“Learning is not attained by chance. It must be sought for with ardor and attended with diligence.” – Abigail Adams
January is an important month for me. Both me and my beloved wife sit down and list down our top three professional and personal priorities for the year.
This is a 2-3 hour long ritual where we have to decide what matters the most for us in the long term and then work backwards from there to what is immediate and pertinent for the current year. Reflection of the past years and multiple past years performance is always a good input for us.
Once committed, we then religiously follow the goals and then try to measure our progress month on month. Over a period of time, this practice has shown us our development areas and has now stabilised as a process that gives us fair indication of our achievable goals in short, medium and long terms. Of course, this gives us scope to make some lofty goals also and stretch our limits.
One of the things thats been a permanent for us is to add new skills or to enhance our existing skill sets, every year. These skills could be something that help us in our professional life or something that we want to just learn for ourselves.
These have varied from learning to swim 5-6 years ago, learning to drive(for my wife), to Azure Certifications last year, wherein I achieved the Certified Azure Solutions Architect level.
The year 2021 started with a lot of promise for us as we looked forward to a better than 2020 year. However, our whole family was shipwrecked with Corona in mid April. The next 2-3 months went in recovery and then stabilisation. Obviously, our plans for the years had to be recalibrated to be more realistic given the loss of time we had faced already.
I decided to give up one of my personal goals of launching a website to discuss financial concepts and market AND launching a tech oriented website, as I realised that I just didn’t have the time to do justice to these this year. Instead, I decided to revise and further enhance my AI and ML concepts.
This is still work in progress.
However, in the beginning of August, one of my dear friends posted a link for 30 days of ML challenge launched by Kaggle.com. I initially thought of skipping it but then went ahead and signed up.
I am very happy that I stayed course for the whole of August and finally closed the competition submission as well in time for evaluation. Now, I don’t have a score card to brag about my ranking in the leaderboard. I am somewhere in the middle there.
However, what is important is that I learned a few more concepts in AI and ML. I did some coding after a long time. And most importantly, I finished something again. My reward is the email below.
The year is still in progress and I am hoping that I would meet my revised objectives of the year.
Keep learning and keep growing!
Grow Daily 