Making ourselves useful

January 2024 Issue

My grandfather Calvin worked in Hollywood from the 1930s to the 1980s. During his time at MGM Studios, he contributed to Singin' in the Rain, An American in Paris, Oklahoma!, The Twilight Zone, and The Wizard of Oz (pictured above, and the person with his back to us is my grandfather). At the beginning of his career, he worked as a general laborer; then, after many other roles at the studios, he ultimately worked as key grip. (If you're not familiar with what a key grip does, The New York Times had a beautiful article in 2023 on the work that Sanjay Sami has done in that role for Wes Anderson's films, including Asteroid City.)

Calvin was not an actor, nor was he a writer, director, or producer. His role in Hollywood was behind the scenes, but it was vital to the success of the films he contributed to. He made himself useful, and that work has impacted people for over 80 years. It's a legacy that anyone would be proud to have.

Being useful in small ways can have enormous consequences

Sometimes the skills we develop in making ourselves useful can have unexpected – even life-changing – consequences. For example, you may be familiar with the story of Adolfo Kaminsky. When he died last last year at 97, the New York Times published an obituary that stated "Adolfo Kaminsky’s talent was as banal as could be: He knew how to remove supposedly indelible blue ink from paper. But it was a skill that helped save the lives of thousands of Jews in France during World War II." The Times even created a short documentary film on him entitled "The Forger."

It's possible that your work can save lives, too. For example, here in Utah, researchers were able to identify microparticulate air pollution from a local steel mill as the source of respiratory problems for children in the area. (That mill has since closed and air quality has improved in the area.) Also in Utah, the biotech company Recursion has developed novel machine-learning methods for the analysis of massive quantities of image data from automated biological experiments to help identify potential cures for diseases.

But you don't have to save lives to be useful. For instance, one consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic was the rapid and widespread adoption of learning management systems like Canvas, Blackboard, or Moodle in colleges and K-12 schools. I had been teaching online and hybrid for several years before the pandemic, and I was able to help many of my colleagues who had only taught face-to-face get up and running on their LMS software. I helped them with things as simple as how to create structured course announcements with a spreadsheet and how to schedule posts in their LMS. (Also, a little knowledge of HTML formatting goes a long way.) These were admittedly small things, but I also know that they saved these teachers a few hours of frustration and helped them create more organized courses for their students, so it was a win-win.

Develop your soft skills to make yourself more useful

This newsletter is called #DataIsForDoing, and I make data courses for LinkedIn Learning and for datalab.cc, so I imagine that if you're reading this, then you have an interest in working with data. Technical skills – the so-called "hard skills" –?are, of course, important to data work. Obtaining data from multiple sources, preparing and formatting that data, and creating models of the data are all difficult tasks that requires significant training and experience. At the same time, data work is not purely technical in nature. I have discussed this topic in other editions of this newsletter – for example, "On the synecdochic fallacy, or why data science needs the liberal arts" – but the short version is that (a) data must be understood within its context; (b) interpretations need to address the goals and constraints of the stakeholders (as well as the proclivities of human nature and the constraints of physical reality); and (c) the actionable insights must to be communicated clearly to the people who will enact them. And those all involve the so-called "soft skills" that can make you and your data work truly useful.

[As a side note, it was the non-technical elements of data science, or the work in interpreting and applying the insights, that made the field so attractive to Dylan Lynn, who is a statistician with dyscalculia, a significant math disability. You can see her story in an article she co-wrote for Education Sciences, at the website Dyscalculia.org, and a video interview at Made for Math. In my university statistics classes, I have many students with various learning challenges, including low numeracy, dyslexia, math disabilities, and even dyscalculia. Dylan's story has helped me adapt my approach for these students, and is guiding me as I create a new textbook and videos with accessibility as a major goal.]

When it comes to soft skills that have an impact on your professional work, communication is probability the most important. In fact, in LinkedIn's Future of Work report entitled "AI at Work," it says that "In the US, communication remains the top skill demanded across all job postings" (page 19). With that in mind, I invited Lisa Poulson of poseycorp.com to join me for my January Office Hours, where she talked about "The Power of Story." (Lisa is also my sister, but I invited her because she is a star-level communications coach with 30 years of experience in the tech industry.) You can see our entire discussion right here:

As a note, here are the books she recommended at the end of her presentation:

• DataStory: Explain Data and Inspire Action Through Story by Nancy Duarte (Amazon)
• Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence by Lisa Cron (Amazon)
• Pixar Storytelling: Rules for Effective Storytelling Based on Pixar's Greatest Films by Dean Movshovitz (Amazon)
• Retellable Story Journal: Shape Your Most Essential Stories, Insights and Life Lessons by Jay Golden (Amazon)
• The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell (Amazon)

A personal note on making myself useful

I'm sometimes surprised that I have been able to make a career in the data world. After all, my PhD is in social psychology as opposed to, say, machine learning, and my university position is in a behavioral science department at a teaching school. However, I have taught 119 sections of statistics to students in psychology and the behavioral sciences over 28 years, I have created 36 video courses (with another 39 translations) on statistics and data science for LinkedIn Learning over 13 years, and I created my own company, datalab.cc, to do the same nearly 10 years ago, and shared 11 courses there. I have shared datalab.cc's videos for free, often providing the source files to other organizations. One such group, freeCodeCamp, bundled the videos and posted them on their YouTube page, where they have received millions of views, such as my courses on R and data science foundations. (I got a nice "Top Contributor" backpack from them in 2019, but otherwise, in line with our agreement, I have received no compensation.)

I have also had several opportunities to help my university colleagues with their research, and I have been able to provide statistical consulting to local small businesses, state agencies, global corporations, and even the Federal government. But my greatest moments in the data world have been the "data charrette" service events I created to pair volunteers – students and data professionals – with local nonprofits that had data but didn't know how to get the insights they needed from it. (I described these events in another edition of this newsletter, "Data science as service.")

I recently applied for promotion to full professor at my university, although I won't know the outcome for a few more months. In preparing my application, I gathered some data on the reach of my videos; I estimate that, across all platforms and accounts, my videos have been viewed about 33 million times. Across my two YouTube channels, @bartonpoulson and @datalabcc, viewers have come from 188 countries:

For my live Office Hours on LinkedIn, participants have logged in from 90 different countries:

I'm truly amazed by the reach that my video courses and live events have had. (I'm even more amazed that people around the world are able to deal with my western United States accent. Thank you for your tolerance!) More than anything, it has been enormously gratifying to know that I am able to offer something of value to so many people in so many places.

An important point about this is that if you have data skills, then there is also a global interest and need for what you are able to do. Take this data as a motivation for your own work. Also, my own videos are not high-production affairs; I record them at home and do only simple editing. It doesn't take an office full of support staff to have wide reach and profound impact. You already have what you need.

Aside from the wide reach of the videos, LinkedIn recently marked my profile as a "Top Voice," which, to me, is a great honor. (Apparently, this is a distinction for approximately 300 of LinkedIn's billion or more members, or 0.00003% of the total.) I don't know the mechanics behind their decisions, but I believe it has something to do with making myself useful by creating and sharing content that helps people solve practical problems, by giving my work a humanistic flavor, and by celebrating people's accomplishments. The fact that I received this recognition without social media blitzes, vigorous self-promotion, or run-away broetry attests, I believe, to the value of making oneself useful to others. I am sure that there are many, many other people with unique talent, insight, and experience who could also make important contributions in their fields. Perhaps you are one of them, but you won't know until you try, so it's time to get started.

You are needed

All of us, regardless of location and regardless of the depth or breadth of our data skills, have something important to offer. Remember, data analysis is fundamentally about understanding humans, and that's something we all have experience with. We can all work to enhance and adapt our technical skills –?that's why I make videos and why I teach – but the personal experience, the responsiveness to social and cultural contexts, and the ability to communicate effectively all have an an enormous impact on our ability to make ourselves useful to others. I'm glad to be able to support you in your own growth and service. Thanks for joining me.