Growth Strategic Plan

I wanna think about what my personal growth goal is for the time being. Ultimately, this comes down to thinking about what kind of person I want to become. One important aspect of this is that I want to see reality clearly and accept it as it is. This doesn’t mean that I’m satisfied with what it’s like, but that I genuinely accept it and can be at ease with it at some level. This is what I’m struggling with. Right now, I’m fucking frustrated with reality as I see it. I’ve been working my ass off for more than 15 years now, and it’s got me nowhere! I’ve been working out hard, and have been eating healthy for more than 20 years, and I look like a started training seriously a couple years ago. It’s fucking frustrating! It’s so fucking frustrating! I try not to depair, to see it as it is, understand what happened, and think about how I can best move forward and – most of all – to see all the many things that are good in my life, of which there are many. This works to some extent, but falling so miserably short in these two domains that are so important to me and that I have worked so hard for gnaws on me. I’ve lost that spark enthusiasm for life and that self-confidente that I used to have. The sense that if I set my mind to it I could achieve anything. Instead, I’m constantly somewhat subdued and often restore to gallows humour. At times I worry that the frustration turns into desperation, and that it starts to eat me up from the inside. I’m trying to be strong, to hold it back, to work with it, use it as fuel to move forward, and keep looking at my wife and my daughter to remind myself that they deserve the best and that I want to give them the best I have, not the worst. But it’s hard sometimes, and it feels that like waves hitting a shore, the frustration keeps coming back.

Sometimes I oscillate between usually short burts of enthusiasm where I think that all will be will and the more frequent moments of anxiety. When enthusiastic, I that I’m ideally positioned, and that all I need is a little more patience – after all, I just started out in industry some 10 months ago. Thus far, I really haven’t given anyone a chance to promote me to much or pay me a whole lot. But most of the time I’m just frustrated that, right now, I’m where I am, and I’m not so sure that things will be much different very soon. This is even more true now that it seems the field is experiencing a transformation. This might be temporary, but we’ve gone from a world where there were plenty of very well paid data science jobs to one where there are very few, and where just about all top tech companies have stopped hiring. In addition, the emergence of LLMs will eventually fundamentally change the day-to-day work of data scientists, and I don’t know whether I want to do the new type of work.

I keep thinking that the way forward is to move towards a role in mangement, which I’d almost surely enjoy, too, and in which I think I could be good at because I could draw on many skills I have and things I enjoy thinking about. But I’m not sure how to get there, and I feel a little stuck. Also, I don’t quite know what kind of role that could be. The work of data science managers as I have experienced it in my current workplace seems dead boring. What I think I would find exciting is to build up a causal inference team from scratch somewhere. But even there I’m not sure whether that’s actually true. Come to think of it, would I really love doing this? I might. But I keep getting back and forth on whether I even wanna stay in causal inference. I think I should, because it’s the closest I get to something that I’ve pursued for a long time now and in which I’ve built some expertise in. But, right now, I’m frankly just a bit frustrated and am not even sure whether I’d find that all that exciting.

The one thing that excites me the most is building my own company. The problem is I have no idea in what. One piece of advise is to think about what I can’t stop think about and then think of problems in that space I could solve.

One think I can’t stop think about is training and health, and living a live that’s worth living in general. Even for myself, that’s something I find fascinating, and think about a lot. But it’s not clear to me how to build a business out of this. There are many aspects to this.

• We live in a world that is designed to make it extremely hard for us to do the things that we know are good for us – spending time with our partners, children, friends and family; eating moderate amounts of healthy foods; moving and exercising regularly; pursuing hobbies that make us genuinely happy by – for instance – building skills and challenging us.

• At least nine out of ten people in any gym I’ve ever been to have no idea what they are doing and are either wasting their time or hurting themselves. I used to be one of these people myself!

• Our mental and emotional makeup, and the world we live in, make it very hard to remember just how unbelievable precious it is that we’re here in the first place! All of us here are unbelievably lucky, and very few of use appreciate it until it is too late. I try to remind myself of it, and in some sense I am deeply aware of it. And yet, I’m frustrated because I don’t have a higher paying job and a more impressively looking body – that’s fucking insane!

• While there is an incredible amount of information on everything out there, most of it is total crap, so that finding high-quality information is actually difficult. Finding information about plantar fasciitis is an example, as is just about anything health or exercise related.

Also, what are things that I really love doing?

• I love building and organising stuff! Setting up a project nicely, or a piece of software (small ones, I’ve never build large ones).

• I also absolutely love healping people.

• There are other things I love, but I’m getting tired of this.