Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American philosopher and writer, and his essay on Self-Reliance talks about the necessity of individualism and avoidance of conformity. While the book seems to be writing for a predominantly male audience, I believe the book speaks to everyone who wants to become a formidable thinker and person.
“A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within... Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of geniu...
We crave solitude but love companionship. It is the cruel paradox of the human experience.
"It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness ...
"It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."
One of the most important career lessons I've learned is to pursue a career and not a job. At first glance, you might think, "What's the difference?" I also didn't get it for years. That's how I finally ended up in an IT job that I wasn't passionate about.
Most people never make a conscious decision about their careers and end up at a certain place, due to external factors and present opportunities. Their career path wasn't carved out or planned.
When you analyze yourself, instead of pondering over what you are not good at, find out your strengths and sharpen them, turning a good skill into excellence.
My friend is a product manager at a popular consumer tech company, and he was lamenting the rise of metrics-driven development. "If we send a single push notification, 7% of people open the app," he said. "But if we send two push notifications, five minutes apart, 12% of those people open the app."
When we observe App notifications, there is a correlation between the number of notifications sent by the App and the probability that the user opens it.
The Gradient Descent, which is a machine learning technique used in a neural network, provides us with this insight:
If we take absorb too much feedback for our actions towards our goal, we will move extremely slow and can fall back or settle for some mediocre solution.
If we ignore all feedback and just act, we may probably never reach our goal.
The way to overcome the problem of "Feedback Frequency" is to change your 'Step Size', which is inversely proportional to the feedback received. This is done by:
Slowly Decreasing Step Size: Take less feedback in the beginning but increasing it as you move closer towards your goal.
Cycling between small and big Step Size: Taking less and more feedback in intervals.
Increasing the momentum of Step Size: Taking more feedback in the beginning and as you learn, decrease the amount of feedback and move forward faster, using the momentum.
deepstash
helps you become inspired, wiser and productive, through bite-sized ideas from the best articles, books and videos out there.
Over 2M Installs
4.75 App Score
Deepstash is better on the app. Discover new ideas and get inspired daily.