Carragee Consulting

Last week I was at the playground with my daughter and there was a guy “fly fishing” in the lawn behind the jungle gym.

Out of respect I did not photograph him, but I did find the scene inspiring.

The Palo Alto park fisherman had two flags marking the width of his cast zone and then two frisbees he was using for targets. He would cast and then reel back in and cast again to hit the farthest target.

If you want to be good at something you have to practice. If you can’t practice the real deal then find a way to simulate it well enough to enjoy and succeed in the times you can do the real thing.

There are so many hurdles to learning new skills and maintaining proficiency in both work and hobbies. We can only make time choices, not more time, so have to allocate it carefully between absolute obligations and those pursuits that feed our souls.

When I can’t get out on the water at least I can erg so that when the opportunity arises I can more fully enjoy it. When I can’t play broomball I can play soccer and maintain field vision and some ability to run. When I don’t have the type of work project I want I can simulate projects with Kaggle data or web scraping. If I can’t rock climb I can do the monkey bars and pull ups on the swing set.

So much of life feels like it’s preparing for something in the future and I forget to embrace the practice for its own enjoyment. I love that there was a guy fishing in the lawn, honing his craft in spite of looking potentially ridiculous.

It seems like in sports we embrace the high ratio of practice and drills and downtime so much more than we do with our work.

Imagine how many hours a week a pro athlete practices outside of their games. Sometimes we talk about player salaries like they are paid just to show up on game day and not as though their lives are consumed by nutrition planning, stretching, strength and endurance training.

Yes, you can scrimmage your way to better performance, but sometimes it’s more effective to break skills down to smaller drills and learn them cold. I think this holds true for a career with data too.

I read a post from Keith McNulty where he’s been doing daily math problems. I know a number of people who seek out new courses frequently. I have no idea what Rami Krispin does in his day job, but he’s constantly learning new things, documenting them and sharing on GitHub. Same with Armin Kakas, building demos with dummy data and refining his methods for common analytics cases and teaching his methods in free webinars.

One of the only people I know who isn’t self employed who spent time studying and intentionally learning new things on the job outside of an internship or apprentice program is an Actuary, whose company allotted some work time to each employee to prepare for their exams.

It seems to me most companies think people will build experience exclusively on the job and they de-emphasize structured practice not tied to daily results.