#010 | The "I should..." problem

Hi, I’m Ryan! You are receiving this because you have signed up to my weekly newsletter for Natural Language Processing (#NLP365), Entrepreneurship, and Life Design content!

March 14, 2021

Hey friends,

One of the books I read this week is The Almanack of Naval Ravikant. It’s an amazing read and I highly recommend it to everyone! Amongst many things, one thing really stood out to me, which it’s as follows:

One of the things I’m trying to get rid of is the word “should.” Whenever the word “should” creeps up in your mind, it’s guilt or social programming.

Last week, a friend pointed out to me that I should try to avoid the word “should”. To be honest, I never really pay attention to the significant of the word “should”. In the context of my situation, it wasn’t that I was doing something that I don’t want to do. It was more of the internal battle of thinking that I SHOULD be at certain stage for project Z at a given moment of time.

Why do I think I SHOULD be at certain stage for project Z at a particular moment of time?

Well, my guess is that I look at other people around me that are working on project Z and subconsciously form a project benchmark… a social project benchmark as mentioned in Naval Ravikant’s quote above.

I am glad that this has been brought to my attention. I am sharing this this week to remind myself the significant of the word SHOULD.

My takeaway is that the more unpredictable the project is, the less you should think about where you SHOULD be. After all, time and effort does not always equal to progress in unpredictable projects.

This week I finished reading:

  1. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant (7th Mar - 9th Mar 2021)

  2. How to Win Friends and Influence People (10th Mar - 11th Mar 2021)

  3. Ultralearning (11th Mar - 14th Mar 2021)

Total: 21 / 26 books | 2 / 26 level 4 notes | 2 / 12 actions

❓Question of the Week

How often do you catch yourself in the “I should…” mindset?

Share your thoughts by replying to this email. I would love to hear from you! 👻 👻 👻

🐦 Tweet of the Week

💡 Quote of the Week

The number one thing clouding us from being able to see reality is we have preconceived notions of the way it should be — The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

🔥 Recommendation(s) of the Week

Join Zeroton’s ACTION-FOCUSED Slack Channel — We are in the process of looking for STRONG ACTION TAKERS, who wants to self-improve themselves through non-fiction books, to join our slack community. We want to connect and learn more about your personal development journey. We are aiming to keep this group small (20 - 25 people) to ensure that the quality of interaction is high.

Through the slack community, you will have access to the following:

  1. Early access to Zeroton’s 100+ Actions from 30 best-seller entrepreneurship and personal development books

  2. Weekly group zoom calls with myself and other like-minded people to discuss actionable insights from different non-fiction books. We will keep each other accountable and share personal experience in testing different actions! Essentially, we will grow, learn, and succeed together

  3. Early access to the Zeroton platform

To join our Slack community, click here.

🔦 AI Research Paper(s) Spotlight of the Week

NER Datasets + Tools

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is the task of identify span of words that are referring to an entity from unstructured data. It's an important step in many applications such as information extraction, question answering, machine translation, conversational models and others.

This week, I would like to share two tables on NER datasets and tools.

🎥 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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