SDS 366: Define Your Own Success

Welcome back to the SuperDataScience Podcast everybody. Super excited to have you back here on the show. I’ve got a very cool story to share with you today. So today we had our monthly team meeting. As you may know, our team is completely distributed across the world global. We’re in, I think, 10 different countries, spanning eight different time zones, and we have 15 or more, now it’s becoming more people working online remotely. By the way, if you’re interested in checking out our careers, you can check them out at www.superdatascience.com/careers. 

And today we had our monthly team meeting, and this one was quite special because we invited four of you, four students, four of our customers, clients, students, conference attendees, podcasts listeners, course takers, four aspiring data scientists or advanced data scientists to join us for this conversation and give us some comments, give us some stories. And specifically I’d like to say a huge thank you to Jennifer, Ayo, Edis and Francesco for coming to the team meeting and sharing with our team. And by the way, if you haven’t met Ayo or Edis, you can check out their podcast episodes 301 and 317. They’ve been on the podcast before as well. 

So Jennifer, Ayo, Edis and Francesco called in from all different countries, Canada, US and I think Francesco, was in Poland at the time of this conversation. And gave us some stories, gave us their stories of how they’ve gone into data science, what data science means for them, what touch points they’ve had with our products with SuperDataScience courses, with our DataScienceGO event, conference, with the videos that we create with the podcast, of this podcast and all these other things that we’re involved in. Just to give a perspective to our team on what it’s like for our customers to go through these journeys. 

And the stories were very touching, were very heart-warming and very interesting. From how Jennifer started out into the world of data science, and now she’s actually influencing people on LinkedIn. And how Ayo changed his career radically from engineering into data science. How Edis at the age of 15 is pulling apart artificial intelligence algorithms and coding them from scratch. And how Francesco flies halfway through across the world to join us for the DataScienceGO and have a fantastic time. So those are very exciting and inspiring stories to us. 

And when we were discussing them afterwards, after the guests left, at the remaining of our team meeting, Mario, who is one of our media editors, he said a very beautiful thing that like, when we were saying, how did it feel? How did it feel to hear this, how your work has touched people’s lives? Mario said a very beautiful thing. And he said that this is a success. And that really resonated with me because hearing these stories for Mario, for all of us in that room, for our team, for me, they indeed show or feel like success. 

And that made me wonder afterwards, what is success? How do you define success for yourself? And a lot of the time, I think people get caught up in defining successes through the amount of money that you have in the bank accounts or through how much you’re making, what salary you making at your job, or how many cars you have, or how big your houses and how prestigious your lifestyle is. And all of those things at the end of the day, it’s all subjective, it’s all subjective. And most of the time, those things don’t even matter. How much money you have, how much money you make, you be making all the money in the world but feel, like how you feel is matters. You might feel unsuccessful. You might feel like a failure or you might feel successful, you never know. 

And that’s the title of this episode. So I dug into this a bit further and, how do you define your own success? And I think that’s the key here, defining your own success, what it is for you. And here’s a couple of examples that I dug up on Lifehacker. Just a few examples of how success could be defined. Success is overcoming fear. Success is learning something new each day. Success is loving unconditionally. Success is knowing your life is filled with abundance. Success is having a place to call home. 

And here are some other quotes from famous people throughout history. For example, Mark Twain said, “Success is a journey, not a destination. It requires constant effort, vigilance and reevaluation.” Bo Bennett said, “Success is not in what you have, but who you are.” Winston Churchill said, “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” And Denzel Washington said, “For me, success is inner peace. That’s a good day for me.” 

So as you can see, all these definitions are different from random ones that you can find on Lifehacker, random ones people around you might say. Random ones famous people have said. And success is different for everybody. So the question is, what is success to you? What makes you feel successful? Is it helping somebody? Is it learning something new? Is it inner peace? Is it overcoming a challenge? Is it failing many times and having the courage to get up and go again? I think that’s a very interesting question. Something definitely worth pondering on. 

I know that I’m going to be thinking about this for the next couple of days, and I encourage you to have a think about that, because once you define what success is for you, you will make it easier. Hopefully you will define it in a way that will make you easier for you to feel successful, not just once a month, or once a quarter, once a year, but every day. It’s a beautiful thing to feel successful every single day and for that to inspire you to keep going forward and to making this world better or whatever success means to you. 

And on that note, we’ll wrap up today’s episode. Thank you so much for being part of the SuperDataScience podcast. Your stories mean everything to us, your success stories are our success stories at SuperDataScience. I look forward to seeing you back here next time. Until then, happy analyzing.