 Next up, we have James Buck, who, like I said yesterday, is the godfather of all things you rug, and we wouldn't be here without him, and we're happy to have him back. Thanks, James. So I wanted to start with a little exercise here. A little exercise. What I want all of you to do is try to relax the left side of your face. Just relax it. In fact, put a hand on your cheek to make sure that you're not moving any muscles on the left side of your face. Now with the right side of your face, I want you to grin with everything you're worth. Like clear up, get your cheeks into it, your eye, like you're really happy. Open your mouth a little bit even, you know, but keep the left side of your face perfectly calm. A little harder than you think, isn't it? You also look kind of goofy. Hold that thought. I want to take a picture. Just kidding. So what was that all about? Okay, well, January 19th was an interesting day for me. For a few days prior to that, everything I ate tasted like wintergreen. I like wintergreen, so it wasn't that big of a deal, but it was just weird. Like I would scrub the heck out of my tongue with my toothbrush, thinking fungus, like, what's going on? It was weird, but nothing fixed it, no mouthwash. I was a little worried, a little concerned about it, but I didn't freak out too much. I was like, it's just a weird taste will go away. But on January 19th, I woke up, and as I was going into the bathroom to shave and brush my teeth and all that stuff, I noticed that it was like I'd been to the dentist. The left side of my face, it wasn't numb, but it was slow to respond. Like I'd tried to smile, and this side wouldn't go up as far as the other side, and I started to freak out a little bit. I was thinking tumor, stroke, what's going on? It totally freaked me out, but it was really the onset to the weirdest thing that has happened to me since puberty. It freaked me out at first, but as soon as I could, I got into the doctor and I told him the symptoms that I wasn't numb, I just couldn't move it as much, and he's like, oh, Bill's palsy. Who here has ever had Bill's palsy? Anyone? Okay, so this will be news to some of you. Oh, brother, reach it. How many of you know someone who has had Bill's palsy? A few others. Okay. It is the weirdest thing. It was news to me, but apparently there's this thing called the seventh cranial nerve, and I'm not a doctor, so if anyone in here has, like, anatomy background, you're totally going to school me on this, but seventh cranial nerve apparently comes from behind your head, comes around on each side of your face, goes through your inner ear, and comes out, spread across your face to control facial expression. It controls blinking your eye, or not just blinking, closing your eye. You can open your eye fine without it, but closing your eye uses the seventh cranial nerve. Rolling your tongue, wiggling your ear, anything to do with that side of your face is the seventh cranial nerve. Now, weird things happen when that nerve malfunctions. No one's really sure how it works, like what causes it. I think there's a lot of different things that can, but Bill's palsy happens when something pinches or causes trauma to that nerve. Now, a few days previous, I'd had an earache in my left ear, and I wonder if, you know, something related to that, because the nerve does go through your inner ear. But the doctor's like, yeah, don't worry about it, it'll go away. Here's, you know, it gave me a prescription for some medication to take to help speed recovery. But he's like, basically, you just got to wait it out. It'll get worse, and then it'll get better. And sure enough, after a few days, it got worse to where one side of my face I could smile just fine, the other side I couldn't, and together you just look lopsided. Like seriously, I would put my hand on my left cheek, and I would strain for all it was worth just to get any movement out of it, just to smile a little bit, and there was nothing. Completely dead. Let me get my notes in order here, I should have done that first. So yeah, within a few days, my face was completely paralyzed on that side. And that's amazing the things you can't do when your face is half paralyzed. You can't chew very well. Like you eat, and stuff like drobbles out of your mouth. You feel like you've been to the dentist. It's the most awkward thing. You don't want to go out to eat because you look like an idiot and the food like falling out of your face. You can't blink that eye. Like I would squeeze my eyes shut as tight as I could, and nothing would happen on this side of my face except my eye would close a little bit. So I had to carry a tissue with me to close my eye so that it wouldn't dry out. But on top of that, like it watered constantly. It was annoying as heck. And at night I had to tape that eye shut so that it wouldn't dry out. And if you've never slept with your eye taped shut, you're missing out. It's a lot less fun than it sounds. Can't wink. Can't chew. Can't roll my tongue. I'm a whistler. How many of you like to whistle? Like I whistle all the time and it probably drives people nuts. I couldn't whistle. Like this side of my mouth was just so I would blow and nothing would happen. Another crazy thing, you can't say P's and F's with half a face. Try it. Put your index finger in the left side of your left corner of your mouth and just try and say, like, feet or fiver. Or this is fun, right? You can't do it. I tried to make the most of it. I tried to have fun with it. I tried to laugh with my kids and joke about it. My dad, who's living with us right now, when I came home from the doctor and told him about it, he said, oh, I'm sorry, James, I'm really sorry about your face. And that struck me as so hilarious. I laughed and laughed. I said, dad, I'm going to use that as a new greeting. I'm going to say, hey, Joe, nice to meet you. Sorry about your face. My kids, you know, they thought it was the weirdest thing. Especially because you can't close your eye and your eye's a little open. You just see the whites. It can be kind of freaky. So I tried to make it fun. I would call it my super face, except, of course, I can't say P's and F's. So it came out super face. And my kids still laugh about that, even though I'm fully recovered. They still say, say super face, dad. But when you can only smile with half your face, it feels fake. Even though I was trying to smile with both sides, it felt like a fake smile. And that, like, not being able to really smile that, that does stuff to your mind. Like, I really struggled with depression. And in my mind, it feels like this period lasted forever. But in reality, the 19th was when I was diagnosed. Within a few days, my left side of my face was completely paralyzed. But by the 30th, I was able to twitch a muscle. And it was totally like that scene in Princess Bride, where the man in black has been mostly dead all day. And Fezig and Inigo Montoya are up on the battlement of the castle, spying it out. And they're trying to get Wesley to move to look and see what's going on. And Wesley, all he can do is twitch his head a little bit. And Fezig the Giant says, that's wonderful. You moved your head. That's how I felt looking in the mirror. My mouth would twitch just a tiny bit. And I'd be like, yes, I twitched my mouth. By the fourth, I could kind of whistle again. That was huge. That was a huge moral victory. By the seventh, I had about 50% functionality back. And by the 14th, good as new. So the whole thing was almost four weeks. But it felt like an eternity because psychologically, it was messing with me. Not being able to smile or whistle or do the things that I like to do. Oh, the other thing I would try to do is puff my cheek, just puff them out. But because I couldn't close that side of my mouth very well, it would always leak out. My kids thought that was hilarious too. But every little thing was just bizarre. So what's the deal with this story? Let's rewind a few years. Let's look back in August of 2005, I released a tool called Switch Tower. How many of you remember Switch Tower? A few hands. It was, within a few months, it had to be renamed Capistrano because of trademark issues. How many of you know Capistrano? A few more. So this is ancient history. This is when it first came out. And it was a lot of fun to work on. I had so much fun. I loved the community that built up around it. I loved the technical challenges. I loved the 37 Signals, Dow Base Camp, that they gave me this tool. I wrote it for them. They paid me to write it. But then they gave it to me to be mine. Like, I could do what I want with it. It was wonderful. By 2008, I was working with Mark Embriaco. He was the sysadmin at 37 Signals. And we had an amazing opportunity to teach a series of seminars about Capistrano. It was really exciting. We started planning it out. We signed the papers. We made plans. First one was going to be somewhere. We were going to fly out there and teach it. And then we told DHH, who was our boss. Makes sense, we would say, oh, we got this thing going on. And he was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. He pointed out that this was a potential conflict of interest, so that we could be spending more time on this than working. And he was well within his rights to do that. Like, he was right. We should have contacted him first and made sure this was all good. But in my mind, this was my baby. This was going to be something that I was going to do on the side. And it was going to be awesome. And we're going to have so much fun. David and Jason both said, you can do the first one because you signed a contract, but after that, don't. And I just remember it was like a punch in the gut emotionally. I did not see that coming. This was a trauma point in my life where suddenly this thing that I had loved and nurtured and cared so much about, it's like the rug was pulled out from under me. And I don't blame Jason and David at all. I want to make that clear. They were looking out for their company, doing what they felt was right. And in retrospect, I agree with them. They did the right thing. I had the wrong expectations. And it totally rocked my world. More than it should have in retrospect, but it did. From that point on, I lost so much love for working for Capistrano. Like everything changed. Suddenly, this was something I had to work on instead of something I wanted to work on. And all the joy got sucked right out of it. Every feature request, every bug report, was suddenly an imposition. And I hated it and I resented it. Within just a few months, I left Capistrano. I just walked away. I didn't try to find someone to take over. I just made a blog post and said, I'm done. If anyone wants to take it over, contact me, and I'll give you the keys to the kingdom. Unfortunately, a good group of people did take it over. And it's thrived. But I walked away from Capistrano. I walked away from my net SSH library and the family of libraries around that. I walked away from my SQLite 3 bindings for Ruby. I walked away from all of the open source things that I'd worked on because I no longer loved them. And this was kind of the beginning of a downhill slope for me. In 2010, 11, I wrote a series of blog posts about mazes, which kind of took me out of my slump a little bit. But within just a few months, September of 2011, I shut down my blog. I left it up, but I basically exported it as static HTML and just left it. I was done. 2012, I stopped tweeting. I said, I'm done. I'm not going to tweet anymore. 2013, I recognized that something was wrong and I wanted to see a psychiatrist. I talked with Jason and David and said, what can I do? Like, if I wanted to see a psychiatrist, do you need to arrange this? How does this work? And they said, just take care of it. But there was no one in my area that specialized in what I needed. I didn't feel like anyone I contacted was going to be right for me. So I kind of self-medicated. I wrote. I write when I'm disturbed. And so I wrote a series of little stories for my eyes only where I, first person, was talking with a psychiatrist. And as ridiculous as that sounds, it was remarkably therapeutic. And I learned a lot about what I was feeling and why I was feeling it. But it wasn't enough and it was too late. And about a year later, I quit my job. My dream job, the job that I love and loved more than any other job I have ever had. It was hard. It was really hard to leave base camp. It was and is, I'm sure, Eileen, I'm sure it's still an amazing place. But it was incredible. And I definitely didn't leave because I was dissatisfied with base camp. I left because I couldn't do it. Here's an example. There's a bug in this code. Can you see it? It's an easy bug. Raise your hand when you see it. Right? In area, radius times radius plus pi. Not a difficult bug to find. But where I was, if I were to look at this code, I would see a wall of text and I would be immediately exhausted and I would say, let me just check my email first. Let me just go read a news article first. Let me just spend 15 minutes playing Kerbal Space Program and then I'll get on it. And of course, anyone who's played KSP knows you can't play just 15 minutes of Kerbal Space Program. So I played a lot of KSP during this period, more than I care to admit. But the fact of the matter is I was done. I couldn't do it. My productivity was maybe 10% of what it was when I started at base camp. And it wasn't fair to Jason and David to pay me a salary for something I wasn't doing. And so I had to quit. And it was terrifying and it was scary, but Jason and David were super supportive, incredibly supportive. And they listened, they made it possible for me to do what I needed to do. But it was like being emotionally paralyzed. It was like being intellectually paralyzed. This palsy that I had brought this all back to me and gave me a framework in which to think about it because burnout is a paralysis. You are suddenly unable to do what you've always done, what you've loved to do. I couldn't be motivated to work. I tried lots of things. I tried Pomodoro. I tried tempting myself with like Cadbury cream eggs. Anyone who knows me knows that I'm addicted to those things. I tried putting the carrot out in front and saying just work 15 minutes and then you can have this carrot. It didn't work. Nothing worked. I could not be motivated. No matter how much I stared in that mirror, I could not make the muscles twitch at all. I was absolutely done. And it was terrifying. I mean, the thing, this was an exciting time to be at Basecamp too. This was right around the time of the release of the new Basecamp, Basecamp 2 at the time. Total rewrite, release this. This was around the time they renamed Basecamp. They renamed the company to Basecamp. So from 37 signals, this was when they got rid of high rise. This was when they shut down, stopped accepting signups for like backpack and campfire. There were huge changes, so much to be excited about and I just couldn't be excited about it at all. Now in retrospect, these are, in reading the research preparing for this, there's a lot of warning signs of burnout. If you've experienced one or two of these, it's probably not a big deal, but I was able to put a check mark next to most of these. Impaired concentration, heck yeah. Isolation, obviously working from home, it's easy to feel isolated, but Basecamp does a lot to help mitigate that with the online chats and the online community, but still, when you're burnt out, you pull away. You isolate yourself. A lack of productivity, depression, anger, anxiety, loss of enjoyment, increased illness, all of these things. I was feeling almost every single one of them. So what do you do about it? Well, first we need to look at the cause. There's a psychologist named Christine Mazlik who came up with these six mismatches that she says can lead to burnout. People often think, oh, I've been working so hard, I'm gonna get burned out too much time. And that is indeed one of the mismatches, work overload. You need to be aware of that, but it is hardly the only way to burn out. I was not being overworked at Basecamp when I burned out. I was not being given more work than I could handle. What I felt, I think, was lack of control. And this was caused by my own perceptions when the rug was pulled out from under me on the Capistrano project. I suddenly realized I didn't have as much control over this as I thought I did, which changed my perception of the whole project, which changed my desire to work on it, which led to this downward spiral. Now there's probably lots of other factors involved, but I think for me that was one of them. And if you are feeling a lack of control in your work, you might be at risk of burn out yourself, something to keep in mind. Insufficient reward, now reward can be salary, but it can be a lot of other things too. There's a lot of benefits involved. This most definitely was not my case at Basecamp. Basecamp, like I said, is an amazing place to work. You've got all kinds of incredible benefits. They gave me, every three years, you get a one month sabbatical paid. You can just go do whatever you want for one month and come back and you'll get paid for a month. When I was suffering from burn out, Jason and David gave me an extra sabbatical to work with it. Like it was amazing. There was definitely not insufficient reward in my case, but for some people that might be it. Maybe you're feeling like your work is not being compensated sufficiently and that can lead to burnout. Breakdown of community. I love my coworkers at Basecamp. That was an amazing community. This was not an issue for me, but it can be for some people. Do you feel like you're isolated? You're working in separate things and there's no communication. Do you feel like people don't care what you're working on? Do you feel left out? Absence of fairness. Again, this is perceived fairness. This doesn't mean that your boss is really not being fair, but if you perceive that things aren't being fair, that can lead to burnout. You feel like someone is being rewarded more than they deserve or that you aren't being recognized where someone else is. That can really cause that trauma to your desire to work. And the last one is conflicting values. This is a tough one for me to talk about because I love Basecamp and I love Jason and David. They are some of the most generous, amazing bosses I have ever had, but for me, I don't swear. I don't like being around a lot of profanity. It bothers me and that's the way I am. I'm not passing judgment, but this is the way I am. Now, I'm sure you all are aware that DHH has no such compunctions. In fact, at Basecamp when I was there, it really felt sometimes like there was a culture of profanity that they rewarded it by recognizing it and glorifying it. And I'm not saying that's a terrible thing, don't get me wrong, but it bothered me. And in retrospect, thinking about these things, I think that might have been another factor in my burnout was feeling like there was these conflicting values. I wanted it one way and the company wanted it another way and ultimately it caused that paralysis for me. And in your case, maybe your company is going a direction that you disagree with and you feel like they're not listening. There's an absence of fairness, a breakdown of community, these conflicting values. These can all come together to really affect your productivity. So the good news though is that you can overcome it. Me, I feel like I have overcome my burnout. I've been writing code for fun for a year now. I've been productive, doing productive work for clients. I feel like I'm better. I've overcome this. I'm no longer affected by burnout, but I'm a different person than I was. I'm not the prolific programmer that I used to be. I used to write code constantly, but part of this burnout has taught me that I have, there's more that I like in life. And so I program less and I do other things more, which I think is a healthy thing. But how do you overcome burnout? Well, there is a path to reigniting the flame. There's several things that you can do. If you feel like you are burned out, please pay attention and really seriously consider some of these things. Even if you aren't burned out, these steps can help you to stave off burnout. First thing, the big one is identify why. Why are you feeling burned out? There's a lot of things you can do. How many of you have heard of the five whys? That's where you ask why and you get an answer. And then you ask why again and you get another answer. Why again? You go five times all the way down until you find a root cause. In my case, I might have said why am I feeling burned out? Well, I just, I don't like working. Well, why don't you like to work? Well, it's not enjoyable to me anymore. Well, why isn't it enjoyable to you? Well, it used to be, but then something happened. Well, why? You just keep going down until you find that root cause. And it's not gonna be a sit down and make a list in five minutes. This is gonna be a ponder it for several days or weeks until you really figure out your feelings. But this is an important part to overcoming burnout is identifying what happened. Getting back to basics. This is an important one too. This is your physical health. This is your diet. Drinking lots of water. Many studies have shown that physical exercise can reduce stress. If you're feeling burned out, are you exercising? Are you eating well? Those are two things that you can address to help make yourself better. Get away. Base camp, I took two sabbaticals and they both helped a little bit, but ultimately I had to get away for a whole year. When I quit base camp, I didn't touch a computer for like three months. I didn't even open my laptop. Three months. And yeah, I had a big backlog of email when I finally came back to myself, but I had to get away. I had to see that there was more to life. I had to get away from all of the stresses that had gotten me there. And that might take a significant amount of time. It might not take you a year, but maybe it will. You need to reassess your goals. What do you want? Where are you going? What do you want in your life? It's the whole conflicting values, one of those mismatches, right? What do you want and is your current position helping you fulfill that? Because if it's not, then you need to get away. Say no politely, right? Don't take more work than you can. I know I have a tendency to say yes. When someone asks if I can help with something, I want to be able to help. I want to say yes. And so for me, it was a struggle to learn to say no. I'd love to help you, but I just can't right now. And I felt like a loser sometimes doing that because, well, why can't you help? Asking myself, why can't you? You're not doing anything. Well, no, I'm not doing anything except recovering. Getting better. When you're sick, you have to rest. Positive thinking. When you're depressed, the world looks dark. And I count myself fortunate that I have never struggled with chronic depression. But part of burnout, you do get depressed. And I fought some of that. I know there are others who fight it a lot more than I do. And it's trite to say, well, just think positively. If it's not a chronic depression, though, if it's a side effect of something else, thinking positive thoughts can help. And then last, find a role that fits. If your current position is not giving what you need, find something that will. Don't be afraid to go elsewhere. I have worked for someone my entire career. I was an employee my entire career. So leaving a job that gave me benefits and gave me money was terrifying. But life goes on. It does. How many of you here are self-employed? Okay, a few? One kind of? How does that work? How are you kind of self-employed? Okay, so some of each. So that's if you're burned out. This can help you get back to where you are. Now, what if you're not burned out? A lot of you here, I suspect, are doing just fine. The fact that you're here suggests you're not burned out. Because I know when I was burned out, I didn't want to go to conferences. So I'm probably preaching to the wrong audience. But this part, if you aren't burned out, well, you can talk about prevention. And this was interesting researching this. Some of these ideas I wish I'd known six years ago. Keep a stress diary. When you're stressed out, identify what is stressing you out and write about why. What it is and why you're stressed out. And over a period of weeks or months, look for patterns. Are you consistently stressed out by the same sorts of things? Look for things you can do to prevent that. If your boss is giving you problems, maybe it's a communication issue. And you need to sit down and have a one-on-one with your boss. And figure out what you can do to make that better. But the stress diary can reveal what's where those stress points are. Track your progress. What do you do in each day? How much work are you accomplishing? What kind of work are you accomplishing? How are you feeling about that work? There was an app, I think, was it Corey Haines, was it Mercury app? Yeah, I think it's still a thing too, isn't it? Anyone know? Basically, you would go in and you would just say on a scale of one smiley to five smileys or whatever, how good you're feeling that day. And you could go back and look historically how your mood was. That can be a very helpful thing. Mindfulness meditation. This is getting a lot of attention in recent years. But it's a great tool to have in your toolbox to help you identify what you're feeling and what's causing it. It also is a great way to relieve stress because you learn to accept what is happening as opposed to striving against it. Schedule some downtime. Don't be on all the time. A 20 minute nap during the day is a beautiful, beautiful thing. I have really learned the value of the 20 minute nap. Go for a walk, get out, read a book, run, exercise, do something outside of work. Change your location often is another valuable one. Like if you're in an office, you might not have a lot of flexibility that way, but maybe it means get up and go work in the lunch room. Go find some other location as opposed to your desk to go work. And I love this one. I've never done this one, but I'm really tempted. Write yourself fan mail. How many of you have ever written yourself a fan letter? I mean, I love that idea. You sit there and say, dear James, you're awesome. I love you, right? Can I be more like you? And there's a lot more. There's a lot of literature, actually. If you go online and search for job burnout, there's a lot of stuff being written about this. There's actually an entire journal called Burnout Research, which if you really wanna dig deep, you can read the Burnout Research Journal. The last thing I wanna talk about is bracing for burnout because no matter how much you try and prevent it, things can still blindside you. I don't know how I would have prepared myself for that whole Capistrano seminar fiasco. But there's some things you can do to prepare. You can get savings. Are you gonna need to take three months off, six months a year? Are you financially able to do that right now? If not, try and get at least three month savings in so that if the worst happens and you have to just quit your job and get away from it for a while, you've got a nest egg that you can fall back on. If you are burnt out and you have no savings, that's a terrifying position to be in because what are you gonna do? You have to keep going to pay the bills. Better to have the savings to fall back on. Hobbies, learn something new so that when you do have to leave your job, you've got things to do besides just sit there and worry about all the things you're not doing. Related to this, and this one wasn't from the research. This is just my own experience. Always be learning. I love learning. I love finding new things to inspire me. When I was living down in Utah the first time, I noticed some birds in my backyard and I was like, what kind of birds those are? And the next thing I knew, I had bird books and bird apps and I was learning how to identify every single bird I found. It became this brief obsession which I'm no longer obsessed about but now I can look in my backyard and say, oh look, an Oregon Junko. Oh look, a Western Flickr. Oh look, whatever. You know, I can identify a lot more of these birds than I used to. And those kinds of things can help you prepare for burnout because when suddenly you have to stop working, you have other things you can do to pull you through that time. So just in summary, if you're burned out, your responsibility is to recover. That's what you need to do. You don't need to work, you don't need to feel responsible to your boss, you don't need to feel responsible to anyone but you to get well again. That is the number one. If you aren't burned out, if you're okay right now, your responsibility is to prepare and prevent because your boss is paying your paycheck or you're paying your paycheck, however it works, you owe it to them to remain healthy, to do what you can, to be productive and to prevent that if possible. And that's all I've got. Thank you. So is it true that burnout is more prevalent in developer communities than elsewhere? And that's not true, actually. There's actually an entire, what was it, an entire article I read called High Octane Women, talking about professional women and burnout because guys tend to be blissfully oblivious to the stresses that women have in professional environments and they are under a lot of pressure and burnout is pretty common among professional women. There's a lot of areas, a lot of different professions where burnout is a very real thing. It just so happens that being computer programmers is one of those. Okay, good question. So first of all, how did I recognize that I was burning out and when did I feel like I was ready to start working again? The burnout I was in denial about for a long time. It took me a while to really say, this is a serious and a permanent thing. It was about the time when I became my own psychiatrist that I really realized that this is burnout. This isn't just a, I'm tired. So that was 2013 and the whole Capistrano thing was 2008. So we were talking about a five-year decline before I finally said, I've got a problem. And then that next year, I worked a lot with Jason and David to find ways, like they let me spend, instead of being a programmer working on features, they let me spend three or four months being the on-call programmer, which was great because when you're on-call, it's a different problem every 15 minutes. You're not trying to focus on one thing for a big long period of time. And that was wonderful and that was really, really good of them to let me do that for so long. Ultimately, it was not enough. For when I felt like I was well again, it was about the time that I started programming recreationally again. I started writing my book, Mesa's for Programmers. You should all buy it. It was actually very therapeutic for me to write that book because I love Mesa algorithms. I always have. It's been a fascination of mine for a long time and so writing about them, I'd start researching the algorithms and figuring out how to write them and figure out the best way to present them and then it'd be like, oh, wouldn't it be cool if? And so I'd do a little side thing where I explored that algorithm a little more, did something fun, and gradually that joy started to come back. I think the process is gonna be different for everyone, but for me, I knew I was recovered when I was like, wow, I've got like five side projects suddenly and I haven't felt this way in a long time. Also, there's some bills that need paying and I should probably get a job again. That played a factor into it too, but it was almost a year for me before I got to that point. Would it be enough to have just one of those six mismatches to be burned out or do you need more than one? I am not an expert. I just know what I've read preparing for this, but from what I've read and from what I've experienced, I think it's definitely more than sufficient to experience just one of those and be at risk for burnout. I think it depends on the magnitude of it. Like if it's a, dang my boss won't let me choose the color of this button, that's probably not a significant thing if you have control in other areas. But again, for me, it was a small thing. I wasn't, I couldn't do these paid seminars for Capistrano, but I had all kinds of say in all kinds of other areas of my work. I had a lot of control. That's one thing David and Jason do really well as they empower their employees. So I had a lot of control, but it was my perception of the control that I didn't have that I think caused that trauma, that caused that paralyzation to proceed. That is a good question. Could I have prevented my reaction in 2008 if I had gone back in time two years and started implementing some of those preventative techniques? And I've asked myself that and I don't know. That's why I also emphasize the prepare, right? Cause I don't know that you can always prevent burnout every time. Maybe I could have been doing some things like the mindfulness meditation, the stress journal, some of those things that might have given me an outlet for the frustration I felt, cause at the time, I just knew I was feeling something and I didn't know what it was. So maybe if I'd been better able to identify those and really relate to them, come to grips with them, maybe that would have helped. I don't know. Ultimately though, I have to say that this burnout has been a good thing, Nat, for me, because it's helped me to discover lots of new passions. And it's showed me that I don't need an employer to be okay. That I can be self-employed, which I had never imagined myself in this situation before. And it's been really good for me. What did burnout do for my family? Or to my family, maybe? I know, I don't remember that list of all the warning signs. Let me just skip back to that quick. The warning signs. No, really. Oh, okay. Anyway, the warning signs. These warning signs, let me just state a few of them here, anger, anxiety, pessimism, apathy, insomnia, irritability, these bleed over. You aren't irritable just at work. You aren't pessimistic just at work. I did get a little miserable to live with. And my wife was worried about me. We talked about me quitting even as early as 2012, maybe. And, but we were both terrified. No, we can't do that. There's no way we could make that work. I don't know that it affected my kids so much, but I know my wife worried a lot. And my relationship with my wife is such that we've never actually had a bitter argument. And so that was never something that would have occurred to me that our arguments would escalate. But I withdrew, I didn't share as much with her, and I think it hurt her in that sense. And if I had known that it was burnout earlier, I might have been able to talk with her along those lines. I'm feeling burned out. I have these things that are the consequence of my burnout. And then she and I could have worked together to find a plan to overcome some of those together. And ultimately that year when I didn't work, we did a lot of that talking. Like that was part of the healing process for me, was having someone to talk about it with. I don't know if that addresses your question. Any other questions? Yes. Jameis, with a bamboo pad. Okay, no. I would love to learn to draw. I just have not ever dedicated myself to it. And so the best I can do is write some words sometimes. Thanks for listening.