Info refinery #17: Improving yourself and life in Finland
Hi, it's been a while since I write here. Feels nice to come back and refining my mind and notes of the past weeks. I will be happy if any of this resonates with any of you.
👋 Hi, good to see you here. Are you interested on data visualization? During October I will be teaching in a coding club for The Shorcut (biggest talent accelerator in the Nordics), where we will meet once per week online to teach you and help you with a visualization project of your choosing. All levels are welcome (from excel users to R/Python users). If this sounds interesting write me an email asking for more info 🙂.
🧠 What’s on my mind
Is being hard on yourself the only way to get better?
I often push myself to do what I think I need to do, by going all-in, and the feel frustrated after if I don’t manage. I somehow feel that if I am not hard on myself I won’t progress given the natural tendency to staying in the comfort zone. But is it the only way? Lately I have been reading about habit forming, and it seems like the solution is to do it slowly and constantly without being too harsh on yourself. Making the process somewhat enjoyable. However I tend to fall back onto going all-in and being frustrated after all.
Then somebody told me to inverse the question. How would you feel if you are hard to others? This produced a shift in thinking: If I try to be empathic towards others why I am not empathic towards me? Shit happens, is natural. The most important is to get back to small habits that will bring you closer to whoever you think you want to be in the future.
🤯 What have I learned these weeks
Life of an Onlyfans creator: Twitter thread about the daily life of Aella, who makes 100 000 $/month on the platform. It is not just about showing your body to strangers, it requires lot of marketing, consistency and research on new platforms. (link)
Expiring VS permanent skills: Let’s face it, most of the things we are learning today will be irrelevant after some time, specially given the speed of innovation in technology. However some skills will always be essential, one of those the list: Not being a jerk. (link)
Indian cooking course: I attended a course on Indian cooking in Helsinki, Finland. I prepared Aloo Bhaja and Raita, all super delicious and flavorful. Course is part of Kansalaisopisto, a subsidized school by the city that offers language courses, food classes, writing workshops, mushroom picking, pretty much all you can imagine, some of them even in English for a very affordable price. It is a very cool model to democratize learning for everybody at all ages.
😮 Interesting things
Food stores in Finland: I am currently working on a personal project to analyze the food market in Finland. I am interested on the distribution of store, the business models etc. Finland is quite big but mostly empty land, this graph I did shows that. Huge part of the land doesn’t have any store within 1x1km squares.
Green screen WTF
Aurora season is on: I have been living in Estonia and Finland for many years, but never seen one. Seem them requires being in the right time at the right place. It is specially challenging considering how early I go to bed and the fact that I don't have a car to go far from city light pollution. Even a visit to northern Finland doesn’t mean you will get to see them, so it is kind of a luck hunt.
🍴 Food for thought
Past week we got a new rescue dog, called Nata. It is incredible to see the power of positive reinforcement on person. Correct behavior → Dog treat. Works like a charm, she has learnt super fast what she is allowed to do and what not.
📊 Visualization of the week
Finnish flag but colors have the same population (link)
Thanks for your time!
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