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This is Five-Minute Friday on Who Dares Wins.
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My all-time favorite quote — which I repeat to myself regularly and find inspiring as a life philosophy — is in Latin. It’s Qui audet adipiscitur. This is three words, which we can translate easily into English. So qui is who, audet is dares, and adipiscitur is wins. So all together: “Who dares wins”.
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That is, if you dare to attempt something, there will be a winning outcome — this is true even if superficially we fail to achieve what we originally set out to achieve with our daring. That’s what makes the life philosophy of this Qui audet adipiscitur quotation so powerful: Even if we don’t achieve what we originally set out to achieve, by having dared to achieve it, by having taken action in the direction of the achievement, we learn from the experience and we gain invaluable information about ourselves and about the world. Having dared, we find ourselves at a new, enriched vantage point that we otherwise would never have ventured to. From there, whether we achieved the original goal or not, we can iterate — and dare again — perhaps to achieve success now at the original objective or perhaps we identify some entirely new objective that would have otherwise been inconceivable without having dared.
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As a pertinent example from my own life, in early 2020, I launched a podcast jokingly called A4N: The Artificial Neural Network News Network. The concept was a show that reported on current news in machine learning and A.I., with a lighthearted, tongue-in-cheek feel something like a 1980s newsroom. Four of us sat around a table joking and laughing, with one of us reporting on how say, machine learning can tackle climate change, and for that segment I’d say “over to Vince with a weather report”, while another one of us would report on cheating in ML competitions, in Kaggle competitions, and so for that segment I’d say “over to Andrew on sports”. And I think the format worked really well and had great potential — I’ve provided a link to the first episode of A4N in the show notes for you to check it out yourself — but then a few weeks later, after we filmed that very first episode, the first wave of the Covid pandemic hit New York and we could no longer meet in-person to film.
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Having dared, but our original goal of having this news-format A.I. show scuppered by the pandemic, we iterated from our new vantage point and moved the A4N podcast to the more common virtually-filmed guest-centered format, similar to the Tuesday episodes of the SuperDataScience show. Our guest on Episode 3 of the A4N podcast was Kirill Eremenko, the founder of the SuperDataScience podcast and up until then its only host. It was on the back of Kirill’s experience as a guest on my podcast A4N that he later invited me to become host of this very SuperDataScience podcast, a professionally-produced show with orders of magnitude more listeners than my nascent program. It was a no-brainer to say “yes” and now thanks to the enthusiastic and dedicated listeners like you, we’ve grown this podcast you’re listening to into the most listened-to in the data science industry. So, to recap, having dared to start my own podcast from scratch, even though that show had to switch formats right away and didn’t end up making more than a handful of episodes, the act of daring led unexpectedly to a sequence of otherwise inconceivable podcast-related successes. Who dares wins.
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As a second, orthogonal example of “who dares wins”, in 2018, I entered an Olympic weightlifting competition despite having little weightlifting experience. I dared, but I certainly did not — at least on the surface — win. Far from it: in fact, I came dead last in my weight class. But, far from being a loss, the experience of community and support from other competitors before, during, and since the competition has galvanized me to be committed to the path of weightlifting. Thanks to the weightlifting discipline and commitment I have developed as a consequence of daring to enter that first competition, I today am the strongest and most mobile I’ve ever been. Who dares wins.
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This “who dares wins” concept applies to probably any imaginable area of pursuit. If you’ve got an idea for a data science startup, why not dare to pitch it to a potential angel investor? Even if they don’t like it, you’ll discover what parts of the pitch resonated well, you could get constructive feedback that enables you to iterate your company toward a more commercially-viable idea, or you could be introduced by the investor to a business partner that fills a critical experience gap in your executive team. Who dares wins.
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Even in your personal life, daring equates to winning regardless of the surface outcome. If, you, say, dared to be in love but it didn’t work out long-term, you nevertheless learn about what works for you and what doesn’t work for you in a romantic relationship so that you can love better and perhaps longer in a future partnership.
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Who dares wins. Qui audet adipiscitur.
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All right, that’s it for today’s episode. Keep on rockin’ it out there, folks, keep on daring out there, folks, and I’m looking forward to enjoying another round of the SuperDataScience podcast with you very soon.
