September has come and gone. Autumn is in full swing now and everyone is prepping for the winter. September was a busy month for me, both personally and professionally. I started traveling more again and wrote up a storm on my Medium account. I finally hit a nerve over there and have been experiencing viral follower growth as well as decent earnings. These earnings aren’t big enough to replace my day job earnings, more like extra money for beer.

There was a short time when at a previous Startup I moved out of Sales and into Marketing. I had to produce a lot targeted content in a niche market and that’s how I earned my living. A lot of the content I created ended up on the company’s blog, video library, or community boards so I considered myself a Professional Blogger back then. Now that I’m back in Sales and I Blog here for fun, I consider myself a writer and a Semi-Professional Blogger now.

I’m going to start this post with a big helping of gratitude. I’m so grateful to the 1000’s of readers that helped me get into the field of Data Science and Machine Learning. I was a part-time blogger that turned my passion into a full-time gig in the AI Startup world. This post is my way of paying it forward to you. Read below if you want to learn how to make money blogging.

It’s Saturday and the month of April is almost over. It WAS Saturday when I started writing this but now it’s the last day of April. It’s been especially cold this April and the leaves aren’t even out on the trees where I live. That’s been a big bummer. There have been a few days this month that have been perfect Spring days and my body is ready for the warm weather.

I hope that this blog post finds all of my readers happy and healthy. It feels really strange having to write that because of all the death that’s descending upon us. Covid19 is really hitting my state (New Jersey) really hard. If you’ve been reading my newsletter, you’d know that we’ve been self-isolating for several weeks. It’s downright scary. There are some small silver linings to all this, I’ve heard from many friends that I haven’t heard from over the years.

Happy New Year readers! Granted it’s already 10 days into the new year but I’ve been having a well deserved break and easing back into work. Now that 2020 is here I hope to amp up more of what I did last year. Read more books, go to the Dojo/exercise more, and make more adventures with the family. I’m not really into the ’new year resolutions’ because I like to ease into things, not make abrupt cold turkey changes.

Lately I’ve been reading Seneca as part of my exploration of Stoicism. There’s a lot of great things here and I recommend you check out the video and my notes below: To live well we must be constant students of life Seneca’s essay “On the shortness of life” reminds us that time is a non-renewable resource Treat time as a commodity, people guard their property but squander time The amount of time we get is uncertain, you could die at 20 or 100 Death creeps up on time wasters Make the most of time, it is an amplifier when used properly Don’t invest your time preparing for life Seneca pushes us to live right now and not to delay happiness Your typical life is work till 60 and then wait to be happy What usually happens is your old to enjoy life then and regret not making most of life Planning the big things in life but don’t delay living it Live life for your own self Being busy with things we don’t like is the greatest distraction of your life We waste time at jobs we don’t like, relationships we’re not happy in, etc Invest your time into making a life worth living Practice Premeditatio Malorum While you waste your time by procrastinating, life goes on Researchers call the dissonance of “short-term gratification vs long-term commitments” as time inconsistency To fight this, use Premeditatio Malorum which is a form of negative visualization Think of what could go wrong with your long term task and then make plans to achieve it.

I’m back in Silicon Valley for a few days to attend our yearly Sales Engineering (SE) training. It’s a great way for the growing SE team to get together and talk shop. I find these yearly meetings very useful but they’re hectic. Fun but hectic. I love being on California. It’s such a wonderful place for the outdoors and ‘chilling’ in cities like San Francisco. I’m a big fan of the SoCal desert areas and Joshua Tree is one of my favorite destinations.

It’s hard to believe that I’ve been blogging now for over 12 years. I’ve written 100’s of posts, some short and some long. I’ve had my shares of ups and downs here but in the end I’m glad I stuck with it. It’s made me realize that blogging has led to my personal growth. Blogging has become a career! What’s happened is that I’ve been reposting and repopulating old posts from my archive.

I always need to be learning. If I’m not pushing myself out of my comfort zone or just plain learning ‘cool shit,’ I just get bored and cranky. This is one of the reasons why I love working at H2O.ai because I’m pushed everyday. Just this past week I was pushed into learning more deeply NLP and coding Python, two topics I’m very interested in. Along the way I’ve learn how to use Git better and solve some interesting use cases.

Back when I started blogging in 2005-ish, I had a few blogs that destructed due to bad software or databases. My Sixth World News and Commentary site just stopped working one day and I couldn’t recover any posts. I was a tech newbie so I didn’t know how to do SQL dumps and try to save over a years worth of work. Wordpress came along and changed all that by making blogging more robust and fun.

I found this interesting article on Pocket about writing. The gist of it is that successful writing is about rituals. Every writer is different and the rituals are different, it’s all about finding out what works best for you. Location and physical environment also play a role in maintaining a sustained and productive workflow. Bob Dylan, for instance, extolled the virtues of being able to “put yourself in an environment where you can completely accept all the unconscious stuff that comes to you from your inner workings of your mind.

Writers gonna write! February is shaping up to be a big traveling month for me. I was in Mountain View at the end of January for Sales Kick Off and then stayed for H2O World in San Francisco at the beginning of the month. Topping that off so far was a trip to Orlando for HIMSS last week. All incredible events but my traveling isn’t done yet! I plan to be all over the eastern seaboard in the coming week!

The best startups have a ‘Do It Yourself’ attitude. When a problem arises, no one get’s assigned the task to solve it. The team jumps right in and gets to work. There’s always a sense of ownership and a sense of pride. They build new things because it’s cool. They think of ways to make things better and make it happen. They are the ‘Makers’, and for lack of a better word, they make $hit happen.

Writing. I have such a love hate relationship with it. I try to write things of interest to my readers but I’m struggling to reconcile what to write about it. So I focus on writing tips and the process. I love the process of writing so much that it gets in the way of actual writing sometimes. Damn. In order to share with my readers, I have to write. In order to write, I have to sit my butt in a chair and start writing.

I’m going to preface this post by saying that lately I’ve been pretty emotional. I’m not sure why, but perhaps it has to do with the fact that in a few short years I’ll be a half century old. I’m starting to look around me and catch glimpses of my mortality in the rear view mirror. Oddly, it seems to be gaining on me every time I look.

For those that know me, I have a favorite saying. When I’m asked “how’re you doing?” I reply, “I’m living the dream.” Sometimes I get a chuckle, sometimes I get a sigh, and sometimes I get “Yah right, more like a nightmare.”

I’ve come to find that I can learn a lot about a person by how they answer this question.

Dear Friend, I’ve been meaning to write about the importance humility and equanimity in sales. From my personal past observations, it seems these are attributes only a few sales people have. What is humility and equanimity? Humility is defined as: “a modest or low view of one’s own importance; humbleness.” Equanimity is defined as: “mental calmness, composure, and evenness of temper, especially in a difficult situation.” The Monkey Brain Recently I was enlightened by a sales colleague about the concept of the Monkey brain.

I find this somewhat older post fascinating. It would appear that more and more millennials are waking up and realizing that there’s more to life than just overworking. Sure they get big $ but they’re burning out too. “I wanted to travel more — I didn’t want to have to ask for time off and grovel for extra days, you know?” says Solomon, now 25 and living in a rental house in Kauai, Hawaii, overlooking the beach.

Good Morning. My name is Tom, it’s April 2018 and I’m done laying low. It’s time to download all this ‘stuff’ that’s been on my shoulders for so long. I feel like I’m just coming out of a long funk that has had the combined effects of burnout and a mild depression. Yes, I was/am burned out and mildly depressed. Why? It’s probably because of several tumultuous years, both professionally and personally.

Despite all the bruhaha that’s going on in Washington, entrepreneurs are reinventing how children are educated. Teachers and EdTech companies need to work together to create the products that will create permanent change in classrooms across the globe. Teachers need EdTech companies to build great products to serve their students more effectively. EdTech companies need teachers to buy into their creations so that they can find a successful home for their products.

Last night the kids and I were across the street at another family’s house for dinner. Their kids are the same age as my daughter and son and often stay for dinner at our house. Last night after dinner we got to talking about the current state of education and how we can better educate our kids. Both the husband and wife have careers in the creative fields and are big supporters of STEM.

I have news. I’ve been mulling around the idea for this post for the last two years, ever since I joined RapidMiner. The journey at RapidMiner has been and continues to be fantastic. In those short two years I’ve worn many hats there, I started as a Pre-Sales Solutions Consultant, then moved to a Sales Engineer role, and now I’m Marketing Data Scientist. I’ve made the move from Sales to Marketing and my chips remain all in.

I think it was back in 2010 when I met up with an old high school classmate. Let’s call her “T,” and she was in between marketing jobs. I reached out to her because we had an opening for a CMO at my old engineering firm and thought she would be great for it. She had recently worked on some really cool NGO campaigns and I liked her forward thinking. I eventually convinced her to throw her hat in the ring for the CMO gig but that’s not the most important thing I learned from our get together.

Last week I shared a few thoughts around what it takes to be a Sales Engineer in a high tech startup. My last thought, around understanding value, begs for a full post on that subject. I hear the word “value” thrown around so often that I wonder if it has a real meaning anymore. Everyone says their new product or service provides value, but what does that mean? When I think about what true value means, I approach it from two distinct angles: time and money.

If you asked me 2 years ago if I’d be working in Sales at a high tech startup, I’d say you were nuts! Fast forward to today and that’s exactly what I’m doing. Today I’m a Sales Engineer at an advanced analytic startup. What exactly is a Sales Engineer? Wikipedia defines it as a hybrid between Sales and Engineering, an interesting combination indeed. I live in a Goldilocks world of solving problems and selling the solution.

The one thing that is as important as your product is your messaging about it. In some ways, messaging is more powerful because if no one knows how great your product is, you’re toast. To illustrate my point, let’s investigate the phrase “the medium is the message.” Originally coined by Marshall McLuhan, Marshall tells us the the medium (product) and message are one of the same. Your message becomes your product and your product becomes your message.

In today’s Advanced Analytic landscape we often hear about the mythical Data Scientist that can cure all our problems and unearth value hidden deep in our data. He/she needs to know Math and Statistics, be able to Hack, and have deep Domain knowledge about a given problem. Drew Conway famously put together a Venn Diagram to show you what I mean. Yet, I always found this Venn Diagram a bit lacking for the softer skills.

This past Friday I resigned from my position as a Civil Engineering Manager at SYSTRA, my employer of the last 6+ years. I did this because an opportunity of a lifetime knocked on my door, an opportunity that will give me a chance to pursue my passion in an exciting and growing field. In short, an opportunity to follow my dreams. I've accepted a position as a senior consultant at Rapidminer, in their Boston headquarters, and I couldn't be more excited about this.

Since this blog is about using neural nets and AI, its only appropriate that I post about an awesome audio book I’m currently listening too. I like supplement my voracious appetite for books with audio books on occasion and have more space devoted to audio books on my 4 gig nano than I do with music. The current book I’m listening too, “Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain” by Sharon Begely is utterly fascinating.

On a random aside, one of my favorite authors from years gone by is Ralph Waldo Emerson. I know that Ugly is exploring Ayn Rand’s Objective philosophies and I suggest he read Emerson’s Essay on Self Reliance as part of his “spiritual” growth. If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises, they lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined. If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is right in being disheartened, and in complaining the rest of his life.