SDS 324: Proximity is Power #2

Kirill: Welcome back to the SuperDataScience podcast. We’ve got a very special episode on the FiveMinuteFriday today. Vitaly and I are here together in Australia. Welcome Vitaly. How are you going?

Vitaly: I’m good. Good to be back.

Kirill: After a long motorbike trip?

Vitaly: Yeah. My wife couldn’t believe I’m going back to see you. It’s almost like I’ve been missing you.

Kirill: It’s only been like five days. Four days. Yeah. Yeah, it’s crazy. How was the trip?

Vitaly: I loved it. A lot of the afterthought pondering that revealed a lot of good ideas and fun filling, so yeah. Happy.

Vitaly: Did you enjoy it?

Kirill: Yeah. Yeah. Same, very cool trip. Six days. And for me the craziest part was the varying… So those who don’t know, we were on a motorbike trip with Hadelin. The three of us, Hadelin, Vitaly and I. In New Zealand, South Island, we did six days. From Christchurch we did a loop back through Queenstown and back to Christchurch. And the varying weather, second day was freezing in the evening. Then third day was raining. The sixth day it was windy as heck. I remember Hadelin got shifted by a meter on the road. It was insane. Insane. What about you? What is your biggest memory?

Vitaly: Heaps, heaps. I think spending time with you, and speaking of proximity, it was good to rub a few, kind of bounce some of ideas and gain clarity I guess in my head on what I planned to do in the future. That was one of the greatest takeaways. Scenery was amazing. Watching you guys swim in the lake next to Mount Cook.

Kirill: Mount Cook.

Vitaly: On one day and yeah, as you said, trying to warm our hands of the motorbike engine on another day because it was bloody cold. Yeah, that was all these things I think. Yeah, paint a good picture.

Kirill: That was crazy. And yeah, today’s episode is proximity is power. Interesting thing. I actually recorded a FiveMinuteFriday episode called Proximity is Power in August. I had a look back at them just now. So this is going to be Proximity is Power #2. I guess it’s good to refresh things sometimes and also we actually lived this value just recently and I think it’s a good, it’s fresh in our minds. So what does proximity is power mean to you? This is a Tony Robbins quote, right?

Vitaly: I would actually start with physics. If you guys remember the physics from the school, I would say proximity is force. There is a gravity force that we all know about that is directly proportional to the mass of the bodies in contact and, is it the counter?

Kirill: Yeah, yeah. It’s what? G over R squared.

Vitaly: So yeah, proximity, like all the distance is the opposite proportional or do you call it?

Kirill: Inverse ending?

Vitaly: Yeah, inverse. We need to brush up all this terminology. To the square of the distance. So I think it starts with the molecules and with the bodies like on earth to exhibit this force or power. Which, kind of like the first thought that came to mind when you mentioned that topic.

Kirill: Yeah. Interesting. That’s a good point. Physical power. I think in magnetism they say, in gravity it’s proportionate to, inverse proportion to the squared distance. And in magnetism I think it’s inverse proportion to the six degree of the distance. So yeah. In any case when two objects are closer, the force is stronger.

Vitaly: Indeed. Same works I guess for people as well. You mentioned Tony Robbins recent event that we both attended.

Kirill: Date With Destiny 2018.

Vitaly: Is there any affiliation?

Kirill: No, no affiliation.

Vitaly: So many fans. Tony Robbins got so many fans actually.

Vitaly: You’re advertising are one of them. So yeah, Tony Robbins mentioned that for the relationship to actually to begin, for the deep meaningful relationship to begin, there were three elements that were necessary. One of them was proximity, two people need to be in some physical proximity of each other. Second was a match on values, if I remember correctly, and or beliefs. And the third one is chemistry. So that spark, that could be a random event, or a joke, or something that played well and that would lead to good relationships with other people. And same ingredients are needed to maintain those relationships.

Vitaly: So very topical conversation with my wife. I have to travel a lot for work, and not having physical proximity. I know slowly tries to chip in of our relationship so I have to mend them and rebuild them. Like every time I get back with more intensity and whatnot. So yeah, that’s how I think of it from my side. What about yourself? I know you travel a lot. How do you manage to get proximity to people you want to be around, your significant other, your family and friends?

Kirill: Good question. Yeah, so it’s pretty, it’s interesting, it’s a trade-off of travel that you, when you travel, you get to see places, experience cultures and just enjoy different things in life. But at the same time you miss out on being close to the people you love. So I got an example. For instance, now I’m back in Brisbane for about a month and a half, so all of December and half of January. And I could’ve gone and stayed on the Gold Coast. So there’s, I like the Gold Coast. There’s accommodation where I can stay there. But at the same, the beach is close, it’s nice and relaxed. The Gold Coast is, for those who don’t know, it’s a city like one hundred kilometers South of Brisbane but it’s on the beach so you can live the beach lifestyle and just be more relaxed and calm. But I chose to be in Brisbane because my brother is here, Ilya, and I want to help him out. He’s starting like he’s recording a course right now, wants to master the topic of robotic process automation and help other people learn it as well.

Kirill: And he’s going through a transition in his life, a very exciting transition and I want to be there for him, and instead of being in Gold Coast and just coming back to Brisbane, what I’d normally do, like once a week we’d catch up. Like this, I’m here, I’m renting an apartment here for a month and a half just to be next to him. That’s the only main reason and we catch up for lunch every day. I go and help him clean out all my trash from his apartment, which is not meant to be there. Like today, we went to the swimming pool, we have lunch almost every day. Sometimes we could shop for dinner as well. So I really enjoy that part and I guess you have to go do that extra efforts to, to really create the environment and opportunities. And I see the difference. I really see the difference. 

Vitaly: Kirill, you mentioned one of the solution is a trade off, but I also noticed that with your significant other, with your girlfriend, you are thinking of another solution, which doesn’t have to involve trade-off, it’s traveling together and you’re working towards it. Could you elaborate on that a little bit more?

Kirill: Oh yeah. So that’s a really cool one. So with my girlfriend, I’m very excited to be with her. You know, like I’ve been in relationships where traveling was the getaway, like runaway from the other person and just get a break as an introvert. But with this girl, I’m really excited to be with her and I’m like, “Oh, I can’t wait to be with you”. So the solution here is… And same time I want to travel, I want to have both. And so the solution is, I spoke to her and I said, “Come on, like let’s try get you an online job. Let’s see how it is like it’s so popular now to be a freelancer and you’re very skilled. You love writing you love science”. So we’re working together an online job, and we’re going to start traveling in January. We’re going to Japan, then I’ll bring her to Australia, then we’re going to go to other places in the world, going to live in South America for a little bit and so on. But like, so the trade-off there is still have the proximity. So kind of, it’s a loophole, have the proximity, but at the same time have the travel together. I think, I’ve never done that before, but we’ll see how it works. I only done it with Hadelin. And, it worked just fine.

Vitaly: Sounds good. Interesting that your thoughts led me to a very common rule that not a lot of people actually deliberately act upon. Which is you are the average of five people you spend most time with and your thinking about traveling with your girlfriend is a deliberate choice of selecting that one person to be out of that five. You don’t want to run away from her. You want to be with her because you want to be together and get influenced as well by her presence. I think that’s in the same way you’re spending time with your brother, with Ilya to again rub off each other, kind of like bounce ideas off each other, to I guess share and learn from each other.

Kirill: Yeah.

Vitaly: I think that’s probably the ultimate decision or action that I would take away. And again, I reassess my immediate close circle of people I spend time with. So in my immediate proximity, to see how much time I spend with whom, and if that happened deliberately or some of the people moved into my life and took space by themselves without my deliberate choice. Because I think that’s a good powerful decision.

Kirill: I think, the thing that comes hand in hand, right? Like proximity, you pick your significant other, there are inevitably going to be one of the five people you spend most time with. But over to you. Who are the five people you spend most time with these days?

Vitaly: It’s a good question. I was actually thinking about that on the way to your place to record this podcast. And before I answer that question, the reason I actually thought about that question was; why our trip on the motorbikes had such a significant impact on me. I like what the hell? Like why that one week of New Zealand was amazing and I almost was scared to mention it to my wife, Amy about it because she would be jealous or she would scold me for a minute, for me taking that amazing trip. Like I’m not inviting her along.

Kirill: She’s invited, next time we should go with girlfriends.

Vitaly: Correct. I know, I know. And she was invited but she had work to do, so. I’m clean on that one.

Kirill: So you were wondering, why was it so amazing?

Vitaly: Yeah, and the reason I thought was the people I spent a lot of time this year were mainly, apart from my lovely wife, who are mainly people from work, from the same industry, that I’ve been for for the last like 10, 12 years.

Kirill: Yeah.

Vitaly: They are amazing bunch of people. But I think that was almost like a bubble.

Kirill: Yeah.

Vitaly: And I haven’t thought that much beyond that bubble that much. And by being exposed to yourself and Hadelin, on the trip, I left for a second, that bubble, go like “aha”. Whoa. The world is much bigger than that. 

Kirill: Yeah.

Vitaly: And that was that aha moment. And I realized, Hmm, if I ever planned to leave the bubble of my management consulting world, not to be always in that area of expertise for the whole entire life, I should have started talking to and spending more time with people in other jobs, in the other line of work.

Kirill: Yeah.

Vitaly: So yeah, that was a bit of a tangential answer to your question. Most of my time in the last year was spent with colleagues from the industry.

Kirill: Yeah.

Vitaly: I worked quite hard a lot of days and a lot of them were spent outside of my home city and outside of home without seeing much of my wife.

Kirill: Yeah.

Vitaly: And most of people that surrounded me were clients and colleagues.

Kirill: Interesting.

Vitaly: What about yourself?

Kirill: That’s a good question. I always wonder that because you know, in the way we choose to lead our lives where it’s, you’re flying around to all these top mining companies in the world and doing crazy projects all around the planet. Hadelin and I, I travel, Hadelin travels, so we don’t have this routine where we go to the office and we see the same people. We’ll have beers with the same people. There’s nothing wrong with that. But in that life, when I used to live that live back in Deloitte, there was my manager and somebody like a colleague at work. Then maybe my girlfriend and, I don’t know, my roommate, those are the four or five people that I would be spending, you seeing on a daily basis in our lives there’s nothing such, so recurring. Maybe for a few months it’s something recurring.

Kirill: Then it changes, and it changes again, and so it’s really hard to pinpoint. I was thinking about that as well. I really don’t have a consistent group of people that I see all the time. For like three or four months it might be these people, I might spend two months traveling with Hadelin and I’ll be like the closest person with me then. Then I’ll spend a week with the team or something else. But on average I would say my brother Ilya, my mom because she comes over to Australia for about two or three months per year. Then my girlfriend now. Probably, I would even say we’ve been spending quite a bit of time this year, maybe like we met up four or five times this year. So in terms of impact, that’s been one of the top five for me.

Vitaly: Okay, so measuring in terms of impact. Oh, interesting. I’m actually going to take an action and look into the calendar and maybe it’s also a recommendation for your listeners?

Kirill: Yeah.

Vitaly: To go back in whatever the media you use to track your time. I use calendar and just probably try to quantify a number of days or hours spent with different groups of people.

Kirill: Yeah.

Vitaly: So I know that my clients from specific industries or maybe specific clients will be one group. My wife, my friends, yourself included will be in another, parents and I think I will be surprised that it will be heavily weighted on the clients and my teammates to help those clients.

Kirill: Yeah.

Vitaly: Now I’m thinking something that I would probably make a resolution for the next year to change and track closely.

Kirill: It’s an interesting thought. Do we track it based on time or do you track it on impact?

Vitaly: That’s a good one. I see time as a commodity.

Kirill: Yeah.

Vitaly: As same as a resource, as money, as effort tries and the impact as the output of that. So if I have a lot of output from spending time with you, 

Kirill: Yeah.

Vitaly: I would like to maximize my time to gain even more impact. So I would probably track time commitment as an input into the system in order to expect even greater outcomes.

Kirill: Yeah. And I guess time is easier to track the impact, easier to quantify. On the other hand, you don’t want to overdo time, like Hadelin and I for instance, consciously we could just live in one country and all the time the whole year spent together because we enjoy each other’s company, we come up with great ideas and so on. But we consciously decided that all right, like we’re going to live in different countries and then, but we’ll meet up like three, four, five times a year for trips and at least a week long each time, maybe up to a month long. And in that way, this kind of seeing each other, not seeing each other gives us an opportunity to go and hang out with other people, learn from them, and then come back and share into our experience together.

Vitaly: I really liked the word deliberate decision from what you said, and that intention and decision about what is the most effective and enjoyable amount of time to spend with a person.

Kirill: Yeah.

Vitaly: And lock it in. Don’t let it not happen within your calendar, but also not to overdo it.

Kirill: Yeah.

Vitaly: So there are diminishing returns from time spent. I think that consciousness around making the decision, I think it’s quite important because that’s the only resource that we really own is time.

Kirill: Yeah.

Vitaly: And being deliberate about how we spend it. I think I can see on the upsides from that.

Kirill: Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Okay. Well that’s good. Well, back to the main topic. Proximity.

Vitaly: Hmm (affirmative).

Kirill: Proximity, power. For instance, that was the purpose. One of the reasons to go to New Zealand for us was not just like, okay, let’s go explore the Island. That was cool. That was definitely cool. Like we didn’t even plan those conversations. Right? But the being together, those conversations just came up. We went and picked up food and on the way back we’re talking about something, or on the sixth day we were riding the motorbikes and we remember we had the intercoms connected to each other, and so we were just chatting and then you came out. You had this idea of, you had this idea on day five or four you shared some idea about a new business opportunity and then on day six on the motorbikes in the crazy wind we were talking about how to refine that idea and how to make it a viable product that will bring value to people, that wasn’t part of the plan.

Kirill: That just happened on its own. And so I’m really glad we did that. I really think we should continue doing that and just putting ourselves into cool environments where we could experience and learn. And if conversations happen they will, they will happen.

Vitaly: Yeah. It’s almost like creating an idea lab, by putting people together in some sort of medium.

Kirill: Yeah.

Vitaly: Yeah. Interesting.

Kirill: All right.

Vitaly: Also, we had some bumps during the trip. Right? In differences in view how to address things.

Kirill: Yeah.

Vitaly: And they were also unplanned and once we see that you, or I, or Hadelin would deal with the problem differently. We will not shy away, we’ll discuss pros and cons. It’s strong ideas loosely held but will then try to defend our ideas and then learn something. Each one of us will have takeaways and walk away with a different perspective on things whether we will choose or not to use it is a different question, but I think that could only have happened with the proximity, because it’s really hard to plan for them as a phone conversation or something like that.

Kirill: Yeah. I agree and it’s really nice to have that proximity ongoing for not just one day or one catch up, one catch up is still good, but if you have two, three, four days, you ease into the relationship, you open up more and that’s when the magic happens, I believe. That’s really cool. All right, so what can our users, listeners, audience do in this coming weekend or maybe even in 2020 what can they do to increase, leverage this principle of proximity is power?

Vitaly: Well, if we were to deconstruct it and summarizing what we discussed, I’ll take a stab of it, but please jump in. I think first I would suggest to focus on what or who you want to be close to. So pick your target and that the five people you spend –

Kirill: Right away, how, how? How do you pick out of your group of people that you know, how do you pick the person, or people, or group, or community you want to be close to?

Vitaly: I will start with the historical analysis first. Who do I spend time with? And rank perceptually people in terms of impact on my life, positive impact on my life, whether I enjoy being around them whether I learn from them, whether together we’re providing larger contribution to this world and straight away I have a prioritized list. If anything I could pick up the top of that list and deliberately make a decision to make them a target audience or target people to be close with in the coming period of time.

Kirill: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Vitaly: But also I would probably think of unexplored opportunities. And so firstly, you need to free up space, I guess, free up your time. And second fill it up with something, either with the same group of people but just in different proportion or explore this world and try to reach out for new contacts. Whether it’s random, whether it’s more deliberate by visiting certain workshops, like DataScienceGO conference to me is an example of a randomizer function when you, especially for the first time was when you go in and see a lot of people, like-minded people striving towards the same goal and you bond with some of them.

Kirill: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Vitaly: Not with everyone because there are so many different people, but with some of them. That’s an opportunity to increase your network and pick those people who you can learn from and you can I guess, learn from each other and grow together. So first step I would suggest it’s to what or who? Like what do you want to spend around or who wants to.

Kirill: What did you want to achieve? Right?

Vitaly: Correct.

Kirill: Like I example I had, I recorded two podcasts I think, was it this morning or yesterday morning? Where in both cases this way, I thought of this topic that in one case the data science and they’re going to come out probably after this episode, but nevertheless a few weeks after. But one of the data scientists, he is a freelancer on Upwork and he works with data science as freelancer. And so he consciously moved from the middle of the US to the Silicon Valley in order to be closer to the opportunities, to be closer to clients. And things happen from that. Like, listeners will hear from the podcast that he was featured on Upwork, he met some clients, he gets to work at some organizations and another one is the other data scientist was a data scientist in Australia, in Sydney and then he consciously moved to the Philippines where his family is originally from, but he lived for 20 or plus years in Australia.

Kirill: He moved back to Manila, Philippines and opened a company, there a data science consulting firm, or data science training firm because he saw that there’s a big opportunity in Southeast Asia for data science coaching and he wanted that proximity to the clients, to the opportunity and now his company’s thriving, instead of doing the same thing but out of Sydney. So in both cases people physically relocated, not because they wanted to be near people, but because they want to be near opportunities. So it doesn’t have to be a physical location permanently, but like you say, going to a conference, that could be the proximity to a community. I don’t know. What other types of proximities can there be? Proximity, I don’t know, let’s say if you want to…

Vitaly: Let me help you out.

Vitaly: If you want to learn surfing, you might as well be living on the coast.

Kirill: Yeah, exactly.

Vitaly: You are going to have to make the travel every time. That hundred K that you mentioned from Brisbane to Gold Coast. At some point there’ll be a bad weather or you haven’t slept enough and you’ll skip it.

Kirill: Yeah.

Vitaly: Just being there, living there will expose you to those opportunities.

Kirill: Yeah.

Vitaly: Show up is one of the first rules to upturn opportunity, just show up.

Kirill: That’s right.

Kirill: Or if you for instance, you love talking to artistic people, you find very enjoyable conversations and versus a data scientist. You’re working in an office, well it’s very unlikely you’re going to meet somebody artistic or very few artistic people would be around you. Why don’t you go and sign up for a painting class or a dancing class or something else and be in the proximity of those people there.

Kirill: And then the chances of you meeting the person that you will enjoy having conversations with are maximized or much higher.

Vitaly: And another example jumps to mind is your retreat on Bali that you do for fasting purposes.

Kirill: Yeah.

Vitaly: You want to be with people who do the same thing to reinforce your habits.

Kirill: Yeah.

Vitaly: It’s not probably the proximity to people you are after, it’s after that the common goal that you individually…

Kirill: I could fast in Australia, in Brisbane, but it would be much harder because I’m not in that environment I wanted, I want to have that proximity. So I would go to Bali.

Vitaly: So step number one, pick your target. What would be step number two?

Kirill: Identify the location physically. These Parrots are going crazy. Identify the physical location where you need to be for that to happen.

Vitaly: Okay. And once you identify that, what is the next step?

Kirill: And once you identify the physical location, the next step would be just go and do it.

Vitaly: Yeah. I think it’s the deliberately taking space in your life, whether it’s in a calendar, resources committed in terms of financial resources, traveling somewhere, tickets, make a commitment. Otherwise it’s the big rocks principle.

Kirill: Yeah.

Vitaly: Otherwise your important big rocks will be displaced by smaller sand that something else will take that proximity and fill that space next to you.

Kirill: Yeah. Exactly. So yeah, be deliberate about it. Whether it’s hard to act on it really fast, but think about, I guess thinking about it, is a good first starting point and then we’ve got 2020 the year is just about to start. So planning it into the year would be a very, very good resolution. Maybe the earlier the better I would say.

Vitaly: And one of questions that I was wondering about how people can get proximity with you? So many you would be an inspirational figure and the key person in the data science world, how can they learn from you more?

Kirill: Thanks. Thanks. That’s really cool. Well, proximity. I guess if we take into account proximity of, I don’t know, can you count a book? A podcast as proximity? We’ve been talking about physical proximity but probably let’s keep talking about physical, physical proximity. Sometimes we do meetups when we travel, we have meetups in different cities.

Vitaly: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Kirill: But other than that I’m definitely always at DataScienceGO.

Vitaly: And you plan to have two events next year.

Kirill: Yeah. Not many people will hear this. But yes, we are planning, I mean not many people will hear it is because this is the very end of the podcast and it’s a long one so maybe some people have dropped off, but for those who are still here, yes, next year, this is a spoiler alert from Vitaly. We are going to have two DataScienceGO’s. One is going to be in Berlin it’s going to be very limited, only 200 seats available, so that will be announced probably sometime in January or February. So keep it between us. Oh we are going to do a big episode, right?

Vitaly: Of course.

Kirill: Yeah. We’re going to do a big episode sometime in January. We’ll come up with a list of topics, send each other questions and then record a stellar episode with no parrots. Damn parrots. All right. Thanks so much and see you in January.

Vitaly: Thanks guys.