I really wish more people invested in statistics and data analysis classes. People take you more seriously in a business setting when you can say "Email A resulted in a response rate of 80%". I usually hear "We think Email A is better because we feel it in our gut".
Ok, not those words exactly, but that's the point. Looking at data, understanding it, and directly applying it to your job is a hugely underrated skill.
You're absolutely right in that people tend to take you more seriously if you come with numbers. But it's such a kangaroo court[1] that it drives me nuts. The instrumentation and implementation to support that sort of data-driven approach is usually far too lacking to give it the amount of merit it receives. Once you take do a first principle's sanity check of things, you learn that no one on the business side has a solid understanding of what "response rate" is actually referring to. Then when you look at the technical implementation, you realize that there's little reconciliation between what it's actually representative of and what anyone on the business side think it's representative of.
Never underestimate someone's gut feeling, especially so if it's from an individual in the trenches. More often than not, dissonance between gut feelings and data point to an issue with the data. Not necessarily that the data is wrong, just that it isn't fully representative of the context it's being collected in and should be trusted accordingly.
Most of the time you don't need hundreds to thousands of data points to be reasonably confident, just a few dozen. I remember the example distinctly from my sophomore engineering stats course, I don't know why everyone else has forgotten it.
A very common example is when some software feature is A/B tested only internally, or even only tested on the team that developed it. It introduces a lot of bias in users’ technical competence, willingness to understand/understanding of the new behavior, how the environment is set up, etc.
Classic, short book about fundamental stats concepts everyone should know.
network a *lot*
Choose fast growing organizations
Choose people you can learn from
Enter a market with few smart people
Use your smart connections to dominate that market
The problem is if most folks in a market aren't smart, then those who are really changing that market look dumb to those already in it, so are the pioneering minds there smart or re-inventing failed wheels.
* Eat less
* Move more
* Consume in moderation
* Socialize
These pieces of advice may not be immediately obvious, but they're also incredibly unhelpful.
Also, networking is vital, however mostly to develop a filter for BS and BS slingers (money slingers or "rich" people are deceptively good at BS slinging). I had a friend who would go to meetups and befriend everyone, in my experience this is not really productive and will lead to being taken advantage of.
Just throwing some inspirational BS
I've worked from home quite a bit over the past few years and I've begun to notice it affecting my personal/communication skills. I'm actually trying to get back into the office more often.
When I was fully remote, after a few weeks I joined a really unique co-working space that was really more of a social club (Hall Boston - now defunct for any curious). It was a really special place, but in hindsight I didn't get much work done when I was focusing there. However, gives me hope for a resurgence of community driven social clubs for city dwellers and entrepreneurial types.
I think what we should be more worried about is the power dynamics/balance between groups of people in society. The relatively morally bankrupt “power people” within the military still needed the cooperation of people like Oppenheimer to get their hands on the bomb. That constraint could soon be gone...
https://github.com/spotify/annoy
https://erikbern.com/2018/02/15/new-benchmarks-for-approxima...