The truth is, we spend most of our days trying not to follow every interesting rabbit hole the data puts in front of us.
Someone asks for “just a quick number,” and three joins, two CTEs, and one existential crisis later, we’ve found it—along with four other numbers nobody asked for but that we now can’t stop thinking about. We tell ourselves we’ll ignore them. We do not ignore them.
Case in point: I sat down last Saturday morning to look at one weird number. Four hours later it was afternoon, I still hadn’t finished, and nobody on earth had asked me to work on a Saturday. That’s not dedication. It’s curiosity… with questionable boundaries.
I’ve always loved puzzles. Crossword puzzles, logic puzzles… it doesn’t really matter. I don’t even mind asking for a clue now and then. The fun isn’t knowing the answer. The fun is figuring it out.
That’s probably why I became an analyst.
The truth is, half our job is explaining that correlation isn’t causation, while the other half is secretly hoping it is—just this once. It would make the story so much cleaner.
People think analysts spend their days building reports and dashboards. We do. But what we really do is ask questions.
Why is that number different? Why did it change? Should those two reports match? What happened here?
Every dataset tells a story. Our job is figuring out what it’s trying to say.
We build dashboards that we genuinely hope will help people make better decisions. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they’re opened once, admired for thirty seconds, and never seen again.
The truth is, nobody actually wants the raw data. They want the one number that confirms what they already believed walking into the meeting.
We know this. We give them the number. Then, gently, we show them the other numbers.
This is called being thorough. It’s also called hope.
Every “quick question” is a Trojan horse for a two-day project, and we say yes anyway—not because we have to, but because we’re curious like that. Somewhere between the fifth JOIN and the sixth GROUP BY, this stopped being a job requirement and became a personality trait.
We don’t fix the data because someone asked us to. We fix it because leaving it wrong feels like leaving a picture frame crooked on someone else’s wall. It nags at us until we fix it. Or maybe that’s just me.
I didn’t finish that Saturday problem in one sitting, by the way. I came back to it Sunday. I’m still a little annoyed about it.
Maybe that’s the real job description nobody puts in the posting.
Not “Proficient in SQL, Power BI, Tableau, SSIS…”
Although yes, preferably someone who can also remain reasonably calm at 11 p.m. when a package fails for reasons the error log refuses to explain.
No.
The real qualification is curiosity.
Someone who can’t walk past a number that doesn’t quite fit without wondering why.
The most honest conversation in any company happens in a footnote that says, “Excludes outliers.”
Almost nobody reads it.
We read it. We wrote it. We know exactly which outliers were excluded, why they were excluded, and we probably have strong opinions about whether they should have been excluded at all.
That’s the quiet, slightly obsessive, deeply curious life of an analyst.
Chasing the number nobody asked for. Straightening the picture frame nobody noticed was crooked. Following one more rabbit hole than we probably should.
Because every unexpected number tells a story. And every story begins with someone curious enough to ask one more question.
Our minds aren’t wired to stop at the answer. They’re wired to wonder what else we might be missing.
Brain clear 