31. Russell Pollari - Building habits and breaking into data science

Most of us want to change our identities. And we usually have an idealized version of ourselves that we aspire to become — one who’s fitter, smarter, healthier, more famous, wealthier, more centered, or whatever.

But you can’t change your identity in a fundamental way without also changing what you do in your day-to-day life. You don’t get fitter without working out regularly. You don’t get smarter without studying regularly.

To change yourself, you must first change your habits. But how do you do that?

Recently, books like Atomic Habits and Deep Work have focused on answering that question in general terms, and they’re definitely worth reading. But habit formation in the context of data science, analytics, machine learning, and startups comes with a unique set of challenges, and deserves attention in its own right. And that’s why I wanted to sit down with today’s guest, Russell Pollari.

Russell may now be the CTO of the world’s largest marketplace for income share mentorships (and the very same company I work at every day!) but he was once — and not too long ago — a physics PhD student with next to no coding ability and a classic case of the grad school blues. To get to where he is today, he’s had to learn a lot, and in his quest to optimize that process, he’s focused a lot of his attention on habit formation and self-improvement in the context of tech, data science and startups.