Welcome back to the SuperDataScience podcast everybody, super excited to have you back here on the show. And I’m very inspired. I’ll tell you right away, I’m very inspired to record this episode.
I wasn’t actually planning on recording a FiveMinuteFriday episode today, but something came up literally like five or six hours ago and I just wanted to share my experience of how this situation unraveled. So as you know, we’re planning our DataScienceGO event. This will be our fourth annual event in November. So November, 2020 in San Diego. We’d be doing it for 3 years, this is our fourth one. Very excited about it.
And if you’ve been to DataScienceGO or any other data science conference or any other conference for that matter, you can probably gauge what amount of effort and planning goes into these things. You have to line up the speakers, make sure the content is great, get the event space. Make sure the catering is there. Make sure that you’ve invited, like you’ve sent out marketing materials, you’ve invited sponsors, you’ve invited guests, you’ve invited celebrities, you’ve invited lots of people who are going to make this event great. You’ve planned out the activities. And one of the big ticket items on that list is getting the event space. And our team at DataScienceGO, we like to get that done very early so that we know, okay, we have this event space planned and you know, if anything does go wrong, we have extra time to get an event space plan.
And so we were scouting around, found a great event space, did about maybe a month of negotiations with them, came to a mutual agreement, just had some minor things to iron out, but we were excited. They were excited. Great place, great location, very inspiring. So this morning we had a meeting between the two parties and we went through all of the things, it was a quite a long meeting, like an hour over an hour. Agreed on some minor things that we still had to basically come to an agreement on, but there were not like deal-breakers. And so we’re about to sign the contract, we were planning to sign the contract this week within a couple of days maximum. And then an hour after that meeting they come back to us and they pull out of the deal. Absolutely out of the blue, unexpected after like a month of negotiations and discussions and everybody being so excited about it, they just pull out of the deal and that’s it.
And, just one email basically cancelling the whole amount of effort that we were going through. So massive blow, massive shock. And at this stage, the normal reaction that I would have had maybe a couple of years ago would have been to be, sad upset, angry, frustrated, disappointed, confused, scared, and all these other things, like not knowing what to do, just shocked and like thrown off my feet. But what I’ve been thinking about for the past couple of hours is that the only thing that I had when I read that in my head was like, wow, that’s a surprise. And the second thought was “Good”. Just that one word, simply “Good”. And I kept thinking, why? Why is this good? Why am I not angry or frustrated or disappointed? Why am I not feeling all those things?
And well, first of all is because we plan these, we do our event space planning well in advance. We have way over 10, well over 10 months until the event actually happens. So we have plenty of time to find a new location and make sure it’s going to be amazing. I know we will do that. We will get a great location, that’s going to cater to all the needs and make an amazing event as we usually do. But then at the same time, there’s still that issue that we put in, you know, like a whole month of effort into this space. And then plus we were looking for a space for another month before that. So all this effort that we’ve put in has just been like taken away, especially by somebody who was also excited about the event. So that it, and then someone should make me frustrated, upset or angry or you know, disappointed whatever else. But the thing is I realized why I was thinking “Good”. And that is because a couple of years ago I watched this motivational video with Jocko Willink.
If you don’t know Jocko, he’s got two great books. One is Extreme Ownership, which I haven’t read, but I have read the second book called the dichotomy of leadership. He’s been on the Tim Ferriss podcast, on the Joe Rogan show. He’s got a podcast of his own now. You can find this motivational video if you look for “Jocko motivation Good”. Really great guy, very inspiring to listen to. And in this video, he basically, it’s just like a two, less than two and a half minute video. He basically says that, you know, whenever somebody, and he used to be in the military, whenever somebody would come to him and like in, in really hot spots like in Iraq and things like that, when people would come to him and say like, we’ve got an issue, we’ve got a major problem, we’ve got, something’s bad’s happened.
He would always reply “Good!” Always the first reply would be “Good”. And here’s his take on it. This is a quote. “When things are going bad, there’s going to be some good, that’s going to come from it.” And so here’s a couple of examples. So you have a flat tire. Good! Why? Well you will, let’s see how you will handle that situation let’s see if you can replace a tire, and how you can manage your emotions in the process. Your manager didn’t like your presentation. Good! Well, what can you learn from that? How can you present better next time? You’ve been trying to solve a machine learning problem for days and you still can’t. Good! What other algorithms are out there that you haven’t tried that you maybe don’t know and it’s time to learn? Maybe it’s time to apply some deep learning, maybe some reinforcement learning to the problem.
You had a heated argument with your significant other. Good! How can you be a better boyfriend or girlfriend to them in the future? How can you give them more love in the future so you don’t have arguments? Your kids just won’t listen to you. Good! How can you be a better father or mother? How can you be a better parent? That bonus or promotion that you were hoping for didn’t come through. Good! What can you do better to get it next time? Or maybe if you’ve done everything you can, maybe it’s time to look for a new job. Your friend let you down. Good! How can you be a better friend so that you don’t let other people down? Or maybe it’s time to find new friend. You feel overwhelmed, you don’t have enough time. Good! How can you get better at time management? So as you can see in almost all situations, of course probably, you can’t say this about absolutely every situation in life. There are definitely situations which are just bad and that is that. You got to deal with them and you really can’t anything good about them.
But almost in all situations in life or in many, in a huge amount of situations where we stress out about things, we’re upset, we’re sad, frustrated, angry, disappointed, confused, and whatever else. Actually you just need to say “Good!” and a. Understand what you can learn from it, b. Take on the solution as a challenge. And in the process of solving that challenge, you will learn from that solution. And so I’ll leave you with this quote again from this same motivational video by Jocko. “If you can say the word “Good”, guess what? That means you’re still alive, you’re still breathing. And if you’re still breathing, well now you’ve got some fight left in you. So get up, dust off, reload, recalibrate, reengage, and go out on the attack.”
On that note, we’re going to wrap up this episode, and I wish you to say simply “Good!” next time a challenge comes your way. And I look forward to seeing you on the following episode. Until then, happy analyzing.
