A lady sat down next to me on the train this morning. She was already on the phone when she got on the train. I knew because she had a distinct voice that carried. She was ‘coaching’ someone, from what I could overhear one side of the conversation.
Two things stood out: In the course of her conversation, she advised her ‘mentee’ that someone had to just go out & talk to people, & just do some work. There was no question about why that was needed, just that something needed to be done.
The other was her story of a conversation she had with someone a few years ago, on dealing with stress. The person in question worked at a hospital, & would walk around the place, to get a perspective that whatever was causing them stress wasn’t causing people to die.
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I’ve been putting off doing an assignment on the Deep Learning course because I simply couldn’t get my head around what seemed a basic concept. The lack of motivation in the last couple of days was partly that too, perhaps?
Anyway, after dinner, & reading to the 6yo, I approached the problem using paper & pen. It took an hour or so to draw out the concept, & about 10 minutes to get through what seemed to be the hardest part of the assignment.
Which reminds me, I used the same technique at work today to design a report that I’d been putting off. Broadly, the #Tableau report needed to keep track of where each customer lay on a price curve, with the price table axis at irregular intervals. Writing out the steps in full make it amply clear where the problem was & how to solve it.