14 Work Ethic Insights To Supercharge Your Learning

20 min readAug 29, 2020

I recently finished BrainStation’s 12-week Data Science Diploma program, a time where I was completely immersed in data science. During this time, there were often pivotal moments where the accumulation of my experiences crystalize into words and insightful trains of thought that will improve how I am going to work moving forward forever. I share 14 of the most powerful work ethic related insights, told through the lens of my experience.

Overview:

The power of working iteratively
Notion is great
The power of learning things twice
The importance of emotion filled learning
Ask quality questions (by logging them)
The power of mentorship
We’ve lost our ability to focus (the power of deep work)
The value of structured knowledge
Don’t neglect your health and rest
Take the extra effort to present things well
Write notes in terms of what you understand in your own words (and with your future self in mind)
The power of producing content (learn by making things)
The explore exploit paradigm
If you can think about it, it probably already exists, so leverage that

1. The power of working iteratively

Get it done first, then go back to improve upon it.

We were given assignments to do every weekend. In the face of a huge task to complete, at one point I realized the fastest way to finish it is to work on it the way we were taught to craft our essays in high school. Start with a first draft, finish it at fast as possible without trying to be a perfectionist, then through workflow iterations, keep improving upon it until you get to the final version.

This idea of working iteratively is powerful in data science especially because the data science workflow isn’t linear, just like how it’s powerful in other areas (check out Agile software development). This aligns with one of my mantras — think big, start small, move fast. It also reinforces to me as a recovering perfectionist that finishing it first is better than trying to make your work perfect on the first try.

2. Notion is great

I took notes on every lecture. I used to take all my notes on my iPad with Notability, Word documents, or Evernote. In my opinion, Notion beats all of those options. I love the customizability, organization, and flexibility. It’s an all-in-one place capable of many powerful things. If I really need to slow down and understand a concept, I will still whip out my paper and pencil to rigorously and slowly do it because that’s a powerful way of learning. But my run of the mill notes are with Notion now.

3. The power of learning things twice

Coming into the data diploma program, I thought that I would already know most of the things. After all, I will be graduating with a bachelors of science in data science next year. But I’ve found that:

With the things I’ve seen once before, I understand it at a much deeper level the second time around. And even if I mastered the topic, hearing it from someone who distills it in easy words is valuable because now you can comprehend it to a point where you can teach it to others.

This is why interview questions like “tell me about a p-value like I am a fifth grader” is hard — being able to get through all the fluff and use easy words to explain something indicates that you really know what you’re talking about and you’re not hiding behind difficult jargon. Hyperparamater optimization — sounds super fancy, but really it’s not that hard a concept.

You can take this a step further and learn things twice by purposefully surrounding and exposing yourself with content related to what you want to learn.

I committed myself to going deeper in data science in this bootcamp, so in addition to my lectures, I tried to best expose myself to how all these concepts I encountered in class are prevalent out of class. I surrounded myself with tech YouTube channels like sentdex where he does really interesting Python projects. I often read Medium articles during gaps of my day because it makes all the difference when I don’t just learn something but I breathe it.

By breathing it, what I mean is just to fill in gaps of your day (like in the car or during chores) to listen to a podcast or find entertaining or educational content you can follow. The caveat is that it has to be something you enjoy. I don’t just do this for data science. I try to do this with all things I am passionate for or want to learn about.

4. The importance of emotion filled learning

The best educators teach creatively and involve emotions in the learning process.

Jim Kwik has helped many actors (including the Avengers cast) to remember their movie lines with a lot of success. What’s one of the secrets? It’s super simple. Emotion. Very simple, but often overlooked.

What moments in your life are memorable? Most of it will be moments where you felt a lot of emotion. Your graduation was filled with accomplishment, winning a lottery with excitement. But alternatively, you probably don’t remember the mundane parts of your life like the cup of coffee you had a week ago.

Involve emotion in your learning process. If you’re bored while learning, you’re doing it wrong. My main emotion was curiosity and a desire to be able to put the content into practice. Have fun with your learning. Interact with memes. Watch fun, educational videos about your area (like Shark Tank if you’re into investing).

Upon reflection, I realize that I’m very engaged with the lectures at BrainStation because of my desire to learn the content. A lot of the content in BrainStation is content I have seen before in college. I might have struggled really hard to understand it before, so I would be embarrassed if I go over it the second time and don’t understand it. So I understand it. (Having the great lecturers I had in BrainStation also helped with this). This article is also the product of emotion — one of wanting to learn to structure my insights more clearly into words so that I don’t forget it in the near future.

5. Ask quality questions (by logging them)

You learn as much as the quality of your questions.

Having questions and conversations about them is really how you improve. When you ask questions, you’re constantly addressing your pain points in conversations because you won’t ask something you already know about. These personal pain points you ask about in conversations are the very pain points that might be crucial to understand the bigger picture of a concept. It’s the active aspect of your learning. So you should ask away.

But when you don’t have direct access to a mentor in the middle of working and questions naturally come up, it’s much more effective to put in the hands on work and run into a wall first — so you can raise the quality of your questions. In practice, you should combine your prepared material with these conversations with a mentor. Reading or prepared material is still important because you might still be at a point where you don’t know what’s important yet in a new domain you are learning about.

How do you optimize your question asking process? It’s by logging your questions.

Throughout my bootcamp, the data science part of myself has actually made a database storing all my questions as I have them so that I can address them with the lecturer in their office hour or ask them the important ones on Slack. But you can do this on a piece of paper or anywhere really, as long as you store your questions somewhere.

Me storing all my question on a Notion database to keep track of all of it and making sure to get them answered during office hours or lecture time

When you do this:

You will never again forget those opportune questions you get at random moments because you can have an organized and accessible place to store it.
You can iteratively improve upon these questions before you ask them.
You may realize when you come back the next day, you already know how to answer the question.
You can clearly see your progress if you can already answer all these questions that initially puzzled you, and getting smarter is always a good feeling.

As a bonus, for all my lectures, I like to store my lecture notes in a database where each day is an entry. These lecture notes are just a way for me to be able to reference them in the future as needed.

Each of these entries open up a page where I write a Markdown format version of the lecture content

6. The power of mentorship

The last point was to get quality questions, this point is how to ask them.

Be it in college, a bootcamp, or in the workplace, what I really am looking for is a mentor.

If you want to move forward, you should strive to look for mentors — noting that a certain level of dedication to self study is a prerequisite. In order to find mentors, you need to be willing to express the intent that you need them and also strive to make the mentors experience as smooth as possible by being prepared and showing to them that you have the capacity and desire to actually improve. There’s a lot to learn by the way these people work and express things.

My personal approach for asking for help or feedback on something is to get as much of the legwork done as possible, so that their feedback won’t overlap with the feedback you give yourself and you can get as much new insight from them as possible. Then remember to present your work clearly and concisely to them so they can be on the same page as you and give effective feedback. So yes, you can be more efficient with the way you leverage help.

7. We’ve lost our ability to focus (the power of deep work)

Focusing just means concentration and deep work. Focus is the core of many things, like the Eastern practice of Qi. Comprehension takes time and focus, and there really is no way around this.

While you’re at it, set ambitious goals:

Intense activity followed by high quality rest and recovery — Benjamin Hardy

We waste so much time in meetings — if you want to make meetings more efficient, cut your meeting time in half
You can get through more in a day than you think. BrainStation 3D was a hackathon event where we were given 24 hours and a team of 5 to essentially bring an idea into fruition. You’d be wrong if you think we ended these 24 hours with just prototypes. Many groups ended up with a product and great startup idea laid out in a great web application and with quality data analytics research to back it up. Even on the personal level, it amazed me how much I could achieve. It opened my eyes to how much I can personally achieve in a day.
At the same time, once you set your goals, don’t waste too much energy thinking about it. Focus on the process one step at a time, not on the result. Or even better, learn to enjoy the process. You get a fit body by enjoying fitness, not the desire to get ripped.

This is something I still need to work on. I still need to train my focus so that I can read more books for longer, listen to more lectures, meditate for longer, and read more music sheets.

Focus can and needs to be trained like a muscle. That extra focus you give at every session is what lets you get ahead.

Great content is all around us, just waiting to be found and studied.

One thing that might be really helpful for deep work is to listen to music on repeat. (It usually helps to have brain music that sinks in the background and has no lyrics, I personally love Lo-fi and piano music).

In her book, On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind, psychologist Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis explains why listening to music on repeat improves focus. When you’re listening to a song on repeat, you tend to dissolve into the song, which blocks out mind wandering (let your mind wander while you’re away from work!).
Wordpress founder, Matt Mullenweg, listens to one single song on repeat to get into flow. So do authors Ryan Holiday and Tim Ferriss, and many others.
— Benjamin Hardy

Here’s a useful website for where you can run YouTube videos on repeat.

8. The value of structured knowledge

Many times, willpower to learn is not enough and you cannot self study everything yourself. Seeing how much BrainStation could pack into just a week makes me realize you can learn at an accelerated pace, but only with the right structure. Learning can be made much easier if you know the important things to learn at a given domain such as statistics. When you have a well-structured curriculum, things are laid out in increments that gradually get harder and build off each other. In that type of system, before you know it you are able to tackle really difficult topics like reinforcement learning and predictive text. Point is, it’s worth investing in well-structured things. They save you time.

Furthermore, structured knowledge doesn’t have to be expensive. There are lots online for free, lots for a small cost, and lots directly around you if you look for it. Here’s a tip on how to structure your own knowledge exploration:

Always look for the best person you can think of at an area and really observe how they do things — given that they have content available for you to consume

They will usually do things closer to a best practice. If not, I always try to find out why something works for them, and try to adopt that to my own way of doing things because there is often multiple right ways of doing something.

That’s great and all, but how exactly I learn through observation? Glad you asked, let me share one instance of how I do this.

I like to watch George Hotz, an amazing coder who has a self-driving car startup comma.ai and helped Elon Musk in the self-driving car field. I observe the way he codes in his Twitch live streams. By observation, I realize how fast he types things, so it actually inspired me to learn touch typing and just how much of a different fast typing can contribute to making you more productive. Also funnily enough, I’m not going to follow this, but George’s entire Python machine learning workflow is in VIM. That’s actually pretty badass and inspired me to put more of my workflow in bash through terminal. You can use functions like open instead of using Finder to open files — and I like that because terminal honestly makes me feel like some next level hacker.

When I was making my chatbot, EVE, for my BrainStation capstone project, I watched many videos on how to do it just to get a sense of the best practices and better ways of doing things I might not know about — and this is how I learn. In particular, Siraj Rival (putting inside the recent controversy about him) and Rasa masterclasses on YouTube were two great resources for this project.

9. Don’t neglect your health and rest

Even though this bootcamp is based in Canada, because of the pandemic, I am forced to take it from my home country in Indonesia, which is 13 hours ahead. So my typical BrainStation day was from 9:30PM to 5AM.

Because I’m working all night long, I had to make sure to eat properly and focus on my well being in addition to my work. Not doing so would be unsustainable in the long run and lead to not being productive.

When I say health, one aspect often overlooked, especially in this age of where there is abundant pressure to work, is that you have to relax. On top of deep work, psychologically detaching and playing plays a pivotal role in health and productivity. Recognize the moments in your day when you’re burned out or not in the optimal mindset, and take that 1 hour meditation session or rest to do something that isn’t psychologically draining. Doing this can supercharge your deep work and actually make you achieve more in less time, one of the productivity secrets.

10. Take the extra effort to present things well

One thing that is nice about BrainStation is that there’s a lot of people and opportunities to present and receive feedback from.

Presenting could mean writing an article, explaining a concept, or straight up presentations in front of an audience. It’s almost always worth spending that extra effort to make clear and engaging presentations, especially as a data scientist, because you can do all the advanced modeling and techniques in the world, but what people get out of your presentation is ultimately where your impact lies. It can sometimes feel like the knowledge you learn yourself will magically be understood by others. But that isn’t true, it takes lots of work to bring others to your world of comprehension.

So if you (like me), deep in your workflow, are wondering if it’s worth that extra effort to present and structure things well, the answer is yes. You’ve come this far doing the work. Finish strong by presenting it well to others.

As for a tool I used, I fell in love with using Canva for making presentations. It really scratches my graphic design itch I had since I was younger because of it’s customizability and simple way of making beautiful presentations.

How do you explain things better?

One big thing you can do is giving context to things. This means to use visuals, illustrations, and stories of your personal experience when explaining a concept. This is especially true with statistics. I learned the poisson process only when I related it to watching stars in the sky and linking it to my love for outer space. Interestingly, I also liked playing my piano more and it made more sense after I linked piano notes and just thought of it as data — after all, music is just sound wave frequencies right?

Also, here’s a communication tip. When you want to explain a complicated concept, just talk slower. One of my lecturers talks real slow all the time to a point where if his internet stops, we would think he is just at a conversational pause.

11. Write notes in terms of what you understand in your own words (and with your future self in mind)

Everyone has their own note taking style that works for them. But there are some guidelines generally should be followed, especially in an environment like BrainStation that packs so much in a day.

What I’ve personally found really effective is to:

Only write what you understand the way you understand it. Most of the time, there’s too much to keep track of, so only write what resonates with you in your own words. Assuming you’re not changing nuanced details of what you’re learning, not only will you understand things in your own words better, the process of thinking of how to phrase a concept reinforces your learning and comprehension.
Don’t write things you don’t understand. (Unless there’s something important that needs to be taken word-for-word or if you’re saving a useful diagram). They end up being clutter.

This will save space and help your future self remember the concepts you understood effectively. If you don’t understand something, it may be helpful to exert some extra thinking for it to make sense first before you take note of it.

As a general guideline, as much as possible (because often times you’re restricted by time), write notes with your future self in mind. How many times have you come back to see you notes, but you don’t understand it — these notes end up being useless and just becomes clutter. Imagine you’re presenting to your future self, so structure it well by using diagrams, references, headers, visual aids, and being concise.

12. The power of producing content (learn by making things)

Producing content could be writing an article about what you have learned, making a video on YouTube, or just making projects (like my capstone) that you post on Github.

Here are the many benefits of producing content:

It’s a great way to really make sure you understand something and reinforce what you have learned.
You get better at explaining things and improve your presentation skills because whenever you create things, you’re essentially presenting what you created for the world to see. Your content has to be digestible, concise, and engaging for other people to consume.
It serves as a journal for reflection and for you to track your progress. Making things help you be a lot more self aware to your skills. Maybe one time in the future, you may look back and realize that you would change a lot of things — and by then that’s when you would feel your progress.
You become a pro content consumer. You realize it’s a lot of work and become more sensitive to others who put in work to make good content for you to consume. This is a big one. This appreciation you build could be motivation for you to learn more and know which sources are good and which ones are bad.
You tend to be able to get better feedback — both from yourself and from other people, because usually when you make something to show to others, part of your identity is represented in what you’ve made, and so you have more pressure to communicate it in a way that can resonate with more people.
When producing content you take ownership of, you are internally motivated to do better because you tend to try to take ownership of content that meets a certain standard.
The content you produce should be something you are proud of, not just a shallow thing you go through the motions of. I realized this for myself when I made my capstone project. It’s fulfilling to be able to finally see the depths of where my work can take me by investing more into it — it’s a depth that I didn’t really realize I can go to because in college I usually have too many responsibilities.

Then I realized that actually when you understand this concept, you can balance practicality and exploration in any setting you like. When you set up your college curriculum or choose the line of work you want to do — you can set myself up to maximize the opportunities for myself to produce content and be able to go through process of making things on top of the mandatory things you may be asked to do. The opportunity to do so lies in what you make out of it.

13. The explore exploit paradigm

Exploring is finding new things. Exploiting just means maximizing your reward by doing the things you already know works best.

This idea is used for machine learning problems like reinforcement learning, but really it’s directly applicable and powerful in any of your life pursuits. (I was introduced to this from reading Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths where they go deeper into this using examples like the Secretary Problem). This exploration stage is immensely important, but we often forget that exploiting is equally important as well. My previous insight on making things is the way to exploit what you have learned and take advantage of it.

If you’re plateauing in your progress, don’t exploit things you already know, exploit the new things you explore. If you’re banging your head against a wall trying to be a better basketball player for example — are you on autopilot trying the things you’ve tried before, or are you applying new concepts and expanding your aperture of knowledge? Applying the same old leads to stagnancy. Applying the new either leads to succeeding and improving or failing and learning, which is a win-win in my eyes. This is a great sanity check to always keep in mind for whenever you’re stuck, and applies in any of your pursuits, from improving on a video game, reading the news, to becoming a better data scientist.

So to recap, the two pitfalls are:

Exploring too much and not exploiting enough.
Not exploiting new things that you explore when you’re flatlining in your progress to improve a skill.

Here’s an article that further explains this. But to analogize this from my experience, lectures are where you learn and explore possibilities. The assignments, workplace, or the real world is where you exploit the best things you have learned to make quality products. Both stages are important. It’s one thing to learn the theory, but it’s another to constantly put it to practice — this is exactly what this bootcamp does. You would learn lecture content for a week, then in the weekends you immediately put it into practice in an assignment.

14. If you can think about it, it probably already exists, so leverage that

All the insights in this article are in my words. But I’m confident that these are not new concepts and that they exist in other books, posts, podcasts, or any other place — just in different words.

Just after writing this point, I was wondering if there was a tool to record my piano playing, then transcribe it directly to sheet music online. To my pleasant surprise, that tool already exists (it’s called Melody Scanner). When I tried to look for a pretty presentation tool, I found Canva. I wanted to look for an ideal note taking and life organization tool, Notion was there waiting for me to find it. I’ve lost count of how many times I thought of a smarter way to do things in Python, and someone else has already implemented it. For example, I was wondering if there is a way for me to feed in my own arguments to a function with a dictionary. And sure enough, with a Google search, yes there is — it’s called unpacking.

As I learn more about tech and data science, it’s amazing the pace from which I am constantly being introduced to new and amazing tools. Keeping up with this is part of the thrill of being a data scientist and working in the tech industry in general.

Be sensitive to the sheer quality of tools that are being developed all around us right now. Research is pushing us forward in territory we have never been in before and these ideas are being deployed to make amazing and consumer-friendly things all around us. We often pass up things that took a lot of work made by other people or groups that can make our lives better and do things more effectively. Spend the time to find and learn these tools, there isn’t a better time in history to do so.

If you can think about it, it probably already exists. And if it doesn’t, you yourself can consider making a startup to serve that need! I just want to show that often times we stick to a way of doing things when in reality there are so many resources out there that will help you sharpen your saw and become more efficient. Whether it’s books, online videos, podcasts, some coding forum, or any other resource — it’s up to us to both expand our minds and leverage the powerful tools available all around us so we can achieve more.

And that’s it! It was a great 12 weeks, and I’ll definitely bring these things with me moving forward. BrainStation did not sponsor me to say any of these things, I just wanted to personally share this fruitful experience I had. You can find out more about them here.

Context is key. Coming back into the education, having some real world experience under your belt (as this bootcamp reinforces with many real world case studies on new topics), definitely will make me a more effective at learning — especially at better learning the theoretical content that Universities tend to err toward.

Hope at least one of these things resonated with you :)