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Identify and Tackle Your Self-Limiting Beliefs and
Finally Make Progress

I get a lot of email from developers and students looking to get started in machine learning.

The first question I ask them is what is stopping them from getting started?

I try to get to the heart of what they are struggling with, and almost always it is a self-limiting belief that has halted their progress.

In this post, I want to touch on some self-limiting beliefs I see crop up in my email exchanges and discussions with coaching students.

Maybe you will see yourself in one or more of these beliefs. If so, I urge you to challenge your assumptions.

Self-Limiting Belief

A self-limiting belief is something that you assume to be true that is limiting your progress. You presuppose something about yourself or about the thing you want to achieve. The problem is you hold that belief to be true and you don’t question it.

Steve Pavlina lists 3 types of self-limiting beliefs in is post: Dissolving Limiting Beliefs:

• If-then Beliefs: e.g. If I get started in machine learning, I will fail because I am not good enough.
• Universal Beliefs: e.g. All Data Scientists have a Ph.D. and are mathematics rock gods.
• Personal and Self-Esteem Beliefs: e.g. I’m not good enough to be a machine learner.

You’re probably a logical and rational thinker. Apply those skills to your own beliefs about your goals and aspirations in machine learning and challenge them.

Waiting To Get Started

I think the biggest class of limiting belief I see is the belief that you cannot get started until you have some specific prior knowledge. The problem is that the prior knowledge you think you need is either not required or is so vast in scope that even experts in that subject don’t know it all.

For example: “I need to KNOW statistics“. See how ambiguous that belief is. How much statistics, what areas of statistics and why do you need to know them before you can start your investigation into machine learning?

Below are some of the more common self-limiting beliefs of skills or prior knowledge that must be obtained before you can get started in machine learning.

I can’t get into machine learning until…

• …I get a degree or higher degree
• …I complete a course
• …I am good at linear algebra
• …I know statistics and probability theory
• …I have mastered the R programming language

You can get started in machine learning today, right now. Run your first classifier in 5 minutes. You’re in. Now, start blocking out what it is from machine learning that you really want?