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Fantastic -- these principles apply in every profession, not just data.

If anyone's reading the comments and wants more info on this, these books cover a few of the same concepts:

1) For more on why you should forget passion, check out So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love by Cal Newport (link: https://amzn.to/3WPSiwd)

2) On running safe-to-fail experiments, I enjoyed Peter Sims' book Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries (link: https://amzn.to/4ceL6xU). Or this article is a good intro to the idea: https://hbr.org/2009/01/innovate-like-chris-rock

3) the excellent Paul Graham essay, Keep Your Identity Small: https://paulgraham.com/identity.html

4) on building in public and creating opportunities, two short easy reads I love:

- Show Your Work: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered by Austin Kleon (link: https://amzn.to/3A5t0kF) -- ostensibly aimed at creatives, but applies just as much to data analysts and accountants

- A Skill Called Luck by Jakob Greenfeld (link: https://jakobgreenfeld.gumroad.com/l/luck)

and a few years ago I wrote a post called How To Turn A Small Opportunity Into A Big One: The Parlay Strategy, which is here: https://www.andrewlynch.net/blog/how-to-turn-a-small-opportunity-into-a-big-one-the-parlay

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Loved it! I recently ran a safe to fail experiment, it failed badly and now I am back to a “normal” job.

Also found the note on keep your identity small quite pertinent.

Looking forward to read more on these with your real life anecdotes. :-)

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Brilliant.

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