00:00:04 ◼ ► I'm Marco Arment. And I'm David Smith. Under the Radar is usually not longer than 30 minutes, so let's get started.
00:00:09 ◼ ► So if you've listened to Under the Radar for any amount of time, you probably know that at the end of the episode, very often, the last 30 seconds of the episode is us trying to summarize the last 30 minutes of the episode in kind of a concise way to kind of bring it all together in a neat bow.
00:00:24 ◼ ► And I was thinking about those recently, and I think 99% of them will boil down to the phrase "be thoughtful."
00:00:31 ◼ ► Be thoughtful about whatever it is that we're discussing, that fundamentally, like, the theme of Under the Radar is about being thoughtful about the things that you do.
00:00:40 ◼ ► And I think being thoughtful has two aspects to it. And it's usually around making a decision.
00:00:46 ◼ ► And it's like either you're going into a new decision, be thoughtful, be intentional, make logical choices.
00:00:52 ◼ ► And I think on the other side of being thoughtful is when you make a decision, is looking back at it and understanding why you made that decision and what was good about it, what was not so good, and being able to kind of use that to improve yourself and your development and your business and all these things over time.
00:01:08 ◼ ► And the theme of today's episode is essentially an opportunity that I've recently had to be thoughtful and introspective, looking back at a decision that I made and sort of trying to understand why it took so long for me to make that decision.
00:01:22 ◼ ► And sort of, I'll get into the details of it later, but essentially the decision was for sort of branching out and not being by myself and my development.
00:01:30 ◼ ► And I actually hired Stephen Hackett to work for me and with me to help improve my business. And this is something that in many ways was a very long time coming.
00:01:46 ◼ ► A very long time I've been doing this largely by myself. And certainly in terms of the actual, like, the crux part of the business.
00:01:54 ◼ ► I work with various jobs and various parts of it, but it's sort of, Stephen is the first time I'm really kind of getting into a different chapter and a different look at that.
00:02:02 ◼ ► And I think there are two aspects of that, that I think looking back at this decision, that I think were holding me back and making it so that it was difficult.
00:02:12 ◼ ► If you want a discussion about the importance of potentially hiring someone and the roles that this is useful for, we did an episode a couple of ago about roles, which was sort of part of this process for me when I was thinking through,
00:02:23 ◼ ► what roles would I want to hire someone for? But I think more fundamentally, what I've learned from this experience when I'm thoughtful and introspective, is there were two things that were getting in my way.
00:02:32 ◼ ► And one of them is, it's not quite a logical fallacy, but it's sort of in that vein where I was realizing that I was conflating and combining two different ideas into one idea.
00:02:43 ◼ ► And one of those ideas was vitally important to me. It was vitally important to kind of who I was as a person, who I kind of think of myself from an identity perspective.
00:02:51 ◼ ► And the other one, it turns out, was actually not that important. And by combining those two things together, I was causing trouble for myself in the long term.
00:02:59 ◼ ► And specifically what this means is I very deeply value and consider myself an indie developer.
00:03:05 ◼ ► Like, indie is sort of what I think of who I am. That's my job. I'm an indie developer. And that is a big part of my identity. That is kind of who I am.
00:03:12 ◼ ► And I'm very proud of that. And I think that this whole show is about us talking about independent app development.
00:03:18 ◼ ► That is what we do. And that's been very important to me. And I think for a long time, I value, and that is something that I think will continue for a very long time.
00:03:26 ◼ ► I think that is something very core to who I am and the way that I work and the kind of work that I want to do.
00:03:31 ◼ ► And I think for a long time, I didn't realize that there were two aspects to that that I was combining together in my head.
00:03:38 ◼ ► And the first aspect is kind of independent as in free. As in, like, I have control and the ability to choose my path.
00:03:47 ◼ ► I can look at this and decide this is an opportunity I want to do, and I can go forward and do that.
00:03:52 ◼ ► Or if I can see an opportunity and say, "No, that doesn't really align with my values, with the way that I want to work, with whatever that is."
00:03:57 ◼ ► Like, I can choose which side of that -- which path I'm going to go down as a business. And I have independence in my ability to choose that.
00:04:06 ◼ ► And that was something that I think is vitally important to me. That is the thing, fundamentally, that being an indie developer, I think, is the most awesome part of this job.
00:04:13 ◼ ► Like, there are some terrible parts of this job, but the most awesomest part of it is being able to have that choice.
00:04:19 ◼ ► Is being able to not have someone tell you what you need to do or to put you in circumstances where you have to sort of compromise yourself or your choices because of you're in an environment that you don't have that choice.
00:04:30 ◼ ► You don't have that freedom. And, like, that version of independence is something that I think is very valuable.
00:04:35 ◼ ► But the sort of the trap and the thing that I found myself being stuck in is I also thought of independence as being alone. That sort of that sense of independent from other things.
00:04:45 ◼ ► Like, rather than having dependence on other people or other things and having the sense of independent as in, like, I'm so sort of just standing on my own.
00:04:54 ◼ ► And that is an aspect of independence, certainly. That being -- you have more freedom to make your choices in the first part of that.
00:05:03 ◼ ► If I am just by myself because my choices have, you know, fewer impacts on other people or on other things.
00:05:09 ◼ ► They're impacting me and my family, but they're not impacting other people. So I have slightly more freedom.
00:05:13 ◼ ► But I think I was conflating those two things together and saying that in order to be an indie developer, in order to be truly independent, I needed to be alone.
00:05:26 ◼ ► And I think combining those two things together, when one of them was so vital to me, meant that for a very long time, I never even really honestly was considering whether or not I could not be alone.
00:05:38 ◼ ► Whether I could have help, whether I could have people working with me and for me, because I was like, if I do that, then I'm losing my identity.
00:05:49 ◼ ► I think the sort of thing that would have been retrospective and thoughtful about this was understanding that those are two separate things.
00:05:56 ◼ ► That they are interrelated, certainly, but they are separate. And I could say no to being alone and still be saying yes to the actual part that really valued to me.
00:06:05 ◼ ► Because being alone was not -- that was not what I signed up for. I didn't value the being alone part. I just thought it was a vital, essential part.
00:06:14 ◼ ► And I think something that I've -- sort of the broader lesson there, I think, for me has been whenever I find myself in a place that there is something that I'm holding valuable that is sort of changing and guiding my decisions.
00:06:26 ◼ ► It's like, make sure that I've boiled that down to the truly essential, vital part of that.
00:06:31 ◼ ► And not just think that it's part of this bigger, broader thing. And it's like, oh, well, this part of it is inextricably linked to the rest.
00:06:39 ◼ ► I can't get rid of that part. That was the lesson that I've had to learn recently about this.
00:06:47 ◼ ► Don't just assume that everything that goes together, because it has gone together in the past, has to and will necessarily continue to go together.
00:07:00 ◼ ► And I think the second part of it that I think has also been just as helpful and is certainly related is the sense that accepting help is not a sign of weakness or failing.
00:07:11 ◼ ► And I think this applies just generally in life. That is just a life lesson that I think we all need to learn.
00:07:17 ◼ ► Accepting help in any area of your life is not a -- this doesn't mean that you've sort of failed on your own.
00:07:24 ◼ ► And that as a result, you are now less of a whatever, less of a developer, less of a businessman, less of a developer.
00:07:30 ◼ ► Whatever that is, it is not a sign of failing. It is in some ways a reflection on your maturity and your understanding that in order to be the best version of whatever it is, you can benefit from other people's experience.
00:07:41 ◼ ► There's something -- just being humble about that and saying, as good as I am at some of the parts of what I do, there are people in the world who are better at them than I am.
00:07:51 ◼ ► And my benefiting from their expertise, their knowledge, their experience doesn't mean that I've sort of failed in some way.
00:07:59 ◼ ► Instead, it's just a reflection of my ultimate goal is to do the best work that I can to make the best apps, to have the strongest business, whatever that sort of definition of best is going to be.
00:08:09 ◼ ► That is almost certainly going to come as part of expanding the skill set and expertise and experience that is driving towards that.
00:08:18 ◼ ► That's something that I was noticing for myself when I look back at why it took so long for me to try and bring someone in to help me with parts of the business that I don't like doing or aren't very strong at.
00:08:28 ◼ ► In our roles discussion, it was one of the things that I wrote down my list of the 64 things that I do and how some of them I was terrible at.
00:08:35 ◼ ► But I didn't get help to do them. And I think part of it, I had in the back of my mind that, "Oh, no, you can learn to do that job. You can learn to do this thing, and you should.
00:08:44 ◼ ► If you do, then you'll be better rather than saying, 'No, get help.' Have someone else who's an expert or good and different than you in ways that will allow you to be better and the business to be better.
00:09:03 ◼ ► It's that sense of making sure that I'm really focused in on what actually matters to me, what is actually the thing that I care about, and making sure I'm not tacking on other parts to it.
00:09:12 ◼ ► And secondarily is the understanding of the importance of saying that getting help is better and is good rather than being somehow a failing or a problem in me or something that I should try and resist as much as I could.
00:09:25 ◼ ► Yeah, I think it shows quite how powerful the cultural baggage of indie meaning that you are alone. It shows how strong that is, that it took you in particular so long to break free of that, because normally, if you'll permit me to fawn all over you for a minute,
00:09:46 ◼ ► one of the greatest things that I get from knowing you and from talking with you is that you are relentlessly analytical and challenging of assumptions in ways that a lot of people do not or are afraid to or wouldn't think of.
00:10:00 ◼ ► And many times throughout the course of being your friend and doing this show, you've said something or you've asked a question or you've challenged something that has broken my mind wide open on some issue that I was just not seeing objectively or was not considering a certain perspective on or was not considering a certain option for.
00:10:19 ◼ ► So this is something that I consider one of your greatest strengths is that you are able to be very pragmatic and look at things and ask those questions and analyze and think about or even try things that a lot of us get stuck in ruts in and don't try.
00:10:34 ◼ ► And so to have the idea of hiring help for something, to have that have even escaped you for this long really shows how powerful that is in developer culture, especially around this kind of Apple indie developer culture that we live in that is such a strong thing.
00:10:53 ◼ ► I'm very first of all happy for you that you've found a way to break through that because I think most of us can't. I know I certainly have always had trouble with that. I have only very rarely hired out certain roles like answering support tickets or something and I usually eventually back away from it and take it on myself.
00:11:13 ◼ ► I also would often feel like this thing that I'm bad at, say making app store screenshots or making marketing efforts or things like that, these things that I'm bad at I often would just tell myself just like you were saying, I should just get better at that.
00:11:27 ◼ ► This is something I need to do for my business and I am bad at it and I should feel bad about that and I should somehow get better at that and be a different kind of person than I am.
00:11:37 ◼ ► But I think the one thing to keep in mind is that there is no medal, there is no award for having done everything yourself. No one cares. No one is going to commend you for that.
00:11:49 ◼ ► And there is no indie police out there who are going to say, "Hey, you said you were indie. Why are you hiring this role out?"
00:11:56 ◼ ► There is no gain to be had by forcing yourself into a limitation like this. No one else cares but you. So to some degree you have to ask like when you consider yourself indie as part of your identity or part of how you kind of sell yourself to the world, who are you performing that for?
00:12:15 ◼ ► And to what degree do you need to be some kind of purist or idealist in those definitions? And if it's not serving you or your business as well as it could by imposing a certain restriction or by keeping this a certain way, who's it for then?
00:12:34 ◼ ► And getting back to what indie even means, I think indie is kind of a spectrum. There's like pure indie in the sense that one person does literally everything themselves.
00:12:46 ◼ ► Maybe there's a question of where the money comes from. Are you corporate funded? Are you VC funded? You can do all those things yourself. It's less likely but you can do all those things yourself.
00:12:55 ◼ ► There's a question of what indie means but there's a lot of flex in that definition. You can look at somebody like us, I think we're pretty clearly still indie.
00:13:06 ◼ ► Amazon, they're pretty clearly not indie. There's a whole bunch in the middle. There's a lot of companies that have maybe no external funding, maybe no corporate owner but maybe they have like three or four employees.
00:13:20 ◼ ► Is that an indie development shop? Maybe, kind of, depends on who you ask. But then to some degree, what does it matter?
00:13:28 ◼ ► Suppose two people are working on something but they get VC funding. Is that indie? Maybe? It's a question mark.
00:13:37 ◼ ► People have different definitions of what that means but again, I think it is very valuable for us as developers to be able to not get too caught up in the identity politics of what kind of developer you are.
00:13:51 ◼ ► For instance, we say we're indie iOS developers. What if there's a really good reason for us to make an Android app sometime? Should we never do that because part of our identity is we're iOS developers?
00:14:02 ◼ ► No. You should do what's right for you and your business and your apps. That's going to require different things for different apps at different times and that might change over time.
00:14:09 ◼ ► So the less you can get tied up in "this is what I am, this is only what I do," the less you can get tied up in that, the better for you and your business.
00:14:19 ◼ ► We're going to be talking about this in lots of ways in life, as you mentioned, but we're not going to be the psychology podcast this episode. Just in general for your business, it's very, very beneficial for you to not get too tied up in trying to perform a certain identity for nobody except yourself.
00:14:39 ◼ ► We are brought to you this episode by Sentry. As a developer, you want to solve crashes and performance issues fast before they affect your customers, not when someone emails you to complain something hasn't been working right for days.
00:14:50 ◼ ► So to do that, you need the right tools on your side. Sentry gives you everything you need for mobile crash reporting and app monitoring so you can resolve issues faster.
00:14:59 ◼ ► Sentry helps you investigate crashes by device type, OS, and release with actionable, real-time insights, including breadcrumbs, screenshots, stack traces, and even suspect commits.
00:15:08 ◼ ► It is a great service, so if you want your app to be consistently rated five stars, Sentry can help.
00:15:15 ◼ ► Because by identifying and solving mobile application performance issues, like long app start times, janky frame rendering, slow HTTP requests, all those things, your customers will get a smoother, better five-star experience.
00:15:28 ◼ ► Sentry allows you to build more and troubleshoot less. It helps you reduce context switching too because it works for web, back end, and mobile all with the same tools.
00:15:38 ◼ ► Using features like distributed tracing, you can identify back end issues that might affect your app performance without consulting other tools or engineers.
00:15:44 ◼ ► And Sentry supports Android, iOS, Flutter, and React Native. This is why four million developers and 90,000 organizations rely on Sentry to deliver a consistently good experience.
00:15:59 ◼ ► So, here's the deal. Sentry is totally free to use, so there's no reason not to check it out.
00:16:06 ◼ ► As an Under the Radar listener, you can get six months of the team plan for free. Just click the link in the show notes and use the code "radar."
00:16:13 ◼ ► That's six months of the team plan completely free at sentry.io/4/mobile or click the link in the show notes, then use the code "radar."
00:16:26 ◼ ► Yeah, saying what you were saying there just made me think of, I remember reading this thing about, I think it was a game developers conference.
00:16:33 ◼ ► And one of the aspects of that conference was you had to sort of, there was an indie game section and then there was a non-indie game section.
00:16:41 ◼ ► And it was like the definition of which of those sort of sections at the convention was.
00:16:45 ◼ ► And the definition is, are you a publicly listed company or are you owned by a publicly listed company?
00:16:51 ◼ ► And that was the definition. If you're not owned by a publicly listed company, you're an indie game developer.
00:16:59 ◼ ► You could have 10,000 developers, you could have huge amounts of VC funding, it doesn't matter.
00:17:03 ◼ ► Are you listed somewhere on the stock market? If you are, then you're not an indie game, otherwise you are.
00:17:10 ◼ ► And in some ways I found that so liberating in a way, where it's like, sure, that's a perfectly valid definition.
00:17:31 ◼ ► But it's like, I'm a very far distance from being there if I would still be able to set up my app in the indie app side of the conference, if that's the definition.
00:17:36 ◼ ► And so it's one of these things, definitions are so, they can be so powerful and they can be so useful if they're not, you know,
00:17:46 ◼ ► For me, I think there have been times in my career where being an indie has been helpful because it sort of scoped and changed some of the opportunities that I chose to pursue.
00:17:51 ◼ ► Because I didn't want to be, you know, I'm not gearing myself up to be purchased by a publicly traded company.
00:18:01 ◼ ► If that was, I would have chosen some different paths and done some things in a different way.
00:18:06 ◼ ► But like, even from that definition of being an indie as being, you know, sort of staying not on the stock market, like there have been choices that I made and that's been useful.
00:18:16 ◼ ► Because like I said, I was finding these, I had a definition that was too restrictive, that was too focused on the wrong things.
00:18:21 ◼ ► And that was, I think, trying to, you know, it's like, and it's funny because it makes you feel good to be able to do these things yourself.
00:18:56 ◼ ► But having the opportunity to learn a new skill and then feel like I had mastery or at least competence at it, like that is a great feeling.
00:19:01 ◼ ► And I think what's tricky is that if you're chasing that feeling, you are, you know, potentially doing harm to other aspects of your business.
00:19:06 ◼ ► Because if all I'm doing is trying to get good at 10 different things, I'm potentially starting to not get as good or not be as sort of focused in my attention on the parts of my business where I already am an expert.
00:19:11 ◼ ► Where I've developed, you know, spent the last 20 something years as being a professional software developer,
00:19:26 ◼ ► And that's as cool as it is for me to learn to make whatever marketing screenshots and feel like I've developed competence and ability in that.
00:19:36 ◼ ► Like it's going to take me another 20 years to get to kind of like, you know, true expertise at that.
00:19:51 ◼ ► And it's like, so that's, that tension, and like, and that's, it's one of those things where it's just important to be, you know, sort of introspective about ourselves.
00:19:56 ◼ ► So like, there's a reason why I valued those skills in me because I did enjoy the process of learning them.
00:20:01 ◼ ► But just because I'm not, you know, I'm giving up some parts of what, of what being, you know,
00:20:06 ◼ ► the various roles, the 64 roles of my business, like giving some of those over to someone else,
00:20:26 ◼ ► It doesn't mean that I won't have the opportunity to develop expertise because I love that feeling.
00:20:31 ◼ ► It just means there may be some areas where the process of which I develop that expertise is in a different means.
00:20:36 ◼ ► It's amazing how quickly you can learn from someone else who knows what they're doing in a particular area.
00:20:46 ◼ ► Like, my typical way of learning is to make lots of mistakes, but hopefully only make them once or twice.
00:20:56 ◼ ► You bump into something, you turn around, and you know, I'm like a Roomba bouncing around trying to clean a house.
00:21:01 ◼ ► And when you work with someone who has, I guess, bounced their head into the walls that you're about to run into already,
00:21:11 ◼ ► "Actually, maybe let's just turn around here and let's not bash our head into that particular wall."
00:21:21 ◼ ► It's like, this is not a particularly novel concept, but it was something that I was recently reminded of.
00:21:26 ◼ ► I can do that in a much less painful process by relying on the expertise of other people,
00:21:31 ◼ ► rather than feeling like I have to develop all of this skill from first principles myself,
00:21:46 ◼ ► But when I look back at my life for the last 10 years, that was kind of what I was trying to do.
00:21:51 ◼ ► I was trying to learn everything from first principles myself, which is like, yeah, maybe don't do that.
00:22:01 ◼ ► Learn from other people, find areas where you can benefit from other people's experience,
00:22:06 ◼ ► and in doing so, I'm not any less of a developer or less of a businessman in the process by relying on other people's skill.
00:22:21 ◼ ► usually we can't afford to hire other people to do things that we don't want to do or don't know how to do.
00:22:26 ◼ ► We have to do everything ourselves. Most indie businesses start off when you're at home at night
00:22:31 ◼ ► or on the weekends from your full-time job, and you have a budget of zero dollars for the thing you're making,
00:22:46 ◼ ► But then it can be very difficult to recognize, once you've moved past the point where, you know what,
00:22:51 ◼ ► now, once the business is succeeding and you're making money, you have to at some point start outsourcing the things
00:22:56 ◼ ► that are not your core competencies, because it's just a terrible use of your time, as you were saying.
00:23:01 ◼ ► Do you think Mark Zuckerberg had to learn how to use App Store Connect to upload the Facebook app?
00:23:06 ◼ ► Do you think he personally makes those screenshots for the Facebook app? Of course not.
00:23:11 ◼ ► It's probably a bad use of his time. Do you think Tim Cook mows his own lawn? Probably not,
00:23:16 ◼ ► unless he really likes mowing lawns for some reason, but even then, it's probably not a great use of his time and energy.
00:23:21 ◼ ► It's important to recognize when you, as a business owner, are kind of wasting time by trying to do something yourself,
00:23:26 ◼ ► and are actually costing the business real downsides or real opportunity costs by you not working on the things that you're doing.
00:23:31 ◼ ► And instead focusing too much on some aspect that could be fairly easily outsourced, and you can afford to do it.
00:23:36 ◼ ► So there's all sorts of complexities to how you decide what those things are, but some things are easier than others to decide.
00:23:41 ◼ ► For instance, I used to do my own taxes a long time ago, and then once I started having an indie business on the side of my payroll job,
00:23:51 ◼ ► So I started doing my own taxes, and then once I started doing my own taxes, I started doing my own taxes.
00:23:56 ◼ ► And then once I started having an indie business on the side of my payroll job, I immediately stopped doing them myself.
00:24:01 ◼ ► So I'm like, you know, this, I don't want to screw anything up, and it's getting more complicated now,
00:24:06 ◼ ► so I'm going to hire an accountant to do my taxes for me. And it was the best thing I ever did.
00:24:16 ◼ ► There are certain things that are easier than others, but then when you get into an indie software business, it can be tricky.
00:24:21 ◼ ► Like, what things do you outsource? Like, do you outsource, again, those marketing needs.
00:24:36 ◼ ► That would be something like, I don't know, I think I'd feel less comfortable about that at first.
00:24:56 ◼ ► Here's something that I used to tackle myself, and now, not only do I not need to tackle it myself anymore,
00:25:11 ◼ ► This has been something that has been part of my life that I can say is that you will be surprised as to how beneficial it can be
00:25:22 ◼ ► And what I've found is it's this thing of, there is something just peaceful in my mind now,
00:25:28 ◼ ► knowing that there are certain aspects of what I do that I've been carrying around with me that I don't have to do now.
00:25:35 ◼ ► And that allows me more freedom and creativity and excitement about the truly essential parts of what I do that I enjoy, I love, and I'm an expert at.
00:25:45 ◼ ► Like coding and doing those kinds of, like the thought of tackling a big programming job, for example,
00:25:56 ◼ ► It's easier to think about that when I don't have to carry around these other aspects to me.
00:26:01 ◼ ► Like this space in my mind that has been opened by taking these things out of there and giving them to someone else.
00:26:10 ◼ ► That is just a wonderful benefit that I don't know if I necessarily appreciated how much there was a drag on me in the past
00:26:22 ◼ ► And honestly, I would often do less of them than I should have, probably, because they weren't preferred activities or things that I really wanted to do.
00:26:29 ◼ ► Their weight, like cognitively, was still there. It was still something that I was carrying around that I was like,
00:26:34 ◼ ► "Oh, I'm going to have to go and check into the help desk. I'm going to go, I need to go deal with whatever the,
00:26:39 ◼ ► writing this marketing description when I'm doing a big update. Like what am I going to put in the what's new?
00:26:49 ◼ ► Those tasks were things that almost like, I didn't want to finish the feature because I knew at the end of the feature,
00:26:54 ◼ ► "Oh, that's not great. Am I in this mode of, I don't want to finish because as soon as I finish, I know I have to make screenshots."
00:27:02 ◼ ► No, this is a terrible place to be. This is not, like I should be excited to finish because that means I can start the next thing.
00:27:08 ◼ ► And so that is just the purely positive part that I was sort of maybe wrapping up around thinking of.
00:27:13 ◼ ► It's easy to get stuck on the, I guess, sort of the more philosophical or the kind of like,
00:27:18 ◼ ► "Oh, the negative feelings around it potentially, or the lack of control, or these kinds of things."
00:27:23 ◼ ► But I can say from experience, it also is a tremendous benefit to release yourself from those things.
00:27:28 ◼ ► And it's like you have this extra speed, this extra freedom to pursue things that I don't need to feel.
00:27:34 ◼ ► Like I just feel more free to dive into the actual, like the coding and the new features and the sort of like the development part of what I do.
00:27:47 ◼ ► I don't know if it's actually apocryphal or true, but I have this vague recollection of this thing about racing, I think it was racing yachts or something,
00:27:53 ◼ ► where there's this concept of how they have to be so careful about the smoothness of the keel of the bottom of the ship.
00:27:59 ◼ ► Because any little bit of drag that is on the bottom of a keel of a ship can be so problematic in aggregate over time.
00:28:07 ◼ ► And you won't necessarily know it until you've, you know, it's like if you sail for a thousand miles and there's actually been like a barnacle stuck to the bottom of your ship,
00:28:16 ◼ ► it's been slowing you down by a small amount for a long time. It could make a huge difference in aggregate.
00:28:22 ◼ ► And I feel like in some ways that's kind of where I have this feeling of. Like I'm knocking off these little barnacles that aren't massive things.
00:28:28 ◼ ► It's not like there's this massive gaping hole in the bottom of the keel. It's like no, it's just this little barnacle.
00:28:32 ◼ ► But because it's been there for 17 years, it's been dragging me down for all that time.
00:28:37 ◼ ► And it's like knocking it off, it's like oh wow, that's nice. I'm going faster and better in the direction and doing the thing that I really am.
00:28:45 ◼ ► Like enjoy doing and that I'm excited about and the part of this business that I enjoy and that I will continue to enjoy and am now able to enjoy more than I did before.
00:28:55 ◼ ► So I can encourage anyone to be thoughtful about these things and like make sure that you understand the essential aspect of what is important to you.
00:29:02 ◼ ► Be very specific about that and then, you know, accept help whenever you can because accepting help is how we get better.
00:29:15 ◼ ► Now I'm thinking about all the barnacles on the bottom of my ship and I'm like, oh boy. I got a lot to do.