Recently someone on LI recommend that I bring more JOY to the world instead of merely complain about it (I wasn’t complaining but apparently she thought I were!). I’m not an entertainer, nor a psychology expert, but perhaps you don’t need to be in these lines of work in order to bring joy to the people you interact with. I thought about it and decided that perhaps data science could be a source of joy to other people. However, for this to happen, it needs first and foremost to be joyful to you. Deriving joy from a challenging and oftentimes frustrating procedure such as a data science project is not easy. In fact, many people can’t stand that largest part of the work such a project entails. However, with the right mindset, even the more tedious aspects of the work can be enjoyable (i.e. be conducive to joy). So, what is this mindset that turns boredom to beauty and drudgery to delight? Although there is no magic formula for making things more enjoyable in data science, if you have the attitude of the data science amateur when you approach a problem, your chances of enjoying it are better. This doesn’t mean being sloppy and checking Stackoverflow or Quora every 5 minutes. The amateur’s attitude is, as the word amateur implies, an attitude based on love for what you are doing. The amateur doesn’t care if they get paid for their work. They may even never get paid, but they do it anyway because they find it fulfilling. It’s like a hobby for them. However, a data scientist still needs to be professional about her work. There are deadlines, meetings with stakeholders, and of course debugging scripts that throw errors at the worst possible time! Handling these matters takes professionalism, but it doesn’t need to be a mechanical and draining process. If you see part of your work as a data scientist (even the debugging stage) as a learning experience and have what is known in Zen as the beginner’s mind, you are bound to find everything a bit more enjoyable. It’s the joy that comes from detachment and lack of rigid expectations from your work, something that every professional knows. Remembering all this, especially on a Monday morning, is not as straight-forward as it may seem when you think of it. However, being joyful is a matter of perspective and at the end of the day a matter of habit. Aristotle famously said that “virtue is a matter of habit” and some could argue that joy is a kind of virtue. Maybe not something you would put on your resume or talk about in an interview, but definitely something worth keeping in mind in those long mornings when you may be tempted to question your career choices. After all, if you could be joyful about data science as a field once, you can be joyful about data science work too. And if you still feel that you need some help to get your enthusiasm flowing, invigorating a joyful mindset, you can always read my book Data Science – Mindset, Methodologies, and Misconceptions. :-)
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Zacharias Voulgaris, PhDPassionate data scientist with a foxy approach to technology, particularly related to A.I. Archives
December 2022
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