I'm going to be a dad
Any day now...(newsletter hiatus and other reflections)
Waiting for a baby to be born is like packing for a trip and having no idea when you’re leaving.
The due date was October 16. The first one is always late, apparently.
It’s nice. Going on little dates. Taking walks in the park. Bingeing Wednesday on Netflix. Feeling into the last gentle days of coupledom.
It’s also kind-of maddening, not having much of anything to do. For the first time since December 2015 - when I quit my sales job after only 4 months, and before I committed to becoming a self-taught data scientist - I feel lost. Not big-L Lost. Just what-am-I-supposed-to-do-now lost.
I’ve been paring down my social media activity. I didn’t want to open any new loops that would distract me from baby.
In that vein, this will be my last newsletter for a bit. I plan to take off, starting now, until baby is about 6 weeks old. I’m proud that I kept to my (unstated) once-every-Saturday schedule without missing a beat, and I plan to continue on my return. I’ll probably still lurk on LinkedIn and Substack a bit. I’ll probably leave comments. But I’m not pressuring myself to write anything of my own. I’ll be focused on taking care of my family - and sleeping enough, probably.
(Also, I’m keen to hear your honest feedback on how the newsletter’s been for you so far and what you want to see next. More on that towards the end).
Finding myself after quitting my job
When I was born, there was no paternity leave.
My dad didn’t get to take time off. I would have, but I forwent that privilege by quitting my job in April.
I knew my wife was pregnant. I knew my savings. I had several ideas of what I wanted to do next, a following on LinkedIn, and dedicated fans and readers. It was a great decision that I will never regret, no matter what comes of my current and future endeavors.
Nevertheless, it goes without saying that I quit well before the influencers (and my parents) would have wanted me to.
Why take this risk?
I wanted to know what it was like to work without attachments. May - October 2025 will forever be the time I learned how I work without pressure, without deadlines, without a mincemeat schedule, without dependents.
In less than a week, I built up my daily capacity for deep work from 1 tortured hour, an unintended consequence of a role with lots of meetings and politics, to 4 1/2 hyper-concentrated ones. My mind wandered far from the chaotic mess and FOMO of the enterprise AI world and assumed its natural orientation towards timeless things. I developed universal models for leadership and for managing research (of which AI projects are but one kind), which I’ll be sharing more on when I return.
My wife and I traveled for over a month. Some of that was seeing if we wanted to move to Costa Rica or Puerto Rico (spoiler alert: we liked PR much more).
I walked between 13k and 17k steps a day. I gained muscle. I made friends.
And I made $100,000.
Just kidding on that last one.
No tidy endings here.
You will shape what comes next
I’d love to know what you’ve thought of my writing so far. Feel free to leave a comment below or email me directly (just reply to this message in your inbox).
I also pose a couple questions below on what comes next. Feel free to answer only what’s interesting.
Are my letters too long? A couple folks have told me that they’re behind on reading through my letters because they’re long. They tend to be about 2k words, with an estimated read time of 10 minutes. They usually take about 4 hours to write, including 1 round of editing. I’ve read and loved long essays, 20 minutes+, including on Substack, and some successful tech and data writers also lean long. I’m unsure which way to go.
Should I publish a debate series? I have loved debate - verbal, intellectual sparring on hard topics - for as long as I can remember. There is no faster way to learn a topic than to poke around its unresolved edges. There’s a reason debate is the basis for the entire Western legal system and why many thinkers in the ancient world (Plato, Vatsyayana, etc.) framed their works as dialogues. I was thinking of collecting 1 or more perspectives on a topic and “dueling” (or dancing, if you will) back-and-forth on it. For example, I might debate someone on the value of agile scrum for AI projects. Debates could be entirely within this newsletter, or a back-and-forth between different newsletters. If there’s a topic or a person you’d love for me to engage with, let me know.
Should I interview data science leaders? Becoming a first-time manager without being promoted into it feels a bit like black magic. I’m the only one I know who did it. I was thinking of publishing interviews with data science leaders (those with formal direct reports) who jumped into management for the first time at a new company without prior management experience. I’d condense and publish the interviews as newsletters, potentially with the video as well. Over time, common insights would emerge.
On the flip side, it’s a bit of a shitty time to enter management. There are fewer roles, more competition, and more burnout from current managers. There’s less supply of leadership roles, and there seems to be somewhat less demand to get into them as well.
Either way, if you’d enjoy a series like this, I’d love to hear it. And if you know anyone who might want to be interviewed, I’d love an introduction.
Does my writing reflect “the real me?” Some of you who know me in-person have told me I come across way more passionate and excited when live or on video/audio as compared to writing. Maybe I don’t use enough exclamation marks!! Jokes aside, several creator friends (like Daliana Liu and Annie Nelson) and former coworkers have told me that I’d be awesome on video. If I were to start in those formats, what would you want to see from me?
Thanks for being a committed and engaged reader. I’ll miss writing these and engaging with you every week.
But don’t you worry.
I’ll be back.
Insightful. I'm curious about the 'last gentle days of coupledom' thought. Is it truly ending, or more of a significant re-architecture of the relationship dynamic? Always wondered.