🌋 Vacationing in Hawai'i

Last updated Jul 10, 2022 Edit Source

• Journal
• Travel

I’ve been staying in Maui this week and have decided to take a break from working and writing my daily logs. Next week I’ll be working remotely, so I’ll be more active in posting updates.

However, just because I’ve been on vacation doesn’t mean I haven’t been learning new things. In this post, I’ll share some things I’ve learned this week and wrap up with some updates about my trip.

I spent the flight to Hawai’i learning about relevant skills for this stage of my life. These are strategies for:

• Job searching
• Networking
• Decision making

In particular, now is the time to learn about job searching strategies and networking: before I need them. In business, people say: “Dig the well before you are thirsty.” I plan on turning my learnings about those two fields into daily practices and habits that will significantly improve my chances of success in my career.

Decision-making is an often-overlooked skill that is somewhat of a “meta-skill,” meaning that improving your decision-making will also enhance your abilities in other areas. It is also a vital skill for people in the data science profession. I repeatedly hear that the ability to be skeptical of data and use data to drive decisions are some of the most critical skill-sets for a data scientist.

Since I was taking it easy this week, I haven’t yet digested the information much, but I will share what I have learned in each of these three areas to share what practices I derive from them.

Most of what I learned about job search strategy this week comes from the Dream Job System Podcast. I would be remiss to leave out Patio11’s excellent post on career advice for programmers.

The core principle of both of these philosophies is to be able to articulate your value proposition to a prospective employer. Many engineers think their value proposition is that they hold a CS degree or can write clean code. However, businesses want to know how you will save or make them $$$.

The Dream Job System Podcast adds to this by urging you to narrow your focus to a couple of target companies. Once you have done that, you network with the decision-makers on the team and show how you could provide value to the company. This system seems like a much better use of time than trolling online job postings and allows you to focus on your value proposition, improving your chances of success wherever you take your expertise.

I have been considering how networking is such a crucial aspect of career development. Since I’m still at least half a year off from my next career move, now is the perfect time to start networking with old contacts and connections that may be of high value at my next opportunity.

This week I discovered Jordan Harbinger’s free 6-minute networking course, which will be a sound basis for my daily networking habits.

Networking is a massive topic with many different viewpoints, but I think he focused on the low-effort, high-value side of the scale for networking behaviors. The course focuses on reconnecting with people you already know rather than making new connections and connecting with typically busy people.

I learned about the course through the Personal Finance Podcast episode with Jordan Harbinger. He also recommends working extremely hard in your early twenties and thirties to set yourself up to join the 1% and to use your calendar as a trusted system for time blocking - something I learned from Cal Newport in his Time Block Planner book.

Ideas from the course include:

• Connect four: reaching out to four people every day with which you haven’t been in contact for a while with the simple premise: this is what I’m up to, and I’d love to hear how things are going for you. The jackpot is finding who you can help and then helping them or connecting them with the right person.
• Use a CRM for managing your contacts. This tip sounds helpful in maintaining relationships like calling your parents regularly.
• “Above the fold” networking: If you see something on social media that you can connect with someone over, send them a personal message instead of a comment because they are more likely to engage with it.

I don’t have an overall goal for what I want this to lead to, but I think the practices are valuable because you can help other people and make the world a little bit more connected.

I’ve learned about decision-making from the book Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke. As I mentioned before, this is a must-read for anybody going into the data science profession.

Here are some of my main takeaways:

• Try to hack your decision-making by rewarding yourself for trying to find the validity of a statement or idea rather than defending your ego.
• Create a group that makes “truth-seeking” its primary ethos. You can use the CUDOS system as the group’s guiding principle:
  • Communism: Share all data and relevant details, even if it could put you in a bad light.
  • Universalism: Separate the message from the messenger. Try not to find people you don’t like less credible, and vice-versa.
  • Disinterestedness: Avoid influence from outside sources, including cognitive biases.
  • Organized skepticism: Consider the counterfactual and be incredibly skeptical of information that confirms your beliefs.

I still have some of the book left, but this system will aid myself and the businesses I serve when making important decisions.

In taking time off, I was curious whether I would feel anxious about not working or, as Cal Newport puts it, start carving equations into palm trees. I found that I didn’t quite feel the urge to work, but things continued to pop up that piqued my interest, such as The Network State, a new book by Balaji Srinivasan and this paper on Pen and Paper Exercises for Machine Learning.

I was fortunate enough to stay at my partner’s parent’s house in Maui this week. We traveled to the big island for the weekend and rushed around to see the touristy sights. We’re spending another week in Maui and working remotely this week.

I feel very fortunate to be able to spend the past two weeks in such a beautiful place, all while being able to work and not break the bank. Hawai’i, and Maui in particular, has a lot of older residents and feels a bit like a retirement home meets the island of the lotus flower. I wouldn’t move here indefinitely unless I were obsessed with surfing, primarily because of the demographics and the three-hour difference from Pacific time.

The summers in this part of Maui are a bit hotter than I anticipated, and the food isn’t as good as some other places I’ve been for the price. However, Hawai’i overall has the highest standard of living of any island I’ve been to, and the natural beauty is stunning. I’m enjoying my time here but am also looking forward to returning to the mainland.

I'm a freelance software developer located in Denver, Colorado. If you're interested in working together or would just like to say hi you can reach me at me@ this domain.