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Under the Radar

78: Difficult Indulgences

 

00:00:00   Welcome to Under the Radar, a show about independent iOS app development.

00:00:04   I'm Marco Arment.

00:00:06   And I'm David Smith.

00:00:07   Under the Radar is never longer than 30 minutes, so let's get started.

00:00:11   So you as the listener would probably not be aware of this, but Marco and I have actually

00:00:18   been doing a fair bit of traveling recently, and so we've been having an interesting cycle

00:00:23   of recording shows slightly out of sequence or bunching them up.

00:00:26   But for me, the most recent thing was the last week I went on a 110-mile Appalachian

00:00:36   trail backpacking trip and did it by myself and ended up with a lot of time to, I guess,

00:00:45   as I was wandering around, to think about my work, think about the things I was making.

00:00:53   And as a result of that, I think it came up with a topic that would be interesting to

00:00:56   discuss here.

00:00:57   I guess you could say I developed some perspective while I was out on my walk.

00:01:05   And specifically, something that I kept coming back to was this feeling that one of the things

00:01:11   that is the biggest challenge I face in my work, and I think as an independent is something

00:01:17   that is a pretty common challenge to deal with, is this feeling of how do you deal with

00:01:25   difficult, hard, often not particularly interesting problems that are necessary or are part of

00:01:34   the work that you do.

00:01:36   Because as I was walking along, I was thinking about the tasks that I'd like to do in my

00:01:41   apps.

00:01:42   What are the big features?

00:01:43   What are the things that I want to tackle?

00:01:46   And I noticed that almost everything on the list at this point, for a lot of my apps are

00:01:51   fairly mature, the things that I run into now are these difficult, hard problems that

00:02:01   I know are solvable.

00:02:02   It's not like I'm doing some kind of R&D thing where I just want to go and invent some crazy

00:02:08   new thing.

00:02:09   These are problems that I feel like should be in the realm of solvable, but they're difficult,

00:02:13   but they're hard.

00:02:15   And being motivated to tackle them when it isn't the situation that I have a boss who's

00:02:23   assigning them to me, like, "Here's this feature that you must implement.

00:02:27   Here's what you're going to work on for the next three weeks."

00:02:29   If that were the case, that might be a little bit easier.

00:02:32   But when I have to choose to undertake the pain that I know is going to be implementing

00:02:39   that feature, going down the road of lots of dead ends, lots of false starts, and attempts

00:02:47   at this particular solution that turns out to not work out, being motivated to do that

00:02:53   is something that I struggle with.

00:02:56   But in retrospect, when I look at it, some of the features that I'm most proud of tend

00:03:02   to be features where I was able to get over that hump and actually start working, actually

00:03:08   get into it, actually solve it.

00:03:10   And then I can look back, and usually that's the cool stuff.

00:03:14   That's the stuff that separates my apps from my competitors, are trying to tackle these

00:03:20   features.

00:03:22   And one thing that I think--and so as a jumping in point for this, I would have wanted to

00:03:26   say is, I've always admired with you, Marco, that it seems like these are the features

00:03:31   that you almost seem to relish in doing, that going off on these several-month, like, visual

00:03:38   vision quests where you dive down into these really complicated, low-level, or hard-to-solve

00:03:46   problems, and then coming back with really cool solutions is something that you've done

00:03:51   time and time again for all of the products that you've made.

00:03:54   And so as I was sitting there, and we're wandering around and thinking about this, I was like,

00:03:58   "You know what I need to do?

00:03:59   I need to ask Marco, like, how do you motivate yourself to tackle those kinds of problems

00:04:05   when you know they're going to be difficult to get started with?"

00:04:09   - I think it's a lot of, like, what satisfies you as a programmer?

00:04:15   Like, what do you most like to do?

00:04:19   And this is different for a lot of people.

00:04:21   Typically, what's fairly common among most programmers is that we like to generally work

00:04:25   on new things, at least.

00:04:27   So that's like one big gimme, is like, we are almost always motivated to work on something

00:04:34   new that interests us.

00:04:36   For me, one of those things is tricky, low-level code.

00:04:42   Some kind of, like, low-level dealing with bits or bytes or sound or algorithm-type things

00:04:52   that aren't too academically hard, but that require low-level messing around.

00:04:59   I always really enjoy that stuff.

00:05:01   So, you know, in Overcast, there's things like the audio engine, you know, all the effects,

00:05:08   the smart speed and voice boost effects.

00:05:11   That stuff always, I just enjoy it.

00:05:14   And when there's something like that that I enjoy, you know, like most programmers,

00:05:18   I think I would rather work on the kind of thing I enjoy, even if it means, you know,

00:05:24   ignoring or procrastinating the more boring things that I probably should also do.

00:05:28   I think this is a problem most programmers have.

00:05:30   The only question is what those interesting things are.

00:05:32   I mean, to me, like, here I was, like, writing this crazy, you know, watch offline transcoding

00:05:39   engine, and at the same time, Overcast is almost three years old and I've never had

00:05:46   an email change form, and my password resets are, I think, a little bit broken.

00:05:51   That is totally backwards priorities.

00:05:54   Like I really, I get emails from people, I'd say almost every day, saying, "Hey, is there

00:06:01   a way for me to change my account email address?"

00:06:04   And the answer is no, there isn't.

00:06:06   And there really should be.

00:06:07   I should have done that, like, on week one or week two of Overcast almost three years

00:06:12   ago, but I haven't, because it's never, you know, the idea of doing that is, like, you

00:06:19   know, terminally uninteresting to me, to the point where anything else that I have to do

00:06:24   with the app has taken priority over that for the last two and a half years.

00:06:30   And so for me, like, diving into these really hard, tricky problems is, you know, it's often

00:06:37   procrastination, and it's what I like to do.

00:06:41   It's the kind of thing I like to do.

00:06:43   For me, what's heavily motivating usually is either things that make me money directly,

00:06:52   like, you know, writing an ad system.

00:06:55   Writing an ad system has actually been a lot more work than I expected it to be.

00:06:58   It's, you know, it's not, I'm not writing a whole network like AdSense or anything,

00:07:02   but just putting the parts in place to have a decent ad system that's good for both me

00:07:08   and the buyers of the ads and the users and, you know, all the different, like, little

00:07:13   management tools you need, like the ability to, like, to monitor how they're doing and

00:07:17   give people stats and issue refunds if necessary and things like that.

00:07:20   You know, I'm having to build all this stuff from scratch, and I've been mostly motivated

00:07:25   to do that pretty well because it is directly related to how I'm making money, and it's

00:07:30   doing well so far.

00:07:31   So that motivates me on that angle, but also I get very heavily motivated by doing something

00:07:38   cool with, you know, with low-level stuff.

00:07:40   You know, like this morning, so we're doing, we're actually doing live shows.

00:07:44   As we mentioned on this show, I think a couple of weeks ago, we are doing Under the Radar

00:07:49   live at CocoConf at WBC.

00:07:51   CocoConf is running a conference called Next Door, which is, like, literally next door

00:07:56   down the block from the, from Musco, or from the San Jose Convention Center where WBC is

00:08:01   being held, and we will be doing this show live that week on the Tuesday, which is, I

00:08:05   think, June 6th, right?

00:08:08   At about 1.45 PM Pacific.

00:08:11   And I'm also, we're also doing ATP live the day before, the evening before at CocoConf,

00:08:17   I mean, sorry, at AltConf, rather.

00:08:20   And so we're doing these live shows, and I thought, you know, it would be nice if I

00:08:24   had a soundboard app for ATP and a timer app for this show to show on my computer screen

00:08:32   during the show.

00:08:34   So this morning, I spent this morning writing a soundboard.

00:08:38   There are a million soundboard apps out there, but none of them were exactly what I wanted.

00:08:41   I wanted, of course, my own custom thing, because I'm picky like that.

00:08:44   And so I spent the morning writing a soundboard.

00:08:46   I was woken up early by my allergies, I couldn't breathe anymore, so I figured, let's get to

00:08:49   programming.

00:08:50   Can't sleep anymore, so let's get to programming.

00:08:53   So that was, you know, novel, it was kind of dealing with audio stuff, because of course

00:08:59   I had to build in things like automatically detecting when the output device becomes a

00:09:03   unavailable and putting up a little alert thing on the top so I noticed that if it happens

00:09:09   during recording.

00:09:10   Stuff I'm never gonna really need.

00:09:12   Like I'm really, that makes no sense.

00:09:15   I shouldn't have written my own soundboard app.

00:09:18   There's many of them in the app store, on the Mac app store, there's probably even more

00:09:22   on iOS, and there's probably even more of them outside of the app store.

00:09:28   But I wrote it anyway, because I had a few hours to kill, I was delirious from waking

00:09:32   up too early on allergy medicine, and I decided, you know what, this is gonna be a fun thing

00:09:36   to do.

00:09:37   And I approached the watch offline playback thing with pretty much the same motivations

00:09:44   minus the allergy component, because it was the winter time.

00:09:47   And my motivation there was really like, I want to, you know, I was, I wanted to make

00:09:56   this feature, and why I wanted to make it I guess we can get into some other time or

00:10:00   maybe later, but I wanted to make this feature, and I knew it was not going to be used by

00:10:06   a lot of people.

00:10:08   But I thought if I'm going to do this feature I need to do it well.

00:10:12   And the biggest problem was, you know, on the, like transferring files to the watch,

00:10:17   like there's no, I couldn't do smart speed on the watch, and the file transfers were

00:10:21   giant and too slow to transfer.

00:10:23   So I decided, let me see if I can write a transcoding engine.

00:10:27   Because iPhones are pretty fast these days.

00:10:30   And so what this, this was kind of like a perfect storm of motivations for me to do

00:10:37   something, which is that it was a hard technical challenge, none of my competitors as far as

00:10:43   I know were doing it, and it accomplished something that I think most people thought

00:10:51   wasn't possible or wouldn't have thought to do.

00:10:55   And I love that combination.

00:10:56   Like to me that's a huge motivator.

00:10:58   And then to also involve this low level audio stuff that I enjoy so much was just the cherry

00:11:05   on top.

00:11:06   And then of course optimization, trying to make the trans codes faster.

00:11:10   It's a fun game to play when you're a programmer.

00:11:11   Like hey, you know, if I change the way I do this it becomes ten times faster.

00:11:15   Let's see how many times I can do that.

00:11:17   And it ends up just being very satisfying.

00:11:21   And this is, this is one of the problems with being an indie and not having anybody like

00:11:26   telling me what I need to be working on.

00:11:29   That often times these kind of deep dives into difficult technical features, often times

00:11:34   these are not a good idea.

00:11:35   Often times they're not an efficient use of your time.

00:11:38   In fact I would say probably most of the time they aren't an efficient use of your time.

00:11:43   But because I defined my own, you know, to do list basically, and that's one of the benefits

00:11:49   of doing your own products, because I defined my own to do list I basically take the indulgence

00:11:56   of doing cool things like this.

00:11:57   Because let's be honest, it is largely an indulgence to be able to do stuff like this.

00:12:01   Because you know, a lot of times you're not going to get paid back on.

00:12:04   I mean I did this entire watch offline playback feature and so far it's being used by something

00:12:09   like .2% of users every day.

00:12:12   It's very, very low according to my awesome home built analytics, which I also built.

00:12:17   But it actually isn't awesome.

00:12:19   It is home built analytics.

00:12:20   I would not describe it as awesome.

00:12:22   But so you know, it's being used by very few people.

00:12:25   It probably isn't the best idea for business to have done it, if I'm honest with myself.

00:12:31   But it was a really hard problem that satisfied me immensely while working on it.

00:12:36   It is right in my wheelhouse of like low level audio stuff that I enjoy working on so much.

00:12:41   And it gave me a competitive advantage, even though it's a very, very small one.

00:12:46   But it gave me a competitive advantage, at least for the time being.

00:12:49   And I'm sure that won't last very long.

00:12:51   But for the time being, it's there.

00:12:52   And so all those, it just, it forms motivation when it has a combination like that.

00:12:59   Whereas if you are somebody who doesn't like working on low level C code, or dealing with

00:13:04   core audio stuff, or whatever your hard problem that's facing you might be, if that doesn't

00:13:12   interest you, I totally get why you wouldn't want to do it, or why you'd procrastinate

00:13:17   it or just try to find ways around doing it.

00:13:21   And there's lots of things like that for me.

00:13:23   Just not this kind of thing.

00:13:24   - Yeah, 'cause I feel like what I'm hearing is it's the, A, it's like the first step is

00:13:30   to kind of try and understand yourself, and understand what things are going to, what

00:13:40   things are you going to enjoy building?

00:13:42   Are you going to be motivated to build?

00:13:43   What's the kind of thing, what would feel like low level audio stuff sounds awful to

00:13:48   me?

00:13:49   My little experience with that has always been pain and suffering, rather than joy and

00:13:56   delight.

00:13:58   And so for me, those probably aren't the directions that would motivate me to go into.

00:14:04   And I think maybe there's something A, interesting in understanding that you and I in some ways

00:14:10   are as similar professionally as two people could be in some ways.

00:14:16   We've both been doing basically the same job for the last eight years.

00:14:22   We do it in sort of fairly similar ways.

00:14:25   We make our living fairly similarly.

00:14:27   But even still, we have these very, I think, very different preferences and things that

00:14:34   we would actually, the parts of the job that we actually enjoy.

00:14:36   And so it's good to just, I think, be introspective probably first at understanding, you know,

00:14:45   when I see myself procrastinating, I think one of the things that I've started to try

00:14:50   and ask myself is like, "Why don't I want to do that?"

00:14:54   Because usually there's a reason, and sometimes it's a good reason, and sometimes it's a bad

00:15:00   reason.

00:15:01   But you end up with this funny situation of, at a certain point, like, I don't know, I

00:15:06   don't know.

00:15:07   You either, when you're independent, you either will be in the situation where the thing just

00:15:11   won't get done because there's not like there's someone else on the team who it can get punted

00:15:17   to.

00:15:18   It's like, you're going to do it or you're not.

00:15:23   And so trying to at least understand why you're not doing it.

00:15:26   You know, there are many features, and I mean, I have whole apps that I've sort of, I've

00:15:31   halfheartedly built or I didn't, for some reason, didn't catch my imagination, I guess

00:15:38   you could say.

00:15:39   It's like, if it doesn't have that, can't get over that initial hump, it'll just sit

00:15:44   there and kind of languish.

00:15:45   And even when it might, from a business perspective, be a good idea or, you know, from a just a

00:15:55   utility to the world perspective might be a good thing.

00:15:58   Like there's, if it doesn't catch my attention, I know I won't really be able to do it.

00:16:05   And so it is something that I don't, but I think increasingly, and this is where I was

00:16:09   trying to think, I'm sort of coming around to is, well, while I think that is how I've

00:16:15   acted for a long time now, like I look at my business and I think, you know, like I'm

00:16:23   by allowing myself to do the things that are only the things that I enjoy, I'm probably

00:16:30   hurting the effectiveness of my business, which is, you know, which is problematic in

00:16:37   some ways.

00:16:38   But honestly, like the more fundamental thing that I'm starting to worry about, and I'm

00:16:41   starting to think about a lot more is I'm not getting better at a very fast rate anymore.

00:16:50   But you know, my skills and my abilities, as I go down this or these, you know, as I

00:16:56   keep doing the things that I'm good at and enjoy doing, I get better, I get incrementally

00:17:01   better at doing those things.

00:17:03   But I don't tackle these bigger, harder problems.

00:17:05   And, you know, it's like your example of like a password reset form or an email change form,

00:17:11   like, it's not that that's a hard tech problem to do.

00:17:15   But I know for myself, I have all these features sort of in that vein that I haven't done.

00:17:19   And as a result, like, they're probably disproportionately more difficult to do than they should be,

00:17:27   because it shouldn't be that hard to do a lot some of these things.

00:17:30   They're fairly straightforward.

00:17:31   But if you put them off for long enough, and you know, at a certain point, it actually

00:17:35   does become difficult because you become very rusty at doing those kinds of things.

00:17:39   Yeah, I mean, I'll honestly, it would take a lot of rust to be too rusty to make an email

00:17:43   change form.

00:17:44   But sure, you know, and there's a couple things that I want to unpack.

00:17:48   You know, one of them, the getting better at new things and learning new things, that

00:17:51   I think we should come back to.

00:17:53   But also, you know, I think it's important that, you know, as I mentioned, like, one

00:17:57   of the benefits of working for yourself is being able to look at a lot of the things

00:18:03   that the world wants you to do or that you think you're obligated to do.

00:18:08   And on some of those, you can just say no.

00:18:10   And not all of them.

00:18:11   You know, some of them are more important than others.

00:18:13   Some of them, there's more ramifications if you don't do them, you know, that you should

00:18:18   think about.

00:18:19   But, you know, like so many things, I think there's a healthy balance to be found.

00:18:24   You know, you're an indie.

00:18:25   You have the ability to not do stuff you don't want to do.

00:18:31   And you have the ability, as I said earlier, to, you know, take the indulgence of working

00:18:36   on something that might not be worth the time you're putting into it in pure business terms,

00:18:41   or that you might want to do anyway.

00:18:45   It's kind of like eating dessert.

00:18:46   You know, that's why I use the term indulgence, because like, you're allowed to give yourself

00:18:51   that.

00:18:52   You're allowed to do something cool that doesn't make sense from the business, as long as you

00:18:56   don't only do that.

00:18:57   As long as you don't do that out of balance such that your business will suffer and you

00:19:01   won't be able to do this anymore.

00:19:03   And this is a balance that many, many companies and indies have a hard time striking.

00:19:10   You know, everyone has like their pet project they would love to do, or their preferred

00:19:14   way of doing things.

00:19:16   And if it doesn't make sense business-wise to do that, you can still do it sometimes.

00:19:21   You know, you can have fun with things.

00:19:22   You can have side projects.

00:19:24   You can take the indulgence of doing some kind of like crazy, ridiculous thing to make

00:19:29   your app 1% better because you just wanted to do it.

00:19:33   That just can't be all you do.

00:19:34   And similarly, you know, the list of things that like, it's a huge problem if you don't

00:19:38   do them, there are a few things on there that that's true for, but that isn't true for

00:19:42   the whole list.

00:19:43   And as an indie, I feel like you should let yourself have that.

00:19:47   That's part, you know, we as indies, we do a lot of, a lot more, you know, administration

00:19:53   and management of stuff like taxes and accounting and all this stuff.

00:19:56   We take on a lot of burdens there and we also take a huge risk compared to people who work

00:20:01   for other people.

00:20:03   And I think part of the reason we take that and part of the payoff of doing that is this

00:20:07   ability to, you know, miss spend some of our time because we can decide to do that as long

00:20:15   as it doesn't cause problems for the business as a whole, you know, as long as we keep everything

00:20:18   in balance.

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00:22:03   - All right, so I think it is worth coming back a little bit to what you said earlier

00:22:07   about that you aren't getting better as quickly as you used to or as quickly as you want to.

00:22:13   And that's so, if you do the indie indulgence, I do what I want kind of thing for too long,

00:22:20   then this is a problem.

00:22:21   That you will only do the things that you want to do and you won't get better at other

00:22:26   things.

00:22:27   - I have the same problem in a lot of areas.

00:22:32   For example, things like I haven't really been pressured to learn Swift because why

00:22:36   would I?

00:22:37   As we've discussed, there's some reasons, I'm kind of interested in it a little bit

00:22:41   and everything, but when it comes down to what I actually do day to day, there's nothing

00:22:46   really pushing me to learn it right this second or to convert anything or to write new code

00:22:49   in Swift right now.

00:22:51   There is no big standard.

00:22:53   We also talked about how neither of us are very heavy unit testers.

00:22:56   There's nothing forcing us to become heavy unit testers.

00:23:00   But certain things do bring new topics to us and new skills to us out of necessity.

00:23:07   So things like when the app store economic landscape shifts around, we're forced to

00:23:12   do different types of business models.

00:23:14   We're forced to try things like freemium and ads and things like that.

00:23:19   And so I feel like just being in this ecosystem does push us into a few new things here and

00:23:25   there, but obviously not every kind of thing.

00:23:29   I'm wondering, is there a specific kind of area or example that you feel like you should

00:23:36   be getting better in but just are not being pressured to?

00:23:40   I think the hardest thing about that question is that it falls a lot in the...

00:23:47   It's an unknown loss.

00:23:51   It's hard for me to know exactly if there's a particular area where I'm deficient because

00:23:57   in some ways by the very nature of it being a deficiency, being an area that I'm not exposed

00:24:01   to, being something that I'm not forcing myself to undertake, I don't understand what I'm

00:24:10   missing out on.

00:24:12   And so it's tricky.

00:24:13   But I think about the situations where I used to be really scared about dealing with low-level

00:24:22   core graphics stuff.

00:24:25   That was an area, like doing animations or things like that, that I used to think were

00:24:29   really...

00:24:30   It was just this little black box that I never opened up, that it was just terrifying to

00:24:34   me.

00:24:35   And more recently, I've gotten used to that.

00:24:41   And in Activity++ was an area where I hit this wall where I was trying to make this

00:24:45   animation, and all of a sudden it's like, the only way I'm going to be able to do this

00:24:49   is if I drop down a level.

00:24:52   And so it's like, well, I really liked this thought I had in my mind for what the animation

00:24:57   would look like.

00:24:58   And so I dove in and I really learned all this crazy stuff and got it to work.

00:25:04   And now I have this whole other toolset that I can... as I'm looking at problems in my

00:25:12   other apps or in new apps, I have this whole toolset that I just completely didn't have

00:25:16   before, and these capabilities that I didn't even...

00:25:19   I intellectually knew probably existed, but I didn't really understand what that meant.

00:25:25   And I think that experience that you can intellectually know that something is possible, but until

00:25:34   you've actually done it, it can be really... you don't really know what you're missing

00:25:38   out on.

00:25:39   And I think the thing that I'm trying to sort of chasten myself with in this experience,

00:25:45   or in this thought process that I've been having recently, is the "I don't know what

00:25:49   all those things are that I'm missing, but I know that they exist."

00:25:55   And I want to try and motivate myself to tackle problems that are difficult so that I can

00:26:02   discover what those things are.

00:26:05   Because the things that I do understand, the things that I have a great handle on, are

00:26:10   the things that are easier, or the things that came more naturally to me.

00:26:13   Another area that I think is something that I'm trying to think about more is having a

00:26:17   better understanding around graphic design.

00:26:22   Not necessarily in terms of app design, but in terms of actual art type of things, and

00:26:28   having a better sense of that.

00:26:29   Where right now, it's this big scary thing that I could never do that.

00:26:34   But I guess history has shown me that all these things that I say, "Oh, I could never

00:26:38   do that," are probably just things that I haven't tried and applied myself to.

00:26:44   And it's an interesting reminder that the skills that I have now, at some point, probably

00:26:51   look like these other things look to me now do.

00:26:55   Yeah, that's fair.

00:26:56   But I think also the life of an indie is, it's broad.

00:27:03   I think graphic design is a good example, because there are lots of things, like deep,

00:27:08   low-level programming things that we won't need to know, or shouldn't know, because we

00:27:14   have to be a little more broad.

00:27:15   And we have to also know about things like accounting and business set up to some minor

00:27:22   degree and things like graphic design and marketing.

00:27:25   There is so much out there that we need to know that you might have already picked up

00:27:30   lots of these things along the way, but you might not be giving yourself credit for them.

00:27:35   It sounds like certain things that you perceive as these big walls that are intimidating to

00:27:40   you in some way, that those things count in professional development or betterment, but

00:27:46   that the things that you pick up along the way of being an independent person and doing

00:27:51   things the way that you do them, especially so thoroughly and analytically, you've built

00:27:56   and picked up lots of skills along the way in that area that you probably don't even,

00:28:02   you probably just did it so gradually or so automatically, or did it without thinking

00:28:07   too much about how you were bettering yourself during that time, that you weren't even giving

00:28:11   yourself credit.

00:28:12   But that all counts.

00:28:13   Like, you were getting better.

00:28:15   You've been getting better at lots of things over time that just might not be low-level

00:28:18   APIs.

00:28:19   Sure.

00:28:20   I think you're probably true that I'm being too hard on myself with this thought process.

00:28:26   But yeah, I think maybe the final takeaway to think about this is just, I think it is

00:28:32   probably a good thing to be conscious of how we're approaching difficult problems, to see

00:28:39   if we're not doing them or we're not approaching them for the right reasons.

00:28:44   Because fair enough, I'm never going to be as good of an icon designer as someone like

00:28:48   Louis Mantia.

00:28:51   Very few people ever will.

00:28:52   Yeah, right.

00:28:53   And so it's not like my goal is to do that.

00:28:56   It's not that I'm trying to be everything and to accomplish all of, like, to do everything

00:29:01   on my own.

00:29:03   But just because I can't get to that end, it's probably still good for me to look at

00:29:08   something and say, "Well, what could I do?

00:29:10   What could I learn?

00:29:11   What's one area that I can try and solve a difficult problem and by doing so, make

00:29:17   myself better?"

00:29:19   And that is almost certainly going to be a productive exercise.

00:29:22   And with that, we're out of time this week.

00:29:24   Thank you everybody for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

00:29:27   Bye.

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