Good morning friends, and welcome to 2024! 🎉
I hope everyone’s head doesn’t hurt too much this morning!
I want to start the year by reviewing 2023 and re-evaluating my approach for the year upon us. Hopefully it will give you some tips into your planning process for the year!
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I want to use this edition to review and reflect on 2023. If you are interested, I encourage you to do the same, and you can use the following framework:
Understand and take pride in your accomplishments
What areas are you doing well in
What immediate actionable strategies can you do to improve those areas in which you are not doing as well in
Action them! (Through habit building, blocking calendars, etc.)
If you are struggling with areas, below is a list of some of the key ones that I use:
Physical Health 🏋️♂️
Mental Health 🧠
Money 💰
Career 💼
Relationships ❤️
Family 👨👩👧👦
Side-Projects & Hobbies ⚽️
You can score against these areas to help frame your focus in 2024.
I am focusing on side projects and hobbies with the aim that they will trickle down in improving Relationships, Careers, and Physical and mental Health.
Let me explain my thinking.
Currently, I am trying to make two YouTube videos, one blog, and this newsletter each week, which has been getting a tad overwhelming.
Despite the quantity, I feel the quality of my videos hasn't been improving, most likely due to churning out videos and not consciously improving each one.
Therefore, I am reducing my frequency to one video per week and changing the direction by focusing more on helping people get into data science and less on technical lecture-style videos. My edge lies more in this area, allowing me to focus on the quality of each video. This approach is more sustainable and gives me more time to focus on Physical and mental Health and Relationships.
Similarly, my focus is going to produce two high-quality blogs a month. My goal this year is to develop my software engineering skills, which is what I am going to tailor my articles to. All of this is likely to improve the Career area of my framework.
This is an example of how you can make small, hopefully smart, tweaks, which can transcend and improve other areas of your life.
I highly encourage you to spend ~5 minutes reviewing those categories and any others you want to add. It is not to make you feel bad about any place you feel like you are lacking, because ultimately this is just an arbitrary scale and every person has different priorities due to circumstances. No one is a 10/10 in everything.
The point is to set some direction for 2024 (only if you want)!
PS
This post marks the 26th edition of Dishing The Data, which means I have been writing it every week for half a year!
And it gets even better.
This week we crossed 800 subscribers! ❤️
I truly am thankful for everyone who reads this every week, and hopefully, you guys get some value out of it.
What’s Been Cooking 🥘
Some tasty stories this week:
New York Times Sues OpenAI - NYT is claiming that OpenAI used their private articles to train their models.
OpenAI $100 Billion Funding - OpenAI to start a new round of funding with a valuation of $100+ Billion.
AI Discovers New Antibiotics - New research has found a new class of antibiotics using AI.
Weekly Favourites ❤️
📚 Podcast - Matt Gray: Ali Abdaal. Great podcast on all things business and content creation.
🎬 YouTube - Alexander Amini. I have recently been learning about Convolutional Neural Networks and this channel has helped so much.
🎬 YouTube - Computerphile: Convolutions. Again, another great video about Convolutions. It amazes me how simple people can explain things.
(PS: Some links are affiliate links that I get a kickback from with no extra cost to you 😎)