In this very short episode, I’m stepping back from the day-to-day business and reflect about why we go to work every day.

I have a very personal story about it, that helped me to see things very clearly and I’m sharing this in this episode.

Further, many of you will listen this during vacation time and thus, I’m also touching on the importance of taking a break.

There is no episode next week as we take a summer break as well.

Transcript

Vacation episode 2018 – some thoughts about why we do what we do

00:01
Hello, this is another episode of the Effective Statistician. Today is a really, really different episode. You notice there’s no music here, there’s no co-host, there’s no interview partner. It’s just me and you today. This is actually the vacation episode. I’m recording this here from the Tiergarten in Berlin just to give you a little bit of a different atmosphere.

00:31
Maybe you can hear some birds in the background, maybe some wind that is going through the trees, maybe some kids playing around or some others walking by just chatting. Very, very nice weather, enjoying the sun and the warm of summer.

00:54
It’s really time to go on a break. It’s time to step back, to get a little bit of a sense of what’s overall important and to relax. To get out of the day, to get out of this day-to-day flurry of events and to see what is really, really impactful in your life. So what is really, what are you really doing?

01:24
that moves you closer to your goals, your personal goals, both on the business side as well as on the personal side. What we do day to day and what really counts there, I found recently, a couple of years ago when my first son was old enough to understand that daddy is sometimes going to work and then not being at home.

01:54
He asked me when he was maybe three, four years old, Daddy, what are you doing when you’re going to work?

02:03
So how do you explain what a statistician is doing to a three-year-old boy?

02:11
So I said, maybe just focus on what’s really, really important. And I told him that the company I’m working for is producing medicines that’s helping sick patients, sick people like him when he’s feeling bad, when he’s hurt himself or things like that. And for other, other…

02:40
different diseases that people can get. And that moment where I talked to him about why I’m actually going to work, not so much what I’m actually doing there, but why I’m going to work, what’s the final impact there, that was really, really noticeable for me.

03:10
I really connected with my son at that point in time. So this is also why I actually started this podcast. It’s for you to reach your full potential in order to be successful in your job and that ultimately helps patients.

03:38
I think we as statisticians can play a crucial role there. And the better we do our work, the more influential we are, the better will be the decisions for patients. So this is really my underlying goal for this podcast. And I hope that it helps you to achieve your goals.

04:03
in order to serve the patients for the different indications that you’re working on.

04:11
But it’s now vacation time, so we are not working. And I think it’s really, really important to take a break and to not work during vacation time. I think it’s also really important to take these longer breaks, because then you really get into an offline mode. You really get into a non-work mode. And…

04:39
Both mentally and physically you can recover.

04:45
Of course, it might feel stressful to go on vacation at the first moment because you think of all the work that piles up and these kind of things. But I hope that some of these episodes on the podcast help you to set up things in such a way that you don’t need to worry about work during vacation. That all the other things are taken care of, that no burning things pop up that can’t be handled by others.

05:18
It’s really vital for us to be productive. And in order to be productive, we also need to relax from time to time.

05:29
and then we can really be impactful and not just busy at work. Too often we are just kind of busy doing one task after the other without moving really the needle further. And I think vacation time helps you to see what’s really meaningful in the end. So as it is vacation time,

05:58
This is a rather short episode. So in summary, take the time to relax, connect with people that are really important for you. Take time to reflect on what’s important for you to see what’s a bigger picture is. And don’t work on vacation. And I’m also taking this seriously. So next week there will be no episode.

06:27
and the effective statistician is also taking a break. Thereafter, we have already recorded lots of those episodes for the rest of the year. So stay tuned and have a nice time. Talk to you again in two weeks.

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I want to help the community of statisticians, data scientists, programmers and other quantitative scientists to be more influential, innovative, and effective. I believe that as a community we can help our research, our regulatory and payer systems, and ultimately physicians and patients take better decisions based on better evidence.

I work to achieve a future in which everyone can access the right evidence in the right format at the right time to make sound decisions.

When my kids are sick, I want to have good evidence to discuss with the physician about the different therapy choices.

When my mother is sick, I want her to understand the evidence and being able to understand it.

When I get sick, I want to find evidence that I can trust and that helps me to have meaningful discussions with my healthcare professionals.

I want to live in a world, where the media reports correctly about medical evidence and in which society distinguishes between fake evidence and real evidence.

Let’s work together to achieve this.