Non-technical talents can benefit data scientists in addition to statistics and programming.

As our article 5 Most In-Demand Skills for Data Scientists shows, being business-minded is useful. How can you get such a diverse skill set? We've compiled a list of helpful resources.

Data science, data analysis, programming, and business are covered. Even a few of these books will make you a better data scientist.

Ready? Let’s dive in.

Best books for data scientists

1. The Black Swan

Author: Nassim Taleb

First, a less obvious title. Nassim Nicholas Taleb's seminal series examines uncertainty, probability, risk, and decision-making.

Three characteristics define a black swan event:

• It is erratic.

• It has a significant impact.

• Many times, people try to come up with an explanation that makes it seem more predictable than it actually was.

People formerly believed all swans were white because they'd never seen otherwise. A black swan in Australia shattered their belief.

Taleb uses this incident to illustrate how human thinking mistakes affect decision-making. The book teaches readers to be aware of unpredictability in the ever-changing IT business.

Try multiple tactics and models because you may find the answer.

2. High Output Management

Author: Andrew Grove

Intel's former chairman and CEO provides his insights on developing a global firm in this business book. We think Grove would choose “management” to describe the talent needed to start and run a business.

That's a skill for CEOs, techies, and data scientists. Grove writes on developing productive teams, motivation, real-life business scenarios, and revolutionizing work.

Five lessons:

• Every action is a procedure.

• Meetings are a medium of work

• Manage short-term goals in accordance with long-term strategies.

• Mission-oriented teams accelerate while functional teams increase leverage.

• Utilize performance evaluations to enhance output.

So — if the above captures your imagination, it’s well worth getting stuck in.

3. The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

Author: Ben Horowitz

Few realize how difficult it is to run a business, even though many see it as a tremendous opportunity.

Business schools don't teach managers how to handle the toughest difficulties; they're usually on their own. So Ben Horowitz wrote this book.

It gives tips on creating and maintaining a new firm and analyzes the hurdles CEOs face.

Find suggestions on:

• create software

• Run a business.

• Promote a product

• Obtain resources

• Smart investment

• oversee daily operations

This book will help you cope with tough times.

4. Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning

Author: April Dunford

Your job as a data scientist is a product. You should be able to sell what you do to clients. Even if your product is great, you must convince them.

How to? April Dunford's advice: Her book explains how to connect with customers by making your offering seem like a secret sauce.

You'll learn:

• Select the ideal market for your products.

• Connect an audience to the value of your goods right away.

• Take use of three positioning philosophies.

• Utilize market trends to aid purchasers

5. The Mom test

Author: Rob Fitzpatrick

The Mom Test improves communication. Client conversations are rarely predictable. The book emphasizes one of the most important communication rules: enquire about specific prior behaviors.

Both ways work. If a client has suggestions or demands, listen carefully and ensure everyone understands. The book is packed with client-speaking tips.

6. Introduction to Machine Learning with Python: A Guide for Data Scientists

Authors: Andreas C. Müller, Sarah Guido

Now, technical documents.

This book is for Python-savvy data scientists who wish to learn machine learning. Authors explain how to use algorithms instead of math theory.

Their technique is ideal for developers who wish to study machine learning basics and use cases. Sci-kit-learn, NumPy, SciPy, pandas, and Jupyter Notebook are covered beyond Python.

If you know machine learning or artificial neural networks, skip this.

7. Python Data Science Handbook: Essential Tools for Working with Data

Author: Jake VanderPlas

Data work isn't easy. Data manipulation, transformation, cleansing, and visualization must be exact.

Python is a popular tool. The Python Data Science Handbook explains everything. The book describes how to utilize Pandas, Numpy, Matplotlib, Scikit-Learn, and Jupyter for beginners.

The only thing missing is a way to apply your learnings.

8. Python for Data Analysis: Data Wrangling with Pandas, NumPy, and IPython

Author: Wes McKinney

The author leads you through manipulating, processing, cleaning, and analyzing Python datasets using NumPy, Pandas, and IPython.

The book's realistic case studies make it a great resource for Python or scientific computing beginners. Once accomplished, you'll uncover online analytics, finance, social science, and economics solutions.

9. Data Science from Scratch

Author: Joel Grus

Here's a title for data scientists with Python, stats, maths, and algebra skills (alongside a grasp of algorithms and machine learning). You'll learn data science's essential libraries, frameworks, modules, and toolkits.

The author works through all the key principles, providing you with the practical abilities to develop simple code. The book is appropriate for intermediate programmers interested in data science and machine learning.

Not that prior knowledge is required. The writing style matches all experience levels, but understanding will help you absorb more.

10. Machine Learning Yearning

Author: Andrew Ng

Andrew Ng is a machine learning expert. Co-founded and teaches at Stanford. This free book shows you how to structure an ML project, including recognizing mistakes and building in complex contexts.

The book delivers knowledge and teaches how to apply it, so you'll know how to:

• Determine the optimal course of action for your ML project.

• Create software that is more effective than people.

• Recognize when to use end-to-end, transfer, and multi-task learning, and how to do so.

• Identifying machine learning system flaws

Ng writes easy-to-read books. No rigorous math theory; just a terrific approach to understanding how to make technical machine learning decisions.

11. Deep Learning with PyTorch Step-by-Step

Author: Daniel Voigt Godoy

The last title is also the most recent. The book was revised on 23 January 2022 to discuss Deep Learning and PyTorch, a Python coding tool.

It comprises four parts:

1. Fundamentals (gradient descent, training linear and logistic regressions in PyTorch)

2. Machine Learning (deeper models and activation functions, convolutions, transfer learning, initialization schemes)

3. Sequences (RNN, GRU, LSTM, seq2seq models, attention, self-attention, transformers)

4. Automatic Language Recognition (tokenization, embeddings, contextual word embeddings, ELMo, BERT, GPT-2)

We admire the book's readability. The author avoids difficult mathematical concepts, making the material feel like a conversation.

Is every data scientist a humanist?

Even as a technological professional, you can't escape human interaction, especially with clients.

We hope these books will help you develop interpersonal skills.

I read 53 novels last year and hope to do so again.

Books are best if you love learning. You get a range of perspectives, unlike podcasts and YouTube channels where you get the same ones.

Book quality varies. I've read useless books. Most books teach me something.

These 9 novels have changed my outlook in recent years. They've made me rethink what I believed or introduced me to a fresh perspective that changed my worldview.

You can order these books yourself. Or, read my summaries to learn what I've synthesized.

Enjoy!

Fooled By Randomness

Nassim Taleb worked as a Wall Street analyst. He used options trading to bet on unlikely events like stock market crashes.

Using financial models, investors predict stock prices. The models assume constant, predictable company growth.

These models base their assumptions on historical data, so they assume the future will be like the past.

Fooled By Randomness argues that the future won't be like the past. We often see impossible market crashes like 2008's housing market collapse. The world changes too quickly to use historical data: by the time we understand how it works, it's changed.

Most people don't live to see history unfold. We think our childhood world will last forever. That goes double for stable societies like the U.S., which hasn't seen major turbulence in anyone's lifetime.

Fooled By Randomness taught me to expect the unexpected. The world is deceptive and rarely works as we expect. You can't always trust your past successes or what you've learned.

Antifragile

More Taleb. Some things, like the restaurant industry and the human body, improve under conditions of volatility and turbulence.

We didn't have a word for this counterintuitive concept until Taleb wrote Antifragile. The human body (which responds to some stressors, like exercise, by getting stronger) and the restaurant industry both benefit long-term from disorder (when economic turbulence happens, bad restaurants go out of business, improving the industry as a whole).

Many human systems are designed to minimize short-term variance because humans don't understand it. By eliminating short-term variation, we increase the likelihood of a major disaster.

Once, we put out every forest fire we found. Then, dead wood piled up in forests, causing catastrophic fires.

We don't like price changes, so politicians prop up markets with stimulus packages and printing money. This leads to a bigger crash later. Two years ago, we printed a ton of money for stimulus checks, and now we have double-digit inflation.

Antifragile taught me how important Plan B is. A system with one or two major weaknesses will fail. Make large systems redundant, foolproof, and change-responsive.

Reality is broken

We dread work. Work is tedious. Right?

Wrong. Work gives many people purpose. People are happiest when working. (That's why some are workaholics.)

Factory work saps your soul, office work is boring, and working for a large company you don't believe in and that operates unethically isn't satisfying.

Jane McGonigal says in Reality Is Broken that meaningful work makes us happy. People love games because they simulate good work. McGonigal says work should be more fun.

Some think they'd be happy on a private island sipping cocktails all day. That's not true. Without anything to do, most people would be bored. Unemployed people are miserable. Many retirees die within 2 years, much more than expected.

Instead of complaining, find meaningful work. If you don't like your job, it's because you're in the wrong environment. Find the right setting.

The Lean Startup

Before the airplane was invented, Harvard scientists researched flying machines. Who knew two North Carolina weirdos would beat them?

The Wright Brothers' plane design was key. Harvard researchers were mostly theoretical, designing an airplane on paper and trying to make it fly in theory. They'd build it, test it, and it wouldn't fly.

The Wright Brothers were different. They'd build a cheap plane, test it, and it'd crash. Then they'd learn from their mistakes, build another plane, and it'd crash.

They repeated this until they fixed all the problems and one of their planes stayed aloft.

Mistakes are considered bad. On the African savannah, one mistake meant death. Even today, if you make a costly mistake at work, you'll be fired as a scapegoat. Most people avoid failing.

In reality, making mistakes is the best way to learn.

Eric Reis offers an unintuitive recipe in The Lean Startup: come up with a hypothesis, test it, and fail. Then, try again with a new hypothesis. Keep trying, learning from each failure.

This is a great startup strategy. Startups are new businesses. Startups face uncertainty. Run lots of low-cost experiments to fail, learn, and succeed.

Don't fear failing. Low-cost failure is good because you learn more from it than you lose. As long as your worst-case scenario is acceptable, risk-taking is good.

The Sovereign Individual

Today, nation-states rule the world. The UN recognizes 195 countries, and they claim almost all land outside of Antarctica.

We agree. For the past 2,000 years, much of the world's territory was ungoverned.

Why today? Because technology has created incentives for nation-states for most of the past 500 years. The logic of violence favors nation-states, according to James Dale Davidson, author of the Sovereign Individual. Governments have a lot to gain by conquering as much territory as possible, so they do.

Not always. During the Dark Ages, Europe was fragmented and had few central governments. Partly because of armor. With armor, a sword, and a horse, you couldn't be stopped. Large states were hard to form because they rely on the threat of violence.

When gunpowder became popular in Europe, violence changed. In a world with guns, assembling large armies and conquest are cheaper.

James Dale Davidson says the internet will make nation-states obsolete. Most of the world's wealth will be online and in people's heads, making capital mobile.

Nation-states rely on predatory taxation of the rich to fund large militaries and welfare programs.

When capital is mobile, people can live anywhere in the world, Davidson says, making predatory taxation impossible. They're not bound by their job, land, or factory location. Wherever they're treated best.

Davidson says that over the next century, nation-states will collapse because they won't have enough money to operate as they do now. He imagines a world of small city-states, like Italy before 1900. (or Singapore today).

We've already seen some movement toward a more Sovereign Individual-like world. The pandemic proved large-scale remote work is possible, freeing workers from their location. Many cities and countries offer remote workers incentives to relocate.

Many Western businesspeople live in tax havens, and more people are renouncing their US citizenship due to high taxes. Increasing globalization has led to poor economic conditions and resentment among average people in the West, which is why politicians like Trump and Sanders rose to popularity with angry rhetoric, even though Obama rose to popularity with a more hopeful message.

The Sovereign Individual convinced me that the future will be different than Nassim Taleb's. Large countries like the U.S. will likely lose influence in the coming decades, while Portugal, Singapore, and Turkey will rise. If the trend toward less freedom continues, people may flee the West en masse.

So a traditional life of college, a big firm job, hard work, and corporate advancement may not be wise. Young people should learn as much as possible and develop flexible skills to adapt to the future.

Sapiens

Sapiens is a history of humanity, from proto-humans in Ethiopia to our internet society today, with some future speculation.

Sapiens views humans (and Homo sapiens) as a unique species on Earth. We were animals 100,000 years ago. We're slowly becoming gods, able to affect the climate, travel to every corner of the Earth (and the Moon), build weapons that can kill us all, and wipe out thousands of species.

Sapiens examines what makes Homo sapiens unique. Humans can believe in myths like religion, money, and human-made entities like countries and LLCs.

These myths facilitate large-scale cooperation. Ants from the same colony can cooperate. Any two humans can trade, though. Even if they're not genetically related, large groups can bond over religion and nationality.

Combine that with intelligence, and you have a species capable of amazing feats.

Sapiens may make your head explode because it looks at the world without presupposing values, unlike most books. It questions things that aren't usually questioned and says provocative things.

It also shows how human history works. It may help you understand and predict the world. Maybe.

The 4-hour Workweek

Things can be done better.

Tradition, laziness, bad bosses, or incentive structures cause complacency. If you're willing to make changes and not settle for the status quo, you can do whatever you do better and achieve more in less time.

The Four-Hour Work Week advocates this. Tim Ferriss explains how he made more sales in 2 hours than his 8-hour-a-day colleagues.

By firing 2 of his most annoying customers and empowering his customer service reps to make more decisions, he was able to leave his business and travel to Europe.

Ferriss shows how to escape your 9-to-5, outsource your life, develop a business that feeds you with little time, and go on mini-retirement adventures abroad.

Don't accept the status quo. Instead, level up. Find a way to improve your results. And try new things.

Why Nations Fail

Nogales, Arizona and Mexico were once one town. The US/Mexico border was arbitrarily drawn.

Both towns have similar cultures and populations. Nogales, Arizona is well-developed and has a high standard of living. Nogales, Mexico is underdeveloped and has a low standard of living. Whoa!

Why Nations Fail explains how government-created institutions affect country development. Strong property rights, capitalism, and non-corrupt governments promote development. Countries without capitalism, strong property rights, or corrupt governments don't develop.

Successful countries must also embrace creative destruction. They must offer ordinary citizens a way to improve their lot by creating value for others, not reducing them to slaves, serfs, or peasants. Authors say that ordinary people could get rich on trading expeditions in 11th-century Venice.

East and West Germany and North and South Korea have different economies because their citizens are motivated differently. It explains why Chile, China, and Singapore grow so quickly after becoming market economies.

People have spent a lot of money on third-world poverty. According to Why Nations Fail, education and infrastructure aren't the answer. Developing nations must adopt free-market economic policies.

Elon Musk

Elon Musk is the world's richest man, but that’s not a good way to describe him. Elon Musk is the world's richest man, which is like calling Steve Jobs a turtleneck-wearer or Benjamin Franklin a printer.

Elon Musk does cool sci-fi stuff to help humanity avoid existential threats.

Oil will run out. We've delayed this by developing better extraction methods. We only have so much nonrenewable oil.

Our society is doomed if it depends on oil. Elon Musk invested heavily in Tesla and SolarCity to speed the shift to renewable energy.

Musk worries about AI: we'll build machines smarter than us. We won't be able to stop these machines if something goes wrong, just like cows can't fight humans. Neuralink: we need to be smarter to compete with AI when the time comes.

If Earth becomes uninhabitable, we need a backup plan. Asteroid or nuclear war could strike Earth at any moment. We may not have much time to react if it happens in a few days. We must build a new civilization while times are good and resources are plentiful.

Short-term problems dominate our politics, but long-term issues are more important. Long-term problems can cause mass casualties and homelessness. Musk demonstrates how to think long-term.

The main reason people are impressed by Elon Musk, and why Ashlee Vances' biography influenced me so much, is that he does impossible things.

Electric cars were once considered unprofitable, but Tesla has made them mainstream. SpaceX is the world's largest private space company.

People lack imagination and dismiss ununderstood ideas as impossible. Humanity is about pushing limits. Don't worry if your dreams seem impossible. Try it.

Thanks for reading.

Learn these subtle cues to gain influence.

Hate being ignored?

As a 24-year-old, I struggled at work. Attention-getting tips How to avoid being judged by my size, gender, and lack of wrinkles or gray hair?

I've learned seniority hacks. Influence. Within two years as a product manager, I led a team. I'm a Stanford MBA student.

These communication hacks can make you look senior and influential.

1. Slowly speak

We speak quickly because we're afraid of being interrupted.

When I doubt my ideas, I speak quickly. How can we slow down? Jamie Chapman says speaking slowly saps our energy.

Chapman suggests emphasizing certain words and pausing.

2. Interrupted? Stop the stopper

Someone interrupt your speech?

Don't wait. "May I finish?" No pause needed. Stop interrupting. I first tried this in Leadership Laboratory at Stanford. How quickly I gained influence amazed me.

Next time, try “May I finish?” If that’s not enough, try these other tips from Wendy R.S. O’Connor.

3. Context

Others don't always see what's obvious to you.

Through explanation, you help others see the big picture. If a senior knows it, you help them see where your work fits.

4. Don't ask questions in statements

“Your statement lost its effect when you ended it on a high pitch,” a group member told me. Upspeak, it’s called. I do it when I feel uncertain.

Upspeak loses influence and credibility. Unneeded. When unsure, we can say "I think." We can even ask a proper question.

Someone else's boasting is no reason to be dismissive. As leaders and colleagues, we should listen to our colleagues even if they use this speech pattern.

Give your words impact.

5. Signpost structure

Signposts improve clarity by providing structure and transitions.

Communication coach Alexander Lyon explains how to use "first," "second," and "third" He explains classic and summary transitions to help the listener switch topics.

Signs clarify. Clarity matters.

6. Eliminate email fluff

“Fine. When will the report be ready? — Jeff.”

Notice how senior leaders write short, direct emails? I often use formalities like "dear," "hope you're well," and "kind regards"

Formality is (usually) unnecessary.

7. Replace exclamation marks with periods

See how junior an exclamation-filled email looks:

Hi, all!
Hope you’re as excited as I am for tomorrow! We’re celebrating our accomplishments with cake! Join us tomorrow at 2 pm!
See you soon!

Why the exclamation points? Why not just one?

Hi, all.
Hope you’re as excited as I am for tomorrow. We’re celebrating our accomplishments with cake. Join us tomorrow at 2 pm!
See you soon.

8. Take space

"Playing high" means having an open, relaxed body, says Stanford professor and author Deborah Gruenfield.

Crossed legs or looking small? Relax. Get bigger.

Could this happen?

Medium isn't like other social media giants. It wasn't a dot-com startup that became a multi-trillion-dollar social media firm. It launched in 2012 but didn't gain popularity until later. Now, it's one of the largest sites by web traffic, but it's still little compared to most. Most of Medium's traffic is external, but they don't run advertisements, so it's all about memberships.

Medium isn't profitable, but they don't disclose how terrible the problem is. Most of the $163 million they raised has been spent or used for acquisitions. If the money turns off, Medium can't stop paying its writers since the site dies. Writers must be paid, but they can't substantially slash payment without hurting the platform. The existing model needs scale to be viable and has a low ceiling. Facebook and other free social media platforms are struggling to retain users. Here, you must pay to appreciate it, and it's bad for writers AND readers. If I had the same Medium stats on YouTube, I'd make thousands of dollars a month.

Then what? Medium has tried to monetize by offering writers a cut of new members, but that's unsustainable. People-based growth is limited. Imagine recruiting non-Facebook users and getting them to pay to join. Some may, but I'd rather write.

Alternatives:

• Donation buttons

• Tiered subscriptions ($5, $10, $25, etc.)

• Expanding content

and these may be short-term fixes, but they're not as profitable as allowing ads. Advertisements can pay several dollars per click and cents every view. If you get 40,000 views a month like me, that's several thousand instead of a few hundred. Also, Medium would have enough money to split ad revenue with writers, who would make more. I'm among the top 6% of Medium writers. Only 6% of Medium writers make more than $100, and I made $500 with 35,000 views last month. Compared to YouTube, the top 1% of Medium authors make a lot. Mr. Beast and PewDiePie make MILLIONS a month, yet top Medium writers make tens of thousands. Sure, paying 3 or 4 people a few grand, or perhaps tens of thousands, will keep them around. What if great authors leveraged their following to go huge on YouTube and abandoned Medium? If people use Medium to get successful on other platforms, Medium will be continuously cycling through authors and paying them to stay.

Ads might make writing on Medium more profitable than making videos on YouTube because they could preserve the present freemium model and pay users based on internal views. The $5 might be ad-free.

Consider: Would you accept Medium ads? A $5 ad-free version + pay-as-you-go, etc. What are your thoughts on this?

Original post available here

Price Intelligently put out amazing content on pricing your SaaS product. This blog's link to the whole report is worth reading. Our key takeaways are below.

Don't base prices on the competition. Competitor-based pricing has clear drawbacks. Their pricing approach is yours. Your company offers customers something unique. Otherwise, you wouldn't create it. This strategy is static, therefore you can't add value by raising prices without outpricing competitors. Look, but don't touch is the competitor-based moral. You want to know your competitors' prices so you're in the same ballpark, but they shouldn't guide your selections. Competitor-based pricing also drives down prices.

Value-based pricing wins. This is customer-based pricing. Value-based pricing looks outward, not inward or laterally at competitors. Your clients are the best source of pricing information. By valuing customer comments, you're focusing on buyers. They'll decide if your pricing and packaging are right. In addition to asking consumers about cost savings or revenue increases, look at data like number of users, usage per user, etc.

Value-based pricing increases prices. As you learn more about the client and your worth, you'll know when and how much to boost rates. Every 6 months, examine pricing.

Cloning top customers. You clone your consumers by learning as much as you can about them and then reaching out to comparable people or organizations. You can't accomplish this without knowing your customers. Segmenting and reproducing them requires as much detail as feasible. Offer pricing plans and feature packages for 4 personas. The top plan should state Contact Us. Your highest-value customers want more advice and support.

Question your 4 personas. What's the one item you can't live without? Which integrations matter most? Do you do analytics? Is support important or does your company self-solve? What's too cheap? What's too expensive?

Not everyone likes per-user pricing. SaaS organizations often default to per-user analytics. About 80% of companies utilizing per-user pricing should use an alternative value metric because their goods don't give more value with more users, so charging for them doesn't make sense.

At least 3:1 LTV/CAC. Break even on the customer within 2 years, and LTV to CAC is greater than 3:1. Because customer acquisition costs are paid upfront but SaaS revenues accrue over time, SaaS companies face an early financial shortfall while paying back the CAC.

ROI should be >20:1. Indeed. Ensure the customer's ROI is 20x the product's cost. Microsoft Office costs $80 a year, but consumers would pay much more to maintain it.

A/B Testing. A/B testing is guessing. When your pricing page varies based on assumptions, you'll upset customers. You don't have enough customers anyway. A/B testing optimizes landing pages, design decisions, and other site features when you know the problem but not pricing.

Don't discount. It cheapens the product, makes it permanent, and increases churn. By discounting, you're ruining your pricing analysis.