Hey there,

Have been talking to a friend and one thing I realized is that acceptance of your circumstances is a super power.

We see people achieving amazing results. Andrej Karpathy joins OpenAI after a stint at Tesla. Tanishq Abraham will earn a PhD at 19 and is co-founding an AI company.

You might be tempted to compare yourself to them and feel like you are not doing enough.

But the secret is this -- you cannot copy somebody else's journey.

You are a sole protagonist of a single player game with unique strengths, weaknesses, wants and challenges.

No one is playing a game like you are so comparing yourself to others is absolutely pointless and simply cannot work.

Take me for example.

I started to code at 29, which was nearly 11 years ago.

In Poland, when I was growing up, we didn't have computer clubs. We used computers for games and to be honest we weren't very good at that either.

Now compare this to the experience of my 10 year old daughter who has STEM lessons at school that involve robots.

You have to accept your circumstances.

You have to accept the energy or time in the day you can give to studying among other obligations.

Yes, you can hack the system a little bit. That is what I write about

But it all has to start with an acceptance of who and where you are in life.

You are the hero of your own story. No one owns the narrative or the experiences but you.

And now we come to the even more important part.

You are the only person in the world who gets to set goals for yourself. It doesn't matter how large or small they may seem to the outer world. All that matters is that they make sense to you.

That they make sense in the context of your story.

For example, some people in ML chose to author a paper. But out of everything else I could be working on I consciously chose to send out these emails on my own time (I work on them over the weekend), every week, at a cost of $49 per month (ConvertKit is pricey).

I could have set out to earn another Kaggle competition gold medal, but instead I am working towards 2000 subscribers on YouTube.

I am completely open to constructive criticism and suggestions. I would be happy to hear what I could be doing better.

But at the end of the day, it is you and only you who gets to decide how you want to spend your time, what goals you will pursue.

This is the only way to maximize your potential, to stay motivated, and to lead an emotionally healthy life.

And at no point does comparing yourself to others fit into the equation.

My favorite things ❤️

🎯 How do you set goals for yourself? - In his legendary book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi shares several components necessary to achieve a state of flow. One of them is making sure that the task at hand is easy enough to be achievable while challenging enough to be interesting. This is the secret ingredient to staying motivated! In fact, the state of flow is pure magic. A great way to finding shortcuts to outstanding performance in your life. You could, for instance, take the conditions associated with the state of flow and apply them to Kaggling (or structuring the work on any other ML project). In fact, this perspective is so powerful enough, I might write about it at some point.

🤖 PKIM is dead, long live the new (old) king! - Personal knowledge management AKA glorified note taking has been a hot topic for a while now. I started with Notion and have meandered through Evernote, Google Keep, Obsidian, only to return to... Notion! But with a twist.

To be productive you have to keep things simple. And even if you have been using a tool for a while, you can still benefit from watching a more experienced power user. In that regard, the Notion Masterclass: Maximise Your Productivity & Organisation by Ali Abdaal has been absolutely legendary! If you are interested, you can sign up to Skillshare and take the class for free (it comes with a trial period of 30). I am super excited and can't wait to start putting my new understanding into practice!

Quote of the Week ✍️

​Gall's law. This is why you have to always start with a simple baseline when starting to work on a Machine Learning project. But that idea applies to so many other domains in life as well!