 It is my honor and my privilege to introduce to you Chris Lemma. His mom gave him a knife and she didn't even have to explain why she was giving him the knife, culturally he understood. If he got into a bind, if he was going to shame his family, he knew what to do. Unfortunately his boss, his commander in the Japanese army told him, you don't surrender, you don't fail, and you don't commit suicide. We're going to drop you off, you're going to go to war, you're going to win, and whatever you do, you wait here till we come get you. And so hero Onada was dropped off in the Philippines in 1944. There was a group of them that were there fighting, but by December of 44, most of them had been killed. Three of them went and hid up in the hills of this particular island, and slowly one got injured, the other got sick, and it was just him. When the war was done, less than a year later, folks drove around in jeeps all over the Philippines with bullhorns announcing, you can come out of the hills, the war's over. He thought, that's a trick, so he didn't come out of the hills. Then they dropped pamphlets from planes, and it said, the war's done. They ended on this date, you can come out. And he looked at that flyer, he didn't like the font. He was like, no, that's a trick. A couple years later, they dropped flyers in Japanese, letting them know. You can come, you can come out. He'd already been in a few skirmishes, right, fights with the local police, fights with fishermen down at the wharf, and he'd even killed some folks. He knew he had to hide up in those hills and wait for his commander. He remembered his commander's words, you don't leave until we come get you. And so he stayed in the hills, every now and then sneak out, have a little fight with the local farmers, people who were trying to come get him, trying to say, hey, it's time to come out, the war's over. And then a college kid flew out from Japan looking for a hero, that he was already a myth and legend back in Japan, looking for him, and he finds him, and he says, hey, the war's been over. And he says, not until my commander comes to pick me up. And so the college student flies back to Japan, gets a hold of the military. They find his former commander. The former commander was now a grandfather running a bookstore, but they put him on a plane and flew him out in March of 1974, 30 years he'd been on that island. And they went to find hero, and they told him, it's okay, you've been pardoned for whatever's gone on on the island, it's time to come home. This morning, I want to share with you 10 mantras, personal statements, things that I've learned over the last 25 years, that I hope will help you succeed. There are lots of different ways that will get you to the point where you call it success. I can't prescribe for you all those different ways, but I can tell you how you fail. I can tell you how you lose yourself in the midst of it, and I don't want that for you. I wish 25 years ago someone had sat down and given me here are the 10 things you need to know. I wish that it happened. These were the lessons that came after lots of time and lots of stories, and I want to share them with you this morning, and we'll start with the first one, right, which is just because you believe it, doesn't mean it's true. He genuinely thought he was still engaged in a war for 30 years, and he was wrong for 29 of them. He believed his wife, who is absolutely amazing, believed she was fired from a job, and it affected how she thought about herself and the world. But she was a school teacher, and a school teacher, at least in California, in April, everybody kind of gets told, we're not sure if you're coming back unless you have tenure. Everybody is, quote, let go. They're not actually let go. They're not enrolled, and then they offer some people the opportunity to come back. One year, just a few years into her career, my wife wasn't invited back. Can we all be clear? That's not the same as getting fired. They just didn't have enough students to bring her back, and she walked around going, I was fired. Any time someone told a story about a way they were horrifically fired, the shame they brought on themselves and their family, unless it would start to tell her story, and I'm like, no, not now. No, your story is not being fired. But in her world, that was what she told herself. I have some friends who are sitting right here in the front table who work at a company called Ninja Forms. The crazy thing is when they started, there was already a well-known form plug-in called Gravity Forms. Everybody knew who Gravity Forms was. In fact, there were people who would get on stage, myself included, who would say, if you're just going to buy one premium plug-in, all the rest of the plug-ins are free, but if you're going to buy just one premium plug-in, buy Gravity Forms. And James decided with a small group of folks, let's build a different form plug-in. Let's do it differently. I am so thankful that he didn't listen to the people who told him, there's no point in doing this. Can you imagine? We thought the market was saturated with one plug-in. That was a long time ago. We're like, well, form is already done. Go pick something else. And James was like, no, I think there's room for more. I'm not saying that everything you believe is wrong. I'm just saying you need to check yourself. And the beautiful thing James did with Kevin as co-founder is that they had a group of people around that they could check. Hey, am I crazy about this? Am I insane thinking that maybe there could be another plug-in? I have a group of friends in the WordPress community that I have on speed dial, that I have in text message, that I have in a Slack room, where I get to check myself, hey, is this crazy? Am I silly for thinking this? And sometimes we'll go, yeah, that's stupid. If you don't have a friend who will tell you when you're being stupid, make one today. Just walk up to a stranger and go, hi there. My name's Chris. And I'm wondering if you would like to be my friend who tells me when I'm stupid. There is no one who doesn't sign up for that. Everybody's like, oh, I love that. I'll tell everybody they're stupid. No, no, no, only when I'm actually being stupid. But the reality is we need to be able to check ourselves because not everything we believe is true. Does that make sense? The next one was one of those dynamics that took a lot of time for me to figure out how to share or what to say to myself. But it started quite simply. I was in college, my last year of college, and I went to the ATM machine to get money out because I was going to have a group of friends over for a graduation dinner. I go to the ATM, stick in my card, punch in the code. Now I was in college, so I want to be clear. My graduation party was going to cost us like 80 bucks, right? And I had maybe like 85 in the bank. So I was like, okay. And I punched in my code, withdrawal, 25, or 80. And I got like $800 out. I'm like, what the heck is this? They were all $100 bills. In Atlanta, you may roll with such a bank that kicks out hundreds. In California, it's 20s. There was clearly a mistake. And I grabbed the money and I walked into the bank and I said, hey, there's a problem with your ATM machine. It just gave me hundreds. And the guy goes, wait, we didn't give you enough money? No, no, no. You gave me way more money than I will ever see in my life. Like, this is wrong, right? And so, do we have a new one? Where was I? $800 is more than I'd ever seen in my life? I think so, right? I'm like, no, no, this isn't my money. Right? And they're like, sir, you're holding the money. No, but your machine gave me this and it was a mistake. And they're like, wait, how much are we trying to get out? $80. And the guy looks at me and he's like, we gave you $800 when you asked for $80 and you're standing in front of me? I'm like, well, at some point you're going to figure it out and chase me down and I don't want to be hiding for the rest of my life. Realizing that banks don't have bounty hunters, right? I was young, I didn't know. So I gave the money back and when I told some friends they were like, wow, I never really thought of you as that kind of guy which isn't very nice to say to one of your friends. Right? But it was the beginning, the kernel of this truth, right? That my integrity mattered to me even when no one was looking. One year later, I was working at a government research lab, the beginning of my career and I was working at Berkeley National Lab. We were literally building the internet and I worked for a temp agency for the lab and I got a check. Now in those days, I mean I would have been lucky to get like $500 a week or something and this check was for like $4,000. And I went, oh, there's a mistake. So I went to my boss and I said, listen, I know how many staff are contracted to the lab and if you made this, if they made this kind of mistake times that many people, this could be like a quarter of a million, a half a million dollars. And he goes, wait, you got a check for more, I don't understand. I said, no, there could be a big problem and so then he said, well, go talk to the division director. I go to the division director, I'm like, hey, there's a problem. He's like, we didn't pay you enough? No, that's not what I'm talking about, right? I think there's a big problem in the system. They said, I wouldn't worry about it. Just cash a check and move on in life. I'm like, no, no. So I went off campus down to the office in downtown Berkeley and I sat in a room on the chairs waiting to see someone and the first person comes out and says, okay, what's the problem? I said, well, it's my check. We didn't pay you enough? No, you paid me too much and here's what's going on and I think this problem could be big and they're like, I don't understand. You got more than you were expecting and you're, what are you doing here? No, because there's a problem with your, I'm worried about you, right? They're like, hold on. And we went through that for three people, right? I was there for like six hours trying to give them money back. But within a few weeks, that story got around the lab to the point where someone in my department who worked in my building walked up to me and it's like, did you hear about the kid who was, I'm like, that's me. It was easier the second time than the first and it's been easier every year after that because the story I tell myself, the one I do believe, is that even when no one's looking, my character matters. The story I tell myself is that if people are choosing between me and some other candidate for a job that my character is going to matter more than my competence and here's why I know that's true. Because when I was starting my career, Facebook didn't exist. When I was starting to do work on the web, browsers barely existed. We had to get a new beta version every three months. Everything about what's gone on in the tech space, even in the WordPress space, everything changes all the time. There is no way you're going to be an expert in everything. You will not reach the holy grail of having your competence known throughout the world as being an expert in all the things. That's never going to happen. But if you have to choose between developing your competence and your character, I want to tell you that character is more important and I want to tell you that it gets easier over time. That's a story you tell yourself that you can hold on to. Does that make sense? Now, in the midst of talking about things we tell ourselves, most of the time the things I tell myself are negative. I don't know about you, right? But if I come off this stage later today and I have 10 people, 15 people walk up going, that was great, that was great, and one person walks up and goes, you didn't mention this. That's it. The rest of the day, I'm just sitting on that negative critic, right? Does that make sense? Do you do that too? Right? We remember the negative far more than the positive and the negative, the worst negative, is our own inner critic that tells us you can't do that. I wrote a plug-in when I was first getting involved in the WordPress community a long time ago. I wrote a plug-in and I kept telling myself, this sucks. I mean, I'm no Norcross, right? He's somewhere here. My code, his code, like I wrote one plug-in and by that point he'd written like 35, right? And I just thought, oh, this... And then I got a letter from a patent troll that said your plug-in is in jeopardy of one of our patents. And inside my head, I thought, see? I told you this sucked. You don't know what you're doing. Now, thankfully, it was a patent troll and not a real deal, and so I just closed down the plug-in, moved on in life, and tried the next thing. I created an online course, a video course on memberships. I know a little something about memberships in the WordPress space. So I created a course and then I thought, no one's gonna buy this. It turned out I was mostly right. Most of people didn't buy it from my site. But some dude halfway across the world had made a copy of everything and he was selling it on his site and he was making a lot of money because he was selling it for $39 when I was selling it for $199. And I thought, see? You don't know what you're doing. You should just stop. In fact, I got involved in WordPress 2005. The series of years from then to now has always had the you don't really know what you're doing. Maybe the biggest crazy mistake I made in life, which turned out to not be a mistake at all, was I thought, hey, maybe we could create another version of Managed WordPress that does something different. So I joined Liquid Web two years ago and close friends, you know, the ones that tell you when you're being stupid, they're like, you know there's ten other Managed WordPress hosts already, right? And you're like, yeah. But I think there's space to do some new things and we've had a lot of fun over the last two and a half years. There's always gonna be an inner critic. There's always gonna be someone telling you, even if it's just you, that you don't know what you're doing, that you can't pull it off. And what you need to develop, right, is a completely different approach to navigating your inner critic. There's an entire field of psychology, called sports psychology, that focuses on athletes and what they do to prepare. And when I was an athlete in high school, and it's hard to believe that this was an athlete at some point in life, but I was. I had a coach who started talking about some of this stuff, right? In 1977, they looked at 16 men who were trying for the Olympics, trying to join the US Olympic team in gymnastics. In 1977, they released the report that said they analyzed what they told themselves. What do you say to yourself? There were some who said nothing, some who said don't blow it. There was a handful that were doing the thing that was popular in those days, vision jumping over the bar or vision grabbing onto the rings or vision whatever you do when you're in gymnastics. But there was the fourth group who simply said, you've been here before, you can do this. Just positive encouragement, self-confidence that maybe they didn't have completely, but it turns out the 1977 study has been mirrored over and over and over. If you're a marathon runner, if you bicycle on a tour to France, the notion that you could say, you've been here before, I can do this. I've been here before, I'm going to make it. It's hard, but it won't kill me. Whatever phrase you have to beat back your inner critic, will have a positive impact on your life. In 1977, they looked at those 16 male athletes. It turns out the group that was positive, self-confident, telling themselves these mantras over and over, they all made the team. The others didn't. This morning I want you to know this. I think you're awesome. I think you're fantastic. I think you're incredible. You know how I know? Because you got up on a Saturday morning to come to a technology conference. There's only two options, you're amazing or you're insane. If you've spent any time in the WordPress community, you likely have seen on Twitter somewhere, or Facebook, or on a news website, the notion of WP drama. Here's what I bet you have never done. I bet you've never gone to Google, opened up your browser, gone to Google, and typed into the search, give me a good rant today. Most of us, when we get on social, we get on social driven by the fact that we had a bad experience at a hotel, a bad experience at a restaurant, a bad experience with a plug-in, a bad experience with a host, and then we want to go somewhere and we want to tell the world about it. But none of us ever go to the same sites, go to Google, go to social, trying to read that. None of us search for the rant. That's not how we work. So you may have an opinion. My recommendation is, choose wisely if you're going to share it. I have some very good friends who work at a hosting company called WP Engine. They're one of the premier players in the WordPress space. They were one of the early players to define managed WordPress. And I was one of their customers. And I remember when my site started getting 502 errors, and I called up my friends who work there, and I said, what's going on? And they said, what are you talking about? And I'm like, how can you be a host and not know that I'm getting 502 errors? And then I had five, six, eight sites with them, and every time they did an update, I didn't get one email telling me, here are the six sites where the eight sites were updated. I got eight emails, one per, and I'm like, what kind of moron doesn't know to send one email instead of eight? You're spamming my inbox. Then I joined Liquid Web and started building a new platform called Managed WordPress, and guess what? Oh, yeah. You get a call from a customer going, how do you not know that I'm getting 502s? What are you talking about? We update plugins on their site and we send out. I have many sites on my Managed WordPress platform at Liquid Web, and I have 30 sites, so every night I get 30 emails telling me what's happened. And I'm like, the gods! Thank God I didn't write a long post about 502 errors and multiple emails, because that would be comical today. Don't presume that the person on the other end of whatever you're upset about did it intentionally to hurt you. Don't presume that there's a secret cabal making decisions about Kentucky Fried Chicken recipes and WordPress Foundation and core. It doesn't exist. And more importantly, your rant about it isn't helpful because there's always that person who's brand new to the game. You were once new to the game, too. Imagine if you had only read something new about Gutenberg that said this thing is horrible and the demise of the Republic, and you're like, I should just walk away from WordPress now. Because you read someone's rant because you didn't have context for the rest of it? I wrote two blog posts about Gutenberg over the course of two years. One that said I don't fully understand what's happening, and the second which was, oh, I think I understand what's happening, I would just shape it a little differently. That was it, too. Did I have 400 thoughts about Gutenberg over the course of the time that it was working? Absolutely. I bet you did, too. And I bet you have those feelings about Jetpack and you have those feelings about everything else. They were in the early, early days, right? There were things Jetpack did that I really didn't love. And then the other day I started working on a partnership with Jetpack, and one of my friends calls me, one of those friends who's like, the one that will tell you if you're being stupid, and he goes, hey, I see you're going to partner with Jetpack. Can you tell me what's going on? And I go, yeah, and I explain it all. Can you imagine if I'd written the post that said, never touch Jetpack, don't install Gutenberg? Whatever it is. There are moments when we can have that rant, there are moments when we can have those feelings, be frustrated, whatever. But you don't want to write that post. You don't want to share that opinion that way because it'll come home to roost. And more important than that, it may derail someone else. You can have all the opinions you want. My advice to you is, you don't have to share them all. Does that make sense? The first time I was offered a job at Disney, we were living in Northern California. I love Disneyland. My wife loves Disneyland. And I was giving a job offer for a senior director at Disney. And I'm like, this is amazing. And my wife said, do we get free passes? She said no, but with what they're offering to pay me, we can buy all the passes we want. This is amazing. And then we dug in a little and she said, wait, they want us to move? I'm like, yeah, we're going to have to go down there. We're going to live down in Burbank or whatever. And nobody chooses to live in Burbank. Right? And she's like, I don't want to move. And so I said, okay, but that, I mean, you know, this is affecting my career. She's like, well, if we have to, I'm like, no. We won't go. We're going to Disney. And I said, okay, we won't. Right? Not a big deal. Got an offer a couple of years later from WP Engine. They were just growing, getting started. They needed me to move to Austin. I started looking up housing in Austin. I was like, this is awesome. We're going to go out. We're sitting at dinner. I can remember today the public restaurant and it wasn't strategic. We just happened to be at dinner. They're looking for this role. They're excited to have me come on board. But we'd have to move to Austin. And her eyes beat it up and a tear started coming down her face. And I was like, whoa. And she's like, by this point, we were living in San Diego. She's like, we have the best life we've ever had. We have all the friends in the world we want. We're connected to the church. Everything is going right. And you want to pull us up and move to Texas. I'm like, well, when you put it like that. So we said, no. Pulled out of the whole process and said, no, thanks. It was easier the second time. The third time right before I joined Liquid Web started talking to Facebook. And Facebook was like, we're very excited to have you potentially do this. And I said, great. Where is it? Oh, well, you can either live in San Francisco or London. Wow. Those are two cheap cities. Right? And Melissa was like, no, I don't want to move. And so I said, no. A lot easier the third time. My entire career has not been optimized for my entire career. You understand? The number of jobs I've passed, the number of companies I've said no to, the things that I could have done, I could have been a contender instead of the most happily married man on the planet. I chose what I believe to be the better choice. And if you met my wife, let me explain to you something. We have a strategy for how we build friendships in our family. Right? Because if you meet my wife first and you think she's amazing and then you meet me, like we do a dinner together, couples, right? 50% of the people never eat with us again. OK? But if you know me through WordPress and we're OK, we're having fun and then I introduce you to my wife, 100% of the people will come back. In fact, some of them will volunteer the hey, if you guys get a divorce, I'm going with her. Right? She is the most incredible person in the world. Here's what I know. When you're dead and if you have a tombstone, there'll be a start date, there'll be an end date and there'll be a dash. I don't know what your dash will look like. But there's no titles on your tombstone. There's no, I got to be the SVP of So-and-So. I got to be the CEO of So-and-So. There are no titles there. If you're lucky, there'll be a tombstone right next to you. All I want is one arrow that says I'm with her and hers to say I'm with him. I love my wife. If my wife said today, I need you to leave Liquid Web, I'd leave Liquid Web without even sending Joe a note. Just walk out the door and just keep walking. That's how much I love my wife. I love my kids and I love my friends and fundamentally, right, you're going to have to make a choice is optimizing your career the most important thing and I will tell you right now, I don't think it is. I've been in a career for 25 years and I will tell you, there have been some highs, there have been some lows, there have been some amazing fun times. But I've never regretted making the choices I made to value my relationships more than my titles. Does that make sense? What makes it easier is this truth, which is you want to make the work the reward. Now it was a lot of work to get pictures of me that don't have me holding a cigar. I just want you to recognize that, right? All of these people are WordPress people, every single one of them. When I got involved in the community, which was about 2011, I knew exactly zero people in the WordPress space. Today 90% of my closest friends come from the WordPress community. Frankly, if the software falls off the edge of the planet and we don't ever talk about WordPress again, these are still my closest friends. When you make the work the reward itself, you stop worrying about the objective, you stop worrying about what hill you're trying to climb and instead, you enjoy the journey. Right? Now, here's my favorite picture. If you take a look, it says make the work the reward. That's me and Matt Molenweg smoking cigars. You know what makes that interesting? He hadn't smoked cigars for 10 years. Right? I got to bring the thing I love most, right? My hobby, and I was like, hey, Matt, can I take you to my cigar lounge in Manhattan, my favorite place? Can I take you there and can I pick your cigar? And he's like, sure, let's do it, and we smoke cigar. And I'm like, this is amazing. And he said, I forgot to take a picture. And then he was like, do you think we can get a picture? And I'm like, oh, sure. And so we asked the person to come take a shot. I didn't care if I had the picture. I'm hanging out with a guy who co-founded WordPress and he's smoking the cigar that I selected. Game over. I win. Right? You make the work the reward. And I promise you, it will be rewarding. How many of you have ever played Jenga? How some of you have no lives. How have you existed without playing Jenga? If you don't know, for the uninitiated, Jenga is a game where you build up a whole bunch of blocks, build a tower, and then you play this game where each person has to take one block out. And you wait to see if the tower falls over. For those of you that have played Jenga, how many times when the Jenga thing falls over, when the tower is down, how many of you have been completely bewildered and shocked that this happened to the Jenga tower? This is what happens when you play Jenga. See, it's going to fall. There's going to be a moment where you grab something you thought was going to work and it doesn't work. It just completely crashes. And if it does, and you're playing with someone where they go, no! I failed! Never talk to that person again. Right? I mean, that's a ridiculous response to the game agenda. You know it's going to fall over. You know it's going to happen to someone. You know that someone is limited to the number of people playing around the table. This is a guarantee. And yet most of us, when we play, we stack it up again and do it again. I could talk to you all day about focus. I could talk to you all day about dedication. I could talk to you all day about making good choices, discernment, and everything else. But I will tell you, the single thing that has helped me most in my WordPress career is persistence. I wrote a blog at crystalma.com. I wrote a blog post seven days a week, every day for three years. Every single day trying to write to live up to Tom's introduction. How can I be engaging and be helpful and educate all at the same time? Every day. You get up, you do it. You go, hmm, that's okay. That's okay. The next day you do it again. And the next day you do it again. And you keep doing it. And I had friends in SEO who were saying, you know that your two posts about membership plugins are crashing and Google's not taking credit. I'm like, I don't write for Google. They're like, yeah, but you didn't get the green light on the... You didn't get the green light on that article because you didn't write enough words. I don't care about Yoast. I love him. He's awesome. He's a friend of mine. But I don't care about his software, because that's not what I was writing for. I was writing for people. And they'll say, oh, well, you didn't do this right. There were people who would write me posts, write me comments, or write me emails saying, you capitalized your title wrong. You didn't put punctuation. I was like, thank you. You got it for free. If you're new to WordPress and you have comments on your website, I want to give you this one little hint. There is a button next to every comment, and it lets you delete the comment. And you don't need to pay extra for that. In my house, if you walk in, all the food that's available in my house is available to you. You can walk straight into my refrigerator. Even if it's the first time you've come into my house, you can open the doors, you can grab anything you want. There is nothing protected in my house. Any of the musical instruments, any of the music speakers, anything that I have is available to you. If you're in my house, you can do whatever you want. And there are really no boundaries. You are welcome in my house as my guest. But if you paint stupid stuff on my walls, I will kick you out. My blog doesn't have comments where they start doing stupid things because I just delete it. And eventually you just delete the comments, and you're like, no, thank you. Persistence is what happens when you realize that you will fail and that failure is not a big deal. When you're playing Jenga and the tower falls over, you don't say, that's it, I'm never playing this game again. You just rebuild the tower and play it again. When I have an idea at work, and I think this is the most brilliant idea I've ever had, and then I say it to someone and they're like, I don't think so. I fail. Let's just figure out another way to try it. Some of you still have key rings with keys. I remember when I had a whole bunch of keys, and if I took the wrong key and put it in the door, and it didn't open the door, I didn't stop and go, I fail. I just tried the next key. Persistence will get you so much more than anything else. I run a conference. You can tell from the photo that it's super intense. I run a conference in Carlos San Lucas at a resort where there's no lectures, there's just a dialogue, there's discussion, and the discussions happen in the pool. But after years of coaching individual companies, I thought, there has to be a way to do this more in mass, bring more people together and share more insight. It's a business conference. We don't talk about WordPress, we don't talk about the technical stuff, it's just business, pricing, hiring, all that kind of stuff. And I picked my favorite place in the world and I invited friends to it, and we run that conference. The most beautiful thing about the conference is every single time we've run it, I think it's six years now, when people leave, they almost never say, oh, that host that led that discussion was amazing. What they say is the person who was sitting next to me in the pool, they made that comment and then I followed up with them and we started talking and I got so much from that conversation. Every participant has their own story. Now I spent about six weeks curating who's coming to the event, but every person who shows up has their own story, has their own lessons, has learned something valuable. And you're just like them. I think sometimes we look forward and we see people that are no more than us, that have figured out more than us, that are more experts than us, and we forget to look back behind us. Because there's a whole mob of people behind us that have barely started and know a lot less than us. Getting help from other people, raising your hand and asking for help got you to where you are today. Don't forget it, and remember there are people behind you that you can help. Does that make sense? In my world, I generally look at what I'm doing in this paradigm that says, I believe every one of you has a piece to the puzzle that we're building. But some of you have taken your piece to the puzzle and stuck it in your pocket. Some of you for whatever insecurity, whatever fear, whatever anxiety you have, have taken your piece to the puzzle and stuck it in your pocket and you're not playing the game. And the way in which I see my life, my mission, my purpose is to help you play your piece. My wife loves puzzles. When we go on a cruise, we play with puzzles. She gets the box, she lays it out. The worst thing that ever happens to her is when you get the puzzle pretty much all done, except there's one missing piece. And then she's so mad, she talks about it the whole rest of the cruise. It happened recently at our house, she bought a puzzle, she did it with my son, and at the end there were two pieces missing, and I'm like, just buy the puzzle again, find the two pieces. She goes, do you know how hard that will be? Do you know how hard it is to listen to you talk about a puzzle? But here's what I know, right? If you have a purpose, if you're clear on that purpose, if you know what you're going after, it will develop a platform of people that are interested in what you're doing and they will listen to you. But if you have a platform, whether you're famous on Twitter or Facebook or Pinterest or YouTube or whatever, that doesn't automatically give you a purpose. So choose wisely and invest. And this morning I want to wrap up the last little story. The Concord is a plane that used to take what was a 17-hour journey down to 7 hours. Absolutely incredible. But because it moved at Mach 2 speeds, the fuel distribution that had to move from the plane to the back of plane at certain timings to get it to elevate, it would change its weight and it could still maneuver was super complicated. So there were two computers in the front dash. Even though they were pilots, the other computers did a majority of the work. The pilots would do the work to get it taken off, but all the rest of that, moving fuel back and forth, figuring out the elevation, everything was done by two computers. And the two computers, the first one did all the work and the second computer was there as the backup. But every now and then, or in fact, 200 times on the plane, the plane would veer off course a little bit. The flight was so long, right, to get from, say, JFK to London, was so long that they didn't have memory that we have today. So they'd have these little memory sticks put in memory at different points, because what would happen as the plane was flying is they would get to a certain way point at a certain time and they would calculate where you're supposed to be and where are you. And they would notice the plane was off a little bit and they would send back data to the plane saying make the course correction. The second computer would tell the first computer, you have to adjust. And that would happen over and over. And they'd get a little further in the plane, they'd swap out the memory, and it would do it again. And it would do it again. And the back could sometimes hear the computer saying out loud, right, hey, course correction is needed, course correction adjustment needed, course correction adjustment needed. And the passengers are like, this is crazy, that happened the whole flight, this is insane. The Concord from New York to London never was late more than three minutes. It is incredible what tiny little changes and course corrections can do to get you where you want to go. But you need to know that it's fine to make those course corrections. I use this as my mantra for lots of little statements, things like, hey, seek to be understood, listen to understand rather than listening to reply. All the platitudes you see on Twitter, I just bunch them all up into, hey, if you make lots of small tweaks and corrections, it's amazing what results you can have. IBM did a study 25 years ago now that was looking at the efficacy of delegating, giving someone else the job. And they came back, IBM Global Services at the time was massive, it was a huge company of consultants, and they said, tell us when is it right to delegate? And the consultant company came back and said, we're gonna give you the answer a little different than you thought, we're gonna give it to you in a multiple. And you go, what's the multiple? You go, well, think about how long it would take if you pass it on to someone else, how long would it take them? And there's a point where you stop delegating. Most of us, if you asked us, at what point do you stop delegating, we'd be like, well, two times, maybe three times. If it takes me one day and it takes them three days, I'm like, just give it back to me, I'll take care of it myself. Do you know what the answer was? The multiple? 10. 10. Someone would take 10 times as long, and that was still a good time to delegate. And you go, that's crazy. Except it turns out it never stays at 10. The first time you give it to them, it takes 10, the next time seven, the next time three, and maybe the next time half. They just may be better at it than you. I read that study 25 years ago, and I was like, sweet, I'm gonna delegate everything, and I have. I've tried to delegate as much as I can, as often as I can. Even when inside, I'm like, oh, I could do it better. Because you know what happens? We forget how long it took us to learn something. I started working with WordPress in 2005. The UI of 2005 looked really different than it does today. But every year, from 2005 to now, when we've made adjustments, those adjustments to me have been tiny increments. And I've just gone, oh, okay, and I've rolled with it. But someone today who starts with WordPress from the beginning is like, ah, I don't know what to do. Now we're working on that, and there's lots of tools that help with that and training and all that. But the point is, we forget. So we say stupid things like, oh, WordPress is easy. Then my wife logs in and she's like, I don't know what to do here. Remember that there are people at the beginning of their journey. And you can come alongside and help them. And if that's not something you're doing, then I want to tell you that tiny little tweaks can have an incredible impact in your career and in your life. My name is Chris Lama. I'm the VP of products over at Liquid Web. You can find me at Twitter at at Chris Lama. Thank you and have a great conference.