 It was dinner time and the family had already finished dinner. We were having a little bit of dessert and the phone rang. It was the office for my dad. Now the number of times that the office called my dad in the evening at our house was exactly zero up until that point in time. So it was just not normal, right? He picked up the phone. He listened for a few minutes, hung up and said, I got to go. And again, the number of times my dad left our house to go back to work after dinner, never before. So it was a very strange evening, one that I'll remember for years on end. And he took off and we didn't see him for a couple of days. He drove to work. Work was only about 45 minutes away, but he stayed at a hotel right next to the office and just kept sitting at the office working for several days. And what happened, I can now tell you only because he doesn't work there anymore and because hopefully none of them or the government is going to watch this video. We'll see. So it turns out, right, that he worked for a satellite company. They shoot low earth orbiting or Leo satellites just outside of our atmosphere. They're the kind of satellites you use for satellite TV or for satellite phones, all that kind of technology stuff. So you shoot a satellite up and you shoot out several. They create this space where they can reflect back and that's how you get cable and phone and other service. And so the company that they did the work for was a telecommunications company that was very excited to launch new service in Brazil. Or actually, let's just say a country like Brazil could be any country, right? We don't need to get into details. But when you're going to launch new service in a place like Brazil, what do you do? You buy billboards and you establish retail shops and you staff it and you train people and you have guys with weird signs who are shaking the signs right outside the door come in and buy self-service and they were doing all that in the months before they got ready to launch service. And the day of the launch, there was no service. None. Now, at the same exact time in another country that sounds remarkably like Mexico, an executive, right, an executive for the telecommunications company had the sat phone with him and his phone beeped on. And he was like, punches the call to the home office and says, hey, when do we get service in Mexico? And they said, we don't have service in Mexico. And he said, well, I'm calling you on my sat phone right now. And they were so curious. He was on vacation with his family, but he got in the car, he started driving all around Mexico. And he was like, yeah, no, I keep... Can you hear me now? We got signal everywhere. So in a mad rush, they bought billboards in Mexico. They set up retail shops in Mexico. They hired guys with signs in Mexico. Now, if you've never built a satellite, I just want to give you a tip. It turns out, if you take those super big panels and mix up left and right, it turns out you might give total coverage to Mexico instead of Brazil. All right? And that's what dad... My dad was actually helping the engineering team that built the satellite. I don't want to say it's all his fault, right? But Mexico loves him. I think they wrote a song about him. And again, we're not really allowed to talk about this, right? But this morning, what I want to do is spend a little bit of time talking to you about some of the big mistakes I've made in life that I remember. Now, satellite one, not my mistake, right? But there are a few that are mine. So can I tell you some of those stories? Awesome. By the way, if you're still standing, there are some seats back over there that you can just come on if you want to relax, because I'm going to be a little bit... I mean, I made a lot of mistakes, right? All right. So there's a time that I hired Mr. Green, right? Mr. Green was awesome. In the old days, and many of you are too young to know this, but before Google, there was another big technology company called Microsoft. And everybody who was anybody who was serious about computing, right? Especially if you weren't living in the Bay Area of California where I was at the time, they were working for Microsoft. And if you could hire or steal someone from Microsoft and get them to join your startup, that was a big deal. And I was an executive running one of... Over the course of about 10 years, I started and sold four or five software companies. And in that time, one of our startups, I recruited a former tech evangelist from Microsoft. That was a huge deal. I mean, I told our president and CEO, I said, look, if I get this guy, I'm retiring. Like, that's the best thing I've ever done. This is so difficult. You don't understand. I'm getting him to leave the big company with the stock options and the money and everything else. And I'm getting him to join a San Francisco startup. And so Mr. Green came in and we chatted, we hung out, interviewed him, checked on a couple of references, had him talk to some of the rest of my engineers, and we hired him. If you know anything about a technical evangelist job, a technical evangelist is someone who is deeply technical, but also can talk to people. And they can talk to other developers and invite them to check out the technology that Microsoft was building. So it's a huge win. And on the first day, I gave him an assignment and the wheels started falling off. Something wasn't right. Second day, I gave him a different assignment, one that was super remedial, like super easy. Let's just, let's go for a couple quick wins. And when I asked to look at, hey, let me take a look at the stuff that you wrote. He was like, yeah, it's not optimized yet. Let me show it to you tomorrow. And then the next day, he didn't show. And then he wrote us a note saying, sorry, my wife's in the hospital. And we were like, oh my goodness. So I said, well, I asked my admin, can you send flowers to the hospital for her? Mrs. Green, likely at this hospital. And she comes back and says, there's no Mrs. Green at the hospital. And I said, okay, we'll try the other hospitals. I mean, call a couple hospitals. I mean, maybe they went to, maybe they look further. I mean, here's the address that he lives at. And no, no Mrs. Green. So I sent him a note saying, hey, super sorry about your wife. We tried to send flowers. Do you want to send it to your house instead? And he said, I know what you're doing. When someone tells you, I know what you're doing when you aren't really doing anything. You should totally be like, what's going on here, right? Something sounds fishy. So my boss, President CEO says, how deep did you do your background search on him? And I'm like, not deep enough. So let's start calling people. So he went to University of California at San Diego and I contacted them and I said, I need Mr. Green from the computer science department roughly this year. And they're like, no, no Mr. Green. And then I was like, okay, well, broaden the years, maybe I'm misquoted on his age. No. Okay, well go outside of computer science, right? We've never had a Mr. Green here. And you're like, okay, that's strange. So then we start looking up more data and we're just trying to ask him, I sent him a note like, hey, I need your transcript when you come in because I didn't put that into the file. And his email response had a whole bunch of four letter words, none of which were the kind of words I'd showed to my mom. And we said, okay, you're done, right? Three days. So what's the lesson? Hire slowly. Hire slowly, fire quickly. It turns out over the course of years I've had two or three of these situations where I have been so excited, so rushed to get the perfect person that I was doing most of the mental gymnastics in my head about what they were going to be rather than actually who they were. Turns out he was a technical evangelist for Microsoft. Microsoft in those days did not actually give you references, but they had just the previous year spun up something where you could pay a small amount and get the basic data. Name, start date, end date. His resume had said he'd spent 16 years at Microsoft. Turns out he spent six months at Microsoft. Right? So the only good news is it took me a lot less than it took Microsoft to figure out the guy was a total fraud, right? But go slowly when you're hiring people, right? Now the WordPress community is awesome. It's amazing. There's incredible people, but it still doesn't mean someone can't because we're so good-willed and we're so excited to connect with other people in the community. It doesn't mean someone can't come in and suggest they're someone they're not, right? So hire slowly, fire quickly, or fast. Then there was a time I was sitting in a cafe and talking to a prospect, right? And you know how there's those projects that they stretch you? They feel like they're just bigger than something you've done before, and you're like, yeah, I think I can pull this together. What you don't realize is that maybe the reason that it's been too far out there for you, right, is because you don't fully know all of what's included. So in this particular scenario, I was quoting a project, but I didn't know all the details, right? And yet that didn't matter, right? So I was like, okay, we got this. So I'm talking, I'm talking, he's talking, we're going back and forth, and he says, finally, all right, give me your number. Like, what's it gonna cost to build this? If you've ever been in that place where you're like, okay, I normally charge $1,000, and now I'm gonna go for five, or you normally charge $5,000, and now you're gonna go for 20, or maybe you charge $100, and now you're gonna go for 1,000. It doesn't matter. But if you 5x, or 10x, or 20x the number, and you're super excited, you put the number out, and it's almost like you go right afterward, right? But you're trying to hold that in, that's the inside face, because you're like, are they gonna say, okay, I put out my number, and he was like, sure, done, no problem. I was like, that didn't go like I thought it would. That went so much faster than I thought it would. I wonder, is there a chance that I am the one that's messing up here, right? I mean, we wanna think, you know what, I'm just a keen negotiator, but when you're like, here's the number, he's like, great, oh my God, he's almost laughing and smiling while he's signing, and you're like, I think something's wrong, I just don't know what it is, right? So, I worked on the project, right? We did the project, of course, halfway through the project, discovered a whole bunch of details that I didn't know, and suffice to say, I wouldn't really say I had profit on that project, right? And it took a long time to figure out, you know, there's more going on here than I'm cluing into, so I went back to that guy, right? We're two thirds away through the project, and I just said, hey, tell me, when I gave you that initial quote, he goes, ah, I'll tell you, I'll tell you right now, man, every quote I'd gotten before yours was three times the price. And I'm like, oh man, he goes, yeah, so I figured, even if you screw this up, I can still go hire someone else and be okay. Wow, all right, I blew that. So, the moral of the story, right, is that I developed this phrasing, how many of you like barbecue? I mean, we're in the home of barbecue, right? Like, you guys barbecue all the time, you love barbecue. So, here's what you don't do if you want to marinate food, right? If you're marinating chicken, marinating steak, here's what you don't do. I come from California, so we do this all the time. Someone comes over, brings over chicken, and they're like, oh, you didn't marinate, and you're like, no problem, you open up a Ziploc bag, you throw the chicken in, then you throw a bunch of sauce in, zip it, throw it in the fridge, wait about an hour, come back out, throw it on the grill, and you're ready to go. Right, no? No, never. Because that won't have done anything to the chicken, right? In California, there's many things we do. Barbecueing isn't really one of them. We grill. There's a difference, right? Marinating takes time. Marinating is about putting the stuff in the day before and letting it wait, right? Marinating is letting time do its work. And when you work with clients, one of the things we have to do is when they start talking, not prepare to respond, not prepare what we're gonna say. You know, any of you do that, right? Where someone's talking and you're like, oh, yeah, I know how to do that. It'd be a post-type, and then I could use this plug-in, I could do this theme, and you're thinking of the solution space almost immediately instead of marinating in the problem space. Just sitting and listening. If I had done that with that customer and asked more questions and dug in more, one of my favorite questions now is just, tell me how you've already tried to solve this. And they start explaining, and even as they're explaining, they're telling me nuances of the problem that I'd never heard of before, right? Marinate in the problem space. You won't lose your shirt. All right. I worked, as I mentioned before, five different startups. We built them up. Four out of the five, we sold off a lot of young energy to hit certain milestones. And one of the big milestones for me was selling my first company by the time I was 30, right? That was a goal. I had sold a company when I was 27, but I was not an owner of that business. I had been a hire, an employee of that company, and we had started it up, built it up, sold it off. And I remember thinking, okay, I want to sell my own, right, where I get the benefit of it. And so we built up a team. We started a software company. We started doing everything we had to do to build it up and get it successful. We got it successful. We had customers. We had revenue. And then we went to sell it. And I sold it two months before my 30th birthday. I did everything I wanted to do. Mind you, during that time, I never saw any friends, didn't see a movie for two years, right? Barely slept. I slept on average four hours a night, six days a week. I made every sacrifice I could to sell this company. We did. And on the day we sold it, the day we did papers and everything else, I don't know what I imagined, but there was no confetti from the sky. There was no parade. There's no cameraman going, hey, you just sold the company by the time you're 30. What are you gonna do now? I'm gonna say, I'm going to Disneyland. None of that happened. At all. I just got up the next day and it was another normal day. And the only friends I had at that time were the other guys in our company that also had given up everything to do this, you know, to get on this mission. And it took, I'm super glad I had this experience at 30, right? And not at 45 or 55. Like, I'm glad it happened early to realize there wasn't anything special about it. In fact, my part, my stake in that, if we're gonna brag a little about how much money I made, I had millions. But none of it was cash. It was all tied in to the equity and value of the next company. I also had a three-year lockout, which means you can't do anything with the money for three years. And in the course of that three years, I was invited, as part of that next executive team, to raise more money. And as I raised more money, my valuation kept shrinking. My three and a half million became $30,000. I gave up two years of my life for $30,000. I know I probably should have started with this one, but I didn't want to depress you all. Okay? Not every investment pays off the same. I'm really glad to have learned this lesson at 30. I don't know how many of you are like, I'm starting a new company, or I'm starting a new plugin, or I'm starting a new theme, or I'm starting a new anything, but it's easy to get super excited about the thing that you're doing, and you focus in on it, and that's the only thing you focus in to the detriment of everything else, only to wake up and discover that the payoff, whatever you thought it was gonna be, wasn't really there. I'm glad I learned that at 30, because the rest of my life changed dramatically. I today, I work at a company called Liquid Web, and it's a great job, but I had offers from all the big names you've heard of. But in almost every case, those offers came with having to move, and my wife didn't love the idea, like she would start crying the moment you start mentioning a city name. And I chose my wife, and I chose my kids over career. I have a fine career. There's nothing wrong with it. But at 30, I realized I need to optimize for other things, and not just the job. I know most of you are smarter than me, but there's a chance that one of you is focusing everything, every minute of every day of every hour. You have friends who worry about you. And so, even if you're not here and your friend is here, I'm telling them to go back and tell you. There is more than just work. Not every investment pays the same dividend, so choose wisely. Does that make sense? Okay. Then there was the time that I stayed at the job way longer than I should have. And I knew it. You know how you have... Let me ask you a different way. How many men in the room have dated a woman that they knew early on was not right for them? No, don't show your hands. The same for women, right? How many women you know they're the wrong guy? Or women with the wrong woman or guy with the wrong guy? It doesn't matter. You know that the person that you're hanging with right now is not the right one, and yet you stay. And I don't mean the wrong one isn't like they're beating you. I'm not trying to get into something really dark. I'm just saying you're like, yeah, they're okay, like for now. I have a 13-year-old daughter. My 13-year-old daughter is actually in high school. She just finished her freshman year. And so in freshman year, she wanted a boyfriend, right? And her mother and I decided it was okay to have a boyfriend. We'd rather her date in the context of us still being there than when she goes off to college. That's our personal choice. It may make a talk later and mistakes I've made in life, but not in this one. So we said okay, right? And then casually, right? On spring break, we're talking and I said, well, when you break up and you go through and she's like, you don't think me and my boyfriend are gonna last? You don't have faith in my relationship. And I said, oh, I have 100% 100% faith that you will break up. Like in the history of all relationships, nobody at 13 in their freshman year high school has ever said, I found my soulmate. And she's like, but I think I have. I'm like, stop talking. Just stop talking because I'm gonna start shooting video and this is gonna be hilarious when you get married and it's on the screen. And I'm like, look, at 13 she thought she found her guy. I was in a job like that. I was in a job where I knew, okay, it's not super. It's not the most amazing job in the world, but it's okay. And what I was really doing was just hiding. I was just hiding. I wasn't ready to step out and take a risk. For all the years that I'd done startups and I had a high risk tolerance. Now I was married and I had kids and suddenly your risk tolerance shrinks and you're thinking about a house payment or a car payment. And for whatever reason, I just started getting anxious and nervous. That little imposter syndrome voice going, oh, you know what, you don't know as much as you think you know. And there's no one that wants to hire you. And so I sat in a job way too long. The moment I took another job and like 10 people going, I didn't realize you were gonna take a different job. Like, why didn't you talk to me? I would have hired you. And you're like, wow. Okay, next time I'm just gonna raise my hands and say, I think I'm leaving, right? And just see what offers come in. But I was nervous, right? Here's the thing. You've been to the grocery store. You've found food that says best used by. We tend to think of that as a food thing because the food will eventually go bad. You will eventually go bad. Your skill set in a specific area is going to dry up. It's going to become useless. It doesn't matter what part of technology you do. It doesn't matter whether you're, you know, graphic design or software development, whether you're building websites or mobile apps. At some point, someone's gonna build technology that automates the stuff that you spend a lot of time doing. And when that happens, you're gonna realize, oh crap, all this investment in the how is not all that helpful. Investment in the why is always gonna be helpful. Being able to explain to a customer why we do what we do when we do it, fantastic. But the how keeps changing. And if you're still doing the same stuff you were doing last year or the stuff you were doing the year before that, if you're just on autopilot doing the same stuff over and over, you've likely reached yourself by date. And the important thing is to just realize it and say, okay, it's time to learn some new things. It's time to put myself back into a seat where I'm learning. Most of you are already doing that, right? Because you had an option this morning to go, I don't know if you saw, there's some crazy people that are running this morning, right? As you can tell from my physique, I don't do that. I stay far away from all those running exercises. But you decided on a Saturday morning to come to a technology conference and hang out. You've already taken the first step towards getting yourself into a position where you say, I wanna learn something new. For the rest of today and tomorrow, right? If you feel like you're someone who's reached their sell-by date, your job is to go grab as much new stuff and just jam it in. It doesn't mean that you're gonna know it all by the end of the weekend, but you will have had some exposure and the exposure will help you learn it later. So instead of going to that session that you already know, go to the one you don't know. Instead of talking to the friends, the four, five, ten people that you know, talk to people you don't know, right? And learn something new. There was that time. We've all had it. You write a blog, you have a blog, you have a website, people start writing comments. The first comments are like, awesome, good job, right? Then you get the, I disagree with you and you're like, oh, should I write back? And then you start getting the comments that are just mean. But you think, well, I don't wanna be censoring the free speech on my website. I'm a generous guy. Any of you come to my house, you're welcome in. Any of you, just show up, ring the doorbell. My wife will go answer the door or I'll answer the door and you're like, hey, I was at WordCamp Asheville. Your husband said I could come in, right? We'll let you in, right? Just a small aside. And even if you don't have a church background, it's totally fine. You will catch this illustration and understand how crazy I am. At one point I was preaching at a church and as an illustration I had taken my house key and I had gone to five hardware stores and I had made hundreds of copies of my house key. And that Sunday morning I had put a key every third seat throughout the whole, and I invited the audience to take the congregation, to take the key and put it on their key ring and they didn't know what it was for and later I explained as part of the illustration that it was key to my house. My wife was gonna kill me. She's like, are you serious? And I'm like, it's an illustration of these people gonna come and if they come it's fine, right? So if you come, right? Just ring the doorbell, right? We'll let you in. If you walk into my house, you can walk straight to my fridge, open it up, take anything in it. I give you permission right now. You can totally do that. I won't have a problem. What's mine is yours. If you wanna have a soda or you wanna have a water, if you wanna grab some leftovers and sit down at the table and eat, no problem. Here's what you can't do. You can't bring a spray paint can into my house and with spray paint write something on the walls about my wife. No one will ever see you again. You can't do that. My house, my walls, you don't get to paint stuff about my wife on my walls. You can come into my house, you can eat my food and it turns out there's a little button in my website that says delete. And when someone starts spray painting on the inside of my walls of my blog, I just hit delete. And it turns out it's also helpful in life. There's people that are, I don't know, maybe you know them from high school or something. Maybe they're in the same meetup. Maybe they go to the word camp. Who knows how you meet them but you meet them and you feel some level of obligation to be nice and there is a fine, I give you permission now to just say hey, thanks for sharing and then draw a line and move on in life. You do not have to carry everyone that you've ever known for life. Right? Okay? Learn to use the delete button. It will save you a lot of heartache. For years I had different people writing on the blog. If you don't know, I used to write a blog at ChrisSummon.com where I wrote about WordPress every single day for three years. Every single day. And the comments would come in and most of them would be fine but you'd get 10, 20% that were horrible and then over the years it got worse and I just started deleting more and more. The new launch which is coming up at ChrisSummon.com, there'll be no comments. I just decided. I was like no. I'll put a link at the bottom and say hey, if you want to chat with me about this, go to Twitter and tweet something at me and I can decide if I want to see it or respond to it or not. But you just have to learn boundaries. All right. I told you a bunch of mistakes and lessons I learned but maybe the most important lessons I've learned in life haven't come from mistakes. They've come from the game. Right? How many of you have ever played chess before? Okay. So you get it. These are super important lessons for me. I hope they're helpful to you. Look at the big picture. Every single time someone writes me something, every single time I see something on social media and I want to react, I have to stop, slow down, count to 10 and look at the big picture. Is it even worth responding? Right? Hey. Know that you're going to win and lose. It's just the nature of the beast. You're going to play a game. Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose. It's not that big a deal. I mean, I suppose if you're competing and you're like a national champion and you got spotlights on in a TV show, then yeah, it's a big deal. Most of us, if we're playing chess, we're playing with a friend or playing with a stranger, but it doesn't matter. The stakes aren't that high. We tend to think that the stakes are super high when it comes to life. Whether it's our job, our product, whatever we're doing and the stakes just aren't that high. You're going to win some, you're going to lose some. Just relax. Also, just know that the more time you invest, the more work you put into it, eventually you'll get better over time. You can't keep playing and not get a little better. You can't keep blogging and not get better. You can't keep working with clients and not get better. It's just a rule of effort. You have to put in the time and energy to see a result. I hired a... I don't want to characterize this person by the age that they are or the generation that they are, because that would be wrong, okay? So I hired an entitled young lady. I wanted an admin to work for me in my house. Granted, my wife stays at home all the time, so it was a very safe environment. My kids are there all the time. I just wanted someone to do some admin work for me at the house. And my house was too cold for her. And I was like, buy a jacket. It's my house. And then I said, hey, I need you to learn this stuff and I sent her a video course and she's like, I don't learn by video courses. So I sent her text tutorials and she said, I don't learn by reading. So then I gave her something else and said, hey, just try it out. I don't learn by doing. I think she could have shortened out the whole process by just saying, I don't learn. I was like, this is insane. But you know what? If you're the kind of person who just doesn't want to learn, then you own it. You call it. You say, hey, I'm not interested in learning anything new. That's fine. Start with that. Open with that. And the rest of us would be like, okay, cool, thanks. I know where to put your graded parties, but I don't want you to work with me. Right? But for the rest of us, of course you're going to learn. It's just that most of us don't have time. So of course, my challenge to you is, make time. Take time. You give time to your clients. Write yourself up as a client. Put in the books. I have a new client. It's me, and therefore I have assignments for me, and I have to go do them just like I would for a client. Treat yourself like a client and invest time in yourself. If you put in the time, you'll get the results. And then of course, play with people better than you. Right? If you know this about chess, you know that you're going to play people that are better, and the more you play with people better, the better you're going to get. You're going to see things that you've just never seen before. And that's worthwhile. Does that make sense? All right. Ultimately, when I'm talking about learning and putting in time and all that, I just want you to know persistence is a superpower. And it's a superpower that's available to all of you. You don't need to bring any particular skills to the table to get better at things by putting in the time and the work. Does that make sense? This is the interactive part. All right. So I want to wrap up by talking about our theme this morning, right? Elevate. We think about elevate. We're like, ooh, I want to elevate myself. I want to lift up my brand. I want to be more known. How do I get myself and my name out there more? Right? And I'm going to tell you, instead of that kind of elevate, shine a light. I make it a habit. If I'm meeting someone new and it's someone that I'm going to be doing work with, I ask them enough questions so that the next person that walks up to us, I can brag on my new friend. But I can't brag on them if I don't know anything about them. Right? I can't say, okay, hey, I want to introduce you to my friend Zach. And Zach, remind me what company you work for, right? That's not a great introduction. But if I said, I want to introduce you to my friend Zach. And he just recently finished his Agile consulting and certifications. He's an Agile guy. He's a guru. He's a project manager who knows how to pay attention. So if I start talking about Scrum and Agile and everything he's just recently done, right, then the other person goes, oh, well, that's actually, I need to talk to you about project manager. But also Zach goes, oh, he actually was listening. He knows me. That's important, right? Shine a light on other people. And to do that, you have to know who they are. And to do that, you have to ask them questions. So I want to let all of you know that today, while you're walking through this camp in that hallway track where people come up to you, you should be prepared to answer a lot of questions about yourself. Because all these people are going to come up to you and they're not just going to say, so what do you do? Instead, they're going to ask you better questions. Like, what have you learned in the last six months? What are you super excited about right now? Where do you see these things going? And collect the information so that when you can, hey, I want to introduce this person to this person. I want to shine a spotlight on what they're doing. I have a lot of friends that do a lot of work in the WordPress space. And I love putting a light on them and saying, look at what they're doing. They're doing great. I bet every one of you has a competitor in this room. I work for a hosting company, right? Liquid Web. There's a lot of hosting companies that show up to these events. And what I can tell you is, they're all awesome. They're great. Every one of these hosting companies does something slightly different for a different kind of audience. And there's no reason that we have to all be like, oh, well, I'm the best. I'm the only one. And you should not look at anyone else but me. It's a lot better if I'm talking to someone and I hear, oh, I have a small budget. I'm trying to test something out. But the real thing I need is I need a lot of phone calling. I knew whatever. And I go, oh, OK. Well, hey, let me show you my buddy Adam over here who works at GoDaddy. And let me see if they have a phone that you can call anytime to ask questions. Putting that light on Adam and GoDaddy is going to be much more effective than just elevating my name in my game. Does that make sense? All right. Empower. I know we think of empowering as coming alongside someone else and teaching them something. I want to suggest to you that empowerment can also be coming alongside someone and asking for help. You know what it's like when you ask someone else for help? They go, I can't believe you think I can help you with that. They also go, I don't know if I know the answer. And then they try it and discover that they do know the answer. And what you've just given them is the gift of self-confidence because they now know how to do something and they just taught it to you. One of my favorite things that a word can't write is to open up my laptop if we're out there hanging around and I get stuck on something and instead of me just pounding out 15, 20, 30 minutes trying to figure out, I just call people over. Hey, does anyone know how to fix this? And you'll discover some people are like, I have the same problem and other people are like, it's just click here, go to this thing, check that box. I don't know if you use Gutenberg but if you go to publish a post, you hit publish and then it pops up and says, do you want to publish? And then right after that it says, hey, are you sure you want to publish? And you're like, did I have to push the publish button three times now? Like who came up with that idea? And then someone else is like, no, there's a setting. You can go in and tweak this and it shows it automatically and you're like, thank you. Right? Ask people for help. Give them the opportunity to help you and give them the opportunity to develop the confidence that this is actually, I do know something about this. Most of the time we're looking forward. We're looking at all the people that know more than us. We don't look behind us at all the people that know less than us. And the truth is we know a lot. If you've been working with WordPress for 10 minutes, you could get on the WordPress.org forum and support and answer questions. I swear to God, you're like 10 minutes. I don't know anything. I'm like, do you know how to log into your site? They're like, yes, guess what? There's an entire form of people who don't know how to log into their site. They don't even know where to go to log in. And you're like, well, I know that. You're like, great, you can now teach. And lastly, engage. And I highlighted this already. Most of the time we talk about engage, we're like join the community, get involved, find a group, get connected, help out. I want to tell you, just start connecting part of the rest of your community. Start introducing one person to another person, people that don't know each other. And just take them and say, I think you should know this person and connect the dots. If you are a dot connector, you will engage more of the community and more of the community will engage itself. And you'll turn yourself into like a superstar networker, just by doing something relatively simple, introducing one person to another. Yesterday I was talking to someone and I had just spent like two or three days ago, I just talked to Brad at GoWP and then yesterday I'm talking to someone and I just went, I need to introduce you to my friend, Brad. Because your company could use what his company does. And I will, this next week, right? And when I do that, that company is going to go, oh my God, thank you so much for introducing me to Brad. Brad says, oh thank you so much. I win two times and I don't have to do any work. I love that kind of winning. Right? So this morning, as we talk about these three things, right? Oh, whoops. As we talk about elevating, as we talk about empowering, as we talk about engaging, my challenge to you is to do the things that you don't normally do. To be different than you normally are. To get out of the comfort zone and to try some new things, interacting with new people, putting a spotlight on people when instead you've normally been ready to tell your story. Connect some dots, ask for help and watch as your experience over the today and tomorrow just become that much more valuable. Thank you. My name is Chris Thama. I do work at Liquor Web and you can find me on Twitter at Chris Thama.