Who Would You Call from Jail?

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.

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• Who Would You Call from Jail? The Power of “High A …

• Still Using Local Jupyter Like It’s 2018? Let’s Fi …

• My Recent Content

Who Would You Call from Jail? The Power of “High Agency.”

In the essay High Agency, George Mack explains a simple yet powerful idea: your success in life depends heavily on your ability to proactively shape your reality. This is having “high agency.” It means rejecting limits others try to place on you as well as breaking free from your own self-imposed barriers.

Mack asks a fun (is that the word?) question to illustrate his point: If you woke up in a jail cell in a third-world country and could make just one call, who would it be? Not the smartest person you know, not necessarily the most connected, but the one who would somehow find a way to get you out—the relentless problem solver, the person who never accepts “no.” That person embodies high agency.

This mindset matters deeply if you’re trying to break into challenging, competitive fields like machine learning. You'll constantly hear it’s too hard, too saturated, or you started too late. But if you operate from high agency, none of those excuses matter. You outwork, outsmart, and out-hustle doubts and competitors. You learn skills others say you can't, solve problems that scare others away, and create opportunities instead of waiting for them.

Key takeaway from the article: if your goal doesn’t defy the laws of physics, it’s achievable. Ignore the skeptics and the naysayers (including yourself sometimes!). Be the person who doesn't wait for permission, the person you'd call if you ever got stuck in that jail cell.

Still Using Local Jupyter Like It’s 2018? Let’s Fix That.

We’ve all been in this situation: You’re deep into a new project in a Jupyter notebook, and suddenly... your laptop taps out. You need more compute—but you don’t want to change your whole setup or get lost configuring AWS. This is exactly what Datalayer is built for.

Datalayer integrates directly with JupyterLab via an extension. Once installed, you get a new tile that lets you launch remote runtimes (with GPU options!) and manage them like local kernels. It feels like your usual workflow—except now your code is running on powerful machines in the cloud.

Prefer VS Code? Launch a runtime from the web app, copy the link, and connect it as a Jupyter server!

✨ Some more stuff I like about Datalayer:

• Runs on your local laptop without needing to change your code

• Pause/resume runtimes

• Persistent storage between sessions

• Snapshots to save runtime state

• Secrets support (securely inject API keys)

• AI Agents! Just launched — they can spin up local Jupyter notebooks and generate code for you on the fly

If you’ve outgrown your laptop or Colab limits, this is an easy upgrade—no DevOps required.

🚀 Try Datalayer for free and level up your notebooks without leaving them.

My Recent Content

Are You Too Dumb for Machine Learning? Dealing With Imposter Syndrome

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