I was recently at the Big Data Singapore meetup and had a chance to chill out with my good friend, John Berns. John has always been an inspiration to me for a lot of amazing things that he has achieved but more importantly, one of the aspects I absolutely admire him for is that he is always on the lookout for learning new things.

Now this may seem to be a default advice for people but what makes John different from the rest is that, he actually goes all out to make this happen, including organizing meetups and coordinate user groups to facilitate this. One such example was for the Coursera Machine Learning course thats in session now. John decided that he was going to participate and learn (not that he actually needs to, the guy is a genius), but the trick to ensure he stuck to it was to ping the Big Data User list and actually setup a meetup group to go through the Chapters and exercises together on a weekly or biweekly basis.

This fascinates me. Not many people I know actually go all in and find a way to stick to it. The takeaway from this is 1) Always be Learning and 2) Stick To It till the end.

Thanks John. You’re an inspiration.