Getting Laid Off Was The Best Thing That Happened to Me
A Twist to a Life That Made $11.4 Million in Revenue
It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.
Epictetus
Some years ago I was in the middle of a protest when some paramilitaries arrived to make us disperse. After some minutes of discussion, they raised their weapons and everybody started running away. Everybody, but one girl… she was one of the most furious members of the student movement, she was brave and intense, but she was paralyzed.
When people face a disastrous situation the brain floods with chemicals that make them feel stressed, it’s natural, and that’s how we survive. However, some people become paralyzed by these feelings of doom, putting themselves in further danger than they already were.
What happened to her, clearly applies to losing a job, it feels like a survival situation.
In Reinforcement Learning, an area of Artificial Intelligence, there’s a parameter called Epsilon (ε). Epsilon controls the balance between exploration (trying new actions to discover the environment) and exploitation (using known actions that yield higher rewards).
If you think about it, animals have their own version of this parameter: some cats can…
