#005 | Just do it vs Overthinking

Hey friends,

As a systematic thinker, my worst nightmare is finding out that the process I have been religiously following is “wrong” and that I have been walking down the wrong path! This usually causes me to over analyse things. On the flip side, I can’t just dive straight into doing things because how do I know if it’s relevant for what I want to achieve in the long run? After all, we all have limited amount of time and should find ways to optimise our use of time! And so this constant battle between just do it vs overthinking begins…

Although I still have this constant battle in my mind till this days, I found one principle that has helped me fight it; the analysis paralysis problem. That principle is the principle of optionality. The one thing we know for sure about the future is that it’s going to be highly unpredictable and so at any given present time, the best decisions are ones that doesn’t rely on certain outcomes happening in the future.

The principle of optionality basically states that at any given present time, we should make decisions that maximise our ability to adapt to the randomness of the future. In other words, we should be working on things at present time that increases our ability to grab different options in the future!

An example would be my NLP365 blog website, where I blog about NLP every single day in 2020. The decision to document my journey using NLP365 has allowed me to grab many opportunities in 2020 that I did not anticipate. In other words, NLP365 has increased my ability to grab future opportunities! Check out my video here where I cover this in more detail as I reflect through the whole project.

So next time you are struggling with deciding what to do, think about the principle of optionality and choose the one that brings you success in the future without requiring you to predict the future! 🎮

This week I finished reading:

1. The Making of a Manager (29th Jan - 1st Feb 2021)

2. The Mom Test (2nd Feb - 3rd Feb 2021)

3. Traction (4th Feb - 7th Feb 2021)

❓Question of the Week

Share your thoughts by replying to this email 👻 👻 👻

🐦 Tweet of the Week

💡 Quote of the Week

🔥 Recommendation(s) of the Week

Video Speed Controller — One of the best chrome extensions you can download! It allows you to speed watch any videos on most platforms! If you are looking to increase your listening speed, you should use this chrome extensions. It allows you to increase the play speed by 0.1 and so you can slowly increase your listening speed while maintaining high comprehension!

🔦 AI Research Paper(s) Spotlight of the Week

Two papers decided to pretrain BERT on financial datasets in 2020. Both uses different datasets and pre-training objectives.

FinBERT: A Pre-trained Financial Language Representation Model for Financial Text Mining

This paper pretrained BERT using six tasks and simultaneously training on both general and financial domain datasets. The six tasks are:

1. Span Replace Prediction

2. Capitalization Prediction

3. Token-Passage Prediction

4. Sentence Deshuffling

5. Sentence Distance

6. Dialogue Relation

The general domain datasets are English Wikipedia and BooksCorpus whereas the financial domain datasets are FinancialWeb, YahooFinance, and RedditFinanceQA.

FinBERT: A Pretrained Language Model for Financial Communications

This paper uses a different set of financial datasets to pretrain BERT:

1. Corporate Reports 10-K & 10-Q

2. Earnings Call Transcripts

3. Analyst Reports

🎥 This Week on YouTube

That’s it for this week! I hope you find something useful from this newsletter. More to come next Sunday! Have a good week ahead! 🎮

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