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Learn in public - Debugging Life #003


Robot designing

Image created with DALL·E 3


James Clear, whose book “Atomic Habits”1 I highly recommend, once said:

“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”

And I truly believe that.

I am a big fan of routines and automation. I function much better when I have a plan and know what to do. I also function much better when I try to quantify things, collect & analyse data (Gallup CliftonStrengths 34 top strength: analytical here). You might have noticed it if you’ve read my previous post2.

That being said, I am human and I do have human flaws (if you’re having pizza with me and you go to the bathroom, you can never be sure if there’ll be any left when you come back 💀).

If I want to tame my flaws and turn them into virtues, I design new systems or improve current ones.

Previously2, I was talking about a system organized around my health and weight. This time, I’ll describe my view on what I want to do to improve my life and why I think learning in public is a good tool to achieve that goal.

So, firstly, why do I even think there is a chance to improve my life?

1. Historically, our chances to live a good life improved


If you were born in the Middle Ages in Europe, there was more than a 70% of chance that you would be a serf. That basically means that you had to work for the landowner (mostly farming) in exchange of physical and legal protection and the privilege of working an additional piece of land for your needs3.

Doesn’t exactly sound like a sweet deal, right?

Of course, this has gradually changed over centuries; however, my reasoning stays the same.

We live in great and unprecedented times.

Today, if you are born in European Union, your chance of being born into the middle class or higher is more than 60%4. Of course there are intricacies of that comparison - what is the definition of middle class, how was the study conducted, how the data was obtained, what were the characteristics of the population questioned5, etc., etc.. However, let’s not delve on the details too much.

If you have some knowledge about history, I guess you would agree that on average people today live in better conditions than, let’s say, 200 years ago?

If you have doubts about that - my recommended reading would be “Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World - and Why Things Are Better Than You think”6.


2. Your task - improve your life conditions


In societies as we know them today, there will always be discrepancies. There will be people that are better off others due to a mixture of skill, determination, circumstances and pure luck. There will be factors that we control and those that we do not.

We do not control what we are born with. But we do control how we use resources that we have.

Common knowledge says “money makes money”, but there seems to be a lower limit from which that saying applies, because:

We can find in the King James’es Bible, Matthew verse 13:127:

“For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.”

Which in simpler words, attributed to Percy Bysshe Shelley, reflected as8:

” (…) The rich have become richer, and the poor have become poorer; (…)”

That transformed into a modern-day aphorism that you might know:

“The rich get richer and the poor get poorer”

So if you want to get rich, you have to accumulate wealth to a particular level, which will enable the “money makes money” trait.

I believe that it’s our solemn duty to make our conditions better. For ourselves and for our kids. That’s why I want to leave my micro-universe in better shape than I entered it.

3. My plan - learn by doing


So, what am I getting at?

How will I make my life better?

My original plan was to work on my personal brand by posting regularly on the blog and expanding my internet network, shaping my social connections more consciously and in a more agentic way (allowing me to reach my goals of getting a better life, earning more, creating new opportunities).

Although I have written more this year than I have written in any other year of my life, this has been so far a mixed success. Why? Mainly because of juggling shifting priorities. And a lot of the time, I was adding unnecessary complexity to the entry conditions of a new post.

This post originally was supposed to be something else as well. I was planning to explain my approach to financial investing and uncover my personal experiences (some cases when I made extremely stupid decisions influenced by emotions). But in the works - I was experiencing overwhelm. I wanted at the same time to revamp the blog’s website, learn new stuff about machine learning, and read and write posts about my approach to life. On top of a regular life and a regular job - this was too much and the pace of progress was too slow and unrewarding for me.

So I began to wonder - what is wrong with my system design? How can I achieve more of my plans and have better progress?

The first bottleneck emerged - separating writing from learning. This was forcing me to dedicate separate time-slots to discover materials for my writing, search for inspiration, and to learn. Whichever I was pursuing, I had a feeling that I was missing the other.

But that shouldn’t be the case anymore. I’m going to write about what I am learning. But as the journey starts, I don’t want to share a clear goal with you (of course I do have one). Why is that? Because I don’t want to be constrained. I want this to be a free journey driven by curiosity and passion. If I share what I want to deliver - I will be bound to sail towards this port. If I don’t, I can change the direction, whichever way the wind blows.

So, do you want to know what’s next? You’ll have to read the next post ;)

4. Behind closed doors


It has been nearly four months since my last blog post. In Poland, we had summer break (July, August), but I’ve been what you might call a busy bee.

I’ve written my master’s thesis, contacted my university supervisor, and had it signed and submitted. I think in the last two weeks of August, I spent north of 70 hours extra filling out blank spots in the thesis logic and correcting LaTeX formatting to be more in line with the latest university formal requirements for master’s theses.

While I am proud that this is finished now, I still have a lot of learning to do. At my university (University of Warsaw), you have to defend your thesis to obtain a master’s degree. Unfortunately, because of my “unique” situation (mainly that my master’s studies are ongoing for around 12 years now ;) ), I needed to re-enroll (due to changes in the Rules of Study).

Next stops:

  1. November: starting an intense 5-week applications development course on AI (LLM in particular) AI Devs 3
  2. January/February ‘25: defending my master’s thesis. This will also be a chance to look with more conscious eyes at what they taught me at university, as I have a list of 77 possible topics to appear on the exam, broadly ranging from my study curriculum.

Both will involve a lot of learning. But I am happy that I can do this. Trying to figure out how to apply practical lenses to theoretical approaches gives me a feeling of accomplishment and growth.

It’s been a busy, difficult, but rewarding year so far. And it’s not over yet. So buckle up and stay tuned ;)

See you on DemystifAI!

Any comments, remarks, questions - feel free to contact me at tomasz@demystifAI.blog. You can also leave any feedback anonymously here.

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Robot intensely studying in the library

Image created with DALL·E 3

  1. Check out James Clear “Atomic Habits” here ↩

  2. Read my previous post on DemystifAI.blog ↩ ↩2

  3. Source: World History Encyclopedia ↩

  4. Source: Nina-Sophie Fritsch & Bernd Liedl “Who Belongs to the Middle Income Class in Europe? The Role of Gender-Specific Occupational Characteristics in Multi-Level Analyses for 17 European Countries” available here ↩

  5. For example, in this study authors decided to use hourly wages in their estimates and, as a consequence, because of lack of those data points, they excluded self-employed workers from their figures. ↩

  6. Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund “Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think”. Check it out on Goodreads. ↩

  7. Source: King James Bible on Wikipedia ↩

  8. Source: Percy Bysshe Shelley “A Defence of Poetry”. You can read it here ↩