The writer as an explorer...

The writer is an explorer. Every step is an advance into new land--Ralph Waldo Emerson

I wanted to create an end-of-year tome that would encourage and dare I say inspire. But like everything in the last few months--the best of intentions are strewn across the laundry room floor--or quite possibly that is actual laundry.

I am not a big fan of listicles or self-adorned professionals insisting they know best or can help you with your journey. There are no shortcuts period. Do the work. If that doesn't yield results, keep doing the work. I probably could have stretched that into an e-book of a decent length but I prefer getting to the joke quickly and succinctly.

The reason I ran over 1000 miles last year is because most people don't. I get up before dawn--most people don't. I don't eat meat and rarely drink. I don't read fiction. I meditate while swimming a slow silent mile. We all have little levers and oddities that yield an advantage in how we live our professional lives or even personal lives for that matter.

I also don't accept advertising or have a "real" job. I watch people with platforms tell us how to improve or create our work from the security of a 9 to 5 gig that pays the bills. I am basically unemployed or unemployable by most metrics but I am booked through March 2020. See what I did there?

I write books, I speak from the podium, I teach data workshops, and as of 2020 I will be fading away much of the contract work. Why? It's time to take the training wheels off of the bicycle. I have been learning. Enrolled in bootcamps, online executive education programs, and teaching data literacy. I learned to code in Python and dusted off my R code expertise. If you are going to call yourself an analyst you better have the skills to get the job done.

​My expertise is in defining data questions, sourcing data, data modeling, curating insights, and weaving a compelling narrative. I am not promising a definitive answer but I am promising that I can hold up my end of the conversation.

Here is a list of some of the best decisions I made in 2019

Podcasts
1619--create an environment where you can question why you include race as a checkbox on your surveys or data collection.

Akimbo
I can't provide links because they are migrating everything to their new platform. But you can search by these titles:
Friction
Systems Thinking
You Should Write a Book

LSE Public Lectures and Events
Ordinal Citizenship 
Narrative Economics
Learning from Data: the art of statistics