How to expand your mind (using Python) ?

Yesterday was Yom Kippour. On that day, I have a little tradition: to read a book for more than an hour and a half (vs thirty to forty five minutes on a regular day). Why would you care? First of all, because I should matter to you! But mainly because I got to finish the book Range by David Epstein.

To a hammer, everything is a nail

I strongly encourage you to read it. If you are too lazy, here’s a very quick summary (if you are even lazier, here’s a quick segment about it on Youtube):

• in most situations (wicked environments), you are better off having had many diverse experiences vs a few very similar ones (breadth vs depth, generalization vs specialization);
• you should try many things to learn about your interests and abilities before committing to a focused practice;
• your (atypical) background is not a liability, don’t feel like you are behind.

A quick history of me

That book was really inspiring. I suspect David to have written it just for me. During my entire professional life, I got denied opportunities because I was “atypical”. To be honest, I am not that special. I can’t even imagine how other minorities can manage all those hurdles. That’s another discussion.

I went through business school (I entered through the back door), got a Master in Corporate Finance and started as a Financial Analyst in Merger and Acquisition. I racked up almost 24 months of internships before I got my first real job in the industry. I was lucky to have real responsibilities during my internships, but the economic situation is not the same.

After a while I switched to financial markets (Equity Research — on a fixed term contract because nobody wanted to hire someone with no market experience). Then I moved to the United States to become Financial Manager of a small company.

Thank you, Internet

I’ve always been deeply attracted to innovation (electronics and gadgets), but as a recipient, not a creator. I thought it was like magic. So I tried a lot of new things. Among them, MOOC’s.

Here I was, accessing courses from top Universities that would have never accepted me as a student. For free. I even took classes for which I was denied access to in business school (for not having the right background).

The more classes I took, the more curious I got, the more I realized I could do things. This is when I taught myself how to code and became a tech millionaire (more on that story here — though be aware of the twist: I am a millionaire… in Venezuelan Bolivar).

Fact is, I’m gold baby!

I’ve always felt inferior/behind because I bounced around. I started a couple ventures in college (both failed), I did corporate finance, financial markets, then corporate finance again (but in a total different way). I wrote, read, took classes about many different topics. But I’ve never really specialized. I haven’t spent the last 10 years on a single topic. I didn’t start to code until I was… a certain age. I don’t have “credibility”.

Except that research is telling a whole different story!

Expand your mind

So to help people be a little like me (and make the world so much better), I decided (after a copious break a fast) to develop an app that would recommend one (or several) article a day about one (or several) completely random subject. Reaching/reading outside one’s comfort zone is primordial. I should try comedy.

Automation is not all bad

The idea is clearly not extraordinary. But to form a habit, you have to make it (the behavior) insanely easy. What is easier than having all the preprocessing work done for you? It’s like a prime rib on a silver platter (or prime Beyond Meat for the vegetarians).

Automating a search is trivial. But to inventory a (super) wide list of different subjects is not. Once again, we can thank the internet and Wikipedia. I scrapped the website to get a list of 700+ different subjects, ranging from “philosophy by period’, “aerobics”, “classes of computers”, “money” to “gnosticism” (what the hell is that — well, you will know if you use the app!) and “cultural anthropology”. More than 2 years of daily reading.

You can access the code here. By the way, please let me know if you have any feedback on it!! If you are interested in receiving the email daily, please let me know so I can (try to) do that.

If you are really curious

I just moved to Brazil. I have a lot of time on my hands so I will try to build more things. If you are a developer, please take some time to reach out with some feedback! I am also looking for some help/collaboration on more heavy projects. So let’s build and read things!!!