SDS 048: Push yourself

So this week we had a podcast with Hadelin de Ponteves on deep learning. And what I wanted to say today is that it’s very important to challenge yourself and push yourself in life sometimes. And in fact, the more often you do it, to of course an extent where you are still functioning as a normal person, you’re not having panic attacks about how far you’re pushing yourself out of your comfort zone, it is very important to push yourself, to challenge yourself, to do bigger things.

And for me, a recent example is that specific course, “Deep Learning A-Z”, which we released with Hadelin. It is a very complex topic and a lot of the things that are involved in deep learning I just didn’t know, I just hadn’t heard of before, simply because it’s such a broad field. And in that course we cover off 6 different parts of deep learning, 6 different models, 3 supervised and 3 unsupervised. And for me, I knew that it’s a very complex topic. And I knew that not only I have to understand all of the nuts and bolts, all of the details and do lots and lots of research, but I also knew that the most challenging part is going to be explaining such a complex topic in simple terms so that people can understand it, viewers of the course can understand it, without having to delve into mathematics, without having to have a huge experience of programming.

So as you can imagine, if you’ve tried venturing into the world of deep learning and watched at least one tutorial on the internet, you will find that they always, always, always go into mathematics. They always go — even if it might be called “Neural Networks Demystified” and then you start watching it, and then 5 minutes in, you just get bombarded with all this math, all of these gradients, all of these equations, and very quickly you lose interest.

So I knew that was going to be a challenge and I knew that I knew that I would still want to push myself to do it. I’ve done things like the machine learning course or other courses, I’ve done things that are quite complex, I’ve explained them, but I have never done something that big. But at the same time, what is the world like if you never push yourself? You will never go past the boundaries to where you’ve already been to. And therefore you’re always going to be limited by that one thing that you ever did that was very out of your comfort zone, or the furthest out of your comfort zone.

You might have done it because at that time you did push yourself, or you were put into circumstances where you had to do it. But you will never go beyond that. And you will never explore what lies further. And it doesn’t apply just to work. It doesn’t just apply to, for instance, creating courses in my case, explaining things. It also applies to pretty much anything you do. Like in sports, you need to push yourself. If you go to the gym, you need to push yourself. If you’re taking cooking classes, you need to push yourself and explore ingredients that you haven’t explored before. Or timed recipes. Or having never done desserts, do some desserts and see how you go there.

So it applies to everything in life. But of course it has to be in moderation. You can’t push yourself, if you go to the gym, you push yourself too much, you might break something. You might hurt yourself. It has to be reasonable. And probably a good rule, especially in extreme sports, a good rule is push yourself to the 80% mark of your ability. And normally in life, you probably operate at the 50% or 60% mark of your maximum potential. But when you push yourself, try to push yourself to about 80%. So that you are going out of your comfort zone, which is 50%-60%, but you’re still not reaching your maximum potential. Because while in sports, you might hurt yourself if you go to your 100%. Because you’ve never been there and everything is on the edge. That’s what Olympians do.

In work, you might make a lot of mistakes. If you take up some algorithm at work, you decide to apply an algorithm at work which you’ve never used before and you think you have just that enough knowledge to pull it through, you might. But you also might make a mistake and it might be a costly mistake. But if you push yourself to the 80% limit, and you do that consistently, that’s kind of the point that I wanted to get across. Don’t just push yourself once a year. For example, as I imagine, I’ve never prepared for the Olympic Games. Olympians probably they push themselves to 90% all the time for 4 years, and then once in 4 years, they push themselves to 100% or 110%.

So instead of doing that — that’s like the extreme case — instead of doing that, push yourself to 80%, but do that on a daily basis. Do that on a weekly basis. And then when you do need to progress, what you will see is that instead of just having this one burst of accomplishment at one point in time, you’re going to have consistent progress. And therefore in a few months’ time, your new 50% or 60%, your standard operating capacity, will equate to what was your 80% limit 4 months ago. And then further down, it will increase. And it will continuously increase like that. And so pushing yourself, challenging yourself, and getting yourself out of your comfort zone is very important and it should be done not just occasionally, it should be done regularly but in moderation.

So there we go, I hope you had a great week and have a fantastic weekend ahead and plan for yourself how you can push yourself out of your comfort zone during the weekend or maybe next week. And we’ll see you back here soon. Until next time, happy analyzing.