In Search of Catholic School Excellence

**Transcript is auto-generated. Please excuse any errors.  

Welcome, folks, back to another episode for our summer series. We're talking books, and this week I'm joined by Pete McPherson of petemcpherson.com, and we're discussing The Dip by Seth Godin. Thanks for being here, Pete. Dude, absolutely. Thank you for having me. All right, so this is, I know Seth Godin's been a big hero of yours for so many years.

He's nice and short in terms of his words, but each of those words- ... has a huge impact. So even though this book is maybe 100 pages or so it's got so much stuff in there. Yeah. I was reading or listening to the audiobook for the first time. I read the book years ago. I re-listened to it over the past two weeks, and it's only 46 minutes.

And I kept thinking, "Oh, man. I downloaded this, and, like, where's the rest of the chapters?" No, that's it. That's it. Yeah. It's much like Derek Sivers in that they don't need much to say much. Mm-hmm. Correct. Yeah. I think, Mm-hmm ... even his blog posts are, like, less than 100 words or something crazy.

Mm-hmm. Yep. I dig it. All right. So anyway, the the idea of The Dip is, if I'm understanding this right, it's that we all go through some period of struggle in order to get to the good stuff that we're producing, right? And so it's quitting the wrong stuff, sticking with the right stuff, and having the guts to make that choice.

Mm-hmm ... how did you see this idea of The Dip? It's exactly that. I think the best way I would summarize my paraphrasing, let's just say that. Summarizing, summarize my paraphrasing of what the book is. He talks about two different curves. One curve is the dip, meaning if you're envisioning a line that goes straight horizontal or maybe even the line goes up, this is when you first start something.

It could be something work-related. It could be a new venture, a new project. It could be a new hobby. It could be learning to play pickleball or it could be anything. It's almost always fun. It's almost always easy when you start out. Mm-hmm. Learning things are fun. That initial improvement to the skill or the game or the work, whatever it is always fun, and the dip is exactly what you said.

It's when you're doing something for a while, maybe it's weeks, maybe it's hours, maybe it's months, years, and it gets harder, and it gets harder for everybody learning this particular thing, whatever it is, and he calls it a slog, which I love. Mm-hmm. And it may be it lasts months, maybe it lasts years. And the dip, the first curve we're talking about, there's two curves.

The first curve, the dip, should go back up. Mm-hmm. Meaning a lot of people never become professional pickleball players because it's really hard, and it requires a lot of time, effort, energy, sacrifice, money, all the things. But that dip goes back up if you can persist long enough, if you can work hard enough, if you can afford it, all those sorts of things.

So it's basically the shape of a U, right? The curve goes down and the curve will eventually go back up. A lot of people quit in the middle. But I think the main point of this book is actually the second curve. The first curve is the dip. The second curve Seth Godin calls the cul-de-sac or the dead end.

Or basically the first half of the dip curve, but it never goes back up. So these are projects where you work and you work and you work and you work and you never get better. That curve never goes back up. There's only the starting and then it dives off, it becomes harder, there's the slog, and it's never gonna come back up.

The point of the book- is being able to differentiate where, which curve you are on. Are you on the dip curve or are you on the dead-end cul-de-sac curve? And persisting on the dip curve, even though it's hard, and ruthlessly quitting the dead-end curves today, right now, this second- Mm-hmm ... identifying I'm on the dead-end curve.

I'm not on a dip curve. I need to quit it so that frees up my resources to focus on other things. That's it. That's my big paraphrasing of the the one-hour- That's great ... Seth Godin novel. I could not have put it that, that any better. I think it's so true, and if if I bend, we're bending these books to f- you know, kinda fit our listeners out there who are, leaders in Catholic schools.

Mm-hmm. And so, whether you're learning something or you're doing something and you keep going down that same path, it's, it, you have to kinda figure out if you're gonna be on that cul-de-sac or if this path is worth pursuing. Mm-hmm. I know in your own work if we can dive 10 seconds into it, you've had many opportunities to switch directions in your your business.

And I imagine you've sat through this process and thought about these things as you went. Yeah, absolutely. I think, again, I'll borrow Seth Godin's word. He says this a lot, especially earlier in the book. Being the best in the world, being the best in the world being a very loose term- Right

in this book, The Dip, right? It doesn't mean actual, the global population. It could be this is the best K through 12 Catholic school in Boise, or this is the best one little afterschool program for high schoolers that do robotics. I don't know, I'm just making this up. Right, right. The world means something different.

And going back to my own life and my own work, I think what I have done over the years is tried... I haven't figured this out yet. It's a constant- ... process for me. I've tried to figure out what is my world. Because for the longest time I had my world, as in who I wanted to serve, what I wanted to do, the work I wanted to do, the name of the business, the strategies, the products, the projects, everything- I think I misdefined those.

I defined those sometimes too broadly, sometimes too specific, sometimes just flat out wrong. And so my life, my work over the past 10 years has really been this process of who am I? What do I wanna do? What does my work look like? Sometimes I think I'm not focusing enough, quote, unquote, focus, right?

That word means- Mm-hmm ... that word means a lot of things to me personally, and sometimes that's just straight up true. I set out to do this project, and I got distracted. I let myself get distracted. I wanted to be distracted because of the dip, because this other thing took longer than expected, because this other thing was too hard, or it cost too much money, or whatever that stuff is.

Sometimes that's been the case. I've worked on the dead-end, cul-de-sac projects and ended up regretting it. Other times, I felt like I was doing the wrong things. I felt like I was unfocused, but I wasn't. I was actually learning and building skills and making progress towards something bigger and better, hopefully more broad.

It's trying to figure out what is your world? And for the school leaders listening to this, it's trying to figure that out. What are we trying to do exactly? How big does our reach need to be? Are we just trying to influence this one small town? Are we trying to get students in from elsewhere?

Are we trying to be this? Are we trying to be that? It's narrowing in on that definition, and I think you have to start there, and then you can start to figure out, okay These initiatives aren't actually doing aren't helping us reach those goals. Now that we've identified who we are, who we want to be, and those sorts of things, you can start to drill down into, okay, what are the projects we need to persist in even though it's going slower than we thought, and what projects are like, oh, these actually, these are the dead ends.

These are the cul-de-sacs. They're not actually helping us be who we want, and cut them ruthlessly. I hope that was helpful. Yeah. Yeah, no, that's great. I mean, I think it's hard for organizations, individuals, right? I mean, even in our own side projects or little worlds it's hard to know where you wanna go.

And I think with organizations, because there's so many people involved and because you think you might have this mission nailed down, that you never really look at, "Am I actually going towards that? Am I actually be- being true to that?" And so you end up doing a lot of things that you don't think are great and you might pursue them longer than you should.

So quitting early and often is, it's not a terrible thing. That, that kind of failure is actually the good kind of failure, and I think that's probably one of the main messages. But it's also when you have to recognize when something's worth pursuing, that you keep pursuing it, right? And not just a shiny object, but it's actually like this is important to us getting to that goal.

Yeah. I'll tell you one other interesting anecdote, again, from the book, not from my own life. I wish I was just smart like ... one example he gives, oh man, I forgot the company. Again, this is a business-related example. Sure. And I can't remember the company. Maybe it was GE. It was GE. The CEO or founder of General Electric, back in the day, I don't know when this was, he decided that if they could not be number one or maybe number two in any specific industry, maybe that's light bulbs.

Okay. I don't know why, but when I think of General Electric, I think of light bulbs. Maybe that's dumb. If we can't be number one or number two in an industry, we should not touch it at all. And part of the reason is not just because, oh, we won't make as much money, or, oh, we may not be successful, whatever.

Part of the reason is we want to train our employees, our teams, to think like this. We want to train them in a way that says, "Hey, we're trying to be the best at this one specific thing. We're not okay with just doing mediocre work everywhere and just getting by, just surviving," and this sort of thing. We wanna thrive.

We want to be the best at these one or two things, or like whatever that is. I thought that was- I thought that was helpful too. That was a, for lack of a better term, "aha moment," quote unquote, for me. Oh, that's interesting. This type of work, quitting things, ruthlessly quitting things that don't make sense, whatever, it's bigger than just the decisions you make.

It carries over into your mindset, your psyche. It affects decision-making. It's supposed to transform you and your organization all throughout Yeah. Yeah, I, we've been talking a lot with a lot of these other episodes about, kinda like drawing a line in the sand, embracing what you're good at and, articulating that or finding what it is, and letting the world know about it.

Because, Apple just came out with, or somebody just came out with a commercial where they have got vanilla ice cream, and it's one of the analogy I always use, it's everyone's selling vanilla. If everyone's selling vanilla, then w- who stands out, right? And so it's I want a butterscotch sundae, like we sh- we need to be able to choose what it is that, that we wanna be good at or that we are good at, and celebrate that. Because in the school world, the organization world, where you're trying to be everything to everybody, you're gonna be failing at all of those things most of the time.

Whereas, being able to do, w- well, of course we wanna do a good job at everything we have to do, but we wanna be really good at the things that we're really good at. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's hard- unless you are Breyers Ice Cream, unless you are the market leader, if you have the number one Catholic school in New York City, or like whatever that is, when somebody Googles Catholic primary school in New York City, if you're the top result in Google, if you have the brand, the market share that people tell their friends about, if you have that already, then you triple down on vanilla, right?

Right. You triple down on this idea that when faced... Hang on, I'll go one more thing. Toothpaste. Toothpaste, Thomas. If you go to your local Kroger, Meijer, Walmart, or whatever, and you look at the toothpaste aisle, it's massive. Right. And there's a million choices, and it's overwhelming, not just to me. I think this is just a pretty universal thing.

Go try and find a specific toothpaste at the grocery store. It's super overwhelming. And what do people do when choice when faced with this choice of like overwhelming options? They either go for the cheapest, period- Mm-hmm ... or they go for the market leader. Mm-hmm. If you are the market leader, if you are the vanilla ice cream, you can double down on that because vanilla is by far the number one selling ice cream flavor in the entire world.

It's actually in The Dip, by the way. Did you know that before you came up with the ice cream metaphor? Maybe I stole that 'cause I read The Dip initially, like many years ago. I might have stolen it from there. That's one of the examples he uses. There's four times, this was in 2006, Four times as much vanilla is sold than the second place, which is chocolate.

And then chocolate, more chocolate is sold than the rest of the top 10 put together, right? It's just crazy. Right. Number one market share is like 10X bigger than the number 10. And so if that is your company, you can lean into that. But like you said, I'm agreeing with you, if you're not that, right, you do have to think about who are we, who do we want to be, who do we want to serve, and lean into that Even if it's hard.

There you go. Yeah. Yeah, the the analogy I used to use, you think about an EQ in music where the frequencies are all jumping up, and I used to say, we wanna fill in all those frequencies, but if you do that in music, you end up with just noise, right? If everything is super loud, then you just end up with noise.

So you want some of those things to be nice and loud. And like you said if you're number one, it doesn't really matter what you're playing, everybody loves you. But if everybody else is trying to figure out, how to make that room, and you have to, And th- this idea of quitting is saying, "Well, we may not be as great at this other thing, so we're going to not invest as much energy in that, but we wanna invest more of that energy in the things that are truly important."

And deciding that it's truly important is, I think, the h- the hard part, maybe the first part of this process, and then actually being able to get through, the dip to get to the other side of, "Wow, we succeeded in that," and then we have to maintain it. I think that's- Yeah ... the first step is, for most schools, the hardest part.

Although they've been doing... They've been going through the dip for years. Well, it's also worth pointing out that quitting things, even things you should quit, are e- is very difficult. Mm-hmm. Right? Part of my psyche as a person, I don't mind sharing, is that I'm terrified of being perceived as a failure.

I'm not super into the Enneagram, but I'm an Enneagram 3. I know that much, and that's what defines us and motivates us to do anything. And so when I quit anything, other people notice, and they might think I'm a failure, right? That's hard. Creating a an initiative, maybe it's an initiative that's been going at your institution for years even.

Maybe it's time to quit. Maybe you should've quit three years ago, but maybe you should kill that program today. That might offend people. That might upset people that are involved who've worked hard over the past couple years with this initiative. It's never gonna be an easy thing to actually focus on what's important.

That requires, I mean, you said the word guts earlier, and that's the word Seth Godin uses a lot. It requires courage to- Yeah ... make that decision, to focus in, to hone in on one thing, right? Yeah. I think another one of the things I've appreciated about you telling your story over the years is you've been very open about, when you've made that decision, you tell everybody like, "Hey, I'm thinking about this," and you lay out your thinking for us.

I think having that kind of honesty and not trying to come up with some story and hide whatever it is that may be going, if a program is coming to an end, you can celebrate the people involved, you can talk about why it may or may not be continuing. Sometimes you can just let something die because it doesn't have as much of a presence that it's gonna cause a stir, but also ignoring it or making up some side story, sweeping under the rug is probably not gonna be great either.

So having the transparency, Yeah ... to do so, I think is huge. If you share that with folks, then people understand why. Oftentimes people are upset because they don't understand why. Yeah, that's clutch. That's clutch. How do you recognize when you're on the cul-de-sac or you're chasing something that's worthwhile?

I have no idea ... have you developed strategies over the years? Yes. Yes. Yeah. But it's a lame answer. I've thought about this so much, Thomas. The only answer I have... And by the way, Seth doesn't actually really, it doesn't give much practical, tactical advice in the book about this. I was expecting that.

I read the book years ago. I re-listened to it. I was expecting some more some questions I can ask myself to help me figure out am I on the right path or whatever. Nope, not very much. So here's my answer, and it's lame. Experience. That's the only, that's the only thing I could really think of for myself.

How do I realize when I start something or as I'm doing something if it's the right thing to be doing? Mm-hmm. Short-term and long-term, the only thing I can think of is just experience. I have done a lot of projects in my own work over the past 15, 16 years, where honestly now I think I'm much better at recognizing those cul-de-sacs versus the dips or whatever in the early stages.

Mm-hmm. I have, It might look... Sometimes it feels like I'm less focused 'cause I try this project, I only give it like a month or two to succeed, and then I quit it. And in the past, I think I probably did that out of panic. I had started a new initiative, it only lasted a year, or it only lasted six months or whatever that is, and I quit and it was like panicking.

Maybe I was in the dip. Maybe it was gonna succeed, I just didn't give it enough time. Mm-hmm. N- I think the more I do my work, the more I realize, nope, I think this is the cul-de-sac, and I'm just gonna move on and move on quickly. And I think once you do that and you actually have, you actually experience the other side of the dip, you start to realize, oh, this is different.

This finally feels different. After the last 10 things I've tried, I can see now, I can feel that this is going in the right direction, even if it's hard. Even if I'm in the slog right now, I can understand that only because I've quit these other projects, I've seen these successes, I've seen these failures.

I think it's just experience. I think that's why- I mean, I think that's why the most experienced people are leaders most of the time, right? Hopefully your audience, leaders of communities, leaders of schools, leaders of all that stuff, hopefully they are more experienced or continue to want to understand their own experiences, if that makes any sense.

Yeah. I don't know if it does. Yeah. I don't know. That's the only thing I can come up with. But if any- if you have anything better, please let me know. Well, I wish I did. I think it's more, For me, it's more about that, like I said, the first part of that process is recognizing can you figure it out?

And he says in the book, we often think that we're being brave by trudging through something that's gonna be terrible. I've been carrying this mantle for so long. But it's the braver thing is to actually, realize that "Hey, this initiative, even if it was my initiative, has failed, and, it's not gonna go anywhere."

This one quote that I picked out here is "It's easier to be mediocre than it is to confront reality and quit." And I f- and I feel you know- Mm-hmm in all walks of life, we accept mediocrity on so many levels because for either lack of a better option or we're not gonna go and do the work to make the better option, and so therefore we just, we live with that.

But at some point you've, if you're gonna try to be the best at something, you've gotta, you gotta wade through that mediocrity and and at least take a stand even if it's, potentially a wrong one. At least you're, there's an attempt, right? Yeah. But I think it's so important to, to identify who we are and try to get out of that mediocre zone because if we're all selling that, maybe we're not all selling vanilla, but if we're selling mediocrity, then it's, are we doing anybody a service, and I think if you're not evaluating even bigger picture, if you're not evaluating what you're doing and saying, "We are doing a good job at something," or, "We're not doing a great job at something. How do we address that?" Then- Yeah ... there, there's no progress, and you could be someplace for 40 years and still have no progress.

So we, we can't let that happen. No. I don't have anything to add to that. I like it. That's pretty funny. One of the other things he talks about is superstars. We, we often get blinded by somebody who... And we have this, in, in organizations everywhere, but you have somebody who can do everything or who can, who really turn something out of nothing, and we often get blinded by that success or that person's ability.

And then you realize once they s- you know, step out of that s- that spot that there's just been like this hole, right? And if you ever had somebody leave a job and you go clean up like the work that they've been doing recently, you kinda realize oh wow, either A, they were amazing and how are we gonna replace them?

Or B what would... I can't figure any of this out, how would they ever possibly work, and I think it's it's important to to, feed your superstars, but you also wanna make sure that you're bringing other folks along for that ride, right? And so you're not just living only on the fumes of those superstars.

In your own business you are the superstar, but you're also the the lackey and the grunt, all the grunt work. Yeah ... how do you- I'm the only one. Yeah, exactly. How do you how do you assess the work that you've been doing? And maybe the superstars are really your projects, right?

How do you then assess that? I mean, what's your way of saying that it's successful, not successful? Obviously it could be tied to money, but there's... I get the feeling there's more to it. You could get bored with something or you could get frustrated with something despite its success, and vice versa.

You could love something that's not making you any money. Yeah. It's a, it's changed over time, for one thing, and I think that's important for anybody to hear. Our goals, how we define success always changes over time, especially when you look at years. For me personally, I have ... it's a two-prong system.

It's a two-prong system. Number one, freedom. Mm-hmm. And freedom, I mostly mean freedom of my time and what I work on, when I choose to work. That has been the coffee filter through which I pour all my decisions, and it didn't used to be like that. It used to be I defined success as monetary gain because I needed money.

I needed to make my current work, for lack of a better term. Right. If that made any sense. But over the past couple years, that's changed. It's shifted, and now what I wanna do is what I wanna do, and here's what I mean by that. I like being unfocused. I like chasing shiny, new projects or ideas or strategies or any of that stuff.

It's what gives me fuel. I wake up in the morning more happy, joyous, excited for my day when I get to work on the things that I want to work on. I think everybody's like that to some degree. Mm-hmm. But for me, it's really important. If I don't have that, I have tended to be miserable. I've tried to fight through corporate work.

I had a full-time job for years and years, and I was really good at it, and I just hated it. It made me miserable, and that affected my marriage, affected my parenting. It affected my friendships. It affected everything. And so every decision I make is made through that. Does this get me that feeling in the morning?

Or actually, it's before I go to bed. You know what I mean? A bunch of people- Yeah ... dread Sunday nights if they don't like- ... their full-time jobs- Yeah ... that start on Monday morning. For me, it's that feeling. I want to have that feeling. Everything has to earn a little bit of money, period, so that I can put food on the table.

And once I reach that minimum threshold, which I can't even tell you exactly a dollar amount right this second, although I have defined that in the past, which I think is important for a solo entrepreneur especially. Once I have that, basically everything else is mapped to that feeling of Sunday night.

Am I excited to work on these things? If that is a yes, I'm good. I'm happy. I- Yeah ... that's it. Sometimes I feel that way even though I'm in a project that is be making me miserable during the day because it's not growing, or I'm doing some marketing things and they aren't working, or I tried selling this little project but it was a failure.

I have I could tell you plenty of one-off examples in the past year even of things I tried to do that were really clearly failures, and they don't bother me as much because I broaden this idea of Who I am and what I wanna do. The dip, right? I'm in the slog right now, in my opinion. If I had to draw that U-shaped curve of the dip in my own work and in my own life in general, I feel like I'm in the slog.

But I'm really happy being here. I've found the right slog to continue working. There have been a lot of maj- well, major and minor failures. I was gonna say major failures. There's a lot of- ... projects or strategies that failed or everything over the past several years. But at the end of the day, I look to that feeling on Sunday night, and I'm

It's not always 100% yes, I'm exactly where I need to be, what I wanna be doing. It's not always that way, but for the past four years, I feel like I've been in a pretty good place. I'm not saying it's easy. It's not. It's been hard. I'm in the slog, but that's my current definition of success, if that makes any sense.

And so everything is run through that filter. Yeah. I love that. I mean, we could all use that, right? Sunday night, am I excited for what I'm gonna be doing the next morning? Yes or no? And I think that's a good mirror test. Hey, this ... Is this what I'm chasing? And if we, pull that out further, obviously you're doing this for yourself, which I think doing it for yourself is harder, 'cause you don't have anybody else to bounce that off of.

Maybe your family or, your friends you can say, "Hey, what have you noticed lately?" But you recognizing that in yourself is really hard. As a leader you have to decide that for your business, in the our case, the organizations. A lot of these folks are making those decisions, but then also looking at their teams and saying, is everybody else, just sitting in a cul-de-sac and, chasing their tail, or are we, working on things that, that we wanna work on and are we building the thing that we really wanna build?

The schools go through this process every s- usually every six years where they get to self-assess and then present that self-assessment to an organization, and they decide whether or not they get accredited for, six years- Mm-hmm ... three years, one year, whatever it might be. And in that process always, I always find it interesting, because certain things will come to light or people bring things to light and it's "Hey, we have this, bump in the road," or, "We have this goal that we wanna achieve, and we're gonna do it."

And everybody says, "Yes, that's awesome." The accreditation group says, "Yes, you're awesome. Keep chasing that goal." And then six years goes by and you're like, "Hey, did we do that goal? We kinda worked on that goal." You just- Yeah ... you're just kinda not really, focusing in. And I think that's- It's so good to not just look at that once every six years, but to look at it constantly and make sure that you're, are we choosing the right things?

Are we, do we have folks starting projects and dropping them before they get done unnecessarily? Or, "Hey, that was a great project, let's see that through. Let's get you some support so you can actually finish that," right? 'Cause it's not just about the superstar being able to pull it through. So I think all of those things are so important for us to keep reassessing.

As we get to the end here, I wanna ask you, what are the takeaways that you may have for folks who are going to read this book or have read this book? From your perspective what's the key takeaway that you'd like to share?

Quote, unquote, "Redefining the scope to win." Redefining the scope to win. I think people age, we get older, we change. Our work changes, our companies change, our institutions change, all of it. Legislation changes, all of it. I think rereading The Dip over the past couple of weeks has just given me this permission to constantly, not in a bad way constantly, but to frequently reanalyze what I'm doing, my scope.

Mm-hmm. And ask myself "Is this what I should be doing?" Redefining the scope to win. It's an act. It's an activity that we need to do. It's not an idea we hear about on a podcast and we think, "Oh, that sounds kinda cool, helpful. I agree with these two people talking about this." It's an activity we need to do.

We need to brainstorm. We need to l- get a piece of paper and write down our initiatives. We need to m- have meetings. We need to ask other people. We need to bounce ideas off other people. We need to do something and then Run it through whatever those filters are. The coffee filter. The- Mm-hmm ... the definition of success filter.

We need to ask ourselves those questions. And we need to do it again, and again to stay focused, not for the sake of staying focused, but to stay focused to get what we want to get. Redefining the scope to win. That's what I had written down on my notes yesterday. Yeah. That's great. That's great.

It's a constant reassessment, right? At the end of the book, the thing that I would share is, he goes through all these things that, do you- how do you know that you're here or not here? And what are you gonna quit, not gonna quit? And it kinda says, how dare you waste your opportunity, right?

How dare you waste your resources in chasing something that you shouldn't? And it, obviously everybody's doing the best they can and n- no disrespect to anybody's, the work that they're doing, but it's true. If, even if we get 1% better every year, that 1% is exponential, right?

I mean, it's just like forever getting better. And if we're not focused on getting better, then we are wasting our time, right? We're wasting our resources. So the idea that we are, we can take a look at it, at what we're doing, how we're doing it, what's really important, and can we shut out everything else and build as a team that goal.

And then the actual steps to get to that goal. I think there's a lot of shiny objects and I'm a big fan of shiny objects too. I chase all kinds of things. But as you mentioned before, sometimes you, you recognize that's something, a shiny object that you don't need to start just yet.

You, you can kill it early. But the ones that you know are going to get you towards that end goal are the ones that you need to focus on, and reenergize everybody around. And I think if we- Mm-hmm ... if we're stay, if we're focused and we're increasing our, we're improving by 1%, then can't really fail at, striking out on these other things that, that we had to quit, right?

So- Yeah ... it's just for me, it's more about figure out what you wanna be good at and then chase that Resources are finite. All right. You only have so many of them. Yeah. Choose where to spend them wisely. Yeah, exactly. That's the entire book. Yeah. Well, Pete, thank you for joining us. Where can folks find out more about what you do?

Yeah, man. I would probably just point people to my main website, which is my name, petemcpherson.com. There's not a lot there, but you can see some of the projects I'm working on. You can join my newsletter if you feel so inclined, and that's it. I think it's a great place to find your happy distractions.

Happy distractions. Yeah. I have a lot of happy distractions. Yeah. Yeah. Every day. I that's what I appreciate about all of your work, all of your writings, and I'm usually on board with whatever your distractions may be. Thanks, man ... it's a lot of fun. Thank you for joining today, and hopefully we'll have you back some other time.

Yeah. Thanks for having me on, Thomas. I appreciate it.