Hey friend,

I recorded a monologue sitting by the Moreton Bay on the Coral Sea.

But I made so many mistakes!

I forgot the name of the bay I was sitting by. I was not sure of the name of the hottest startup in all of generative AI.

Plus I yell at the camera through part of the video, misuse the term "researcher" and the audio sucks.

And despite it all, after much deliberation, I still published it to my YouTube channel.

Why?

Do you know how it feels to start writing a blog post but never publish it?

To tweet but delete it 5 minutes later?

To start working on a GitHub repo but never share it "cause the code is not clean enough"?

These are all variations on the same theme.

Not accepting that you are human. That you are vulnerable and fallible.

By not telling the complete story of who you are you deeply hurt yourself.

Yes, deleting a tweet after publishing it is 100x better than not tweeting it in the first place.

But this behavior has its roots in a sense of shame. Along with elevated, unattainable expectations.

UNATTAINABLE to you where you are right now in your journey.

Listen, if I could record a better video right now, I would. If you could write a better blog post, you would.

But by not embracing who you are right now you limit your opportunities to learn and to grow.

Our mind evolved to protect us from harm. This is the main reason why we feel so uncomfortable in new situations.

But if we put ourselves in those uncomfortable spots and give our mind the chance to observe that actually, nothing bad happens to us, and we do this repeatedly...

This is how we learn.

You do not become better by sitting on the bench. You become better by playing the game.

Give yourself the chance. Go out onto the field and swing that bat even if it feels that you stand no chance.

For first 100 swings you do not. But on the 101 swing something magical is likely to happen.

My favorite things ❤️

📊 My first ever Kaggle competition - The Cdiscount’s Image Classification Challenge was the first ever Kaggle competition I seriously participated in. I didn't even manage to make a submission! I struggled so badly on things like moving data around, working with a dataset of over 100GB, using cloud compute, etc. All the things that are your bread and butter on a job but that courses don't teach you about. This competition finished on the 15th of December, 2017. Half a year later, on the 31st of May, 2018, I won a Kaggle competition setting of my ML career.

📺 YouTube video - The humble beginnings and the rise of Mr. Beast. From what I understand, it took him 7 years for a video of his to cross 1000 views. Shared with my by my colleague, Benedikt! (thanks a lot again! 🙂)

📺 YouTube video - MKBHD's 100th video. He made it for his 74 subscribers at that time. At the time of this writing, he has 16.6 million subscribers and is one of the most respected YouTubers in the world.