SDS 262: You Cannot Make Progress Without a Routine

Welcome back to the SuperDataScience podcast, ladies and gentlemen, super excited that you’re tuning back into the show for more insights, more ideas and more discussions. And today I’ve got an interesting concept for you. You’ve probably heard the title is quite controversial, you cannot make progress without a routine, right? Why controversial? Well, because it’s like we all don’t really like routine. I want to get away from routines and in fact in previous episodes, at some points we’ve talked about like that routines, on one hand can be good. On the other hand, your life can fly by you, without you noticing it and things like that. So routine has kind of a negative connotation to it and putting it into one sentence with the word progress, which we all strive for, whether in our personal or professional lives, may sound a bit controversial. But let me start this off with a story, a story about what’s happening in my life right now and how I came to deciding to make a podcast episode about this specific topic. 

So I’m in Bali right now in Canggu, one of my favorite places. I spent close a month here last year and I came back now. It’s truly magical can’t recommended more. I haven’t seen or read Eat, Pray, Love, but I think there’s a reason why Julia Roberts comes to Bali to find love. It’s, it’s just, just that’s how you feel here. And one of the things that I’ve been doing recently is as soon as I arrived here, I was looking for a calisthenics gym because I wanted to work on my physique and body strength and spend some time taking care of my body. And I found this amazing gym, it’s called Nirvana Strength. Highly recommend checking it out if you’re ever here. And it’s not just a normal gym, it’s an Olympic gymnastics center. So they have things like rings, stall bars, Olympic weights.

And you know, lots of room to do handstands and pull ups and things like that. So in the end, the best part is like they actually teach you how to do these things properly. So before I thought I could do plenty of push ups in a row, 30, 40, 50, but when they showed me how to do proper push ups with the right technique, I could only do 6 and then I fell over. So that’s, that’s kind of what they teach you here. And I instantly fell in love with this type of approach that they have here. Plus they have a really cool sauna and a 6°C pool, which is about like I think 40°F or something like that, almost freezing temperature. And it’s really cool to spend some time there.

So I fell in love with this gym and I’ve been going there for the past two weeks every day except for Sunday. They don’t have classes on Sunday and I’ve been really seeing progress. I’ve been seeing progress in terms of my health, in terms of how I feel and in terms of my immune system as well. I can actually feel my immune system building up stronger. And even when I have not enough sleep or some other stressful event of certain type, I feel different too as opposed to how I was feeling before. So I’m actually seeing this progress.

And that made me think about something that one of my good friends said not so long ago. So a couple of weeks ago, or maybe around a month ago, I was in Melbourne spending some time with my family and friends. And one of them is David Tanaskovic, who you know, if you’ve been with the SuperDataScience podcast long enough, he was on the show in episode number 31, back in March, 2017.

And so David is a really cool friend. Somebody I look up to a lot because he is a person who seems to have 48 hours in a day. He gets so many things done. He’s a dad, a husband. He is a champion in lots of different of styles of ballroom dancing. He’s passionate about computer games. He watches, he loves watching TV shows and he’s always happy so he knows how to live life to the fullest. I look up to him for advice on that. And one of the things that he said when we were chatting about a month ago was about progress. And I think we were talking about his dancing and he said, or no, we were talking about Chinese. He’s learning Chinese, you know, like, hey, out of nowhere, he decided to learn Chinese and he said that he’s learning constantly.

He’s got a routine on how many times, several times a week he goes to talk to his Chinese class. And he talks to his instructors there and he’s always learning it in a routine, not sporadically, not when he feels like it, when he doesn’t feel like it, but it’s just become a routine, his constantly making progress. And so his quote was that ”you cannot make progress without a routine”. At the time, I thought it was, quite a bit maybe individual because people might see progress in their own ways and achieve it differently. But the more I’ve been thinking about it and the more I’ve had experiences like this one with the gymnastics center in Bali, I’m kind of coming to a conclusion that while it’s controversial, it’s still nevertheless universal. And I’ll give you a couple of examples.

So how many times have you had a situation where you’ve gone to an event, a conference or some kind of place where you learned something, you discovered something new for yourself, something revelational about maybe your diet or about some hobby that you would love to pursue or maybe some kind of professional development path that you want to undertake and you were very excited about it. And then you came home and a few days, weeks passed, maybe months and you didn’t actually do much, or maybe you did something in the first couple of days or a week or so, but then the excitement tapered off. And while the discovery is still there, while you still see value in that diet or that professional development or hobby or whatever else it is, because you weren’t, you didn’t put that into routine, it actually tapered off and you weren’t able to get the true benefit of it or add it to your life.

So I’ve had that plenty of times, I’d go to a conference and be very excited about changing something in my life, making some progress. But then that’s where it ended because I didn’t actually put a routine in place in order to get me there. And then on the flip side, you’ve probably had examples of the opposite as well, where you actually got into a routine. You set yourself a target for instance to gain muscle, lose weight. And you set yourself a routine of going to the gym every morning or every second morning or on certain days of the week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday or something like that. Or maybe you set yourself a target of learning a certain tool in data science like learning python. And you set yourself a routine of, okay, every day I’m going to spend one hour learning python or something like that.

And that routine helps you accomplish a progress. So I’m sure you can think back in your life or even just recent couple of months and think of examples of when you were not able to achieve a change or some progress that you wanted to have in your life and examples of where you were. And just think about in which cases was there a routine and there wasn’t. And I’m pretty sure that routine and progress will actually be correlated in those instances that you’ll be able to come up with. And the interesting thing is that it applies across all areas of life, whether it’s physical health, whether it’s dancing, computer games, learning a musical instrument, learning a language, learning things in data science, advancing your professional career. Or it can be even something as simple as making connections, networking, getting a promotion, getting a job.

It could happen magically, like by accident, but if you actually want to make that consistent and reliable progress forward, it needs to be a routine, you need to be going out there on LinkedIn or wherever else and posting things up or talking to people, connecting, networking, and eventually the progress will come. So that’s just something to think about.

And perhaps maybe right now there’s something in your life whether personal or professional where you want to make progress. We all, part of our needs in life is to learn and grow. And we, as Tony Robbins says, if you’re not growing, if you’re not learning, you’re dying. That applies to humans, businesses, ventures, pretty much anything. And therefore, what we all want in life is to learn and grow. And so maybe there’s something in your life where you want to make progress and for now you haven’t been able to.

Well, something to think about on this weekend is how can you put a routine around making progress in that direction? It doesn’t have to be something crazy. It doesn’t have to be two hours per day. It doesn’t have to be five hours per day of learning r programming or TensorFlow or how to progress your soft skills and talking to people and being on stage or making appearances and coming up to people and just talking and putting yourself out there, being vulnerable, whatever it is you want to make progress on. It doesn’t have to be two hours. I mean, it doesn’t even have to be an hour a day. It can be something as little as 15 minutes a day. To start off with, it can be 10 minutes a day, it can be 30 minutes every second day. But there has to be a routine that you will follow and that no matter, what you’re going to execute on. That way there is a, probably there’s a science behind this that you will actually, in a guaranteed fashion, eventually make progress.

So something to think about and hopefully that will give you some inspiration to make progress in the areas of life that matter to you. On that note, thanks so much for being here and I look forward seeing you back here next time. Until then, happy analyzing.