Embrace Your Weirdness

You might be an outlier and you might haven't realized it yet

A concept I believe is really important nowadays when AI is closing the gap of what you can create and where you come from is: weirdness. The strange combination of skills that make you a valuable individual.

At some point of our lives, someone tells you to pick a lane.

The school, a teacher, family, social media. Maybe your own head at 2am wondering if you’re interested on too many things to ever be taken seriously at any of them.

“Pick one thing, go deep enough and become an expert at that for the rest of your life.”

Although the most interesting people I’ve come across didn’t get there by picking a lane but by refusing to.

Specialists & Outliers

I’ve been recently reading Dan Koe’s Purpose & Profit and a concept that grasped my attention was that the education system was never designed to help you reach your potential but to turn you into a useful workers in an interchangeable role.

Debatable but I can see the point behind it, if you’re only trained to do one thing you can’t adapt. Specialization isn't bad. But betting your entire identity on a single skill, in a world that's moving this fast, is the riskiest thing you can do.

Your Weird Combination Is the Advantage

I’ll use my own story here because it’s the most honest one I have.

I graduated from med school in Venezuela in 2019. But I felt something was off. Not wrong exactly, I knew I was supposed to be there but I wasn’t feeling fulfilled.

So I started exploring other things on the side: bartending, mobile app development, whatever I could get my hands on.

Then the pandemic hit, and I stumbled upon Python.

Something clicked.

I started applying it to football analytics and got immediately hooked.

I took MOOCs, networked with people in the industry, and eventually joined a non-profit group of analysts working with NWSL and national teams with real data from top providers like StatsBomb, Tracab, Opta.

Then I expanded into data science and machine learning applied to business. This expertise helped me land my first tech role at an AI consultancy, working on health projects and speech recognition.

Along the way, LLMs and RAGs came into the picture, and I started applying all of it to the projects I was already building.

At every step, someone raised an eyebrow.

Why tech? You are a doctor. Why football? You’re a doctor in tech.

I never had a clean answer, but I knew I was shaping the foundations of my identity.

At some point I got honest with myself about where I actually stood. I listed the gaps in my foundations: systems thinking, engineering depth, the ability to build things that work in production and not just in a notebook.

So I looked back at my background as my advantage and started building from it.

I had:

• A medical mindset

• Data/AI engineering foundations

• Football domain knowledge

• AI tools to help me build and mix all of these.

That led me to create my own Venn diagram intersection.

Image by Claude

That’s Koe’s point when he says you are the niche.

Most people spend their careers searching for an external niche to fit into (I’ve been guilty of that too). But your specific combination of experience and context it’s already a niche. You're standing in it.

A couple of days ago on a Saturday night, I was building my football RAG system (a project that’s teaching a lot on engineering foundations), and I lost track of time. I ended working from 9pm to 3am. It felt like craft and I think that’s what happens when you stop fighting your weird path and start building from it.

Mapping Your Own Stack

Some self-awareness is necessary here to understand how to mix your skills, (might sound like a self help book advice but trust me, you need to sit with yourself on this). I want to give you something I didn’t have at the beginning of my journey: a starting point.

Start by asking yourself these three questions. Note them down on a notepad, Notion, or somewhere else you can easily go back to:

• Is there something you know that most people in your field don’t? Something specific rather than general. What context do you bring that wasn’t in the job description?

• Where do your interests converge? The things you read on weekends, the problems you notice in one domain that nobody there is thinking about because they don’t have your other domain to compare it to.

• What can you build to work at the intersection of it? Think in projects, tools, analyses, newsletters. Something concrete that only you could have built from exactly where you’re standing.

• An extra: How can you leverage the use of AI to boost your skills?

I would start from there.

May The Weird Ones Prevail

We now know the system was not designed for this but AI is compressing the value of standard skills faster than most people are ready for.

What it can’t compress is taste, context, and the specific lens you’ve built from an unusual combination of experiences.

The people who do well in what’s coming won’t be the deepest specialists or the broadest generalists.

They’ll be the ones who can see across domains, connect things that shouldn’t logically connect, and build things that require a very specific, very strange set of keys to unlock.

Your weirdness is your moat.

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This newsletter is about building AI systems, using football analytics as the sandbox. But every now and then it's worth stepping back to talk about why we build what we build, and how we decide what's worth building next.

Till next time,

Ricardo.