Just do a damn Kaggle competition……..
This is what I have been telling myself to do for the past couple of years. but to no avail, I did not. I would spend the time doing half assing another online tutorial of the same material I have already learned. it was the resistance that was keeping me from actually doing something. I learned about the Resistance in Stephan Pressfeilds book “The War on Art”. In short, the resistance is what holds us back from starting a creative project and/or doing something new. Its always the starting part that is the hardest and where the resistance hits the hardest. Its always “I’ll check my phone again or email” etc.
With me, the Resistance has kept me from presueing a career in Data Science/Machine Learning. I got started in this journey a few years back while in graduate school, where I got a solid foundation in data analytics and machine learning algorithms. After I graduated I knew I wanted to shift my career into this field. However, that is where the resistance hit. Not having any work experience in this field, it was hard to get my foot in the door. The Recommendation was to “create projects” or do kaggle competitions. Everytime I started to do one of these, I quickly shifted and put this off.
Fast forward a couple years to now, I have made zero progress except completing a couple tutorials and throwing together a couple Tableau dashboards. But no longer will this be an issue. I am finally going to conquer the resistance and pursue the career that I want. Here is my detailed plan to achieve this:
- As the first line says, join a Kaggle competition. Don’t worry about how you place, just DO IT!!!!!!!
- Read all the text books I have on the subject concurrently to the above.
- List of books I have:
- Artificial Intelligence
- Machine Learning
- Introduction to Algorithms
- Deep Learning
- Applied Predictive Modeling
- An Introduction to Statistical Learning
- The Elements of Statistical learning
- Data Mining
- List of books I have:
- Bring this knowledge to my current job.
- Already working on a predictive algorithm to forecast interchange rates
- Finally, blog about the journey
- Spending money on wordpress will help conquer the resistance by having skin in the game
Please come along on this journey with me and I hope you enjoy the ride!
Grug's Data Journey 