RadReads 143
The unbundling of the career, inversion, thinking like a data scientist
Good Morning, Squad 💚
It’s a beautiful weekend and the mix of this week’s stories is just delish. (Data science, reclaiming your attention, the future of the career, and investing processes.) Thank you to Matt 🙌, Jared 🙏 for supporting our community via Patreon. Donate as little as a Venti Pike per month by clicking below.
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Ruling out rather than ruling in
5 Minutes | reactionwheel
Is it dangerous to rely on your intuition in angel investing (or any decision)? Over time (especially if you’re going at it alone) it’s easy to “develop strongly held beliefs that happen to be completely wrong.” This article is a mix of Munger’s Inversion Model and Sam Hinkie’s Process: constraints can’t rule things in, but they can definitely rule them out.
Make haste slowly: Jocelyn K. Glei
Rad Awakenings | iTunes | Google Play | Stitcher
Jocelyn K. Glei lives at intersection of the creative process, self management, and the future of work. She’s a creative polymath who’s held editorial positions, written a book on escaping email hell, and just launched the podcast Hurry Slowly (iTunes). We chat tactically about how people with corporate 9-to-5'ers can “flex their creative muscles” and why inbox zero is so damaging. Theoretically, we debate the subjective nature of time, how productivity requires a deeper conversation on achievement, and how the best things in life are imperfect and thus cannot be optimized.
I wish I was the person my Pocket reading list says I am
8 mins | Quartz
Pocket (or Instapaper). They’re everybody’s favorite tool for intellectual hoarding. I’m super conflicted about my own list — it’s a seamless way to have everything I could possibly want to read at my fingertips, yet a reminder that the Internet is infinite. These apps thread the line between how we spend our time today in benefit of our future selves. And @corinnepurtill candidly wrestles with this tradeoff in how she approaches treating her Crohn’s disease.
How to spot a machine learning opportunity even if you aren’t a data scientist
9 Minutes | Harvard Business Review
Seeing an article that had Y= mX + B as an example brought me tremendous nostalgia. Having an intuition for how machine learning algorithms work, irrespective of your technical background (or lack thereof) is a critical business skill (see “The Unbundling of the Career” below). There’s a primer on supervised learning and classification algos, but what makes this article 💯 is the 2-step process to determine what tasks in your organization could be appropriate candidates for algos.
How do I get my daughter interested in computers?
12 mins | Elaine’s Idle Mind
There’s a huge movement to get young girls into STEM and coding in particular. (I’ve thought about this for my own girls.) Becoming a software engineer gives you the tools to build out ideas, except according to the author “most software engineers aren’t realizing their own ideas.” Her fix: Teach them about capitalism instead. (Note: I disagree with the first two arguments.)
Postscript: The Unbundling of the Career
Below the Fold
MONEY TALKS
📈 The miracle of compound interest can apply to your career (8 mins, Quartz) — Dan bootstrapped a company out of his dorm room and is all about the long game. Listen to Dan’s journey on Rad Awakenings.
🙌 Financial Freedom (6 mins, Better Humans) — Our relationship with money can represent: status, security, success, revenge, salvation, moral superiority or guilt.
🍺 How Other Half Became the Official Beer of Wall Street (6 mins, Punch) — Wait, wut? Dudes are hiring Task Rabbits to buy craft beer?
ICYMI
💼 RadJobs: This 🚆 isn’t slowing down! We posted a Principal VC role at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, plus a mysterious junior VC opportunity in NYC. Looking to have your dream job delivered directly to your 📥? Sign up here.
🎙 Venetia Pristavec (RAD Awakenings Podcast) — Airbnb’s 7th employee on anger, health, and burlesque shows.
LAST WEEK’S MOST READ
📖 The Blockchain Man (14 mins, ribbon farm) — A rewrite on the classic management book, The Organization Man.
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