Welcome to Gratitude Driven, a weekly newsletter where I share practical ideas and insights across personal growth, professional development, and the world of AI and data science.
In This Newsletter
Become a Data Scientist in 2025
This week on my YouTube channel, I shared a ~1 hour long video on how to become a data scientist, from absolute beginner to your first job.
As a companion to the video, I also created a free 80+ page e-book with the complete roadmap, along with links to learning resources, checklists, example projects, and more.
If you missed the e-book, you can download it here.
Deeply Experiencing Life While Pursuing Big Goals
Working towards big goals ā like transitioning into a new career ā can consume so much of our energy that itās easy to lose sight of the present moment. As the year comes to a close, many of us find ourselves making plans for the year ahead. The promise of new beginnings and ambitious goals can be really engagingābut itās also worth pausing to consider how we approach them.
Iāve been reading Meditations for Mortals, the new book by Oliver Burkeman (the author of Four Thousand Weeks), Ā and one section towards the end of the book stood out to me. Ā It explores the idea that when striving for goals, we should be careful not to let those ambitions keep us from living fully in the present. Burkeman reminds us that real life is happening right now, not just at some future point when everything feels āsettledā or accomplished. Here are two relevant passages from the book:
āIf there's a single truth at the heart of the imperfectionist outlook, it's the one to which we turn as we begin this final week: that this, here and now, is real life. This is it. This portion of your limited time, the part before you've managed to get on top of everything, or dealt with your procrastination problem, or graduated or found a partner or retired; and before the survival of democracy or the climate have been secured: this part matters just as much as any other and arguably even more than any other, since the past is gone and the future hasn't occurred yet, so right now is the only time that really exists. If instead you take the other approach- if you see all of this as leading up to some future point when real life will begin, or when you can finally start enjoying yourself, or feeling good about yourself - then you'll end up treating your actual life as something to 'get through,' until one day it'll be over, without the meaningful part ever having arrived. We have to show up as fully as possible here, in the swim of things as they are. None of that means you don't get to harbor ambitious plans as well - about the things you'll accomplish, the fortune you'll accumulate, or the difference you'll make to the world. Far from it. It means you get to pursue those goals and feel alive and absorbed while pursuing them, instead of postponing the aliveness to when or if they're achieved.ā
āShowing up more fully in the present is about how you pursue your plans for the future; it certainly does require that you abandon them. It means letting go of the notion that you can't quite allow yourself to feel fully immersed in life before those plans are realized, and coming to understand on the contrary that the pursuit of ambitious goals is one excellent way to be fully immersed in life.ā
So, make those big plans for next year. Execute on them fully. But donāt forget to show up for life as itās happening. The pursuit of goals is one way to engage deeply with the presentābut we canāt let the future hold all the keys to our sense of aliveness. This moment, right now, is just as important.
What Iām Watching
This was a fun video by Welch Labs about neural scaling laws, showing how AI performance improves predictably with more compute, data, and model size, while exploring why these trends hold and whether they represent fundamental limits of AI. Definitely worth checking out.
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