 you know, if you want to perform well in front of millions, then you have to be willing to put in millions of reps when no one else is watching, which is how we define the unseen hours. And that that actually I stole from my friend Drew Hanlon, who's an MBA skills coach who he's the one that came up with the term unseen hours. And I conveniently borrowed that and I use it everywhere because I really believe that success in anything even the success of your podcast is predicated on the due diligence and the research that you do on each guest before the mics go hot. Very true. And that's the unseen hours. And that's what a lot of people they don't see. I mean, I don't know that anything would make me more sick to my stomach than for someone to see me doing something that is not in alignment with what I preach from stage or what I put in my books. And I don't hold myself to a standard of perfection. I'm fallible. I make mistakes. I have lapses in judgment. But generally speaking, the fact that I'm putting this content out there, I want to hold myself to that. So when I find myself getting momentarily stressed, I actually smile, have a kind and compassionate conversation with myself and just say, Alan, remember, you write about this, you speak about this, now you need to live it. And in that tongue-in-cheek kind of self-compassion actually gets me through those times. Whether it's Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan, or Tiger Woods, their sole focus was on being the best. And that's not my focus. Mine is being my best. And there's a difference between the two. If your goal is to be number one in the world, an absolute world class and best in craft, then as you said, you almost need a maniacal obsession and have to be willing to sacrifice everything in your life. And those guys have done that. Whereas for me, that's not my North Star. Having some semblance of harmony and balance, being my best, and please know, I mean, I work incredibly hard at my craft. I pour everything into my speaking engagements in my books, but I'm not comparing myself to anyone else. My goal is to do the best that I'm capable of. Those guys were heavily attached to achievement and to outcomes. It was, you know, I win an NBA championship or bust. There was no gray area. If I win an NBA championship, this season was a success. If we don't win an NBA championship, this season was a failure. It was incredibly black and white. Whereas as I choose to look through a lens now of being much more process oriented, you know, I certainly would prefer to hit certain outcomes and have certain achievements. But my sense of self, my confidence is not derived from those. I've learned to detach from those outcomes and learn to simply love the work, love the steps, love the process. And I feel like if I can enjoy the work, then I've already won in advance. And to me, that's taken a process of unlearning and reconditioning myself because I was incredibly outcome driven and very achievement driven for the vast majority of my life. But what I found was it put me on a roller coaster of when I achieved, then I felt good about myself. When I fell short, I didn't feel good about myself. And that was a very rocky road to be on because I'm a huge believer that you should set your goals and aspirations so high that you're stretching that maybe you're only hitting them at a 50% clip. You know, if you're achieving every goal you set, I think we could make a compelling argument. You're not shooting high enough. You want to be a better spouse. You want to be a better parent. You want to be a better lawyer. You want to play the piano at a higher level. It doesn't matter. You have to learn to stick to the basics and the fundamentals. And that is difficult. I'll readily acknowledge that often in any area of life the basics are monotonous, they're mundane, and they can get boring. And I also believe that society is wired to make us feel that we should always be chasing what's flashy and what's sexy and what's new and what's hot. So we've got the temptation to feel that the basics are boring. And then over here, we're constantly being tempted by what's new and what's shiny. I think that's the reason that many people kind of skip over the basics. And I know in my life, anytime I'm not performing at a level that I believe that I'm capable of, whether that's as a father or as a keynote speaker, once I have some self reflection and some introspection, I can usually acknowledge I've started to wane away from the basics and I have to get back to them. So the goal is to never leave them in the first place. But because we're human, we're fallible, we're flawed, that's going to happen occasionally. So I make sure that I'm always going back and drilling in on the fundamentals. And one point to that, it doesn't mean that you only do the basics. It just means they're the foundation to which the rest of the house is built, so you never leave them. If you believe you are the thing that you do, and you are tethered to external results, that's a very dangerous slope because I know in my own experience, anytime I've attached my self worth and my confidence and my belief in myself to external results, it's dangerous because ultimately, that means when you achieve and when you perform at a high level, you feel good about yourself. And when you fall short of a goal, or maybe you don't perform at your best, then you feel lousy about yourself. And ultimately, what you create is this human roller coaster of emotions that kind of ebb and flow, because as human beings, we're sentient beings, we're going to have a wide variety of emotions. So for me, I chose to get off of that roller coaster, and I choose to be much more process oriented and focus on the things I have control over, focus on my habits and my mindset. Still aim for these, you know, these North stars and these goals, if you will, but I don't attach myself worth to them so that if I fall a little bit short of a goal, it doesn't make me feel less about myself. It just motivates me to figure out where I could have done something differently, and then maybe pursue that goal again. First and foremost, you have to know exactly where you are right now, or the GPS has to know where you are. The GPS doesn't care where you were last Tuesday. It doesn't care where you were 10 minutes ago. The GPS only cares where you are right now. So that's akin to self-awareness. We need to know who and where we are in space right now at this moment. But then the GPS also needs to have an ending address. Where are you trying to get to? And you need to know that. That would be akin to having a goal or having a North star. And once you have those two points, then it is going to give you the most efficient and effective way to get there. However, control the controllables, which I believe are attitude and effort. So the vast majority of my focus is in my own attitude and effort. And I'm getting better at certainly having letting everything else go. But if I can say, even with this interview right now, if I give my best effort and I have my best attitude, that's all I have control over. I don't have control over what you guys say or what you ask. I don't have control over what the people watching or listening think of me. So I have to learn how to let that go. Now, obviously, I want to do a great job for you. And I want to add value to their lives. That's the North Star. But I don't control that. So all I can control is my effort and attitude. And I'm starting to get to a point in my life where I'm finding peace with that. And there's some serenity in knowing. I'm following the process. I'm doing the best I can. And I'm living my truth through the basics. And everything else is just going to happen the way it happens. And I'm okay with that. Make your preparation your separation. And that preparation is one of the few things in this world that we have massive control and influence over. And in order to be a high performer, you need to prepare for every situation that you're going into. And the more you can prepare, then the higher you'll perform when it's time. And both of these things, as you alluded to so insightfully, require discipline. And I'm a huge believer in discipline. I think in today's day and age, especially on social with memes and slogans on t-shirts, that motivation gets a little bit over indexed, that it's a little over glorified. A certain level of motivation is certainly important. But it's been my experience, even in my own personal life, that motivation is fleeting. It's like any other emotion. There's sometimes where I feel highly motivated. And there's other times where I don't. And I want to make sure that I'm showing up as my best self as consistently as possible. So if I'm only showing up as my best self, or I'm only doing what I need to do when I feel like it, or when it's convenient, or when I'm feeling motivated, then my performance is going to be like a roller coaster. And I don't want that. I want to be a consistent performer, regardless of how I feel in the moment. I think I could make a compelling argument that the things we say to ourselves, our self-talk and our self-narrative, are the most important things we will ever say. So we have to start learning to talk to ourselves the same way we would talk to a friend or a loved one. If you called me up tonight, and I know we're new friends, but if you called me up tonight and said, I'm feeling stoppable, I'm feeling stuck, I'm struggling, the very first thing I would do would be to try to comfort you. To let you know I believe in you, that I care about you and that you got this. The last thing I would do would add shame and guilt, would be critical would pile it on. Yet a lot of high drivers, a lot of ambitious people, that's the first thing they do to themselves. And they take these negative feelings and they either try to resist them or suppress them or ignore them, which I don't recommend. But then they start being very critical and they start stacking on the shame and guilt and that only weighs them down. So the first thing you have to do is just let it go. Learn to refocus on the next play. Focus on what you have control over. Control the controllables, which is your attitude and your effort. And then refocus the lens on the process. Yet you've got your North Star, you've got where you want to be one, five, 10, 20 years from now. But refocus that lens on the process and let's start getting, let's invest in that now. And when I started making investments in others, making investments in relationships and then double down on basically my own self-care and my habits and my mindset, that's when things started to escalate. And now that things are getting better, I'm reaping the benefits of the seeds that I planted when things were dark. And that's what I would recommend to your audience. You don't know how long this is going to last, but if you plant these seeds now, it will get better and they will bloom at some point. So make sure you make the effort to do that.