ERP057 - Adversity and Values

It's like first we almost just have to acknowledge how difficult this actually is. Like none of us started 2020 with all our big plans for this year, thinking that this was coming. We all got knocked off our feet in some way or another. So, I think that maybe the first step in towards sort of affecting the decisions that you make in this time is to acknowledge how difficult this time is. Welcome to Evolve Radio where we explore the evolution of business and technology. I'm your host Todd Kane. Today on the podcast, I'm speaking with Josh Weiss with LA Creative Technology. Josh experienced very difficult personal events in the past year. The standard pressure of running an MSP was compounded by his girlfriend being diagnosed with cancer and his father entering palliative care. Then to top it off, the coronavirus pandemic forced everyone into lockdown. It would be understandable that Josh would have been overwhelmed by the pressure. Instead, adversity has created an opportunity to reflect on his values and his habits. Josh and I talk about these challenges and what they have taught him about how he lives his life and how he manages his business. To be honest, I've avoided talking about the pandemic in the podcast. But I also see now how this event will have long-lasting impacts on our business and our society. I hope you enjoyed this discussion with Josh Weiss on adversity and values. If you haven't already, please subscribe to the podcast so you get every new episode. Also, if you wouldn't mind, please leave a rating and review in your podcast app. This helps others find the show so we can reach more of the community. Now, on with the show. And welcome to the podcast, Josh. Thanks so much, Todd, so excited to be here today. Yeah, so this is a bit of an interesting episode that we're going to go through today. Um, I think what I would since we're going to be talking about is um, personal and professional adversity is maybe a good way to describe it. And I I maybe won't put uh sort of too much uh front ending on this and and really just start with your story. I think uh uh if you can kick us off on on sort of what started you on what we're going to talk about around your personal journey here. Yeah, well, I would say that this this particular piece of my journey acutely starts about uh, let's say late October, early November. So almost a year ago for anyone listening at any time. And uh my girlfriend was diagnosed, I found out she had a very large lump in her. And we went through this pretty intense process of eventually learning that that was a cancerous tumor. And that she had not only that, but a second tumor in her as well. And this is someone who's been super healthy, like hardly ever went to doctors, just very, very healthy, energetic woman. And that was, you know, that takes us to just sort of late 2000 uh 2019. Uh right before this crazy year of 2020. And this was my first experience with really illness in a in a loved one at all, my first experience anywhere in my family or personal network with cancer. And so this was really just like a crazy learning experience for us. And so that started what was sort of a pretty stressful personal time for me as a, you know, as a, you know, someone who I love dearly being ill and also being an entrepreneur and keeping a business running. Um, it started a lot of learning for us and so she started chemotherapy uh very early in 2020. And, you know, really fascinating to be two months into chemotherapy and then have the coronavirus hit. And sort of see this this sort of personal challenge that we had and then to start dealing with the coronavirus as well. Um, that was really challenging on its own. Um, and then right around the same time, I found out that my father was entering hospice care as well. Which uh, you know, so he had been on dialysis for a couple years. And I just sort of entered this head space of like everywhere I look felt challenging, right? With so much of the world dealing with what they're dealing with with uh with shutdowns and economic hardships and coronavirus. And my girlfriend's cancer and my father sort of, you know, coming to terms with what it means to lose a parent as well. And and then everything coming up around social justice issues, which have always been very important to me and I'm part of a very diverse multicultural community of people as well. And it really brought into acute focus for me how important it is to uh, how important it is to have purpose in life. And to really practice self-care and to practice care for those around me. And so that's what it felt like on a personal sense for me. And on a professional sense, I really got this really incredible dose of how important it is to really care for employees. And to care for clients and to, you know, sort of care for their employees, care for the business owners. And it just really brought out for me how much how much joy and purpose can come from our personal and our professional interactions. Um, and how that is a direct response to dealing with the most difficult time that I've had as an adult. And for anyone listening, I'm I'm 38, so I'm a young in, but still have a lot of years of adulthood behind me. So, I think that that's an introduction to to the concept personally and professionally of where I've been at. Yeah, and I think uh obviously at this time everyone in the world is dealing with and probably an inordinate amount of of stress. Uh from sort of the the the external factors that are now placed on everybody. Um that so, you know, yours amplified by 10 or 100 times that that had to be significant. Uh everyone can kind of appreciate the level of stress that they're feeling just on a day-to-day basis and then imagine adding sort of those those extra external pressures on top of that, that that must have been crushing. Yeah, yeah, and it's it's definitely been crushing. But I'll say something that I couldn't have anticipated thinking. I mean, I remember back, you know, back in November when all this stuff first started just thinking like, how am I going to make it through this? Just my girlfriend having an illness, not even everything else, right? But I was thinking about just in the last couple weeks, like this has been such a positive life-affirming, life-changing time for me. And one thing that I'll sort of refer listeners to is there's there's a book which has become our Bible, which is called anti-cancer living. Um, and what I love about this is that everything that's encouraged for healing and preventing cancer is is everything which is really just makes you a healthier, more vibrant person. And, you know, so it comes down to stress management, it comes down to sleeping more, um, it comes down to eating better, it comes down to having a good social network. And so on the one hand, this has been such a difficult time that I wouldn't wish upon anybody. But it's really fascinating to look at the amount of healing that both myself and my girlfriend have done. And just the amount of inspiration that I've been able to bring to the people in my life around me. I mean, I've been I've led my employees through some, you know, 2 31-day meditation challenges. And got them to meditate when they never have before and really like inspired leadership in my employees who went out and spread this to their friend. Um, and so the reason that I say all this is that when adversity strikes. There's this, you know, there's this thing that happens where I wish it hadn't happened, I wish that, you know, all the I wish that people weren't sick and I wish that the world wasn't suffering. But I've never felt so much inspiration and so much drive in my life as I feel now. And so it's been crushing, but when I look at the net effects of everything that's happening in my personal and professional sphere. It's been incredibly positive, which is a really uh I wouldn't have predicted it. You know, as much as I've read sort of like the pithy cliches a million times and I've read stories about other people experiencing this type of adversity and how it impacts them. I couldn't have imagined this type of impact coming out of it. And and you asked me before we started Todd if if I see myself as a healthy person before all this. And yeah, I was more healthy than most people. But I never could have imagined how many changes I could make in such a short period and what a positive impact they would have. Yeah, I think your point about adversity is really key. That that's one of the things that I strongly believe and I've heard this idea batted around a bunch, but I really subscribe to it that there's a certain level of adversity in a person's life that's actually required. And if you reflect on it and really sort of use that as energy to to to push forward and to look for the things that that can and should be done in your life. I think that that can provide a a ton of um purpose and a and a ton of uh focus for what actually needs to get done. Um, you know, a couple of examples of this uh my brother uh his family uh their daughter was one of the youngest ever diagnosed type one diabetics in in Alberta history, she was I think like three or four months old. Um, and so they've basically not slept a full night's sleep in, you know, her 13 or 14 years of of of life. Um, and the the amount of adversity that that places on on someone's life is incredible, but, you know, it also acts as a focal point of strength for them. Similarly, a lot of high achieving entrepreneurs actually struggle with dyslexia. And that level of adversity sort of places some road block in front of people and a lot of people will just say, well, my life is hard, so, you know, I have an excuse to not uh try harder or put in a higher effort. And then the other people that kind of look at that and say, no, like I'm not going to let this limit me and that becomes massive fuel for their potential. You kind of see some similarity here that if you hadn't had this event that maybe it wouldn't have provided some level of fuel for you to change. You probably just would have continued on the trajectory that you were on. There there's no question to me that that's what's happening right now. I have two interesting responses to what you just said. So the first one is that we are conditioned by the media and by society to desire easy lives. And I think that that is really interesting in itself. I mean, I listened to a previous podcast that you did uh with a gentleman who's writing a book about ADHD. And and he talked he talked about a few things that stood out to me and one of those was that he was afraid to explore his ADHD. Because he was afraid of the shame that he would encounter if if he went in there too deep or he didn't, like he was afraid of what he would find. And so society sort of says, keep things easy, don't don't have too many challenges, you can buy all this stuff to make your life easy. And and and the weird thing is that if you go through an easy life, and you know, of course, we see this where people who have massive wealth are not necessarily happy and don't really have a sense of purpose or well-being, right? So it's not as simple as just having an easy life. Um, and I think that this really points to what you just said. If we become if we become complacent or if we don't really do the work to figure out sort of like how, you know, who do we want to be, how do we want to live and what are the changes that that we want to make in our lives to have more well-being and to be healthier. Like we get stuck in a rut. And the thing that I've heard, I mean, not even focusing on my personal adversities through this time, but just looking at the larger context of the shutdown and the coronavirus. I I struggled to speak with one person who is not happy for this pause and for this change in the world. And I know a lot of people who are completely screwed without jobs. I know a lot of people who work in the creative fields, people who are DJs and musicians and touring artists and they're not in a great spot right now. Um, but even most of them are happy for this change and for this time. It's almost like we were all in this giant wheel that was spinning so fast and it was so hard to get off. And so I see two things that happened, first off, the external circumstances of the world and the shutdown provided me among, you know, among everyone else. With with like a timeout, right? With not having to. I mean, I know you're a speaker, Todd, I can't imagine how many planes you would have been on, how many conferences you would have attended in the last five months, right? And just me, I was slated to DJ at a music festival, speak at a couple MSP conferences and just like running around like a crazy man. And I as those dates passed on the calendar and I was just home, I really had like a sense of peace. Like I I couldn't have achieved what I wanted to achieve without doing all of those things, but when the world took those things away, I saw that I could keep moving right along. And I think that's just been a blessing of this time. And and so with this pause that I've been granted by helping somebody to heal from cancer and by learning from so many. Very, very traditional Western cancer doctors who I wouldn't anticipate saying to be vegan, who I wouldn't anticipate saying that science shows that meditation is healing. It's really hearing those in this very precise, measured, scientific way was a kick in the butt that I needed to make a lot of changes in my life. And I could not have done it without the pause and I could not have done it without everything that's going on in my life. I mean, it's not even a question. Because tangibly I already knew all these things, I was already farther down that path than many of my peers and yet I struggled with the discipline to actually execute. Yeah, discipline is so massive in that. I I 100% agree, I think if if anything, the pause has given me that opportunity, uh where I don't have the excuses that I used to. Like I'm still busy, uh thankfully and and, you know, business is good. But obviously it was a lot more time just at home where I don't have the limitations of schedules with uh, you know, family and getting up to to events and and things like that. So it has allowed me a lot more time to focus on the the base principles that I think are are strongly related to health. And it's helped me to be more attuned with what works and what doesn't. Like you you mentioned meditation and meditation, uh I was inspired actually by Nigel Moore, who's um our our friend at the Tech Tribe, uh he has been meditating, I think for three years straight without missing a day, if I remember, it's some it's two to three years or maybe even more. No, it's three or four. Oh, is it? Okay, so a long time where he's he's really not missed that routine. And that inspired me to get back into it and and I found it really interesting that I've meditated on and off through the past. And I find I certainly find it helpful. Um, and I've sort of lumped that that in with exercise on those two things, if I don't get them done basically on a daily basis, I'm highly aware of how much more emotional and reactive I am to the things around me. And having this space and this time has really created that opportunity to focus on what are the important things in my life that I do need to prioritize and maybe didn't prioritize beforehand. So I'm curious, uh how much of kind of those those Eastern philosophies and mindfulness practice, those types of ideas, were those things that you kind of ascribed to beforehand or was this sort of new territory for you? So for me, I was I was raised by two 1960s hippies, I come from like a very non-traditional background as far as who my family is and as far as who like the people that I knew growing up were. And so certainly these have been part of me, like my dad was a uh, my dad was a meditation teacher in Colorado in the 70s. And so I I had this framework floating around me for a long time. It's sort of like I grew up eating healthy food. My mom only eats organic food. And as soon as I turned 14, I was spending my $2 allowance at McDonald's and buying soda, right? And like I was, you know, buying my buying my egg McMuffins. And like, so I had this upbringing, which was much more alternative than most people's and I had a framework for understanding these topics and I knew a lot of people engaged with them, but I've never had a solid practice that I could really, really count on outside of the last six months. So, I've done things for a few months, kind of what you said, you know, where I go on, I go off. And and it wasn't I think a major issue for me is the fact that I was involved in nightlife. And so between running an MSP, which takes a lot of hours, being a manager, growing a business, keeping things together, going home, taking a nap, going out late, staying out till two or three, you know, it was just like sleep until the last possible second, run out the door, go to the office. You know, it was just like sleep until the last possible second, run out the door, go to the office. And so as much as these frameworks have been very important to me, I do have to say, I saw Nigel Moore give his talk at the Avic conference in January. And this talk is it's very similar to anti-cancer living, it's another framework for spiritual well-being, physical well-being, you know, mental well-being. Um, and it's just by seeing more and more people, so someone like Nigel, who's ostensibly giving a business talk at a business conference, who is who's given a keynote opportunity to speak about a framework for wellness. That happening the same week that my girlfriend started chemo, um, Nigel really inspired me. And so, you know, to your question, I've had a lot of I've been circling around this for a lot of years. But it really wasn't until this pandemic that I got the time to do it and there's nothing like the wake up call of a cancer diagnosis for someone you love. And and getting into the science was I think at the end of the day what tipped me over the edge. And what you said, that observation that I feel better when I do these things. If I wake up slowly where I have time to sort of sit by myself before I hop on phone calls and hop into meetings. And if I do, you know, a long walk every day and if I do some hard exercise and if I do journaling, the more you do, it's synergistic. Just like if you're doing marketing, you can't just do one thing when you're marketing. Right? You have to get your emails out, but then you have to follow up your emails with phone calls. You have to have good content developed in the first place to be using in that marketing. And the more you do, the the more effective that marketing is. And it's just the same with the level of healing that we can bring to ourselves. Right? So if I bring more purpose to my work, which is one of the things that's really come out of this is like, at the end of the day, 30, 40 million Americans are unemployed. Just the fact that I'm paying employees now, it's felt so basic to me before. And now they're so grateful, this is one of the things in their life that they are most grateful for is to have a job with the boss who takes care of them, right? And I see that with clients, like now the fact just the fact that we're an MSP and we keep these businesses functioning day after day, who are helping their employees by giving them jobs. Like the act of assigning that sort of gratitude and purpose to that work, it makes the whole thing so much more worth it. It's not just about money, it's not just about growth, it's not just about success. It's about how do we impact the people around us. And so bringing, you know, that's one of those concepts, gratitude, you mostly only see it in Eastern literature until the last 10 years or so. But it's it's it's critical to all of us. You don't have to meditate or be a Buddhist to benefit from bringing that gratitude into your daily life. Yeah, and I think that that's one of those things that is critically important and often overlooked in the IT service um uh channel as well. Is that um it's really difficult to point to something as finished in IT and I talk about this a lot around knowledge-based industries. You can't say, hey, we're done, it's like, no. There's no end to the work in IT. And that can be really mentally taxing if you don't understand what the purpose is and what you're providing. So the the aspect of understanding what what service you actually provide to the business and the criticality of the work that you do and how it can be appreciated by by other companies and and really having a sense of purpose. I think is really critical and really important aspect of what what we do as businesses. Yeah, yeah. And it's it's funny to me to go back and look at this now, to like look at this definition of purpose, which has been there the whole time sitting right in front of me. And just like the meditation, I've always been aware that sort of one of the first keys to success is being really clear on your business values and having a purpose and making sure that your business sort of stems from that purpose that you can remind yourself about daily, but it's one more thing that I just ignored, right? Yeah. Um, so I mean, just like purpose and how I was able to align that, I it's really become crystal clear to me that one of the things that is very important to me is just the relationships that I form in a business. So whether that be the relationships that I've formed in the IT channel with folks like yourself and Nigel Moore and Richard and, you know, on and on. It's it really I've been in this space for about a decade. And I remember when I first got on some of the early Yahoo message boards around manage services and, you know, there's friendships that I found on that message board that I still have going today. And there's there's recommendations for business that folks on those message boards gave me when it was just me working by myself that are that are still valid and so important. And it was what I would explain to people when I was first starting this business that, hey, like, you can get so far so fast if you have the right relationships and if you really nurture them. And I've seen that go beyond where I mean, we just had an old end user from a client who quit our client maybe three years ago. She just reached out because of a Facebook post I made and hired me to make some educational videos for a project she's working on. And it's just like, I think back to all the times that I maintained that relationship with this client where we were sort of went above and beyond and we're always making recommendations to make her job easier. She literally hired us to do a presentation around those same topics. And it's just interesting to think that while we were just being helpful, who I am and who my team is landed with her in such a way that she understood it and hired us years later to carry that forward. Um, that's awesome, perpetual impact, right? Yeah. Um. So fascinating. I'm also interested like the this was a sort of uh a personal reflection that started to sort of make its way into your business. Obviously, being a business owner and your personal psychology uh of all owners of all businesses has a heavy degree of influence on the business. Uh what were what was different with the company before and after you sort of made these reflective changes? And I'm also curious, the second part of this is um uh the you you mentioned bringing uh meditation to the company and having people do a meditation a 30-day meditation, uh was there any resistance to that and what was the feeling that people had? Yeah, well, the things the things that are different now, I would say is that if it's even possible, I am just more authentically myself as a boss than I've ever been before. Um, and in my team meetings, it's it's really interesting, my team is split between the US and then I have a uh we have a virtual operations manager in the Philippines and we have a technician who's in Mumbai. And so we have in our staff meetings, we're like it's almost like I'm starting to feel a little bit like a therapist. Like I just like my technician in Mumbai has been locked in a non-air conditioned house for five months with his family now. Like he loved riding his moped, he's not allowed to ride his bike. Like and so like I just I feel very aware of the impact that this time is having on my team, right? Just as much as they're really taking care of me because they know I'm really going through it, I'm more aware than ever of the humanity of the people involved. Like I feel like now, now when I'm on the phone with a client or when I'm on the phone with a vendor, I really try to take the beginning of that call and connect on a human level with them. Because everyone's struggling right now. And so that's one of the things that's changed, I think is just like a renewed humanity. And like in our staff meetings, I'm I'm really aware, I mean, one of my employees just broke his foot and like, so now he can't even exercise, right? And so it's just I can't separate those things, I can't just be like a purely metrics numbers driven business because there's humanity and like I need to I feel like I need to take care of my team. And so on that level, it's been bringing in more authenticity, more humanity, like I know that my operations manager from the Philippines, she said, I've never had a boss before who wanted to actually know what was going on with me, right? Because she would when I first hired her, she would have some like weird attendance issues and I said, hey, like, you just ask me for a day off and I'll give it to you. If you don't show up to work, you get fired. But if you tell me you need a day off, like even if you need two days off, I'll give and we went through this two-month negotiation process of like, now she just tells me when she needs a day off and she gets it. But she was raised doing BPO and working for Accenture and working for Chase where you don't have a person, right? You're just like, you're a number and if you don't do well, you get fired and they hired someone else. And so I would say that wraps up the the humanity and the authenticity piece. The meditation, only one of my employees took me up on it. So I'm not going to lie, it wasn't everyone. Okay, fair enough. But but I presented it to them. I mean, I do know MSP owners who have their whole teams go through exercises like that as a requirement. And I I'd kind of love to do that, but I think I have some other initiatives to finish first. Sure. Um, but just that one employee responding and taking that challenge, I was able to see it in him. Like within two weeks, the fact that he was someone who struggles with discipline, who was waking up every single day, doing a 25-minute meditation and spending another journaling, it changes people. I mean, you know, you're a management consultant and so I'm sure you think about these things, right? Of like, how do we impact people without bludgeoning them over the head and requesting change, right? And so the in the challenge we did, there was a request to invite your own members, like your own team to join the challenge. He took it up and all of a sudden he's leading 10 people through this meditation challenge and I just watched him blossom. And so, you know, there was resistance from other members of the team. I'm I keep sharing all my literature that I'm finding and I keep sharing recipes that I'm cooking and everyone thinks I'm kind of a cook for it. But nonetheless, it's like, you know, everywhere we look, we get bombarded with advertisements for drinking and eating burgers and eating all this crap. So the least I can do is at least share my experience and my journey with people. Um. And and I think that, you know, I think that my team appreciates it even if they don't necessarily follow along with all of it. So I got a couple of follow-ups here. Um, I I think it's it's it's it's cool that you were honest with only one person taking you up on it, but also you sort of soft sold that and and wrapped it up in a way that I think actually demonstrates the impact of that. Is that one person, you can you created the effect for him to have impact on multiple others. And if they drafted other people along with that, you may have only got one person to take on the program, but in in effect, you probably got 15 or 20 to have some level of impact in their in your life. And I think that that's a really incredible point around this, around simple changes can have such wide-ranging impacts that have draft effects that you may be invisible to you. But just the like changing your own psychology and just talking about the the N of one change that that can can create, uh that has positive impacts in just on how you interact with people, right? So I think that you have to be cognizant of where you show up and how that presents and what the the impact is on other people. The other part that you that sort of triggered me what what you were talking about is uh a level of psychological safety in your team. So I I love this research around what makes teams high performance and highly successful. And the number one key component is psychological safety. And your story about the the service manager that was sort of unclear about how they should engage you and felt like they kind of had to dance around some issues, but once they know that they're they're they have some safety and that that they feel protected by the team, they feel protected by their manager, everything is so much smoother. And I think that you guys are actually talking as a team about what your personal challenges are, also helps to create that psychological safety. Because there's vulnerability in the group and everyone is therefore more willing to share the things that may impact them and they feel like they can draw on their team for support. And I think that's a huge anchor in developing loyalty and a level of team commitment that you wouldn't otherwise get even if you have a high performance team that is just based on performance. Like they may be competitive, but they don't necessarily feel safe with each other or safe from each other and that's a different level of performance that I think uh the psychological safety and what you're talking about. But unlocking that with your team actually has a a pretty massive advantage distinct with other types of performance management. Yeah, yeah, it's been really fascinating. I mean, that that service manager tells me constantly, she said, you're the best boss, I've never had a boss like you, she said, I've been working for over a decade and I've never had a boss like you. And, you know, I get down on myself, I mean, there's a lot of performance metrics and KPIs and sort of levels of professional management that I could be far better at myself. But you know, there's something like I've read a lot of articles with, let's say, restaurant owners since the pandemic hit and they're saying, look, like if I break even and I keep my employees employed, then I'm it's okay, right? Maybe in February or January, I had this huge growth plan and I was going to hit all these margins. I'm not talking about myself, but, you know, when I read I've read so many interviews saying this where people went from make money, make profit, make money, make profit and all of a sudden, it's like, can I support myself and my team? And, you know, that's not going to be sustainable forever, but when we're looking at a recession, depression, who knows what's happening. I mean, you know, though, of course, no one ever knew anything and there's always uncertainty, the fact that seven billion earthlings are all of a sudden faced with like, really no one knows what's going to happen tomorrow, like we just don't know anymore, right? If 2020 has taught us anything is like like just have no expectations of what what next week is going to bring you. Exactly. So, when you've got the fact that seven billion people are now coexisting through a time of uncertainty unmatched in modern history. It's it's really, you know, comes back to what you just said, can I give people safety, can I give myself safety? Am I paying myself, are we still making some profit, but it's not going to doesn't have to be the same level that it made it to be back in January at the moment. And it's like my purpose feels wrapped in this. Wrapped in creating that safety for myself, for my girlfriend, for my family, for everyone and, you know, just also giving myself permission, this actually just occurred to me as I as I'm saying it right now, to give myself permission to accept less profit points for a little while while I navigate all this stuff, right? I mean, if I had a 40-person company and I had a, you know, if I really if I had my integrator in place and I could kind of just take a step back from divisioning and that would be one thing. But I have a five-person team. So it's, you know, a lot of this is going to fall on me one way or the other. And to give myself permission to just sort of practice that gratitude and to maintain these relationships and to be of service in the world in whatever way I can, that that also counts. And that's that's hard to do because everyone tells me that's not okay. Yeah, yeah. I think there's there's a certain level of the competitiveness that is helpful, there was a a quote that I saw recently on this, I don't know where this was from, but they said, revenue is not the point, freedom allows uh or revenue provides freedom, freedom is the point. And that that really resonated strong with me because like I see a lot of people, especially the the hardcore entrepreneur types that are so driven, but there's there's so much collateral damage that to in their own lives and in the wake of their achievements. That I I you I think it's reasonable to question, was it really worth it? Like maybe you're better off, maybe you're not. Um, you know, you can compare a $100 million company and, you know, the the owner is super stressed out and, you know, is has on his his third divorce and kids hate him. Versus a person who's making, you know, three and a half million and is doing fine and is pretty happy, is able to kick up on the weekend, can take a couple of vacations a year, who has a better life, right? I think that's a legitimate question that um really helps for me to define like uh a really a strong resistance to that hustle culture. Of just more, more, more, more and and growth is the only metric that that really should should be uh given any any uh light, right? I I think this is an important reflection and and maybe given the circumstances that we're in, people have more of an opportunity to reflect on what is important for them, right? Yeah, I mean, where I've I mean, if you read profit first, right? I mean, in in Mike's book, private profit first, it simplifies. Simplify, simplify, cut, cut, cut, stop trying to do everything, right? Like stop first just focus on cutting cutting your bleed, then you can worry about the next steps. And I think it's really easy to get caught in the trap of like, I'm bleeding all this money, so I have to get more and more and more and I have to grow to fix this. And sometimes you just have to take a step back and think, what other ways can I address this? And, you know, going once again back to the pandemic, I uh 12 years ago, I had the opportunity to live in Central America for a year. And during that time, I decided I loved DJ and I was teaching computer classes and setting up computer labs there and I wasn't working very hard, my life was very simple and very cheap. But it sort of gave me this dual path of music and tech. And for the last 12 years, I have just been hustling on the rat race wheel to do those two things. And what happened with the pandemic was like, oh, what do I want to do now? Who am I now? Because most of us don't ever benefit from time to think. And, you know, I'm looking at my girlfriend, she works for a major school district who never allowed a single day of remote work ever and going right along with her treatment, she got to work from home for the last six months. And it's the same with her, she's never had the time and the space to not wake up at 6:00 in the morning and like she's a, you know, she's an administrator, she works very hard, she has a lot of responsibility. And to be granted to sort of to watch her for the first time be able to sleep in and like have time to herself and make her own schedule. It's like on a global basis, anyone who's not working, you know, retail or working as a nurse or sort of out in the field, which is, you know, a good it's probably a good 30, 40% of the professional population has had their entire life flow changed. And getting away from that hustle. I mean, I can only imagine someone who had a commute, who just got two, three hours a day back, right? I mean, just it's it's it's crazy. And before you can't question it, it's like, I mean, like it's interesting, it was interesting watching like the Arab Spring a couple years ago and watching this uh sort of ring of protests happening around the world. And it was always very fascinating to me that it didn't happen in the United States. And it's because we're so busy. Yeah. Like you can sort of see what happened a couple months ago. People were pissed, people were frustrated, people had things to protest about. But we just built this this incredible distraction machine where every one of us is I have a job and then I have another hustle and then I have a hobby and then I have to go to this thing and then I have to go to this other thing and then my wife's sister is having a baby shower and now I have to go to, you know, now, you know, my girlfriend really, you know, is a member of this nonprofit and they're having a gala. I mean, it's just it's endless, we were just like in this machine of all these ostensibly pleasant things that we were all doing, which completely robbed us of a chance for introspection. So I'm curious on your perspective on this because I know that you're you're pretty passionate about um sort of the the BML movement and and social justice historically. Do you think like all circumstances being equal, do you think the same sort of uh uh showing up or coming out would have happened without these circumstances being the same, do you think like those things had to happen together for it to come out the way that it did? Yes. I really do. I really do and I think so because we saw the whole rest of the world. I mean, you had people in Chile and Argentina and like the entire Middle East. And, you know, I'm not saying any of those protests were necessarily fruitful, a lot of those just sort of re-engaged a similar cycle of some regime change and then another uh non-friendly regime coming in. But I think what happened, it like it actually gives me a lot of hope for the world because people have time. It's it's the same thing I just said. It's like, I I mean, I just like I look at myself who's been passionate about this, like I found this photo of myself wearing like an anti-police brutality shirt from when I was like 12, like this has always been in my consciousness and I was raised this way. But I wasn't talking about it and I think I think two things happened. I think one is that the social safety net disappeared. So all of a sudden, you've got 30, 40, 50 million Americans who don't know where their next paycheck is coming from. And I think before there was a lot of Americans who were living on $8 an hour or, you know, $9 an hour and were just barely making ends meet, but they had enough, right? They had enough that they know what they're going to eat tomorrow. And when you look at on one side, how many people now just had their livelihood ripped away from them and then watched themselves get really no help from above, right? People were sort of like, oh, now what? And they were like, I don't know. So, so that's one thing. But the other one is time. Again, I mean, I would want to go to protest before, but I had been out at an event till 6:00 in the morning and I was sleeping, right? Like it's just that people had no time. I mean, it's just as simple as that. Like now, I think I think more people are mad now and more people are observing that there are issues in the world, but just people have time. And if you have time, what are you going to do? You're going to, you know, you might sit home for a couple weeks, I mean, I literally have friends who did nothing, who had no job, no work and they were staring at these blank walls of a week and maybe some of them got into self-care more or some of them. But a lot of people were just like sitting home watching TV, like hoping that this thing was going to end and they were going to be able to go back to work. Yeah. I I think that's an incredibly important point as well is that I I think I agree, I think a lot of people have sort of squandered the opportunity that was given to them. And I think if anything in in sort of listening to this and reflecting on sort of your situation and basically what you've pulled from the fire as far as as giving yourself opportunity and creating space to make improvements in your life and in in everything around you to try and reflect on what's important, this is not going to end anytime soon. And if you have not made the changes in or that surround you that to produce happiness and to create some equity in your life, I think you need to be really diligent about how you proceed forward. Like what are the things that are important to you, what are the things that you do that don't contribute to your life and you may think that they're important or that they're of some value to you. But I know a lot of people that just simply watched a lot of Netflix and seriously ramped up their drinking. And that's not the type of thing that is going to help you long-term in this. Like if you're stuck at home for another six months, is that really the life that you want to create for yourself? And I think that's to me what I'm trying to reflect more on is that I did pretty good in trying to utilize this time, but I absolutely recognize I could have been better. So what like what are the things that you reflect on in what you might change in your business or in personally going forward now that you've you've created this space for yourself, what are the next steps for you? Well, I want to say one thing before I jump into that. And that is if anyone is listening right now and sort of hears what I have been saying and what Todd just said. It's also acknowledge that there is some level of global grief happening right now. And I think the first thing you need to do because a lot of people who are drinking more and watching more Netflix, you're actually masking just grief. I mean, and you know, again, I keep talking about how science keeps proving the things that I've always sort of been drawn to. When the pandemic first started, I was reading the Harvard Business Review, you know, not exactly your woo woo Eastern Eastern medicine uh tome and they said that thing you're feeling right now, that's grief. Right? Because like everyone was just sad, like you're reading the news and it's sad. You're having political disagreements and it's sad, like whatever it is, like there's just a lot of plain old grief and no matter the work you do, that's not going away, right? Um. So, I want to say that. It's like first we almost just have to acknowledge how difficult this actually is. Like none of us started 2020 with all our big plans for this year, thinking that this was coming. We all got knocked off our feet in some way or another. So, I think that maybe the first step in towards sort of affecting the decisions that you make in this time is to acknowledge how difficult this time is, right? And if you've been drinking and watching Netflix, like congratulations, you never would have imagined you would have had that much time to do it. So, so you just got that time, right? Um, I don't think for myself if I hadn't dealt with sort of the the cancer diagnosis and my dad's death, I don't I don't know if I would have had the the same level of of inspiration behind me to change. Um. But here's what I can say. As far as my business, my entire focus is on what you said, Todd, is reframing it to be revenue for freedom. So. One thing I've done right now is I'm I'm really just laser focused on process improvement right now. On going from having a lot of process to having a really well organized business brain that my employees know how to maintain without me. And so that is like what we're like that's my main focus right now. Um, because I want to do that because I'm working a lot on marketing and so I want when this marketing really starts feeding the pipeline, I want to be a lot more organized and I want to do a lot less of it myself. So what I'm looking at is creating freedom for myself. Because one of the things I've learned, I I lived at my girlfriend's, which is an hour away from all of our clients and from my office for four months. I didn't have to be at my office to work. And I didn't have to go to my clients, we have one tech who's spending maybe a quarter of his time doing on sites and that's it. There's no other reason for us to be anywhere in particular. And I let one of my texts go hang out with his family in Florida for a couple months because why not? And so I've seen the possibilities of freedom and that is that is my goal right now. I want to I want to do my work from campgrounds. Like I want to go, I want to get a cabin somewhere, even if it's just like a tiny home on a plot of land and I want to keep working sort of with a lot more freedom and a lot because I don't know what led me to think I've been trapped in Los Angeles all these years. But by the fact that I stayed in a one bedroom apartment in a different city for a couple months and didn't have to be at my business was really eye opening for me. Yeah, and I think. I think a lot of people will find some some familiarity with that feeling as well. I know for me, commuting was absolutely the worst part of me working um far away from the city enough that, you know, it was a 45 minute on most days and sometimes it was an hour and 20. Uh and that's brutal, right? Like and I don't think a lot of people really reflected on that and I've heard that similar story from a lot of people now that they're like, you know what, not having to commute is amazing. And they may not have the situation to work from home entirely, but at least to commute less, I personally hope that that's one of the things that society as a whole really takes to heart with this. Is that uh the physical location of where you work from is not always as important. There's there is an important to physical connection, you know, like the one part I have missed about the conferences is just not seeing people and be able to build relationships and chat and things like that. There's there's some level of personal interaction that is required in all levels of business and and personal interaction. But I think that the importance of giving back that time, right, one of the the parts that I found really fascinating about this shift. Is that everyone has really said that the productivity of the staff has not gone down and in a lot of cases it's actually gone up because they're taking that time that they otherwise would have been spending commuting and just sprinkling it through the rest of the day. People, if you look at the stats, uh Microsoft put out some numbers around this that people are generally working longer hours and their satisfaction with work is actually higher. Because they're less engaged, they take time for lunch, they get up slowly, they uh spend some time with the kids in the morning before they go down to the to the basement office, right? I think those quality of life issues are are things that we have neglected in the past and I hope that it's uh it's things that that like that that people can reflect on and make things better in their lives. Yeah, it's amazing. It really is amazing, I mean, just the fact that all these things that could never change, all of a sudden changed. That's that's one of the wild things about this pandemic, you know. And so, you know, we're not going to we're not going to have time to cover it today, but just in the digital transformation that all of our clients are going through. It's like, I one of the things that stands out to me is one client who I spent two years sort of in the CIO role telling them the fact that your files don't reside in the cloud is like completely and totally insane. Like there's just no reason for it. And he's like, we have no reason to work remotely, we never work remotely, I hate when my team wants to spend one day working remotely. And, you know, he called me prophetic for the fact that we executed that and finished it in January, finally. And just thinking about that head frame that he was in, that he couldn't fathom it, right? He was making money, he could afford it, he didn't care, it was purely cultural, just no. So, but I think, you know, where I want to end this is that from when you asked me what is the change I see for my business. I see an evolution for, you know, when I figure out my exit from this business to really teaching people what I've learned in this journey. Sort of what I learned from the anti-cancer living lifestyle stuff, what I learned from leading in a really humanistic, authentic way. Sort of like the changes I've been through in the last year, I've thought about it a lot and and I've also thought about a lot, you know, there's no business that can run without technology and so of course, the fact that as a technology provider, I help people navigate that is amazing. But I'm addicted to my phone, you know, I feel bad sometimes selling people more cloud, more connection, more convenience when I also know what comes along with that, right? More data collection, less privacy, uh less less presence. And so I see the next evolution of of me and my life as a consultant of being teaching people that wellness, even if it's business focused, really teaching people to live from purpose and from presence and to lead authentically and to really not, you know, everything we've been talking about. To sort of deprioritize the hustle, um, and sort of delegate and outsource is one part of it, right? Just stop doing it all yourself is sort of the the traditional capitalist model that I still espouse and and love, but I think usually what the traditional uh the traditional teachings in this country, at least, you know, it's all started to change in the last five or 10 years. But the traditional teachings have prioritized hustle and money over everything else and if I can teach anything about entrepreneurship to people, it's to live from a more balanced place of wellness. Yeah. No, that's great. I think it's a great place to wrap up, this has been really insightful, Josh, I appreciate your your willingness to share the the adversity and and some of the lessons coming through this. And uh as we said, hopefully the the lessons of 2020 long-term will be more balance and more more equity in uh relationship between our our work and our home lives and our relationship with technology. So, here's to hoping around the the positive outcomes of an otherwise awful, awful year. Seriously. Thank you so much, Todd, I really appreciate sort of giving me the chance to share this story. And just quickly, if people would like to reach out to you, just to to uh either connect with you or ask you more about about your story, uh any socials that you would direct people to. Yeah, um on LinkedIn, just LA Creative Technologies plural or Josh at LA Creative Technologies.com is my email. Those are the two best ways to get a hold of me. Um and see our website LAcreativetech.com. Great. Thanks, Josh. Cheers.