Beyond Bars: Transforming Adversity into Career Triumphs

I was thinking about the prisoner's life during my morning walk today. How do they get by each day. Every single day is the same, there is some routine - but confined to a small cell, sometimes alone, sometimes sharing a cell - not in control, subject to the mechanisms driven by the prison. Day in, Day out. The same thing. How do they last so long. What do they do? How do they handle the reality. What is it that keeps them grounded and motivated? What do they look forward to? Some serve prison sentences that are short, some really long, 5, 10, 15, 20 years in prison, and they still get out -- they wait, they endure, the have hope, they stay the course. Not all of them are Nelson Mandela! Not all are working toward a grand cause, an aspiration to free their people. No, they're got other motivations. That's not to say their motivations aren't any less than Mandela's. Must be very personal, right? What gets them through their daily grind? What can we learn from folks who served time and got out in the end?  Yeah, I know critics might say that prison isn't a useful reference, because in the real world, you're free to choose, you're free to act, you have agency - so if you find things getting too tough and unpleasant for you, you have options, demonstrate agency and take control of life/career through intentional action. Indulge me anyway...

So, ask yourself - especially if you find yourself tempted to quit, to leave, to run to the exit -- or say you find yourself entrapped, imprisoned by the corporate you work for, or you feel like life/work in general is just a grand prison -- ask yourself, how can you stay the course -- how can you wait, how do you adopt a prisoner's mindset / behaviours / attitudes to unlock resilience, serve the time and leave with the joy of knowing you've transitioned to a better version of yourself..

< ! The rest of this content was generated by ChatGPT as my copilot >

Imagine, for a moment, the life of someone like Michael Liebowitz, whose story I came across in the "Prison: The Hidden Sentence" podcast. Incarcerated for 25 years, Michael's journey wasn't just about survival; it was about transformation. He realized early on that the only way to truly free himself from the confines of his cell was through self-improvement and preparing for a future beyond the prison walls. Just like Michael, we can look ahead and plan for a future where we're not just surviving, but thriving, even in our most challenging professional periods​​.

Or take Tommy DeLuna's story from "The Prison Post." Sentenced to life without parole, Tommy's narrative is one of accountability and remorse. It wasn't just about serving time; it was about owning his actions and learning from them. In our professional lives, how often do we take a step back to own up to our mistakes, learn from them, and move forward with a renewed sense of responsibility? Tommy's journey teaches us the power of accountability in transforming our own lives​​.

And then there's Jarad Nava, also featured in "The Prison Post," who turned a sentence of 162 years to life into a story of hope and redemption. His transformation came through faith, education, and the support of his community. Jarad's resilience reminds us that no matter the depth of our struggles, be it in our personal or professional lives, there's always a path to betterment and growth​​.

So, what do these stories tell us about handling our own 'prison-like' situations in life and work? They remind us that our circumstances don't define us; our actions and mindset do. They show us that growth, change, and liberation are possible, even in the most restrictive environments.

You see, it's not just about enduring the hardships or waiting out the tough times. It's about actively shaping your journey, learning from every experience, and finding meaning in even the most mundane tasks. It's about realizing that the keys to your 'prison cell' are, in fact, in your hands.

Let these stories be a source of inspiration for you. Whether you're feeling stuck in a rut at work, facing personal challenges, or just trying to make sense of the daily grind, remember the lessons from these individuals who turned their prison sentences into life lessons.

Your 'prison' might not have bars, but the lessons on resilience, transformation, and hope are just as relevant. And it's not just about knowing these stories; it's about applying their essence to our own lives. Here's how we can do that:

• Purpose is Your North Star: Just like those prisoners who found strength in personal goals or aspirations, we need to pinpoint our own driving force. What gets you out of bed in the morning? Is it the desire to innovate, to lead, or perhaps to create a positive impact in your workplace? Hold onto that purpose. It's your beacon through the foggy days.

• Rhythm in Routine: There's comfort in routine, much like the structured days in a prison. Setting a daily rhythm for yourself, be it in your work or personal life, isn't about monotony; it's about creating a framework within which you can thrive. This could mean setting aside time for your professional development, for exercise, or even for those small moments of reflection.

• The Classroom of Life: Every challenge is an open book, a chance to learn something new. Those walls around you? They're not just barriers; they're teaching you resilience, patience, and perhaps even creativity. Embrace every hurdle as a learning opportunity.

• The Strength of Connections: Relationships can be your lifeline, just like they are for many prisoners. Nurture your network of colleagues, mentors, and friends. They're not just contacts; they're your support system, your sounding board, and sometimes, the push you need to keep moving forward.

• Reflection and Mindfulness: Just as prisoners often turn inward, introspection can be a powerful tool for us too. Reflect on your day, your decisions, and your interactions. How did they align with your goals and values? Mindfulness isn't just a buzzword; it's a practice that helps in keeping your thoughts focused and your emotions in check.

• Keep Moving: Physical activity and mental exercises are vital, even more so in confined spaces. They keep your body healthy and your mind sharp. Find activities that challenge you, that keep the gears in your brain turning, and your heart pumping. It's as much about physical health as it is about mental agility.

• Visualize Your Success: Imagine yourself overcoming your current challenges, reaching your goals. This isn't daydreaming; it's a powerful exercise in motivation and planning. What does success look like to you? Keep that image in your mind's eye, especially on the tough days.

• Joy in the Little Things: In prison, a small joy can mean the world. In our everyday 'prisons,' it's no different. Find happiness in the little achievements, the small steps forward. Celebrate them. These moments of joy add up, creating a collage of a fulfilling journey.

• Remember, our 'prisons' - be they our jobs, our personal struggles, or just the routine of daily life - can become places of immense growth and learning. It's about changing our perspective, finding our purpose, and making the most of every moment, every interaction, every challenge.

These stories of resilience and transformation behind bars are not just tales of survival; they're blueprints for thriving in any environment, no matter how restrictive it may seem. Your 'prison' has lessons to teach; are you ready to learn?

My experiment with ChatGPT as a recommendations engine using Netflix data

As some readers might have learnt about me by now, is that I enjoy data analytics, and more recently been curious about the capabilities of ChatGPT. So I decided to take my Netflix data and give it to ChatGPT code interpreter to see what it comes up with.

If you didn't know, as a Netflix user, you can get access to all your data by requesting it from under account management on the web site:

After a couple of days, you will receive an email from Netflix with a zipped file "netflix-report". Here's what my archive looks like:

The section that's important is CONTENT_INTERACTION. Recommendation engines are all about understanding a user's viewing behaviour: their content preferences, search history, viewing history, events that happen during playback, viewing activity - all inputs into what is called "viewer engagement". 

For 20 years I worked as a software professional building video technology systems. In 2004, I joined a research team building video recommendation engines. At the time, we focused on rules-based engines and used Amazon as the general poster-child, north-star - even then, Amazon's retail recommeder system was making headwaves. In 2004, it was still the early days of the internet. Set Top Boxes, the devices that enabled you access to satellite TV, were not always online. So the scope of our work was constrained to the embedded world of this device: limited compute, memory and storage power. We knew there needed to be a multi-pronged approach to video recommendations back then, with the bulk processing intelligence being done in the "back end" - headend - and recommendations eventually broadcast to the set top box over the air. Anyway, building software that learns viewing behaviours of users was an art back then - and even almost two decades later - remains still an art - although with the proliferation of many software-as-a-services providers, we now have so many options available "Recommendation engines-as-a-service". In my previous role as CTO for Africa's largest video entertainment company, over the years built our own stack, leverage open source recommendation engines. With new capabilities like Amazon Sagemaker and other services, I got our team to start thinking differently and transform to out-of-the-box recommender systems. Don't reinvent the wheel. Build flywheels instead. I left that team in 2020, 4 years later, I'm told the team's completed their transformation and using almost all their recommendation components off-the-shelf instead of building their own.

So what happens to content recommenders now that we have tools like ChatGPT, code interpreters and powerful data analysis? Could video recommendation engines be further disrupted - i.e. democratizing content recommendations to the new world of personal intelligent agents?

Experiment: ChatGPT as a content recommendation expert - Epic Fail

First, I asked ChatGPT to analyse the Netflix data set, then provide an analysis as a video recommendations expert. I've shared my Netflix data. Act as an expert video recommendations engine, recommender system, using all the state-of-the-art concepts for understanding viewer behaviour. Analyse the datasets and produce a detailed analysis and insights report into my viewing habits. What are my preferences? If you were a video content expert, how would you categorise me? What content will you recommend to me? Etc.

Feedback - Results, much better luck with DeepNote

A bit disappointing - ChatGPT struggles to analyse consistently, without errors. Too many errors, load failures and errors analyzing. It starts strong and then bombs out. I find it to be rather inconsistent. Had to wait a while and create a few sessions to get going. A bit of a time waster. It's a shame that ChatGPT has to restart its chain of analysis everytime there's a failure. "Regenerate" kicks off the process all over again. 3 sessions later, then I get bombed out as I've exhausted my time window - come back later. I pay for ChatGPT and still have to accept limited time-based usage. Crazy times. Switched over to Claude to see if it gave better results. Nope, Claude has severe limitations in file size uploads. Waste of time. Google Bard, equally useless. 

I then switched to Deepnote (an alternative to Noteable which is now dead), my experience was much better there. It turns out the Netflix data is sparse enough, missing vital data attributes like content genre classifications (like action, comedy, drama, romance, history, etc.) which makes it difficult to draw conclusions on viewing behaviour. This means we need to find a content database like TMDB to map my Netflix data to (i.e. complete the dataset by appending vital content attributes like genre, actor, director, studio, etc.), then we can build up a complete profile view of my usage, the content my household is inclined to and the for the last phase of the experiment, get the AI to recommend content from another catalog to surface recommendations for me. To get a glimpse of the potential power of an AI-coPilot used in DeepNote, I've shared my project as public here.

I'm not investing more time going down this rabbit hole today! However, it is certainly food for thought on potential new GPT-agents one can build now that OpenAI have released its GPT store. I suspect it's only a matter of time that someone builds a content recommender-gpt on ChatGPT's store, that can provide more diverse recommendations outside the closed walls of a streaming provider. I suspect we will have a resurgence in Content-Aggregator Wars in 2024!

Personametry 2023 - Wheel of life streams, hours logged

It's that time of the year when I sit down and review my time tracking data for the year. This time round, playing around with ChatGPT (whilst still maintaining my AWS Quicksight dashboards). I was quite looking forward to continuing to use Noteable's AI/Data tools, sadly the service shut down :-(

I've shared my dataset openly and also you can look at the ChatGPT transcript of the conversation and prompts here.

ChatGPT's overall summary:

• Rest and Sleep (Individual): A substantial 2,856.11 hours, akin to the restorative power of a long, rejuvenating sleep every night.

• Professional Work: Impressively, 2,051.20 hours were dedicated to your professional life, showing a solid commitment to career growth and achievements.

• Family Time (Family-Man): A heartwarming 1,398.79 hours spent with family, which is like embarking on a year-long road trip with your loved ones, filled with bonding and cherished memories.

• Spirituality (Individual): A profound 1,106.44 hours in spiritual pursuits, reflecting a journey akin to a spiritual retreat, deepening your inner peace and understanding.

• Personal Time (Individual): 467.55 hours of 'Me Time', ensuring a healthy balance of personal space and activities, like taking a short, refreshing break each day.

• Marital/Wife (Husband): 451.91 hours dedicated to marital life, resonating with the quality time spent in building a strong, supportive partnership.

• Knowledge and Learning (Individual): 202.88 hours of enriching your mind, like attending a series of insightful lectures throughout the year.

• Health and Fitness (Individual): 145.07 hours, a commitment to staying active and healthy, similar to a consistent routine of short, daily workouts.

• Social (Friend): 117.06 hours, akin to enjoying meaningful social gatherings, reinforcing bonds and making memories.

Looking back, my time tracking is reaching steady state. Not sure I'm going to keep reporting these stats going forward, but I'll probably keep fine-tuning. For 2023 Scorecard, I'm glad to have focused and met largely my spiritual goals, work/professional goals was maintained year-on-year, despite the spike in work hours in the last quarter (I got "promoted", with extra responsibilities which means more work hours). Health and Fitness hours took a dive compared to 2022, but it seems that my Strava/Garmin activity tracking shows better performance in 2023 compared to 2022 (so more time logged doesn't necessarily equate to being for fit, or achieving more). Social time decreased because we lost some friends to emigration, and generally our year was focused on the kids as my son approached his final high school matric exams, we prioritised staying at home.

If you've read all my previous posts on Personametry, you would've learnt that as part of this experiment, even way back when I started in 2016, I wanted a personal-assistant AI to help me with my RAGE / Personametry framework. I wanted to engage in meaningful conversations with an AI-assistant, coach me, act as my council, gatekeeper, motivator, etc. I believe there is still a need for this and the current state-of-the-art still has some catching up to do. Nevertheless, I am quite enjoying my interactions with ChatGPT. It was able to understand my personametry data, derive some insights, create the views I would generally take a couple hours doing myself. It's just a matter of time until we get truly personalized agents, like a personametry-gpt agent. Here's what ChatGPT offered I should look into for 2024:

Here's my Personametry slides as usual:

46 today

I asked ChatGPT to write a poem, I turned 46 today.  

In honor of your journey and the resilience you've shown, here's a poem that weaves in elements of your life story:

From Natal's fields to corporate climbs,

In the land where the sugar cane twines,

A boy with a dream, in apartheid's times,

Grew with a flame that brightly shines.

Hitching a ride, 600km through the night,

To an interview held in morning's light,

Persistence his creed, ambition his might,

Against all odds, he would take flight.

Engineering called, though medicine's voice was clear,

Yet no regret, for tech was near.

In computers found, a passion so dear,

Self-taught, self-made, amidst career.

Mo, at forty-six, your story's just begun,

The lion's roar can't be undone.

Your flame rekindled, the past is spun,

Into a future brightly won.

On this day, let's not be remiss,

Celebrate the life that is Mo's bliss,

Forty-six years, it's hit or miss,

But Mo's tale, is one of grit and wist.

So happy birthday, with a cheer so loud,

For Mo stands out, in any crowd.

At forty-six, be humbly proud,

For your life’s story speaks volumes, unbowed 

————

At forty-six, the heart still ticks,

A journey through life’s blend and mix.

Not young nor old, but squarely mid,

With years of wisdom, no longer a kid.

Each wrinkle earned, a tale to tell,

Of laughs and tears, and times we fell.

At forty-six, life’s sweet refrain,

Plays on in joy, despite the pain.

So raise a toast to all those days,

The quiet growth in subtle ways.

At forty-six, still much to do,

Another year of being true.

For in the mirror, the truth’s not stark,

It’s just a number; light a spark.

Embrace the day, let’s not be brisk,

Life’s rich at the age of forty-six.

———

At forty-six, not just a number, but a force,

Rekindling fires from a powerful source.

A story of grit, hard work, and might,

From Natal's fields to tech's soaring heights.

A father's legacy, a machinist's son,

To a leader of tech, second to none.

In every challenge, a lion's heart,

Against life's storms, a steadfast part.

So rise, be bold, reclaim your flame,

In this year's chapter, make your name.

Forge ahead with courage, let passion dictate,

At forty-six, it's your story to create.