Ideas All Over!
How to filter what I need?
This blog is part of a personal story. It might seem very random writing, and if it seemed so, it probably is.
A year ago, I was not active on LinkedIn or Twitter. I did not have a GitHub account. I had not even heard about this site called Medium. I was an infrequent user of Facebook, mainly for news (I heard that LOL!). I used more of Whatsapp to keep in touch with friends.
How things change!
I was a VLSI engineer. I used to like my work. But I won’t claim I loved it. I knew I wanted more challenging stuff to keep me going, than designing logic circuits, even though design was for a tough domain-digital communications. When my ex-boss asked, “Why quit? what next?”, my answer was, “I will figure out”.
How many people have the luxury of quitting a full time job, relax for a while, and then slowly get onto learning machine learning?!! I am grateful that I have the luxury, while my spouse has been working hard 10+ hours a day in a full time job. It has been challenging with kids craving for attention. Still, I could spend good number of hours on intense learning of Data Science and Machine learning. For some time, I was just busy with my learning and personal life handling.
This domain does not allow you to be in your shell. I had to get out at some point, to create GitHub and Medium to contribute what I learnt, to be active on LinkedIn to grow connections.
I get daily digest from Medium, which I can not really digest the same day. The posts are filled with so much information, perspectives, growth lessons, not to mention the technical tutorials. LinkedIn posts by Data science community are witty and interesting. LinkedIn seems often like professional version of Facebook, with people voicing their opinions, but mostly positive part of Facebook. I am just getting to know twitter, and the brevity is its strength.
Writings from lots of sources often times seem confusing. How do I filter out these ideas fire-hose? How do I focus on what I need and want?
Meditation helps
Encourage everyone to try it, there is a caveat though, wrote a follow up post. It is not equivalent to closing eyes and controlling thoughts. In one word, it is just “being”. Being comfortable with what one is, for that short period of time, however short it could be. It automatically teaches one to prioritize and process these “Ideas” in a meaningful way. It has helped me to prioritize from a pool of available materials for learning Data Science/Machine Learning. Meditation at least makes me feel “I have” rather than “I want”.
These days, I get questions like how I learn or do what I do (or how did I develop my GitHub repository). I really don’t know what is the right answer to give. I find it scary to answer anything to people I don’t know, because I have been on the receiving advice side (I still am) too and it is hard to interpret deep topics or thoughts over the internet, especially in the form of messages. It is even more difficult if it is a one on one interaction, because then I am more accountable than writing a public post like this. I don’t think I am matured enough to advise. I just write my experiences, often for the pleasure of writing, and I am honest in doing so.
Well, the intention of this post was not adding one more confusing idea to “Ideas All Over”. I hope it has answered some questions about me. If there are any general questions of interest, please comment on this article. You can perhaps follow me on twitter to tap my brief thoughts once in a while.
Twitter handle: aparsha2303