going to miss on this yoga. What if it’s really cool? What if something amazing is going to happen there. I’m going to… I could be learning something, I should go there but I got to finish this work and then I just couldn’t take any more. I told myself, “No, I won’t go. I will miss out on this yoga session. I’ll actually, I choose to miss out on this yoga session.” Once I said that, even though it was still… I was having itchy feet to go around and do the yoga session but once I said that I made the resolution was much easier.

I knew that I will miss out. I choose to miss out. Instead of fearing of missing out. I choose to miss out. That’s important principle to understand. For me anyway, it was very important because I’ve lived my life in a way that I think I can get everything done. I can experience everything, I can… I don’t know, go everywhere, be everywhere, just like I’ll never miss out on anything. If I try really hard, I will never miss out on anything. But that’s not true. Life is so big. There are things we’re missing out on right now. You’re probably missing out on lots of things by listening to this podcast. You could be listening to a billion other podcasts. You could be listening to music, you could be just being in silence. You could be talking to somebody and yet you’re listening to this podcast.

Sure. You are missing out on things. That’s the important thing to realize that they are always going to be things we miss out on. Just some… a lot of the time we’re not aware of them. That ignorance, is safeguarding us from the stress that is caused by the knowledge of knowing that you’re missing out. Here, the only problem is that you are aware that you’re missing out. In my case, I was like, “I’m missing out on this yoga. My gosh.” If I had been sitting in another room and if I had not known there’s a yoga, I wouldn’t have this fear of missing out. I would’ve found out about this yoga later on in the day. And I’m like, “Well I missed it. Too bad.” Fear of missing out is only something you experience before the event, before that event that you will miss out on. Only the awareness of the event is what drives you to have the fear.

There’s nothing you can do about the awareness. Once you know something, you can’t unknow it. You know there’s a yoga going on or there’s two movies in this cinema and you only picked one or there’s 50 pairs of jeans and you chose this or you’re choosing this one or you’re about to choose this one. There’s nothing you can do about the knowing. You can’t just cancel that out and unhear what you heard or un-know what you know. But you got to come up with… what’s I find is important, you’ve got to come up with a method of safeguarding yourself otherwise. You can’t just rely on ignorance always to safeguard you. You got to come up with a rigorous system, reliable system where you will know, “Okay, well, I choose to miss out on this. I can’t have everything. I’ll have my cake and eat it too. I can’t have everything, I’m going to miss out on this consciously.”

That’s that. That’s how to deal with it. I can’t say I mastered it. I’m still always looking for the… not always but very often catch myself looking for the perfect choice. How do I find… what if this is perfect? What if that one with that would have been even more perfect in the sense I’m a perfectionist very often. But that’s a very bad habit and basically leads to unnecessary stress. I’m definitely working on it. It’s something, basically this FOMO, this perfectionism has been around with me for 30 years. It takes time to get rid of it. In fact, it takes a lot of effort and I think I’m not putting enough effort into it. Conscious effort of maybe exercises or thinking through my decisions, thinking through my day and things like. To really put this to rest.

But hopefully this step two in this episode helped you see or increase awareness. Do you have a similar thing that you need to work on or not? It’s really… I would say it’s quite an impressive thing if you don’t in this world of abundance. But if you do, there’s… that’s my take on it how you could work on it. Number three, full circle stress. Running events is hard. If you’re listening to this podcast, if this is not your episode, you probably heard of the DataScienceGO event. It’s come up many times, mostly because I meet a lot of really cool people there and then I invite them to the podcast. I hope you’ve been enjoying meeting them as well. DataScienceGO is an event we run ourselves, a Data Science Conference happens in San Diego towards the end of the year. It’s been growing quite fast.

We started in 2017 with 150 people. Then 2018 we grew to 350 people. In 2019, we had 620 people, not just registered, actually come up and physically pick up their badge at the event. Almost doubling or almost doubling every year. Next year we’re looking to have between 800 and a thousand people attend DataScienceGO. Quite a cool business. Very exciting for me to be part of it. Also, the team is great, impacting lots of people, love the community, love the data scientists and managers, everybody who comes there. I feel really good when I’m there. But running these things, running these events is extremely hard. The main reason for that is that you only get one goal per year. You only get one weekend when it’s happening. The rest of the year you’re preparing, planning, it’s crazy how much planning.

We start planning… as soon as one event ends, maybe one month later. We take a month to clean things up and send out accesses to recordings and early bird promotions and a recap on how they’ve been went. Then we start preparing right away for the next one. We bought 11… 10 to 11 months of preparation going into this. You only get one shot at the event itself. It’s not like a recurring business that happens every day. You’re selling something or you’re… or every week there’s… I don’t know, something going on like a webinar going on or something. This is just once a year. A lot of waiting, a lot of stress, a lot of pressure to make it perfect. Speaking of perfect but not to make it perfect, to make it good, to make, to make sure people enjoy themselves.

That’s the main reason why it’s a hard to run this business and so there’s a lot of volatility. You can’t really predict with happening if… basically the law of large numbers or if you have some a big dataset and you have lots of observations, it’s much easier to predict. Your average is going to be close to the expected or the hour, in the case of return, the average return is going to be expected close to expected return or your average input is going to be expected close to expected input. But when you have only like three observations over the course of three years, the volatility is very high. You don’t know… you don’t really know or you can count the average boards. The standard deviation is huge. You don’t really know where exactly the next event’s going to land.

Things come up and around August… so we had a budget basically. We had a budget for the event. This was in December, 2018. Everything’s great. Then we’re pulling this budget and then around August, early August, 2019 the event manager comes to me and says, “Kirill, you got a problem, this and this. And if you’re at DataScienceGO, it was at the Hilton, amazing hotel on the Bayfront in San Diego. We decided to experiment and go to one of the best hotels in San Diego. The event manager comes to me and says, “Kirill, we’ve got this and this, unexpected costs with the Hilton. We need an extra 50% on top of our budget.” I won’t go into specific numbers here. It’s not really relevant. But in terms of percentages, we need an extra 50%. We need to come up with 50% out of thin air to add to our budget and we have a week to do that and completely out of the blue.

I got super… I remember I got super stressed. I wasn’t visibly stressed but inside I was going crazy. I was something… I was totally not expecting. I didn’t… it’s something I’m not used to handling completely out of my… not just comfort zone but zone of control. Something that I know how to deal with. This was first of all a large amount of funds that needed to be injected into this business. Also second, I didn’t like the… the timeline was very short. Timeline was short. Anyway, so we find a way, we figure it out. Everything’s great, start relaxing a little bit. But before I’m able to completely get over this stress end of August, my event manager comes back to me, “Kirill, another unexpected thing came up. We need another 30% of our budget.”

Again, time frame is like a week and what do we… how is this happening? And again sorted out, start relaxing. This is like… can’t make this stuff up, not like a… it’s like a TV show, start relaxing and then literally a week later, I mean, maybe a week and a half later. That was late August, this is early September. Event manager comes back, “Kirill, again, unexpected thing.” Things is to no fault of his own like we… It was third time running an event and especially first time in such a high end hotel. Completely we didn’t know that these things were possible. Anyway it comes back early September, we needed another 20% onto budget. Like bam again. At that point I felt… I really felt this that… the stress went so high that actually went full circle.

If you imagine a clock and how the arm of the clock goes around. Imagine that’s the stress levels will go up, up, up, up all the way around. Then they go past midnight… Past 12, the top part of the clock, the 12 [inaudible 00:33:48] clock. They go past and then you’re back, your full circle and that’s how I felt. I felt the stress went so high that it couldn’t just go higher anymore that I tipped back over to zero. It was such an interesting feeling. It’s like that scene in the Matrix in the third one when they’re flying up in this space in there, like a vehicle, whatever it’s called. Underground flying ship, underground flying spaceship. They’re flying it and then they get out into on the surface of the earth and these robots are chasing and then they fly up, up, up, up, up and they go above the closet and they see the sun.

That’s how it felt. All this stress was building up so much too much. Then I tipped over and it was just calm and beautiful. How to explain it is the problem was still there. In total the budget went over about a hundred percent. The problem was definitely still there but I looked around and even though I thought I was stressed or I felt this stress. The birds was still singing, the trees were still growing. The sun was still rising every morning. The air was fresh, everything… grass on the ground was green. Everything was nice. The world just was… just kept on going. Then I realized all these stresses, we make them up for ourselves. A lot of these things are superficial, like a bird flying in the sky doesn’t care about how crazy things are going in your business. It’s just flying in the sky.

It’s just enjoying the day. From then on I’ve noticed a massive change in myself. I feel that that experience, as painful as it was but also it was very healing and revelationary. Since then, I’ve… I’m so much calmer about a lot of things, I feel like that if I could survive that stress and not just like survive as in resolve the problem. Yes. That was good. We would resolve that. Everything worked. Event went great. Everybody was happy. Actually very, very good. [inaudible 00:35:58] very happy with the event. As you could tell from the guests that have been appearing on podcasts, every one of them enjoyed it a lot. But not just about resolving the problem. If I could survive that, if I’m still a human being, I still am able to think and breathe, then I’m… I should be happy and I can… any other thing, at least below that level of control that I’ve expanded or level of experience, anything below that in terms of stress, I’m definitely going to be able to handle.

The interesting part is that probably anything above that level of stress as well, I’ll be fine. Probably still be alive. Probably not going to kill me and everything. The birds are still going to be singing, the world’s still be beautiful. But at least anything below that level of stress, now I come across problems. I just… sometimes I just breathe in, breathe out, okay, everything’s great, let’s solve it. I know it’s a problem that needs to be solved but I don’t really let it stress me out as much or as much as it used to or sometimes at all. Some people come in one of the other business in SuperDataScience, which you’re probably well aware of.

Somebody will… like two days ago or yesterday or no. Yeah, I think it was on Friday somebody came to me and said, “Kirill, we have a huge problem. This is massive. Epic. We’re going to lose this partnership.” Then I breathe in, breathe out. Okay, this is how we solve it. Everything’s okay. I didn’t even get a tiny bit stressed about it. Full circle stress. I guess the recap here is stress is all… alot of the times, yes, indeed, there’s sometimes this… there’s really life and death threatening situations, critical things. I’m not saying that everything can just go posture. But if you’re a Tibetan monk or Shaolin monk, you probably wouldn’t get stressed by anything. But the reality is we… in our lives, we will get stressed by things and that’s normal.

But a lot of the other stresses, like little ones, unnecessary. Really I think we as humans make up a lot of these things for ourselves. If you feel stressed, just look outside, look at the birds flying around, the sun coming up every day. Even if there’s no sun, the clouds are beautiful as well. Seriously, I love looking at clouds. Look at the storm raging outside. Nature keeps going. A lot of the stress that we experience sometimes is unnecessary. Let’s try step away from it just by breathing and realizing we shouldn’t be wasting our time on that. Then it’ll be easier to solve the problems if you’re not feeling the heart pounding, the sweat, sweaty palms as you can’t concentrate, you want to be calm, calm and resolved. That was full circle stress. That was number three.

Number four, letting doors close. This year I had to say goodbye or we said goodbye to each other with my ex girlfriends. It was at the first… second quarter of this year. It was sad. It was hard but at the same time it didn’t feel right for both of us. I have a friend or I had a friend, actually I call a work colleague before who described one of his past relationships in a way that he was happy. He was almost happy. He would be fully happy if he squinted. If he squinted really hard, then you would see that he’s happy. But he would need to squint. He’d need to pretend a little bit in order for him to be happy. That’s as well I guess how I felt that everything was amazing except for… it was just almost perfect.

No perfect is the wrong word. But it was almost right but it wasn’t. Unfortunately we had to… or fortunately I think it’s for the best of us we had to say goodbye to each other and sometimes, I guess the takeaway is that some people are… maybe not the right fit for each other. Sometimes the timing is just not right for either one of the people or both. For example, you might simply not be ready for a relationship or emotionally prepared for one or in the right place in your life for one. Some relationships are simply learning relationships. They’re not meant to be forever. Some relationships are there for you to meet someone who’s going to teach you something about life, wisdom, emotions, feelings, inspire you to do great things, challenge you to face your fears, work on your weaknesses, embrace your strengths and things like that.

Understand yourself better. Some relationships are for learning. Not every relationship is one where, “This is forever.” Or it’d be great if it was like that. We parted, we go on great terms. We’re still in touch. Everything. Every single thing is fantastic. It was for the best of us. It was hard at the time but looking back, I guess, it was a good choice for both us to make. But what’s this part of the episode is about is that letting doors close is important because if you hold onto a door and keep it open all the time and what will happen is you won’t let other doors open. Letting doors close gives room or frees up room for other doors to open up. That is something that you cannot… you just got to trust in that. You just got to believe in that.

You can connect those dots. As Steve Jobs would say, “You can’t connect those dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking back.” If you hold onto this one door or the one relationship, you will never see what’s out there for you. Maybe there’s something else waiting, someone else waiting for you. That’s what happened to me, closing one door, letting one door close, opened up room for a new one. I was in Madrid, I was learning Spanish and I met a beautiful girl. Now we’re dating and I’m very, very excited about that. That’s all I’m going to say on this topic that if you are finding yourself in a difficult situation, like limbo is the worst thing. Either sorted out and give this a proper shot and what…

One of the recommendations out there is you’re not sure if you’re in the right relationship for you, give it 90 days. Sorry, 60 days. 60 days where you give it all you got. 100%, no more holding back. Just put everything you got into the relationship and really care about that person. Be there for them. Unreserved, unconditional love. A, you might not be able to do that then it’s probably not the right thing. B, if you are able to do that but they don’t reciprocate. They don’t step up in the first 10 days, keep doing it. 20 days, keep doing it. 50 days, keep doing it. 60 days and they’d still haven’t stepped up then it’s not the right thing. Give them a chance to see and to get used to you putting in 100% and then let go if they’re not willing to start because maybe they’re not ready. Maybe this is not the right thing for them.

At least then you’ll have…you won’t have that regret or always second guessing, “Was this the right decision to end that relationship?” At least then you’ll know that you gave it your best shot. But you got to be fair. You got to be honest. You can’t just be like, “I’m giving my best shot but they’re not playing along, so I’m not going to do… I’m not going to be as nice today.” Whatever. No. 100% in, No reservations, fully committed for 60 days, see what happens. Finally, maybe they will step up. Maybe once you open up and give them all the love, they will be like, “What am I doing with such a beautiful person? I just want to give back to them now too. I want to that.” Maybe things will work out.

I guess that’s that. But at the end of the day, one way or another, inner or out fill and hold to half open doors. If you do that, then very likely you’re missing out. This is not fear of missing out. This is you’re actually not in the place where you should be in. That’s my take on it. Again, of course this is your life. This is your relationships and psychology, emotions and you know yourself best. This is just my opinion. Number five, numero cinco: managing my energy as an introvert. I love this podcast. How after… what is it been 45 minutes, I relax into it. I feel so much more open now. Very interesting. Somebody… sometimes people say, “Why are you podcast so long? Why is it like an hour.” And lately they’ve been going over an hour. You’ll hear a few episodes in at the… in January that are like an hour 20 or something.

But the reason is because it’s fun. It’s really fun to talk to people after the first 30 minutes. First 30 minutes is great. Insightful. You get to know someone but that’s… a lot of the time it’s still superficial. To go deep, you got to relax, get comfortable with people. You’re always just like, here today is just me. It’s all up to me when I get comfortable. But with two people, two people got to get comfortable. Sometimes it might not happen at all. Might take like hours to get comfortable. If we can do it in 30 minutes in a podcast and then the second 30 minutes have a very deep and meaningful conversation, that’s awesome. If we can do it in 45 and then have 15 minutes of great conversation, that’s also great. That’s why I think podcasts needs to be at least an hour long. Anyway, back to managing my energy as introvert.

A quick recap, so we’re all on the same page. The way I look at introvert versus extrovert is not something that might be quite a common misconception where how good are you talking with people? Do you enjoy talking to people? No, not at all. I enjoy talking to people. I’m an introvert. It’s about where do you get your energy, do you recharge when you’re alone, you go for a walk by yourself or you sit in your room, do some work, read a book, whatever else. Is that how you recharge your energy? Then when you’re with other people you spend your energy, expend energy. Or is it the other way around? Do you recharge when you’re with other people, that you recharge by talking to others? I’m a good way to answer that question if you can’t answer it at the top of your head, although you probably already know.

Good question, a good way to check it is what would you rather? Would you rather sit at home and read books and for instance, do work or learn things, work out but all by yourself for seven days in a row, seven evenings in a row or would you rather go and meet people, go to different parties, go to clubs. Not necessary clubs, maybe bars, maybe just a friend’s places to play board games and so on but just… and be on people for seven days in a row though. For instance, for me, I love playing board games and I love hang out with interesting people and talking to them and learning and growing. But seven nights in a row that would be so draining, so exhausting. I wouldn’t be able to stand it. Whereas reading a book for seven days, I might get a bit bored and a bit lonely but I’ll be fine.

I’ll be full of energy and then on the 8th day I’ll be able to go and have a fantastic time with some friends in the social environment. That’s introvert vs. extrovert. Introverts tend to have a rich inner world and live in their fantasies or not just live in their fantasy but go… their inner world is… or I should say our inner world is a safe place where you can always retreat to and just recharge. Extroverts have a rich outer world and lots of friends, great acquaintances, they love… like many people love spending time too but they get energy out of spending time with people. How did I learn to manage my energy as introvert? I started reading this book called Quiet by Susan Cain. Actually, I started listening to the audiobook and I didn’t really like it. I didn’t like the way it was being read.

It sounded very pessimistic to me. Put like a gray feeling on top of introvert. Even though in the book itself they say the opposite, that introverts don’t have to be gray and they’re very colorful as well. But the way the book is being read is just not exciting. I stopped listening to that. I might read it one day but I need to get over that scarring first. But there are some very interesting parts in there like how we moved from a culture of a character and the late 20th century took culture of personality or even a cult of personality in the early 21st century. What role Dale Carnegie had to play in that, the growth of cities, business, the growth of big business and so on. Why and how all of that led to the culture of personality, which we live in now versus our culture of character, which was prevalent back in the day.

I recommend reading at least that part of the very first part of the book. Very interesting. I haven’t read the rest of it. But also apart from reading a book, I listened to this podcast called This Week In Startups, recommend to one of our my colleagues at SuperDataScience. [inaudible 00:50:24] twist, This Week In Startups, a great podcast for founders and entrepreneurs. What I noticed quite a lot of entrepreneurs and founders of businesses that were being interviewed on the podcast. It’s similar to this podcast but instead of data scientists interview founders. The founders of big businesses, medium businesses, startups, mostly media businesses and startups. What I found is a lot of the founders on this podcast, they were actually introverts and I was very interested. Many of them share their thoughts on what it’s like to be an introvert, especially running a business, founding a business.

Specifically one of them that I enjoyed a lot was the founder of HubSpot or one of the co founders of HubSpot, I think the CEO of HubSpot, I forgot his name. He’s an introvert and his co founder is even more of an introvert than him. He talked about managing his energy quite well. We’ll link to that. I’ll give the episode number to our team and we’ll link to that in the show notes if you’re interested in listening to that. But other than that, it’s a podcast called ‎This Week in Startups. If you just look for a HubSpot CEO, you’ll find… find him there. How do I manage my energy? Basically I tend… I aim to take off at least once a month, a whole 24 hours to be alone. If it doesn’t happen naturally. For instance, this month I’m a lot alone in Australia because I need to do a big project.

I’m working on recording a course that I choose to be alone. That’s… I don’t need to engage in the strategy. But if I am around people for a whole month, I at least once a month for 24 hours I go away and stay by myself somewhere and recharge. It might be hard to explain to people but that’s like the curse of being an introvert, explaining to extroverts that you need time alone. You got to surround yourself with people who understand or at least accept that about you. I tend to leave a party early if I’m feeling tired. I don’t feel pressure. I still… there is the pressure to spend time with others but I don’t succumb to it. When I want to spend time with others, I do. I’m selective with the time… of how I invest my time.

People sometimes will invite me… this past year in 2019 I think there was, I don’t know, it’s just one of those years, when all your friends are getting married. I was invited to five different weddings, four or five but I only went to one because at the end of the day, I just knew there’s… I was very selective. I’m like, “Okay, this is great. This is your day. I hope you have a fantastic day.” But me being there is like a nice to have for you. But for me it’s a whole investment of a day or even two days of my time and just energy into this and most of the people there, I don’t know and I don’t really… I’ve already socialized this week or I’m going to be at this other event before that so I’m not going to want to socialize much more.

Explaining it or not even explaining it. Just explaining it to yourself like, “Okay, this is what I want to do. This is what I don’t want to do.” I know if you’re an extrovert, if you’re an introvert and you’re listening to this, you might be going, yes, this is exactly how I would want to choose to spend my time as well. If you’re an extrovert, what you’re probably thinking this guy is crazy. He is so antisocial. That’s just a difference between introverts and extroverts. You can pretend to be social. You can pretend to like, “All right. I’m going to be like everyone that I… everyone is seeming to be around.” The other problems that you don’t really see a lot of introverts, they just stay indoors often. Not all the time but you don’t.

All these parties, all these things you see on TV and news and things like that or hear from your friends often, it’s like extroverts, partying and maybe introverts also choosing to be there or forcing themselves to be there. For me, sitting at home painting, reading a book or spending time one on one with somebody I care about and having a deep conversation, way more important than going to a party and going crazy. It’s just a difference and I guess it’s important to appreciate and accept these things about one another. Maybe you’re not an introvert but you have an introvert in your family. In the U.S. I think it’s about 30% are introverts but worldwide, it’s… recently I saw a statistic, I was actually 50% introverts. It’s crazy. So it’s 50-50. You might have someone in your family or someone you know or maybe a significant other is an introvert and maybe you’re not.

How do you accept that about them and respect that and help them get the time that they need? Because it’s very important. If I don’t get the time I need, I get cranky, I become resentful, I feel I can’t express how I feel and nobody… the people around me don’t understand. Therefore, I start not wanting to be around them. It’s terrible if you’re in a relationship with that person. If you’re in a relationship with a person who doesn’t understand you as an introvert and doesn’t give you your time, it’s a recipe for disaster because you’re going to force yourself to be extroverted and spend time with them and give them all the attention they need, whether it’s by SMS or whether it’s in person or on the phone and so on. But you are ultimately going to be very unhappy more and more and more. It’s not sustainable.

There has to be [inaudible 00:56:06] you’ve got to be… you’ve got to feel comfortable. If that’s the other person, your relationship, then ensure they you need to make sure they feel calm or just ask them to express their feelings. We’ll get to feelings in a second. That was our number five. Learning number six. Number six is no coaching. I was in this meetup in Bali. You might know from the podcast that I like to go to Bali occasionally. This year I went in total, I think I spent like five weeks in Bali. I think I went three times actually this year. But anyway, so I was in Bali and somehow I was going to this one gym called Nirvana Strength. Already recommended on the podcast. If you’re there, go say hi to Ian, the founder owner, one of the founders owners. It’s great.

It’s Olympic level, Olympic class gymnastic center in Bali in Changzhou. How crazy is that? Out of all place? I haven’t seen a gymnastic center that good. The last time I saw one like that it was like in Moscow years ago. I don’t think I’ve seen one like that. I’m sure they are. Some got in Australia, I just haven’t seen… come across one just on the street. This was just right there, huge center, amazing sauna, amazing cold pool. Anyway, I was there and then at the gymnastics when I was leaving, they’re like, “Hey, by the way, we have this thing every Monday in the evening, we have a men’s circle.” I’m like, “Oh, what is that?” They were like, “It’s where men can get together and talk about their feelings.” I’m like, “Wow, okay, that’s new. Let’s check it out.”

I go, rock up and it’s really a cool thing. It’s like 20 guys or so sitting there from all walks of life. Bali is a place where a lot of entrepreneurs, freelancers come to work. One of the episodes in the podcast we actually had on I think a data scientist or starting data scientists that I met in Bali randomly at a coworking and recorded a podcast together. As a data scientist, freelancer, you can [inaudible 00:58:13] just recently on the podcast we had a podcast about freelancing in data science. You could become a data science freelancer and go live in Bali. Anyway, all these guys from all walks of life, business owners, just travelers, freelancers, designers and I don’t know, surfers and so on. Rock up to this place like at six and lasted for good two maybe two and a half hours.

Basically you just sit… we all sit, it’s all confidential and you just express a problem in your life that you’re dealing with. That’s something that’s really affected you. Maybe personal, professional, emotional, whatever, physical, whatever problem. Something that’s a big challenge in your life. You say it. There’s only one rule and the rule is there is no coaching. I did not understand it at first but it is a genius idea. What you… basically, when somebody says something, you can do two things. You can either put your hand on your heart or on the table saying that… expressing you sympathize or empathize with them. You understand how they feel or you’ve been through something similar. Showing them that they’re not alone or after they’re finished talking, you can give advice but only based only if you’ve been through the same thing and basically not give advice or just what you can do is you can show like explain how you dealt with the same situation in your life.

That’s all. If you haven’t lived that, you cannot coach. You cannot say, “I think I would do this or you should do this.” Or even if you have lived that you can’t tell a person, “Well you should do this or you need to fix this part of you or this is how you can solve the problem.” No. You can only say, “I understand. This what you’re going through. I’ve had the same in my life. This is what I did.” It’s like share your story now. That’s all you can do. It was so crazy. The reason why it was so crazy, it was because… I was so tempted to tell people how to live their lives. Mostly in situations they were describing that I have not been through ever in my life.

I was just like, “That’s obvious. They should do this and this and this.” But then I had to stop myself because I realized, “Hey, there’s no coaching, then no coaching really, I can’t do that.” That made me realize reflecting on this, this was probably one of my biggest… one of my top experiences in 2019. When looking back on this, made me realize like, “Why is it so hard to do? Why was it so hard?” I went there twice or three times. I think twice I went to this thing. Unfortunately I found out a bit late so I only had two weeks left and so I went on both Mondays I was there. Then I was thinking, “Why was it so hard to do?” I think the answer is because as guys, as men we tend to always solve problems.

We look at everything in life as a problem. That’s a common… The thing that is said that’s men tend to… In male-female relationships, men tend to not give enough feelings, emotions to their partners. Maybe in male-male relationships as well. As men, if the other person needs feelings, needs just some taken care of or just… Like being asked how they feel and they just want to talk about their feelings. As men, we tend to not… we tend to ignore that or not understand that well enough and I appreciate that. Instead we’d go into solving the problem. Let’s solve the problem now how… somebody might come to you and say, “My gosh, my purse was stolen.” Then you like, you right away, you’re going to jump into, “All right, how can we find it? Let’s call the police. Let’s… what did they look like? Next time, here’s how you can prevent that. Put your purse on this side, when you’re walking down the road, make sure your handbag is away from the road or if you see, don’t walk down these streets.” And so on.

Whereas the other person might… if it’s your girlfriend coming to you, they might just want to ask you, “How do you feel, are you scared? Were you scared?” Give them a hug and things like that. As men, we tend to solve problems but when you have this no coaching rule that you cannot coach someone, you’re forced to back down and just open up and listen. It was a fantastic experience. Highly recommend trying that out with maybe your friends or not even… You only have to agree to it.

Just like when you listen to someone next time, try the no coaching thing. Catch yourself and think, “I heard on that podcast with that crazy data science guy that you don’t… I should try the no coaching thing.” Just give it a go and see how you… see how it works out. Instead of telling a person what to do or how to solve a problem, how to live their life, just empathize with how they feel. Try to feel it in you and promise yourself that then and there for the just set for the next… for that one conversation. The other you can even work if you say for the next five minutes because five minutes will pass and then you’ll start coaching. Just promise that for the whole that conversation, you won’t coach that person. Unless they ask you. Unless they ask you, “What do I do?”

Then yeah. But otherwise try the new coaching thing. You’ll feel a huge difference. Six minutes left. Last learning. Learning number seven, numero siete is feelings. I did the Myers-Briggs test a few weeks ago. We did… We all did it at SuperDataScience for our team. We had a team retreat in Cancun, Mexico. Retreat. Team conference. There’s a whole lot of work involved. Our podcast editors listening to this are probably laughing right now, right, Jaime, JP, Mario? Because they know how it went. There was quite a lot of work anyway. But it was fun as well. We all did the Myers-Briggs test in order to identify what personalities we have so we could better… especially in the leadership team, we could better understand how to work with our colleagues and teams. Where some of the conflicts are coming from. Highly recommended.

The best place to do it from my point of view is at the website called sixteenpersonalities.com. Very easy. It takes about 20 minutes to do the test, get the results, get a great description of your personality. I think it’s a fantastic addition to your life, especially if you take it seriously and actually read through it. You will understand quite a few new things about yourself. I did a test recently and I’ve always been an INTJ introvert, so the first letter is introvert or extrovert. I’m an introvert. Second letter is intuitive or sensing. We won’t go into the details now. I can maybe make a separate podcast about this. I’m at N, intuitive. Third letter is T or F thinking or feeling and fourth letter is J or P judging or perceiving. I’ve always been a INTJ. I’ve been working or I’ve always wanted… not always wanted, I’ve… deep down what I’ve always wanted to stay INTJ because it’s got a cool description.

But that’s the wrong reasons to… once I’ve understood consciously that I need to move away from the J or be closer to the P because judging on one hand is good to be organized. But it also, you judge things around you and people around you and you’re like, yeah, you can’t… it’s really hard to just relax and perceive things as they are, accept and appreciate them for the way they are. I always wanted to see how I would… at least see how it would be as a P, what life would be like as an INTP. That’s what I thought I was working on. But recently I did the test again and I turned out to be an… word for it, INFJ. My T, the thinking turned into an F a feeling and I was like so shocked at that.

I Still couldn’t believe it. I still actually think that it’s not 100%. It’s really hard to embrace change, isn’t it? I really think it’s not 100%, probably depends on how you feel at the time you’re taking the test and things like that. But it’s still an indication that I’m moving in that direction. Basically what that means is that I’m moving from fully enclosed in my brain and thinking all the time, thinking through strategies and how to solve problems to tarting to feel things. Looking back, interestingly enough, that’s exactly what I’d been working on for the past year. As you know, I love talking to psychologists. I find it very insightful and very helpful to continue my personal growth. I’ve been listening to podcasts about emotions. I’ve been working with psychologists on emotions, I’ve been asking a lot of stuff about these things.

Experimenting, doing practice exercise. We have a session with psychologist and then they say, “All right Kirill, this week you’ve got to practice empathy. Or this week or like in this week I’d like you to feel this…” This was a cool exercise. When you feel stressed or you feel angry or you feel sad, I want you to physically feel it in your body. Feel it. Where are you actually feeling? Is it in your stomach? Is it in your chest? Is it in your neck? Is it in your legs? Where is this feeling originating from? Actually like stopping, pausing and feeling it through. I can’t say I’m an expert at doing that but it was be… it was very helpful and very interesting. And so by working on these things, it turns out I turned into… not into but move towards an F. Here are a couple of things.

If you’re interested in doing something similar, if you’re… because as a data scientist, maybe you’re also stuck in your head a lot like I am. Then maybe some of these will be helpful. Observing where that feeling originates. Great. Useful exercise. In general, observing your feelings. You might feel angry instead of letting it take over, you feel angry. Try… ideally you want to let it go as fast as you can but if you can’t let it go, just observe consciously say to yourself,” I’m feeling angry right now.” Maybe write it down so you can look at it later. Keep a journal of how you feel. Telling others around me about my feelings. If I feel upset or grumpy because I didn’t get enough sleep, before I would just like, “Just pass through it, be strong.” And so on and like, “I’ll be fine. It’s a feeling what’s…”

But that’ll affect other people and then they would not understand and they would feel resentful towards me. Now if I’m feeling grumpy because I didn’t get enough sleep and I can’t do anything about it, I can’t let go of that. I just need to get that sleep but that is not going to happen for the next six hours. I tell others around me, I’m like, “Hey, I’m feeling grumpy. I didn’t get enough sleep. I’m sorry if I offend you. I’m going to try control myself but just you should know that I may be irritable right now. Whatever else.” People understand. We already talked about on the podcast about making it about me. Rather than saying… when talking to another person and so let’s say if they’re doing something that you don’t like or they’re behaving a certain way rather than saying, “You should change or you are doing this or I think you should stop doing that.” 

You should… what I do now is I talk about myself. I say, “This is affecting me in this way. This is how I feel. This is what I’m going through when we’re together or when we’re not together.” Whatever else. Make it about yourself rather than coaching or telling the other person how they should be. Express how you feel. That’ll help develop the feelings part of things. It will help you rather than logically explain how things are going on and how things originating from another person’s bad behavior or whatever else they’re doing. It’ll help you better appreciate how you… what you’re going through, what you’re feeling. This also goes the other way. If somebody… you cannot be… another good exercise is not being responsible for other people’s feelings.

If somebody is constantly blaming you for making them feel another way, like they say, “You made me feel like this or you make me feel like this.” No, you’re not. Everybody is responsible for their own feelings. If somebody is trying to make you responsible for their feelings, one exercise is not to fall into that trap. You could talk to them and you could say, “You are responsible for your own feelings by saying that someone else is responsible for your feelings, you’re giving away control.” Basically, you’re letting someone else control your life. That’s never going to be a good idea. Basically you want to not fall into the trap of being responsible for someone else’s feelings and that in turn will help you observe how others feel and observe how you feel as well about all these things.

We could probably talk more about that but we are out of time. That was feelings. Very important. I think in bottom line on feelings is that it’s very important. I think or I feel and that’s another thing, saying, I feel when it’s relevant rather than I think when you actually feel something don’t say, I think, say I feel. I’ve started doing it as well. Basically, I feel that working on feelings is important because you don’t want to be stuck in your head all the time. You want to follow your heart, you want to listen to your heart because that’s a whole new world. If we are mastering the world of data science and analytics thinking, then that’s great but also participate, I want to participate in the world of feelings. It’s such a beautiful world. Such a beautiful world.

On that note, thank you so much my friends for being here, for sitting through this long episode with my top seven learnings in 2019. It has been a fantastic year. I really appreciate everybody who listens to this podcast, whether you listen to one episode or to 300 episodes, it is great to be able to share amazing guests with you and also my thoughts and experiences. If you have any questions, any suggestions, anything at all, you can always send them to podcast@superdatascience.com or you can always give us feedback on the different platforms from SoundCloud to iTunes to wherever else. I always really appreciate it and once again, thank you so much for being here today. I look forward to seeing you back here next time. Have a great end of 2019. Until next time, happy analyzing.