Gathering Data…
I have recently been reminded of the sheer data needed to drive decision making. Although I’m finishing a Master’s Degree in Data Science and love Emily Oster as much as the next guy, for once I’m not talking about BIG data. Rather, I’m talking about calibrating my own intuitive and logical decision making process to better direct my own effort and skills on a daily basis. Allow me to explain what I mean in two different ways:
The first way is in processing bad days. Whenever I have a truly bad day, my gut instinct is to “get back to work”. A bad day is a problem, and problems need to be fixed, so I should get a move on and figure out what needs to change. However, if you were to consider what the bottom 15% of days in a year look like, they’d likely be pretty bad.
This is true whether you are living your dream life, or are miserable. The very bottom 15% are not going to be good days, no matter where your median lies. Out of 365 days in the year, that is 55 days, or about a month and a half. If these very bottom 15% days were evenly distributed, they would occur slightly more frequently than one out of every seven days, or about once a week.
For a truly bad day, that’s insanely frequent. Now, obviously they are more likely to occur in a few notable groups than once a week; however, this demonstrates the rate at which a truly bad day can occur even if you are doing everything right. This elementary math suggests that sometimes the answer isn’t to fix whatever is causing the problem, but rather to increase your tolerance for the natural pain of life, which will come whether or not you are working towards your goals.
The second way data can guide inutitive and logical decision making has to do with skill building. In my experience, until approximately three months of consistent improvement in a skill, I am useless in my decision making. Take social media, for example. Out of college, I ran the social media accounts for a digital and radio advertising company. With a background in design, I came in guns blazin’, confident that I knew how to renovate the “brands” for each social media account. However, about a month into the job, it was apparent that rebranding everything wasn’t actually working.
So what did work? Posting several times a day, every day, for about three months, and trying to always improve something from the previous post. At 20 days, I started to see some basic patterns in which posts succeeded more than others. Every 30 or so days, I would “unlock” new areas to focus on which were formerly clouded by my sheer naiveté on the subject. After around 90 days of consistent improvement, I started to have a fairly effective grasp on what worked and what didn’t with my audience, and my results skyrocketed.
I have to frequently remind myself of this in other areas - whenever I start working with a new audience, platform, or skill, there is no easy way to “shortcut” knowledge and expertise. All I can do is put my head down and try things with violent effort for approximately three months, and after that I will likely have enough data to start making good decisions.
