Now

What I'm up to.

What I'm working on

Primary Focus

A longer term project (two really...) I'm not ready to share yet but it's nearing the end.

A beginner-friendly machine learning course!

One of the questions I get asked most often is "I want to learn machine learning, where should I start?".

And most of the time I'd reply back with a list of resources. This time I've built my own.

I designed it alongside Andrei Neagoie, one of the highest rated instructors on Udemy and it's live and ready to go. If you're new to machine learning, the Complete Machine Learning and Data Science: Zero to Mastery workshop is for you.

Course update: We've hit 30,000+ students! This is phenomenal. I'm in the Discord chat every day answering as many questions as I can. If you're interested in getting started with machine learning, I hope to see you there.

Movement

Took a week off intensive exercise the last week. It felt right. Went on a long, slow, below stressful walk each day instead. Came back to BJJ on Monday and had one of the best sessions of my life.

I think that's the protocol going forward. Once every three months or so, a full week off. Nothing but walking.

Science hasn't got there yet but I've got a hunch walking is as important as sleeping.

Moving

I moved out of the family home and into my own place for the first time. It's 5-minutes down the road from where I lived. That was a requirement. Family is paramount to me.

It's a nice place with a good view of the water (where I'm writing these lines), two bedrooms (one for the studio and one for sleeping) and plenty of space for furniture, of which I don't have much and plan to keep that way. I did buy a nice table for the deck though, it reminds me of sitting at a French cafe.

Living alone sucks though. Any longer than 12-hours on my own and I start to go crazy. My personality works best around others. To compensate I'm finding myself at a local cafe almost every morning. I know all the staff and they know me. It feels good to be a regular.

What I'm learning/reading

The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb (2nd time) – think back on your life, the events which shaped it were probably ones you couldn't have predicted. For example, take away the biggest 10 days of the stock market from the last 50-years and you lose a great deal of the overall profits.

I'm finding reading something for the 2nd time to be a different experience. I feel like I'm cementing the pathways it originally left in my brain by going back over them.

The Knowledge by Steven Pressfield – only a few chapters in so far but I'm loving it. Pressfield is the author of some of my favourite books on creating: The War of Art, Turning Pro and Do the Work. The Knowledge reads like a coming of age story of a writer who knew they wanted to be a writer and was probably already a writer but hadn't quite "made it" yet. One of my favourite lines so far is the reminder; enjoy it while you're broke and all you've got is a dream and the work, that's the best time.
The Lindy Newsletter – the internet is clog with sh*tty content. If you're like me, you're starving for something real. First-hand experience or something made from the soul. The Lindy Newsletter is one of the few things (outside of books) I look forward to reading. What's Lindy? Start with the basic concepts issue, it explains it better than I can.

Experiment I just tried

A five day fast. Nothing but water (and some salt) for 120-hours. Last time I went for four days, so I kind of knew what to expect. It's a strange feeling to not have eaten for over 100-hours and not be hungry. I even worked out twice a day on 3/5 of the days. Blog post and video documentary coming soon.

Last update: 3 October 2020