Balancing exploration and exploitation

I have a friend who used to be my teacher in statistics and R programming. No doubt he is specialized in R and he is really good at it, still publishing every day and crawling public data to get more experience. Seem like he never stops learning.

Yet these skills are not enough. And he might get stuck in what’s familiar to him instead of learning new things and expand his capacities. I found one can do so much more especially on production with Python. And Python is great at doing reinforcement learning and big data management. This is its great feature. Rather than focusing on one, he can have the working knowledge of Python and have a specialized knowledge in R to help them accomplish more things.

By sticking with the known is comfortable but never beneficial in a long term. It’s better to expand one’s knowledge and learn although being a beginner sucks.

This is also applicable to when I cook food recently. I can reuse the recipes I learned like Korean curry, tomato soup and a lot of stir fries. Yet I feel quite too familiar with the taste and it makes me feel bored. That’s why I invest so much time learning new recipes and watching them in the evening. I guess in the past it would be too difficult learning different world’s cuisine but now it’s all possible thanks to the rise of Youtube and internet sharing. I could learn so many recipes now and expand my knowledge in food. And I feel too many people are missing the fun of cooking. They eat out too often and it’s no longer a fun thing.

So exploit what’s learned, but don’t forget to always explore. Keep in touch with your existing friends, yet also meeting new friends. You don’t know who will surprise you.