Before I entered the world of work I was a student at the University of Stirling. During my 4 years there I played American Football for the university team and one of the activities we used to do in our classroom sessions each week was review the goals we set ourselves at the beginning of the season. We were asked each week: “Hand on heart, who has done what they can this week to achieve their goals?”. Initially, the peer pressure in these sessions made you do what you could each week to better yourself and the team.

Throughout this experience I found it amazing how much I could achieve when I actually applied myself, didn’t procrastinate and said to myself: “Just do it” (this quote was not sponsored by Nike).

This is something that has stayed with me since then (about 10 years ago) and I have no doubt this has helped me along the road to where i am today.

I recently read a blog by Rebecca Roland (@RebeccaJRoland, blog here) which has sparked my reminiscing on the subject. Throughout the blog she talks about having a workbook with the different types of charts she has built/learned. A great idea but the thing I really like about this is that Rebecca has developed a hit list. A number of different charts that she would like to learn how to build in Tableau and I think this is an absolutely fantastic idea so I am going to pinch it! I am going to create my own hit list and you will probably see some of the content posted here. Some of the things that will be on this will be a marginal histogram, a hex map and probably a map of the states in America that has Alaska and Hawaii in positions closer to the main body of the country.

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to get in touch. My twitter page is here.