A few months back, I was asked to speak at a small private event. For this talk, I came up with a new thesis that I wanted to communicate. I then did a fair bit of research and designed, illustrated, and printed a custom zine to hand out at that event.
I gave my talk to this small group of maybe 20 individuals, a few of which I had already known. I walked through the zine, asked provocative questions, and we had a good conversation at the tables. The feedback was immediate and effusively positive.
One of the members of the audience was someone who had previously spoken at this dinner series. I had been in attendance when they spoke, it was forgettable.
After the event was over, this person in the audience came up and said, “Wow, you really put a lot of effort into this,” in a self-aware contrast to their own effort.
My response in the moment was, “The way you do anything is the way you do everything.” – the common refrain. However, this person paused, sighed deeply, looked at me with extreme indignance, and said: “Man, that’s exhausting.”
I am almost pathologically occupied. I am consistently working on 3 or more serious projects simultaneously. I am nowhere near the model of an modern master delegator, or a smart prioritizer. However, despite my over-subscription to interesting and valuable projects, I find it extremely difficult to not put effort into things.
For example, when deciding to create a hackathon for Data Agents – what became America’s Next Top Modeler – I had an opportunity to make it a normal hackathon. People could have come and shown off some data thing that they had built with AI; it could have been fun. It would have been what people expected.
However, I find it difficult to do things that feel pedestrian or “yet another”. As soon as I start thinking about an idea and wanting to do a great job, I start thinking about how it could be really great. Immediately I start thinking of the 95th, 98th, and 100th percentile of what it could be. Obviously, shooting for something like an 80th or even maybe a 70th would be a lot smarter; as a peer recently told me they used to say “slap a 70 on it” back on the Pandora Data Science team.
For this upcoming hackathon, we are designing a custom dataset and a custom set of evaluations on said dataset. We’re building connectors and libraries to make it easy for visitors/contestants to be able to interact with the data. We’re even thinking about how we can capture all this information to give it back to the community to help everyone understand what’s going on in the world of data agents.
Would it have been smarter to simply do the normal thing, get this across the line, and be happy with the outcome? Probably, but I find it incredibly difficult to become enthusiastic about things like that.
When I look back at projects that I’ve pushed beyond 70, 80, or 90’s in the past; I feel pride. I feel thankful that my little zine stressed me out for a few days but made about 15 people smile, I’m glad I totally restarted semantic.art a week before launch because I thought the web-design was bad, and I have a hunch that America’s Next Top Modeler is going to be one to remember.
I’ll conclude with another quote that captures how I think about these things, and how I continue to reason with myself that my instincts are “good, actually”.
The old Letterman quote:
“Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.”
