Welcome to Gratitude Driven, a weekly newsletter where I share practical ideas and insights across personal growth, professional development, and the world of AI/ML. ✨

Here's something that bugs me about the "just build projects" advice everyone gives career-switchers: it doesn't automatically help you get a job.

When a hiring manager looks at your resume, they're not asking "can this person code?" They're asking "if I put this person on my team, will they figure out the right thing to build, handle practical constraints, and deploy something stable to production?" Your to-do app on GitHub doesn't answer that. It tells them you can write code in isolation, sure, but that’s table stakes.

So the reality is, most portfolio projects don’t actually help move your career forward in a meaningful way.

In this video, I talk about how to find project ideas that do actually demonstrate you’re a viable candidate, and even count as professional experience without having to get a super competitive internship or entry-level role.

Blog version is here.

If someone asked you to describe your personal values, you'd probably have some answers pretty top of mind: family, creativity, honesty, knowledge. When we think about our values, we tend to assume they're a stable part of who we are, and that the real challenge is just living up to them.

But your values aren't as fixed as you think. They change over time, not only as you grow and develop a personal philosophy, but also simply as you go about your day. And when behavior and values diverge (as they do all too often for most of us), the research says it's usually the values that move to match behavior, not the other way around.

Psychologist Milton Rokeach spent decades studying how values change. In his self-confrontation experiments, he showed people objective evidence of contradictions between their stated values and their actual behavior. What he found is that this produced long-term changes in people's values.

The mechanism behind this is cognitive dissonance. When our actions contradict our stated values, we feel an internal inconsistency that needs to resolve somehow. And more often than not, we resolve it by adjusting what we say we value rather than changing what we do. It's the path of least resistance.

Tatjana Schnell names this pattern the "value-action gap." As she writes in The Psychology of Meaning in Life, "The fact that something is considered valuable or good does not necessarily translate into action." And when action and value diverge for long enough, the value shifts to match what you're actually doing. You don't decide to stop caring about something… you just gradually do.

This impacts us in a couple of ways. Sometimes it means we lower our standards and stop holding ourselves to things we once cared about. But it also shows up when we over-index on a single value at the expense of everything else. Schwartz's Values Wheel maps human values along a set of tensions, one of the most important being self-enhancement (achievement, power) versus self-transcendence (benevolence, universalism).

Achievement is a real and useful value (one I hold deeply myself). But when we consistently prioritize it and neglect the things on the other side of the wheel, like being present for family or making time for friends, we don't just create a temporary imbalance. We actually start to reorganize our entire value system around self-enhancement. Not because we made a conscious decision, but because our behavior slowly changed what we care about.

So here's an exercise that flips the usual approach to evaluating our values: Rather than asking yourself what you value and trying to act accordingly, look at what your actions already reveal.

Take your calendar from last week and your bank statement from last month. If someone studied only those two documents, what would they conclude you care about? There's a good chance their answer won't line up with what you'd say your values are.

If that's the case, it's nothing to be ashamed of. This is basically Rokeach's self-confrontation method applied to your own life: giving yourself objective data about the gap between your stated values and your lived ones. And according to his research, that kind of self-confrontation is exactly what produces real change.

The good news is that the same mechanism that changes your values without your awareness can be used deliberately. If your calendar says you value work above everything else but you want your relationships to carry more weight, you don't need to completely change your life. Pick one small behavior that reflects the value you want to hold onto, and do it consistently. Because your actions don't just reflect your values: Over time, they shape them.

This month I launched the AI/ML Career Launchpad, the learning community I wish I had when I was starting my career in the field.

It’s a structured path for navigating skill development, portfolio projects, job applications, and more, all with direct access to me for any questions you have along the way.

Learn more here. 🚀

Want to chat 1:1? Book time with me here.

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