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- #014 | A Scientific Approach to Self-Awareness
#014 | A Scientific Approach to Self-Awareness
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!
Hey friends,
Having trouble knowing what you want to do in life?
Today, I would like to share a personal story of how I realised I didn’t want a career in the financial industry and how I discovered that my biggest joy in life is to build things that improve something. I will reveal what that something is at the end of this newsletter 😁
Back in 2015, I was lost…
…I was working in the financial industry and I hated what I was doing…
I spent the last three years preparing myself for a career in the financial industry that I now realised I didn’t want to be a part of…
I was lost. Here’s what I did next…
I reflected on my experience so far and asked myself: What were the few proudest and most joyful moments?
Fortunately (or unfortunately), there was only one proudest moment throughout my 2 years of work experience in finance — I built a process using Excel and VBA that allows me to semi-automate a monthly task, cutting the task time from 1.5 hours to 15 minutes!
Through this reflection, my hypothesis (direction) was that my biggest joy comes from building things that improve something.
But I didn’t know what I want to build or what I want to improve on at the time…
One thing I knew for sure was that, for me to build things, I need to acquire a different set of skills. My Economics degree isn’t going to cut it. Excel and VBA aren’t design to build things. I need to expand to other areas such as computer science.
Long story short, that led me to self-teach myself and explore programming and computer science (execution) and build different things (execution). I LOVE what I was learning (navigation) and the things that I was building and so I went on to pursue a Masters degree in Computer Science and now a PhD in Applied AI Research. I have worked as a Data Scientist for three years, specialising in Natural Language Processing. Throughout the years, I strategically learn skills that allows me to build things.
But the question remains: What do I want to build? To answer this, I need to know What I want to improve on? This led me to ask myself: What’s my biggest joy in life?
My BIGGEST joy in life is personal growth. I love learning and improving myself every single day. But I realised that personal growth is hard. There are lots of frictions; people are having a hard time consuming massive amount of information (information overload), staying consistent with their actions (habits formation), and most importantly, figuring out what they want to do in life (vision).
That was the moment I realised that what I would LOVE to improve on is people’s personal development journey. I want to build something that ENCOURAGE and ENABLE people to take smarter actions towards achieving their goals. That has led me to build Zeroton.
I am building Zeroton to improve people’s personal development journey, enabling people to take smarter actions towards achieving their goals.
A Scientific Approach to Self-Awareness
In research, the general macro process is as follows:
Form a Hypothesis (Direction)
Run Experiments and track Results (Execution)
Evaluate, adjust and repeat (Navigation)
You can use the same scientific approach to gain self-awareness and slowly figuring out what you want to do in life. Start by estimating (forming hypotheses - direction) what you might enjoy doing. Then go do it (execution) and see if you actually like it. Based on your experience, adjust accordingly (navigation), either spend more time to get more data or pivot to something else. Repeat the process until you eventually figure out what you want to do in life.
This week I finished reading:
Mastery (5th Apr - 10th Apr 2021)
Total: 29 / 26 books | 3 / 26 level 4 notes | 2 / 12 actions
❓Question of the Week
What was your proudest and most joyful moment? Are you actively chasing more of that? If not, why not? What’s stopping you?
In your 20s, experience and experiment with as many different things as you can. Find your optimal match quality; the thing that feels like play to you but look like work to others (quoting Naval Ravikant). Don’t settle because of security and certainty!
Share your thoughts by replying to this email. I would love to hear from you! 👻 👻 👻
🐦 Tweet of the Week
Reading more books isn't the goal. Books are a means to an end.
The end is to become a wiser person, to spark imagination, to satisfy your curiosity, to get a deeper understanding of a topic, to get inside someone else's head.
Not everything is a race or competition
— Wes Kao 🏛 (@wes_kao)
1:54 PM • Apr 10, 2021
💡 Quote of the Week
The process of building a habit can be divided into four simple steps: cue, craving, response, and reward — Atomic Habits
🔥 Recommendation(s) of the Week
We are 11 days into April 2021. This month, Zeroton’s monthly habits challenge is to READ CONSISTENTLY. We want people to build the habits of reading and here’s how our group is doing so far:
Zeroton’s mission is to encourage and enable people to take more actions. As a group, we have read a total of 4260 MINUTES!! Our target is to hit 10000 reading minutes by end of the month!
If you are interested in joining this challenge with us (it’s never too late), please join Zeroton’s Slack Channel here.
🔦 AI Research - Knowledge Graph vs Property Graph
Here’s some of my rough notes on knowledge graph vs property graph:
Terminology Difference —> Labels
In RDF graphs, labels are standard predicate defined in the RDFS namespace. It represents the value of a display name for any resource
To represent type of nodes in RDF, this would be another node in the graph
In Property graphs, labels is used to identify the TYPE of a node or edges
To capture display name of a node, it's store in property "name"
SHACL is the language for creating ontologies (aka rules and constraints for RDF graphs). 1.3.2 - Ontologies in Neo4j is what you used to turn RDF graphs into knowledge graphs
Terminology Difference —> Properties
In RDF graphs, edges are properties and objects (nodes) that a property points to is called a property value
Property can either be attributes or relationships
Edges are typically re-used, meaning the same type of edges will have the same identity whenever it's used
To attach information on an edge between two specific nodes, RDF uses a special way to create new nodes
Allows edges to be added to other edges and you can also add more information to any properties
In Property graphs, properties can only have literal values, which are treated differently from nodes in graph
Properties here have attributes
Edges tend to have different identities despite being the same type
Edges uniquely identify the (source, edge, target)
If you want to add edges to edges, you need to create intermediate nodes
To add more information to a property is to change the structure of the graph to turn a property into an edge and a value into a node
🎥 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! 🎮