Analytics: The motivation ingrained in us

Most people think of analytics as a business area. A practice which can optimise your application through the use of data. A fancy area full of algorithms, code, statistics and hypothesis. As CEO of a startup, I network a lot. People often ask me that why am I doing this? What is my motivation? What analytics? etc. etc. They are obviously expecting an answer on the lines of 'because I was working in this area for X years' or 'I saw the impact on business by YYY dollars'. However, analytics connects to all of us who are working in this field, at a much deeper level which is actually linked to human evolution.

Curiosity: How many times we have seen mighty Sherlock Holmes asking Dr Watson not to jump to conclusions without data. He was doing his own analytics in the 1800s. In fact, all the research which we now take for granted has been generated through painstaking data analytics. Methods changed, terminologies were created, trashed and recreated over time but the drive still remains same. We want to know the nature of things around us. We are always hungry for more. We cannot see or understand everything at the same time. We need to explore, we need to experiment and finally the data generated through that is needed to reveal the precious truth.

Wired for Machine Learning: Even if you are not interested in quantitative analytics, you still have to get your hands dirty. Reason - You are a human and even all the qualitative decisions of your life are learned subconsciously through raw data. Remember when you first held your current mobile phone in your hand? No? Of course not. You cannot consciously remember about that data point. But tell me this, when you do hold your phone now, do you see or think about what are you holding? No, right? You automatically know it's your phone because your senses have already learnt how your phone feels like. That's how we learn each and everything that we do in our lives. I wonder that if this inspired us to invent Machine Learning?

New perspective: Analytics is an aggregated field. Even though its impact is on 'me', it is predominantly about 'we'. Your business is nothing but an aggregation of your customers. If you want to know what is happening with your customers, you can talk to them. But you cannot possibly talk to thousands of customers to know what is happening with your business. For that, you have to see the patterns emerging from your data. We want to explore more but we are too small and restricted. Analytics gives us a bird's eye view of different things happening in the world. A view which rarely emerges in our day to day life and let me tell you; the view from here is amazing.

Sense of achievement: I studied mechanical engineering during graduation but as you can see I am not a mechanical engineer. I will have to write a separate article on Indian education system but the point is: I spent all 4 years of lectures sitting at the back and solving logical puzzles. Initially, it was about getting the right answer but slowly I fell in love with the journey rather than the destination. The adventure of trying to put all the pieces of puzzles together so that they make sense, well, it's a thrilling ride. But if you do have to take that path, why not solve some real world problems rather than fake ones.

At last, I would leave you with my favourite quote which is the best representation of my motivation. Let me know if you too can connect with it?

“The urge to discover secrets is deeply ingrained in human nature; even the least curious mind is roused by the promise of sharing knowledge withheld from others. Some are fortunate enough to ?nd a job which consists of the solution of mysteries.” – John Chadwick (The Decipherment of Linear B)