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. ✨

Fully remote job postings dropped to roughly 6% of new US listings in 2025, down from around 15% a year earlier. Two thirds of remote roles gone in twelve months. 🤯

But hope is not lost! There are still remote tech jobs — you just need to stop looking for them on LinkedIn.

This week's video breaks down exactly where to find remote jobs, and what distributed-first companies actually look for in candidates.

Blog version is here.

Last 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.

If you sign up today you’ll be able to join for our next live Q&A on May 21st!

Learn more here. 🚀

After a setback, most people try to reconstruct exactly what went wrong. This makes sense of course — if we can understand where we got off track, we can prevent the next failure, right? This kind of precision helps us do good work and build reliable software after all.

But unfortunately, this approach doesn’t work as well when it comes to analyzing our personal failures.

Dan McAdams, a psychologist who has spent decades studying how people construct their life stories, found that when it comes to processing hardship, “coherence” matters more than accuracy.

To understand this, imagine two people who went through, say, a layoff. The one who builds a more coherent story about what happened (even if it assigns meaning to the events that weren’t empirically verifiable) tends to move forward more easily than the person who has a more factually precise account of what happened and why.

For example, a coherent story might be:

“The layoff was hard, but it’s making me take time off that I otherwise wouldn’t have. This is an opportunity for me reflect on what I actually want to spend my time on. The stress is worthwhile because it will make me happier in the long run — everything happens for a reason, after all.”

This person is telling themselves what McAdams calls a “redemptive story.” Redemptive stories frame the pain as leading somewhere; even though the pain sucked, something grew in its aftermath.

Contrast that to perhaps a more accurate story: “The execs are out of touch and over-hired during Covid, but they won’t admit it and now they’re using AI as an excuse to eliminate my role. I’m fucked and it’s not my fault.”

This is called a “contamination story” in the research. Contamination stories frame experience as decline: things were fine, then they went south, and that’s the end of the story.

People with high standards often default to contamination stories because they’re usually more factually accurate. This instinct toward maximum accuracy feels like intellectual honesty, while redemptive stories can seem naive.

But the thing is, while this perspective may be accurate as far as the facts, it doesn't say anything about what happens next. It closes the story at the point where things went wrong, which makes it hard to move on from effectively.

Tedeschi and Calhoun, the researchers behind the concept of post-traumatic growth, found that growth doesn't require denying pain or pretending a situation was fair. It just requires leaving the end of the story open enough to notice what happened alongside the painful experience. People who do this show greater resilience, more life satisfaction, and stronger motivation to help others. The redemptive framing can actually be practical. It makes you more likely to actually achieve your goals moving forward.

So my challenge to you is to take the hardest professional thing from the past year and ask: how did it shape you? What did you learn that you wouldn’t have otherwise? In what ways did it actually make you stronger now?

You don't have to feel grateful for what happened, or pretend it was a fun time. You just have to be willing to notice that your accurate story might also be an incomplete one.

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