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Why not take a risk and try something new?

Today we have a guest editorial as Steve is out of the office.

I don’t know about you, but I am pretty set in my ways. I have a routine and it is pretty consistent. I am not a huge risk taker. I tend to play it safe. So, what does it take to try something new? To take a risk and go into uncharted territory. To risk failure, but also a chance at success? For me, I guess all I needed was a bit of encouragement.

First, we must look at why we should try something new or take a risk. Sometimes it is hard to see what benefit might come from something new. If there is a risk, then is any reward really worth the possible failure? I believe trying something new and taking a chance can lead to good things. This is not always true of course, sometimes you can get the short end of the stick, and things don’t turn out as you had hoped. Still, the chance to discover something new that you enjoy; that you are good at can be very rewarding.

Writing these articles is something new that I tried several years ago. I appreciate Steve Jones sending a call out for people to write more articles; it was the encouragement I needed to give it a go. I wasn’t sure if I would be successful. I didn’t know if people would enjoy or appreciate the things I was writing about. I haven’t always done the best job. I am human and make mistakes or say things I shouldn’t. I haven’t always received positive responses, but I have learned that I enjoy writing more than I thought. Also, I do believe some people have enjoyed and perhaps benefited from things I have written.

As I took this small step in writing articles, I was motivated to try other new writing projects. I recently self-published a children’s book based off a story I used to tell my boys when they were young. It cost me a lot of money and I have no idea if the book will do well or not, but I decided to try something new and take a risk. If you are interested, you can take a look at it here.

So this is my call out to you. Be encouraged and take a risk and try something new. Failure is just an opportunity to learn. You might find something new that you enjoy. In my opinion it is worth the risk, so give it a shot.

How about you? What is something new you have been thinking about doing? Are there some small risks you could take, that might lead to something new that you enjoy?

Ben Kubicek from SQLServerCentral.com

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Question of the Day

Today's Question (by Steve Jones):

I decide to add a computed column to one of my tables. I use this code:

 ALTER TABLE dbo.SalesOrderHeader ADD PONumber AS 'PO' + OrderKey

I want to index this column. What happens when I run this code?

 CREATE INDEX SalesOrderHeaderIX_DPONumber ON dbo.SalesOrderHeader (PONumber)

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Yesterday's Question of the Day

Yesterday's Question (by Steve Jones):

I have a data frame with the passing leaders for the last three seasons of the NFL. The data looks like this:

 > passers Season Player Team Yards 1 2016 Drew Brees NOR 5208 2 2016 Matt Ryan ATL 4944 3 2016 Kirk Cousins WAS 4917 4 2016 Aaron Rodgers GNB 4428 5 2016 Philip Rivers SDG 4386 6 2016 Matthew Stafford DET 4327 7 2016 Joe Flacco BAL 4317 8 2016 Andrew Luck IND 4240 9 2016 Carson Palmer ARI 4233 10 2016 Russell Wilson SEA 4219

I want to plot a histogram of the number of times that a player as thrown for certain values of yards. Meaning I want a count of a frequency on one axis with the number of yards on the other.

I decide to use the hist() function, but what do I pass in?

Answer: hist(passers$Yards)

Explanation:

If I call hist(), I need to pass in a column of the data frame that is being used for the breakdown on one axis. The other one will be the frequency by default. This will give me this plot:

Ref: hist() - click here

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