Christopher Penn: In this
episode Brianne asks, What
habits do you do on a regular
basis that help you learn and
stay ahead in the AI and Mar
tech space? So it's a good
question. Any kind of progress
requires you to be doing two
things to build a third thing.
And those two things are you
need to be learning, which is
the academic knowledge act,
acquiring information,
processing and understanding
what it is that you're reading.
And then two is practice.
implementing what all the things
you're reading so that it's not
just theory. You understand how
it works, make your own
discoveries, and more
importantly, discover what
doesn't work. Those two things
combined get you experience or
wisdom if you'd like. And they
are required in equal amounts.
One of the challenges we see
happen a lot is people who are
over leveraged in one of those
two areas, they are spending so
much time doing the thing, that
the knowledge gets stale. I meet
a lot of practitioners at
corporations who are so heads
down on getting the job done
getting that to do lists cleared
and stuff that they lose track
of what's happening in industry,
they don't know that, you know,
this new model came out or this
new technique is available, or
this new software has happened.
Because it's just one of those
things. They're trying to stay
afloat, which I totally get. I
had experiences like that and
agency life where you're working
60 7080 hours a week, just to
get things done just to keep
things moving along. The
academic knowledge without
practice, is armchair theory,
right. You can read about
something go well, it could do
all these things. But you never
actually understand how the work
so you don't understand the
limitations. And you may not
even understand what it is
you're talking about. When I was
in graduate school, I remember
this one class where the
professor was talking about OLAP
cubes, online AP application
processing, take notes on it,
the type of database. And he was
talking about the theory of OLAP
cubes and transaction
processing, and had never
actually used the technology. So
in class one day, I said, Okay,
well, let's just set one up,
because at the time, Microsoft
SQL Server supported that. I
said, let's just set one up. And
we did. And it turns out that
most of this professional
theories about how OLAP cubes
worked, didn't hold up because
the practical application was
very, very different. And he
really was not aware of that.
Now. In fairness, It wasn't
necessary for his job to do
that. And the theories
themselves, I think were
starting points for people to
try to figure out how to
implement them. But that's why
you need that practical
application and the academic
theory in tandem, they can't
have one without the other. And
so for what I do, to stay
current is those two things on
the academic theory side, I put
together newsletters, I read a
ton. In order to do that. I have
software that helps curate a
list of the top things I need to
pay attention to in martagon,
marketing data science and AI.
And as I'm putting together
these newsletters, I'm reading
through what the machines have
have assembled as my reading
list. I go Wow, I didn't know
that happened or I didn't
realize that happened or this
was the thing. That's like 1500
articles a week and just going
through this. Wow. There's a lot
That's happening that was not
aware of and as I go through and
put together my newsletter, I go
that's useful that's useful
that's useful. Go and read those
things. I also belong to a
number of communities I run a
slack community as part of Trust
Insights. If you go to Trust
insights.ai slash analytics for
marketers, that's the community
I run but I'm also in two dozen
other slack communities about
half a dozen discord
communities. I'm subscribed to I
can't tell you how many
newsletters voluntarily that all
bring in new information, new
academic information to learn
Hey, did you know this thing was
happening? I was reading Elisa
Solis is Seo FOMO newsletter the
other day and this is how core
web vitals are going to be part
of ranking download, okay, I
need to know that.
But then the other side, the
practice side is doing the
thing. Now, a lot of I get a lot
of practice doing stuff for, you
know, clients at Trust Insights
and things, but I also So you'll
run my own website, my personal
website now Christopher Penn
calm, I test a lot of things out
on it. Because it's a safe place
to test. I'm not going to
destroy my company's revenues to
fight to take down a website by
for an hour by accident. I do.
I'll just a lot of testing in
general, I used to do a live
stream show called Saturday
night data Party, which was more
just messing around with stuff,
playing with things. As new
models come out, or as new
pieces of software come out if I
can run them in an environment
like Google Collaboratory run in
there, see what happens. I'm
actually got another window open
over here, trying to run a model
called jukebox, which is going
to do generative music creation,
which is interesting stuff. So
it's just picking up things as
you read about them saying, I'm
going to try this. How does this
work? What does it involve? And
can I make the thing work and
generate the result that's
promised result and you find out
really quickly Some things live
up to their promises, other
things, not so much on a good
day, you might be able to get
them to work on a bad day. Just
immediate and hilarious failure.
So that's the process. The
challenge is, you have to build
time and your schedule for it,
you have to make time for
professional development. It
will, in almost every place I've
worked, there's been a lot of
lip service to professional
development and like maybe an
organizational send it to a
conference like once a year. But
that's it, they will not create
the time for you. So you have to
do that. And if you can do that
in your working hours, great.
Sometimes you have to do it
outside your working hours. If
you care about your professional
development, you will have to
make that time outside of work.
You'll have to take time away
from something else like you
know, whatever series you've
been doing on Netflix, in order
to give yourself time to
research and grow and that's the
hardest part for you. But people
are not willing to make the time
for themselves personally, even
if it's a benefit to them
professionally and to their
careers and to their their
income, all that stuff. I don't
know why doing stuff that is for
professional development has
just been something I've always
been part of doing. I think it
comes from either whether
whether you like the process of
learning or you don't. But I
think is a learnable thing. I
don't think it's something
you're born with. It's just
overcoming perhaps bad
experiences in the past. So
that's the process, academic
knowledge, practical
application, put the two
together to get experience and
make the time for it. Make the
time for it. Dedicate two hours
a week, wherever you can find
them. To do that one hour
reading one hour of doing your
follow up questions, leave in
the comments box below.
Subscribe to the YouTube channel
and the newsletter. I'll talk to
you soon. want help solving your
company's data analytics and
digital marketing problems? This
is Trust insights.ai today and
let us know how we can help you
