 Hi guys, so there's a strange phenomenon when you buy something new and nice. It could be as big as a car or as small as a necklace or something as ephemeral as a meal, dental work, paint in the new basement. You paid a lot for it, it's new, and so you have these expectations. And so you're spending a lot of hard-earned money on this thing and you're usually taking a lot of time to consider if you should actually get it. And then it arrives and you realize it's not perfect. It doesn't work like you think it should. It doesn't look like you think it should. You can't see past that speck of dust or the teeny little nick on the underside and you think, I got a defective model. Or maybe they were careless and they need to make it right. The first time this happened to me was when I was a young man, I was 26 years old and I had my own apartment. I had a pretty relatively good-paying job and I was ready to buy myself something nice. I got myself a leather recliner, something to put in my apartment, something that demonstrated who I am and what I'm all about. Single, urban, sophisticated, hard-working, someone who knows how to put his feet up at the end of a hard week on the road as a consultant. And then I flipped it over, only to find that the stitching underneath the chair was, well, it wasn't perfect. It was asymmetrical. The one over here went like this and the one over here went like that. It looked to me like a careless mistake and I couldn't look past it. And let me remind you, it was on the underside of a chair. So what is this? Is this, I think you could call this unhealthy skepticism, subconscious buyer's remorse. I think you could call it really bad behavior. Acting on it, not the thought. The thought's normal. It's okay to have that thought. Like some of that trust but verified attitude that mindset, that's important. And, you know, your work and your purchases and everything that you do. You work with people, you wanna make sure that, okay. But when you're dealing with big established companies, there's two things you have to keep in mind. First of all, the QA, the quality assurance is usually very good. They have processes and systems and people and checks and checks and checks and checks and checks to make sure that the product that they put out there, be it a guitar or a blender or your fancy special on the menu for the evening, passes quality assurance that it is pretty much perfect. And number two, there's excellent customer service at companies that make and deliver and serve products and services like this. They are there to make sure that if something doesn't go right, if you're disappointed in any way, even if it's not legitimate, you're gonna be well taken care of. So back to when I was 26 and I had this chair and I was like, oh, this is wrong. They gave me a bad one. I can't believe they were so careless about this. I called customer service and told them, well, something's wrong. They said, well, what's wrong? Well, the stitching is blah, blah, blah. Okay, we can send you a new one. And I was like, I mean, I don't know. Maybe I don't. So you can always call to talk to someone, even if it's just to talk to someone. And the third thing to remember here is feeling scammed or ripped off is a totally different feeling. So for example, if you go sit down at a pizza place and you see the menu and they're like, oh, it's $40 for a pizza. And you're like, oh my God, I can't believe how expensive this is. And you order it and you feel like an idiot and you just got ripped off. That's not the same feeling as purchasing something that's quality, that's a value, that's like in that case, you're probably not gonna send the pizza back that you paid that you way overpaid for. Because what are you gonna say? You ripped me off. You're not gonna fight over an imperfection. So chances are if you're feeling that you're searching for imperfections, you probably got what you paid for. It was probably actually a very good value for something of high quality, trying to extract every last dollar out of something that you committed to pay for. That's a normal feeling, that's survival. That's basic human biology. But you have to remember that behind the product or the service or the meal that you just purchased are humans, people like you and me. People who have, are dealing with their own challenges and frustrations and hardships and worries and fears and thoughts, all the things that go through your head too. They have good days, they have bad days and there's a chance that the person that was sewing the last stitch on the chair, the big fancy chair that you purchased, maybe they coughed when they were running it through this sewing machine. And so there's a little blip. You hope that people go through their day giving you the benefit of the doubt, that they consider you a good person and that they're assuming that you're doing your best. So let's give that to the people behind the expensive things that you purchased. And I'll see you next week.