Podcasts about hey josh

ATTENTION!! RONIN TV LAUNCHES TODAY ON YOUTUBE!!!! Go subscribe so you don’t miss a single minute! HURRY!!! HURRY!!! Josh was really late to record today's show. Hey Josh!!! Pass the tardy sauce! Why was he late? It was Lagoon's fault! Lagoon made him late! Chunga and Chandler have officially lived through their first Las Vegas dust storm! HOLY CRAP!!!! Their garbage cans wound up in the neighbor’s backyard!Hey, have you seen the new Mortal Kombat yet?! Chandler LOVED IT so did Chunga ... BUT ... if you haven’t seen it yet, be warned!! They changed the traditional story AND it’s EXTREMELY gory! WOOOO HOOOO!!!! Also, the final episode of The Falcon and The Winter Soldier is out! Did you like it!?? CHUNGA POLL: Be honest about yourself! Which superhero best fits your personality? Post your answers below!PLUS!!! It's time for HEADLINE D&D!!! Thank you Tim Hemingway for the most excellent story submission! LISTEN NOW!!!!

ATTENTION!! RONIN TV LAUNCHES TODAY ON YOUTUBE!!!! Go subscribe so you don’t miss a single minute! HURRY!!! HURRY!!! Josh was really late to record today's show. Hey Josh!!! Pass the tardy sauce! Why was he late? It was Lagoon's fault! Lagoon made him late! Chunga and Chandler have officially lived through their first Las Vegas dust storm! HOLY CRAP!!!! Their garbage cans wound up in the neighbor’s backyard! Hey, have you seen the new Mortal Kombat yet?! Chandler LOVED IT so did Chunga ... BUT ... if you haven’t seen it yet, be warned!! They changed the traditional story AND it’s EXTREMELY gory! WOOOO HOOOO!!!! Also, the final episode of The Falcon and The Winter Soldier is out! Did you like it!?? CHUNGA POLL: Be honest about yourself! Which superhero best fits your personality? Post your answers below! PLUS!!! It's time for HEADLINE D&D!!! Thank you Tim Hemingway for the most excellent story submission! LISTEN NOW!!!!

ATTENTION!! RONIN TV LAUNCHES TODAY ON YOUTUBE!!!! Go subscribe so you don't miss a single minute! HURRY!!! HURRY!!! Josh was really late to record today's show. Hey Josh!!! Pass the tardy sauce! Why was he late? It was Lagoon's fault! Lagoon made him late! Chunga and Chandler have officially lived through their first Las Vegas dust storm! HOLY CRAP!!!! Their garbage cans wound up in the neighbor's backyard! Hey, have you seen the new Mortal Kombat yet?! Chandler LOVED IT so did Chunga ... BUT ... if you haven't seen it yet, be warned!! They changed the traditional story AND it's EXTREMELY gory! WOOOO HOOOO!!!! Also, the final episode of The Falcon and The Winter Soldier is out! Did you like it!?? CHUNGA POLL: Be honest about yourself! Which superhero best fits your personality? Post your answers below! PLUS!!! It's time for HEADLINE D&D!!! Thank you Tim Hemingway for the most excellent story submission! LISTEN NOW!!!!

Spencer is sick. It's Chandler’s fault. Hey Josh? Why did you make Spencer drive while he’s so sick!??? JOSH YOU DID WHAT!?!? Tiger Woods has been in a horrible accident. Actual status is still unknown ... watch for a tsunami of incoming memes! Daft Punk has broken up. ALL six Ronin are devastated! It looks like Netflix has decided to kickoff 2021 with a trashy murder series after all (sigh) ... once again, it has close ties to Utah ... Chunga is hearing all kinds rumors from a bunch of sources and they’re all saying that Disneyland is going to open REALLY SOON or ... kind of soon!!!! Either way, he may have some awesome news! LISTEN NOW!!!!!

Spencer is sick. It's Chandler’s fault. Hey Josh? Why did you make Spencer drive while he’s so sick!??? JOSH YOU DID WHAT!?!?Tiger Woods has been in a horrible accident. Actual status is still unknown ... watch for a tsunami of incoming memes! Daft Punk has broken up. ALL six Ronin are devastated! It looks like Netflix has decided to kickoff 2021 with a trashy murder series after all (sigh) ... once again, it has close ties to Utah ...Chunga is hearing all kinds rumors from a bunch of sources and they’re all saying that Disneyland is going to open REALLY SOON or ... kind of soon!!!! Either way, he may have some awesome news! LISTEN NOW!!!!!

Spencer is sick. It's Chandler's fault. Hey Josh? Why did you make Spencer drive while he's so sick!??? JOSH YOU DID WHAT!?!? Tiger Woods has been in a horrible accident. Actual status is still unknown ... watch for a tsunami of incoming memes! Daft Punk has broken up. ALL six Ronin are devastated! It looks like Netflix has decided to kickoff 2021 with a trashy murder series after all (sigh) ... once again, it has close ties to Utah ... Chunga is hearing all kinds rumors from a bunch of sources and they're all saying that Disneyland is going to open REALLY SOON or ... kind of soon!!!! Either way, he may have some awesome news! LISTEN NOW!!!!!

"It was as overwhelming as, like, Dorothy Gish complimenting you?"Josh Fillmore is back to talk about movies with title colors spanning the rainbow! We go from red to white and then all the way back to red! Dancing! Crime wife abuse! Nuclear subs! 0:00 -- Intro (Josh is back, brrrr, the podcast cost)7:23 -- The Red Shoes30:40 -- White Heat55:28 -- The Hunt for Red October1.11:03 -- Awards and rankings2.18:18 -- Future business (with surprise Mark appearance!)2:28:08 -- Outro and outtakesHey! Be sure to watch To Kill a Mockingbird, Blazing Saddles, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for next time! Hey! Leave us a voicemail at (801) 896-4542!Hey! Hear the Filmspotting review of The Red Shoes (32:35)!Hey! Witness the BFI list of top British films!Hey! See Rent II: Condo Fever!Hey! Hear the Kiss Your Franchise Goodbye about The Hunt for Red October!Hey! Go watch White Nights for obvious reasons!Hey Josh! Hear our podcast about Highlander!Hey! Knightboat!Hey! Hear "Master and Servant"!Hey! Subscribe in iTunes!Hey! Check out the Facebook page and vote on the next category!Hey! Check out Jon's YM&T Letterboxd list!Hey! Check out Roy's YM&T Letterboxd list!Hey! Email us at yoursminetheirspodcast@gmail.com! Send new topics! Send new theme songs!Download this episode right here!

As Bethany walked down the stairs on a Monday afternoon, she said to Josh, “Hey Josh, why don’t we come up with 20 Art Prompts each to share on the podcast.” Josh looked at her for a second and with a confused look on his faced asked, “What’s an Art Prompt?” That’s what this week’s episode is about; Art Prompts! Have you ever felt a deep desire to create something but when you approach the paper or canvas your mind is exactly like that surface…blank? Well then, maybe this week’s topic will help you get the creative juices flowing! Enjoy! Artwork “Dancing in Yellow” by Bethany Granberg “David” by Joshua Granberg

Hey Josh what’s your playlist looking like? 1:11 ​Hey coach, do you believe in right person wrong time? Like you two were spiritually immature when you got into the relationship? Or not possible? 2:14 ​How to not settle for what you don’t want but it feels right 4:22 ​recovering from rejection best methods? 8:09 ​Hey Coach! I hope you are doing well!!! Many blessings always! How do you rid yourself of fear and anxiety feelings in your physical body even when you know you trust and believe in GOD mentally? 11:37 ​Heyyy Coach, After So Long of Being Single,, How Can I Bring blend my Personal Life To my children after losing their father ​Hi coach. What is God's purpose for single mothers? 17:01 ​God just gave me whatever trial u go thru, check your: Faith, Obedience, and your Word. How can I lead the youth with this? 21:58 ​Coach how do you know God wants you to be married? How do you know that’s his will for your life? 24:30 ​How do I get out of bed. I’ve been in a hole for over a week ? 27:47 ​Raising a head strong, difficult son as single mom, how do I have strength to continue on 30:40 Donation and Support http://iamunplugged.com/donate or CashApp $JoshuaEze One on One Coaching: http://www.iamunplugged.com/custom-co... The Purpose of Singleness Course: https://lifework.teachable.com/p/arey... Books: https://www.amazon.com/Joshua-Eze/e/B... Games: http://ezegames.com Mentoring Program: http://wepropel.education Booking: http://www.iamunplugged.com/booking-1 Mr. Eze Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsww... Worksheets: http://www.iamunplugged.com/worksheets Good Guys Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCR9L... Podcast - Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/coachjosh

127: Interview with Dr Larry Little Josh: So, I've got a special guest with us today, which is Dr. Larry Little. Now, Dr. Larry Little is somebody who's been very, very fun part of my life and has influenced millions of people through his book Make a Difference. Now Make a Difference is all about doing just that, making a difference. And I'd like to introduce you now, Dr. Larry Little, why'd you want to make this book? Learn more about how to make a difference at dorksdelivered.com.au Dr. Larry Little Well, Josh, thank you first of all For allowing me to be with you and just to hang out and to talk. I'm so proud of you and you're such an incredible leader, and example of what that make a difference the whole concept is about. And you're a wonderful example of why I wrote the book. Because I understood that people they may be brilliant and certainly can do things from a skill standpoint, can do things from a technical standpoint that were... and they were very gifted in that area. But what happened was I had entrepreneurs and owners and people that were leaders would come to me and they would say, "You know, Larry, I had this wonderful, for instance, engineer and she was brilliant. So we promoted her and she failed miserably. We promoted her, she had a team of people around her. She had no clue how to lead a team. She frustrated the team. She was frustrated. She ended up leaving. So we lost a great engineer, not to mention we still have a need for this leader in this area." I got to thinking about that, Josh and I saw a gap and how we literally talk, communicate, engage others. And I thought we're going at this kind of in an ineffective way. So, the Make a Difference concepts began to emerge around understanding who you are but not so you can just understand who you are, but let's understand who you are so that I can then understand who others, who they are and so that I can get to where they are and speak their language. And that's the real secret if you were to take... So if you take the whole book, in a nutshell it's understand who you are, but understand how to speak the language of others. The results have been really, really exciting as I've seen relationships grow personally in business, professionally simply because people begin to understand how to connect, engage, and really speak the language of those within their circle of influence. Josh: I completely agree. And one of the things that I definitely found from the book that I got now, I was fortunate enough to have started reading the book a number of ago when you did a bit of a tour around Australia and I met you in person, which was... didn't realise I guess the golden nugget, the opportunity that had landed in my lap in meeting you and how it was the change and pivot the direction of my life and the influence that it gave to me. So one of the things that I've found is it's not just about business, and it's definitely about relationships and communication and the way that you're talking with people and understanding what's their carrot for some people, and what is the driving motivators? why do people act the way they do? I know myself, and if it's not overly obvious, I'm definitely a quite a monkey. And the the interesting thing, actually, I'll give you a bit of background on the book. So you've got different characters that you all relate to, and there's different of profiling that you can do. But this is really easy to see and understand what type of person that you are and the type of... and how you discuss different things with different people. And how you've received the information from different people. And there's different books that I've read over the years and other ones on the five love languages, which I'm very familiar with. A different type of concept, but still resonates strongly with me. And being able to understand that when I'm talking with a line and they told me something very directly, and it was impacting me emotionally from them telling me what they've told me and it was... And they've told me and then it's been shifted on, it's out of their mind. And someone might say, "Josh, you look stupid in that shirt. What are you wearing that shirt for?" And all of a sudden that's in my head every time I see them for the next three years, they think I look stupid. And whether or not it was just something silly that I did or some off the cuff comment. And in my mind they were thinking about that as well the whole time, and I was thinking about it. It had entered their mind and let their mind and that was it for them. Dr. Larry Little Great. Josh: So, it's interesting just to understand how people think about you and how you should start thinking about others. And I'd say comfortably it's affected in positive ways, all areas of my life. My communication with family, friends, business associates, anyone and everyone. The way that I present myself on stage, the whole lot has changed because you can more easily gauge the feedback of the people that you're discussing or conversing with and work your way from there. It's a valuable read. So what would you say is where are you going from here? Dr. Larry Little Well, first of all, Josh, once again, congratulations, you get it. That's exactly the purpose of the book. And books like The Five Love Languages the Make a Difference these books all have one thing in common. And that is, it's about servant leadership. It's about understanding how to get to where someone else is instead of them to get to where you are. And that means you've learned to put your sensors in when you're around lions and not be offended with their direct language. You've learned to when you're presenting, to understand who your audience is and present in that format. And all of those things are... those are concepts, principles that really are undergirded by that servant leadership model. And the servant leadership model is just, let's understand and look at leadership from a service mentality instead of a dictatorial, narcissistic mentality. Josh: Yes. Dr. Larry Little Which it really is about serving others. And that's the premise of the book. The book, there are two myths that we really have to debunk. And the first myth is that we believe everybody shares our value view. In other words, we believe that what we think is important, everybody else thinks is important in terms of emotional connection and those kinds of things. That's not true. Everybody has their own value view. The second myth is that we believe everybody views us the same way we view ourselves. That's not true. We had this narrative that we tell ourselves, and this is how, based on our personality, based on who we are that is the narrative that drives our behaviour many times. But when we become self aware and we say, "Wait a minute. You know what, that narrative is not true for her or for him," then it changes the way we connect with others. And it's that understanding that drives us to serve others. And really the crucible of leadership is your purpose. Why are you leading? Why are you doing what you do, Josh? And the answer is because... for me it's because I want to make a difference in the lives of others. I want to make a difference in their life. I want to be able to speak into that. So this is a vehicle, this Make a Difference book is a vehicle for that. And that book it's been around and it's been around the world and we've been just very excited and very humbled by seeing the difference that it's made in relationships. Because Josh, if you in this interview you had said, "Hey Larry, this book it's really good. It's helped me to be a better leader. Boy it's helped me to be really much better president, CEO of my company, entrepreneur. Boy I could really lead my people in my company now." I would really be disappointed in you and I would say, "I'm so sorry. I was disappointed in myself because we didn't achieve what I wanted for you." But if you said what you said a minute ago, that, "Hey, this has helped me personally. This book has helped me in my personal life with those relationships that are so important to me. And oh by the way, I use the concepts in my professional world as well because it spills over." Then we celebrate. Then we say, "Hey, that is awesome. I'm so excited. I'm so proud and I'm so glad that you were able to use a bit of this to speak into the lives of others." So what's next? And it's really cool to watch it. The organisation that I work with, it's called Legal Centre for Leadership and we are taking these Make a Difference concepts and we continue to coach around them. With the executive and leadership coaching. We also have make a different seminars. We have a series of those that from accountability to engaging the disconnect, those kinds of things that our trained facilitators do a tremendous job. Very excited about our products and tools that we offer to support that and assessments. And really excited to roll out in 2020 what we are calling Eagle University. And Josh, we are taking those concepts and we are building a university online where you can go and get certified as an Eagle leader by walking through these, make a difference courses and other courses and that kind of thing. We are, our team is, they're going at it. They're excited about it, and we're focused on it. And I'm so grateful they let me hang out with them. It's exciting times around Eagle leadership. Josh: That's cool. So for the people that are in the land down under, a lot of the time that we find I guess we were only a very small, I guess we're a small continent full of widespread people. Is that someone that you'll be touring around Australia with or is that something we could say and definitely jump into online for some of the online university type media? Dr. Larry Little Oh yeah, the answer's yes and yes. Definitely you can jump online. Definitely you can participate in the Eagle university in the coaching, the seminars. With that I was just over in... well I would say your neighbour, maybe, we were in New Zealand. Josh: East Australia as I call it. Dr. Larry Little Yeah, the East Australians. Yes. So we were in New Zealand and we were able to roll out some of these concepts and yes, we'll be back in Australia. We'll look forward to that. But a lot of our work from a coaching standpoint can be done virtually now. We coach leaders literally across the globe. And so to answer your question, absolutely, we can do it virtually or in person or online. So that's exciting. Josh: That's cool. Yeah. Well, it's definitely as I said, it's impacted my life and it's been something strong enough that my position has evolved as it does over the years. Over the 12 years I've been in business, I've gone from being the guy in the trenches and talking with customers all the time, to being the guy that goes out and builds a team. And then from the team now I've started influencing and leading other business owners, which is something I'm very, very dear about and interested in doing. Because it's helping not just grow my business and the way that on own my mindset, it's helping grow theirs and hopefully accelerating their growth. Instead of taking 12 years to gain the knowledge that I've gained, helping them get it in a fast paced way that allows for them to apply that to their business, grow their business. And have the maturity that they can have, hopefully sooner. One of the actual great bits of feedback that I got and only a couple of weeks ago I had someone call me up, and I'm sure he would've called you up if you had your number. But he called me up and he said, "Joshua, I can't tell you how happy I am that you book Make a Difference on to me and how much it's changed my life." He's only halfway through the book at the moment. And him and his partner, they both work together in a local plumbing business. And he took his car to the mechanic and so the mechanic he's been taking his car to for years, and he he left. And he noticed that there was something wrong in the brakes and he thought, okay I'll bring it back to him and I'll just let him know there's something wrong with the brakes. And he thought, I'll talk to him as he would because they're on a friendship basis, the working friend relationship. Dr. Larry Little Right. Josh: He said, "Oh, I know you came in and you discussed... you had my car serviced, but I've noticed that the brake pads don't seem quite right. I've had a bit of a check over some pretty technical mind and I've noticed there's only a couple millimetres left. And I know I didn't bring it in to build the brake pads, but whats to go with that?" Now the mechanic went into an attack position, got rather upset with him. And Dan, the person who took the car to the mechanic was able to diffuse the situation by not retaliating and showing his teeth, and instead understanding where he was coming from and making sure to calm down the situation. Now the relationship with the mechanic might not continue on a whole bunch because it's... he felt very, I guess... you don't feel comfortable when someone does something like that. Josh: But it showed him this mechanic that's been a local mechanic for 20, 25 years around the area, what he could gain from the learnings or from the teachings that you have. And how impactful it's been for somebody who's only halfway through your book. And I can only imagine what value they would be getting out of any of the courses and through your seminars. Dr. Larry Little Well, you know I'm really glad to hear that. It is fulfilling and I just love to hear when someone says, this is helping me in my personal life. That was the purpose of the book. And that Dan had the competency to absorb and then to put into practise how to have those hard conversations. Realise that situation, how to have a hard conversation is certainly very, very important part of the things that we talk about in the book and in our seminars. So it speaks well of your friend. And like you said that professional relationship may change and look different and not be salvaged. But the fact that he did not allow himself to engage in that personal conflict, but yet he had healthy conflict and had a hard conversation, it says a lot about him. Josh: Absolutely. And there's a book that I've read by called [Flawsome 00:15:14] and it's about embracing your flaws. Now these aren't necessarily personal flaws, but about embracing flaws that you might have had because you dropped the ball, you stuffed up. Now everyone does it. Everyone has a bad day. Everyone has an off day. And when you dropped this ball, Flawsome is all about making sure that you embrace the flaw and then overcome it. What I love about Make a Difference is it's about making sure you're understanding it from the other person's perspective so that once you aren't... you have a lot of empathy towards the situation and you're not going in with the Lion heart outset or the monkey outset or the camel outset. And I think that's such really important to do. Dr. Larry Little Well, I think that you're very wise and that is a skill and you're 100% right. You've got to be willing to fail. You've got to be willing to say, it's not about getting it right every time, Joshua. Right? It's about saying, "I'm going to try to get in those other quadrants." And when I say other quadrants, I'm talking about where are the other personalities live? And the book breaks that down. So, that takes practise just like anything else. It takes discipline, rigour and rhythm. And if we have those things and we say, "I'm going to have the discipline." Yeah. Josh, just a quick... we'll chase a quick rabbit is, one of the things I've never understood this when we start teaching and talking about this, sometimes some of those lions or camels will say, "These are soft skills. You're just teaching soft skills." And the truth is no, there's nothing soft about it. This is hard. These are hard skills. If they were so often easy, then everybody would be doing it and relationships would be flourishing everywhere and we would never have problems. Right? This takes practise and it takes it... Good news. It is something you can choose to learn and choose to grow in. Right? But it takes practise and being willing to say, "Hey Josh, I blew that. I tried that. I'm sorry. Let me back up and try something. Yeah, Josh, I thought you were lion. I was a bit direct there. Let me back up." Because you're really a monkey and I got to tell you how good looking that shirt is and how I really like it. Josh: Exactly, exactly. And it's about understanding someone else, understanding how your team's working. And I also find, and I've done a couple of YouTube videos and this one's called the Mirror Mindset. It's about understanding yourself and about also knowing a situation where you need to be present as a different person. So, being a leader is about making sure you understand your team and you have your team all pulling towards... I think the saying goes, all ships rise with high tide. And hopefully I didn't quote that wrong. Josh: The important thing is when I was very introverted at school, and very introverted for the first part of my life. I was overweight. I was picked on to a spot where I wasn't able to walk anymore. Walk any more for a couple of weeks, when I was... Sorry, bashed up would be the more appropriate term rather than picked on, physically picked on. It was a traumatic experience. And when I lost the weight, I lost 38 kilos, I was still the timid person that was still trying to make people feel good, feel happy. And the reason I believe I became a monkey or what was because everyone resonates with the class clown. Everyone resonates with something that can make them laugh. And the universal languages is the smile. And Mr. Bean did it really well as did Charlie Chaplin making everyone smile without even speaking. Dr. Larry Little Right. Josh: Now, now when you read this book and you understand the teachings of Larry, it's fantastic to sort of know, okay, when you jump onto stage, you need to snap out of the mindset that you had and the person that you was, and you then need to become this other person. And one of the things that I found that taught me a lot is people such as [WindoyYankovic 00:19:19] Jim Carrey and a bunch of other people that are very loud extroverted people. But at heart are still very introverted people and they're actors and they're acting extroverted. Now, what I found is I was able to put on different hats, depending on different situations, and more easily resonate and get my message across. If I'm talking with a lion and I know that the information they want is to be direct. They want information, but they're not looking for details, that they're wanting to pieces to get the information... to get everything done. And that also goes for myself when I'm in a situation that I can't be a monkey or I shouldn't be a monkey. Or I need to be aware of all of those traits. It allows for me to be a better person in all situations, even if it's, yeah, I guess in just all situations. So- Dr. Larry Little Well, Josh you know, you're so right. And first let me say to you congratulations for how you walked through trauma because the truth is that was a very traumatic event for you as a young man. Congratulations for losing the weight, I knew that took discipline and nobody understands that work. But I'm really impressed with the fact that you look back at that very difficult, unfair, not okay situation that you found yourself in. And in today's world would call it being bullied, and that's not okay under any circumstance. However, you chose to look at that and instead of remaining the victim, you chose to learn and you chose to grow, and you chose to overcome that and say, "I'm going to... Was that fair? No. Was it okay? No. But neither is life." Life has never fair. Life is not fair. Josh: No. Dr. Larry Little And the only thing we really get to choose is how we handle the struggles. We don't get to choose if we struggle because we all struggle. We all have things. But we do get to choose how we navigate those. And you chose to learn and to grow from a... I hate this really, but the truth is we seem to learn more from the hard experiences in our life. Not that they're okay, but if we choose, we can really learn and grow from those. And you did just that, and boy that's inspirational. Thank you for that. That's choosing to learn and grow and become a better leader and then to go into these concepts instead of becoming bitter, angry, defeated, you said, "No, no, no, I'm going to learn these concepts so that I can invest in others better, so that I can lead through serving them. So that I can understand and be self aware of who I need to be." Josh, that's great work. Congratulations. Josh: Thank you. It's obviously doesn't come with having the right mentality and making sure that you are investing in your personal development. Interestingly, actually that story has a second part where the person... there was these, about three different people that were picking on me out of a school of 1200. It was relatively low numbers, but still life impacting, isn't it? It's not about the percentage, I guess. Dr. Larry Little That's right. Josh: And so one of my first jobs was at subway, subway sandwiches, which we've got everywhere I guess. And I'm there behind the counter as a sandwich artist as it would be, and one of the bullies came in and my heart dropped. And I went, Oh my goodness. And I started freaking out and I thought to myself, no, because... I thought to myself and thought about it from their perspective, and put why are they bullying? What is going on in their life? And I feel whatever's happening in my life could only be... I've got great parents, I've had a great upbringing. I'm fortunate enough to say that I live in one of the best countries in the world, and we... and I thought what has happened in their life for them to be doing what they're doing? And I felt in my mind, it calmed me down. So I thought, okay, they've gone in a direction where they've had to lash out. And I thought they probably don't have the best family and upbringing. And I'd thought of this in my head and as I'm making their sandwich, and obviously everyone has this one thing sitting on this shoulder saying, spit in their sandwich. Dr. Larry Little Right. Josh: No one listens to this one, I hope. I hope not. I still go to subway. Obviously we're not talking about yet. So and he said to me without me saying anything and I was just smiling and being the best person that I could, and making sure that my outlook was not dropped down to any of the previous influence that I'd had from the situation. And he said, "Josh, I'm sorry for picking on you." And he said, "I'm sorry for bullying you at school." And he said that without me putting anything up, and nearly made me cry because I thought, wow, he's also matured in his mindset- Dr. Larry Little Wow. Josh: And that instantly all like... everyone's sort of... always having not miss about it. No, not about that situation, but at school. And when he said that everything sort of just felt like it was just a blanket that disappeared, and it shows the mental games that you make in your mind and how that plays and the impact that has on you, and what someone might say or do to you that changes and pivots the direction of your life. And as I said I'd be lying if I said that... I'm pretty sure when you first gave me the book, it was 2013 I think. Might have been 2012 around then. But it was, I can comfortably say that people come into your lives sometimes for good, sometimes for bad. That bully... And it's all again up to the mindset. That bully came into my life, and at the time I thought it was for bad, but then it's allowed for me to further understand how people think. So in a way it was for good. It was a hard lesson to learn. You came into my life for good. And again, that's a pivot and grown the direction of my life and how I've gone to impact things and people and that has been for good. So, it's all about your mindset, everyone... And this is again in the YouTube video I made the mirror mindset is about. When I started losing weight, I felt still overweight. My eyes saw a fat person in the mirror. And it was only after I then put on a couple more kilos that I then looked at a photo of me when I'd lost as much weight that I look anorexic. And I thought I've gone in the other direction. And so it's about your mindset and making sure that you keep in check and making sure you understand how people are perceiving you, how you're perceiving people. And know that the way that you're seeing you does not necessarily reflect the way that other people are seeing you. And we always, we're our worst critics, I'd agree. We do agree? Dr. Larry Little Yeah. There's no doubt. Well, unless we're narcissistic and then we're delusional. Right? Josh: Yeah. Dr. Larry Little But I think a lot of times that's very true of leaders and people that we are our worst critics. But perception is reality. And so you have to make sure that your perception is rational and it is real. And you had to check that even when the bully was apologising to you. You could have perceived that for him just to try to make up to you or that he had an ulterior motive, or that he wanted to get something for it. But you didn't. You took that at face value. You allowed it to be a source of healing for you. When people come into your life, when we introduced you to the concept that you had a choice to make. You could have perceived that as these are just soft skills and maybe it's good for somebody else, but you don't know what I've been through. You don't know what I've suffered. You don't know... But you didn't do that. You said, "I'm going to take those, I'm going to perceive that as something good and I'm going to use it and I'm going to apply it." And you did that Josh. And your choice, and we can never underestimate the power of choice in our life. We all have choices to make every single day. And you chose to take those concepts, you chose to use those concepts, you chose to apply those concepts. And you know as well as I do, if you were honest that took work. I mean, you've been doing this now since 2013 and you're still applying it and still using it. It's not a onetime and done. It's you've made that a part of your life and that took a lot of hard work. Josh: Right. And it's hard work. Nothing comes easy. Dr. Larry Little That's right. Josh: And a few things my father has taught me, is nothing comes easy and trust everyone until they prove themselves untrustworthy. Dr. Larry Little That's right. Josh: So, walk up to someone with open arms, not, not closed, and feel comfortable with the person that you're approaching until they show themselves to be, not the person that they first appeared to be. And that's a... Another person that's influenced my life. It's you and dad now, so- Dr. Larry Little Love that. Wow. You know, it's so true. And the whole centrepiece around the Make a Difference is that. And that's what we entitled it Make a Difference is that it's outward focused. It's about becoming self aware, yes. But becoming self aware so that we can give to others. Becoming self aware so that we can make a difference in the lives of others. And so you have done that, you've taken that and that's our goal in teaching these concepts. Josh, the truth is there are a lot of personality profiles out there. There are a lot of psychological assessments and they're all good. But seriously, there are a lot of very good psychological assessments that you can take. The problem comes when you take those tools and you get this plethora of data, you get all this stuff right? And they set it, and you try... First, you don't have time to go through it all. Second, you're not really sure what it means. And third, and most importantly, you don't know how the heck you're going to apply that quickly. So, the concepts we developed, the secret is not in a little assessment tool, that's not the the secret. The secret is well, I'll show you. So the secret is this, the secret is white picket fence. Josh: Okay. Dr. Larry Little White picket fence. So right now, Josh, even if you wanted to or not, it doesn't matter. Who you are, you're thinking of a white picket fence. You could say- Josh: I sure am. Dr. Larry Little ... I'm not thinking of one, but you are. And so that's the secret of what we do because neurologically our brains are hardwired to download word pictures very quickly and to process them very quickly. So, we use silly animal names, much love monkey, leading lion, competent camel, a tranquil turtle, so that our leaders are... And by the way, when I say leaders, I'm talking about all of us because we all are leaders. We all lead- Josh: Absolutely. Dr. Larry Little ... at least one person and that's ourselves. We only get to choose if we lead ourselves poorly or wisely. So, we wanted something that leaders could take and download quickly and apply quickly. So, the secret is in making it simple so that it can be practically applied so that then you can begin speaking that lion language to the lions in your life. You can speak the turtle language to the turtles in your life, and learn how in the world do you speak camel language and you speak that into the lives of camels. But the secret to the success of this, I truly believe is as simple as white picket fence. It's the practical application. It's the word pictures that we created because colours and numbers, our brain can't process that quick enough to really use it in the moment. Josh: Having a full letters that come back on a piece of paper without talking about the other tests. Obviously you can't really describe that or relate that to someone. But when you ask a five-year-old, "What does a monkey do, and how does a monkey look? How does a monkey react to a situation? And how does a lion look and what does a lion do and how does a lion react to a situation?" And anything that's worth teaching and worth learning should be able to be understood by a 12 year old. And I could comfortably say that being that we're related to animals, everyone knows animals, everyone loves animals. Everyone can see and see how they work together and how they can work better together. So, it's very, very smart the way that you did it. And as you said, situationally you can look and go, "Okay fine. They're that sort of person, they're that sort of person." And we've got a job network in Australia called Seek, which is you put an ad up on there to find a new employee. And we were using the make a difference test to sort of work out how they would fit into our organisation and how that would fit with us and the rest of our team. Dr. Larry Little Love it. Josh: And right from the word go we knew how we would be relating to them. And it's important too, what you pointed out earlier about engineers. And engineers may be being put into a managerial role does not necessarily mean that they should be managers. And it doesn't necessarily mean like a pay rise and a responsibility rise may not be what they're looking for. It may not be their carrot, and it may not be something they're looking for in their skillset. But if it is, it's definitely make a difference as a way that they can make it work with that position to make a difference, to there, present in the moment around that new position. Dr. Larry Little You're so right. Hey Josh, so I have a little secret and if you want me to, I'll let you in on it. You'd ask earlier what do you have? What's next? You want me to share it with you? I'm going to tell you just a little snippet about what's happening next. Josh: Yes, please. That'd be wonderful. Dr. Larry Little So, we're very excited that we knew the Make a Difference book, we felt like it had the concepts and we're so thrilled that it has helped people on an international level. That's awesome. But I knew there was something else and I knew there was, and the series is wonderful. We're glad to do that. We're so glad that, so cool what would people do that? But I knew there was something else. So, for over a year I've been piloting ideas and thinking about ideas and teaching and doing some work. And just last weekend I finished, I went in to an intensive, what I call an intensive, and I wrote a book that I believe is the sequel to the Make a Difference book. The working title of the book is called Lead to Make a Difference Above and Below the Line. Josh: Okay. Dr. Larry Little It's a different concept, but here's a snippet just to kind of give you an idea of where I'm coming from. You have to read the book to find out what above and below the line is all about. But it builds on, if you think about the DNA diagram, in the Make a Difference, it'll give you a hint. But the concepts are more around this. We talk about teams and that kind of thing and why they underperform or why there's toxicity in the team, or toxicity in a relationship. And the book centres not only on professional, but we talk a lot about personal relationships. And I think there's a monster. I think the monster attacks our relationships and attacks our teams. This monster is, I believe the reason that companies go under, that company's struggle, that relationships are destroyed. And the monster is fear, and the fear of failure, fear of being misrepresented, fear of being misunderstood. We could go on and on and I think the antidote to that fear is trust. But not in the traditional context of trust. We always talk about trust in terms of trust in a team or building trust in your relationship or building trust to be a strong... to trust each other to... Here's the problem with that. There's a huge disconnect there. Gap, if you will, and this is it. I don't think we can truly develop trust in someone else until we understand how to develop trust in ourselves. And I think self trust is something that people don't want to think about, but how in the world can I ask you to join me in a trusting relationship if I don't trust myself? Josh: Yeah. Dr. Larry Little: How can I build trust on a team if I don't trust my reaction? Josh: Got it. Yeah. Yeah. Dr. Larry Little: Yeah. So that, the book Lead to Make a Difference Above and Below the Line talks about how to gain that self trust. There an assessment tool in there about it. So, I'm very excited about it. I think it's going to... Boy, I hope that it helps a lot of folks. It was difficult to write because it kind of went down a different direction even then when I first started the concepts way back. Because I've talked and listened, and learned and I've tried to learn from others. But I think the end result is going to be pretty exciting. Josh: Well, I'm definitely pumped. I've loved your first book and I'm very interested to read the next one. It's something that I think everyone has... As I said, everyone has this demon inside themself. They're self-doubting, and I know I'm going to say I'm the worst for it. The worst for it, I guess. And I know myself, I have a team that look up to me. I have staff members that have left. And I've continued personal relationships with them. I'm still friends with them. And whenever they come to Queensland, they see me. And I sent out a something to one of them recently. And and I said, "Oh look, I'm looking to go this approach." And I said, "I'm worried about some of the directions that, some of the parts of the business are going." And I sort of brought them up to him and he said, "I've worked for five companies since you. You are the most professional company. You offer the best, most outstanding service verse any of them. You should not be worried about anything." And I felt wow, the way he's told me and how he was able to put that data together nearly made me cry to be honest. It was wonderful and I thought, everyone's got this doubt in himself and I can't do this and I won't do this. And I relate it back to the girl at school that you had the crush on, or 2009. The person you had at school, you had a crush on I guess. But the girl at school that you had the crush on, looked across you thought, Oh, I'm going to... At the right moment I'm going to go there and talk to her and I'm going to... Oh, I'm going to ask if I can say hey or hang out with her at lunch or whatever the case was. And then you didn't. And a year goes by, two years goes by and this person is saying, still do it. And you go, "No, I'm not going to do it." And then you... I'm not going to have to hang out with her. She's too pretty. She's too beautiful. And then the last day of school happens and then you finish school and you realise, wait, I'm in the same position now as I was before if I hadn't jumped on that opportunity. And this self doubt can have you lose opportunities and have you fail at I guess the butterfly effect. If you've got a small thing that just saying hello once to someone, reaching out like I did with yourself and saying hey. The smallest thing can build into a big thing for everyone involved, if you've got the... I guess not the guts, but the power within yourself to override those thoughts, feelings, and strive forward. So, I guess it's an important message. Dr. Larry Little: No, it really is. And it's revelation when someone realises that she no longer has to allow feelings to drive her behaviour. He no longer has to allow irrational thoughts, right, to define who he is or who he's not. That there is choice involved and we can learn the discipline of learning to lead through those emotions and making good choices based on that rational thought process. In fact, if you take two leaders and look at two leaders who were put in the exact same scenario of struggle. One may do very poorly that he may become a victim. He may become disassociated, he may become... Another may experience struggle and hardship and pain and so... But at the end he's grown stronger. Josh: Yeah. Dr. Larry Little: What is the difference? And so the book addresses that head on. The difference is this person understood how to lead above and below the line, understood the voices that he or she had before them. And we talk about the importance of having a grit, G-R-I-T and leading. And so I don't want to go into all of that and take out time, But I'm very excited about it. I think it's a good, I really do think it's a good sequel to the first make a difference project. Josh: Cool. And is that going to be available in Australia or online or audio books?> Dr. Larry Little: Yeah, all of the above. Right now, it's just brand new and it's actually at our... we're in the editing process right now, so look forward in the spring of 2020. And it will be, our goal is to have it hard copy, online obviously you can get it on Amazon, those kinds of things. And then also I'm going to push our team so that we can do an audio version. I want to do it... In fact, I want to do that for both of those books and create that audible experience as well. So it was a great question. Josh: Cool. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's, especially I guess for business owners, and I'm going to say I love a physical book. I love feeling a physical book. I love the paper of a physical book and you want to get many technical people saying that. But I'm in front of a computer monitor sometimes eight hours a day, sometimes 18 hours a day. And the thing that I absolutely love is stepping away from that feeling something and you can... I think you can feel more of an emotion in the book. I don't know. It's probably just someone I'm saying. I feel that there's something there that you just can't get off of a screen. And that's where I'm looking forward to getting the physical book and I think that's going to do it for me. But at the same time, business owners are busy people and some people spend half their lives driving around in cars and I'd sincerely suggest not reading a physical book while in a car driving. Right. Dr. Larry Little: Agreed. Agreed. Josh: Yeah. So, it would be good to see it as an audio book. Well, I'm really happy to have been able to speak with you and go through and hear about the new exciting projects that you've got on offer coming through in the future. And also the, some of the ones that you've got on offer now through the university in bits and pieces, and... or soon to be on offer. Is there anything else that you'd like to ask me will go through? Dr. Larry Little: I'll tell you, Josh. It's leaders like you who are truly going to successfully make a difference moving forward because you are, as our friend Brad Scow talks about the entrepreneurial journey. You're in that leadership journey of now mentoring and coaching and just be encouraged that that is a very, very influential and important place to find yourself. So it is my hope. Who knows, Josh? This is what I might ask of you moving forward. Let's have a talk. I mean, we're always looking for coaches, so you never know, and presenters. So we may have to talk offline a bit about what you're doing. But seriously our website is eaglecenterforleadership.com and we'd love to talk with whoever is listening or watching and to be able to speak into your life as a leader, to walk with you to journey with you. That's a call that we have that is bigger than any of us any one person. We have a team of around 60 or so individuals that are all committed to walking with leaders in order to help them to lead differently and help them to influence others just like you Josh. And so it's been just a real honour. Thank you for calling and inviting me to come hang out with you for a while in the land down under. It's been a blast. Josh: Any bloody time. All right. I really appreciate you giving me the opportunity here as well. And as I said, I've looked up to you and your teachings for quite some time and I've carried them through to my life and carried them through in all aspects. And also in the lives of the people that I'm influencing. And it's touching to hear the stories. And I could only imagine the stories that you would have with people that have come to you and how you've helped them out. And there's a few written in the book, but the amount you would have had from the book, I could only imagine, would be a very impressive and very humbling to have all those. We will put a link to your website in the description below as everyone does, or it will be in the article on our website or in the podcast, or whatever the method is that you're listening. There'll be some way to jump on the site and check it out. And yeah, I really look forward to speaking with you again and yeah, going from there. Dr. Larry Little: Thanks my friend. Good day. Josh: Thanks. You too.  

Working in IT can often feel like long periods of soul-crushing depression and frustration as we work through a technical issue, punctuated by brief moments of insane euphoria when we find a solution, followed by yet another period of soul crushing depression and frustration when we move on to the next problem. In this light, learning to take time to celebrate and express gratitude is essential. In this episode, Leon, Josh, and Doug explore the habits we've developed as IT pros to get us through the hard parts of the job; and the lessons from our religious, moral, or ethical tradition can we bring to bear. Listen or read the transcript below. Leon:                                     00:06                     Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our career as IT professionals mesh, or at least not conflict, with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. Leon:                                     00:53                     This is a continuation of the discussion we started last week. Thank you for coming back to join our conversation. Leon:                                     00:59                     Another area that I think, um, we can in it build a sense of gratitude is in the amount of work that we do, um, that we need to recognize in IT the difference between hours and accomplishments. How much time we spend, and how much we accomplish. Um, and I'm gonna have a really radical idea and anybody who's listening to this, who, who manages people or runs or owns a business is probably not gonna like me saying this, but salaried employee employment cuts both ways. Do not try this at home. Do not push this at work if you are in a shaky situation or whatever. But I am telling you right now that if it is okay for work to say, "Well you know there was an emergency or you have to get this done and if it takes you 50 hours to get to do it, then I guess that's what it takes." Then equally so is if you get your work done today in four hours you can go home because you have got it done. And I think sometimes we need to recognize that "I got it done, I did it, yay me." I don't need to spend more hours sitting here pretending or looking like or looking for trouble again or picking that next thing off the pile because this is what I intended to get done today. Doug:                                    02:09                     Absolutely. And I mean even on the flip side of that, I've had days where things just weren't going well and all of a sudden I realized if I keep going, I'm going to break something way worse than it is. And it is much better for me to just walk, get up and walk away and come back tomorrow. Now, by the same token, I'm not currently a salary employee, so that should indicate that it hasn't always worked well. Speaker 4:                           02:30                     Right. When you're in trouble. I think that that's a technique, but I just, I want to hit this again for just a moment and say that when we're talking about gratitude and talking about appreciating something, how amazing would it be if at two o'clock in the afternoon you realized "I got it done. I fixed the problem, I, I did it. I'm going home." You show up at home to your family, your dog, your TV, whatever it is, your, your Halo, your Quake cooperative. Whenever you know, World of Warcraft team, whatever it is, they're like, "Why are you here?" "I got my work done. I had, I get extra time. I'm finished. Free recess for the rest of the day. Yay me." That is powerful. Josh:                                      03:11                     I recently had to go through an experience just like that where for 20 years I have been the person who has always been present. I learned from my parents that showing up to work is, is even more important than doing well at work. And not that my parents did a poor job, but they were there. They taught me that always being at work showed value. And so I fell into the trap, Leon, that you talked about. I routinely would work 50, 60, 70, and 80 hours a week, uh, during my 20 year career because that's what I thought I had to do. And in my new job, I am very much have the autonomy to decide when I've had enough, and that I'm expected to not be at work all day when I don't need to be at work all day. And this is, it's a really weird dichotomy for me because I've had to reprogram my mind to work around that. I mean, I think again, another podcast episode another date, another time, but we need to, we need to realize that again, Doug's sins aren't my sins, right? Doug:                                    04:24                     I hope not for your sake. Josh:                                      04:28                     So quote a famous Mormon, um, whose name was J. Golden Kimball. Uh, he was also known as "the swearing apostle". Um, he, he used to say... in fact he used to swear over the pulpit at the conference center in Salt Lake. Um, but he used to say famously, "I'm not going to hell. I repent too damn fast!" Don't worry, Doug. We're, we're fine. Doug:                                    04:54                     All right. Leon:                                     04:55                     Another habit I think that can lead to a better sense of gratitude is, um, actually just thankfulness, which I know is kind of buzzwordy these days. Saying thank you a lot. Just say thank you to other folks for the things that they do a lot. It has an incredible effect on you. It has an incredible effect on people around you, but just get into the habit of saying thank you. Doug:                                    05:25                     And it's important to be able to do that, to actually be aware of the people that are doing stuff for you. I mean, I, I actually went to an exercise program today. I know, hard to believe. Um, but it was our first time going and I didn't know how it worked. And I got my wife there and she's settled and I was looking around. I could tell that we were supposed to get some equipment, but I couldn't tell what, you know, how some people had it and some people didn't. So this lady came up and she said, "Let me show you where to get this stuff." And she took me over there and I got all my equipment. We did the exercise and... But I made sure that when I went back I said, "I really appreciate you finding me wandering around and putting me in the right direction. And because people don't do that, you could have just let me..." There were 50 people in the room, one person came up to help me. And so, but I made sure that I went, I noticed that she had helped me, of course, but then I made sure I went back and thanked her. So it just, it's so you're grateful when people do stuff for you, but you have to, people do things for you all the time. And you may not even notice. Josh:                                      06:30                     And I think this ties back to the authentic comment that I made earlier. You were appreciative for a very specific thing and you went and found someone and you didn't just say, "Hey, thanks for your help." You said, "Hey, thank you for helping me to do this thing you saw me in need. I'm grateful for that." That is way better than getting the traditional hallmark "Hey, thank you for being a great person." 'Cause, why? Like what, what did I do as a great person? I mean for me, Doug:                                    07:03                     participation award! Josh:                                      07:07                     In Canada, we used to call them the "partici-paction". It was an exercise program. So very... And I..., Anyway, Canada's weird and you used to get a participation. It was, you know, gold, silver, bronze, these little, um, knitted, uh, medallions and did, yeah, well kind of knitted. And then if you didn't get a gold, silver or bronze, then you got a participation award? Uh, anyway, it was growing up in the 80s was weird, man. It was really weird. But I wanna I'm curious for, for both of you, how do you show your true, authentic nature when you're expressing gratitude to others? In Doug, you gave us a great example, uh, an evidence of how you do it. Are there any other ways that we can pull that off? Because I want to be more authentic in 2020. Leon:                                     08:01                     I think that that some of your comments hit on it. First of all, recognizing what the person did and that it was, and also understanding that it was exceptional. I mean, it's always important to say thank you to your wait staff. It's always important to say thank you to the people who are, who are, there being paid to help you because you know, yes, they're being paid. You don't go, you know, you don't fall on your knees for that, but you still thank them. Like "I recognize that you just did something for me." But when somebody is not there in that capacity or role to say, "Hey, I know you took time out of your exercise routine just to put me on the right track. I saw that. I see you. You are not invisible to me." I think that that in itself is powerful and then also expressing how it helped you or how it made you feel. And Doug, I know feelings are not always things that you are, you know, thrilled about talking about or sharing or anything like that. Um, again, we've known each other a really long time but, but saying you know, it really, you know, "I was, I was really uncomfortable. It's our first day here. I didn't know what to do and you made it a lot easier for me." Tells that person how they impacted your life and you want to call it positive reinforcement. Fine. You want to call it paying it forward, fine. But it, you know, in the same way that you would probably want to be thanked and recognized by a stranger on the street. Doug:                                    09:31                     Yeah. It's just being appreciated for what you're doing. I mean when, when I go through checkout on a holiday when I can just tell that they are just being slammed. I tell generally tell the cashout guy, I said, I really appreciate you being here cause I needed to get this food today. And the fact that you're here just made my life so I could do this. I mean if you think of that, think of none of the cashiers showed up. You'd have to steal all the food. I mean, excuse me. No, you, they wouldn't open the store. Josh:                                      09:59                     I was surprised. I recently took a trip and I went into the airport lounge. First time in my entire life that I've ever gone into an airport lounge. Um, had to look at the, the podcast episode we did where we talked about, uh, you know, the travel hacks, right? So that, that was good. So I went into the lounge and I, one of the times I spent seven hours in this lounge on a layover. I always surprised how many people in the lounge did not say thank you when the staff in the lounge came by and picked up your, your plates and your cups and stuff. Come on, people! Say thank you to the, the people who are like, you don't tip these folks that they, they, they're only thing that they're there for is to make your life in the lounge more pleasant. The least you can do is look up, smile at them and say thank you. Leon:                                     11:01                     Right. Again, I see you, I see what you did. He appreciated what you did exactly. Doug, before we started recording. You talked about, um, something else about hearing the 'thank you' when it's not said, and I want to give you a chance to tell that story over. Doug:                                    11:15                     It's really, it may be big because this is the flip side. This is, yeah, we were talking about we should be grateful. We should be thanking other people, but we're also looking at ways that we can go ahead and find gratitude and in our own lives. And sometimes the reality is we are not thanked for the wonderful things that we do for other people. I know this comes as a shock to everybody, but it's true. And when I had my own consultancy, uh, for the longest time I would base it, you know, I would be doing work for clients and doing work for clients and doing work for clients and clients never thank you. I mean, yeah, they pay, but they never actually thank you. But then all of a sudden I realized every time they said, "Okay, now that's done. Now what I want is..." They were essentially "Thank you for the thing that you just did." Because they wouldn't ask me to do the next thing if they weren't grateful for the fact that I had accomplished the first thing. So every time from then on that I heard now what I want is in my head. I just flipped it to, "Thank you Doug," and we were off and rolling. Leon:                                     12:09                     That's why I wanted you to tell it over it because that's really powerful. If you think about all the times at work that people say, "Okay, next I want you to do blah, blah," and just realize that there is an implicit, not explicit, but an implicit, Thank you. Great job. Because if you screwed it up, believe me, I would have told ya." Doug:                                    12:31                     Right and they wouldn't be asking you to do work on anything else ever again. That there's a, there's a very strong thank you every time they give you something new and if it's bigger, it's a big thank you. Josh:                                      12:41                     I want to point out to our listeners because I'm sure a number of them have had these moments, the weekly team meeting where we all start off by the usually the managers saying, "I just want to point out that Josh showed up to work today." Or or something really mundane. Those co, those scenarios where you as a manager or a team lead are compelled to call out the things that your team does well, completely backfire on your team. Don't do them. If you're going to do them, make sure that it's for things that are exceptional to the norm. For example, me showing up at work today is not normally exceptional. May showing up to work today after I worked all weekend. That might be exceptional. "Hey Josh we really appreciate the fact that you worked all weekend and that you're here on Monday morning and that you have pants on." So those are exceptional things, but don't, don't force that gratitude because that just hurts your team. I don't know. Leon:                                     13:48                     This goes back to the authenticity, but I had a very different experience. I had a manager who was himself exceptional in this regard that he would first look for, and then began to solicit and curate recognition... Points of recognition for the team. And, um, I'll post an example of it in the show notes. So if you're listening to this on a Tuesday, it'll be posted on Wednesday. But, um, it was really remarkable the effect it had. Because to your point, Josh, he was recognizing the exceptional mostly. Mostly he would say, "Okay, we saw that, you know, we, I noticed that you were online at two o'clock in the morning. It wasn't your on-call, but you just noticed it and that's really incredible. Please don't feel obligated to do that. But I know that you did and we appreciate it." But there was one thank you in the example I'm thinking of where he said, uh, you know, "George or whatever his name was. Um, there was nothing really noticeable about you this week. Um, you're fired. No joking." He said, "Really what was interesting was that everything that you accomplished was remarkably normal and under the wire it was consistent and it was typical. And it's what everyone has come to expect from you because you do it all the time. And I just want you to understand that that consistency is also appreciated." So here is a way to take a person who had had a normal week. Nothing to your point, Josh. Nothing exceptional. No 2:00 AM Sev1 calls, no working the weekend and say, but that's valuable too. Doug:                                    15:24                     That's managerially brilliant. Because the problem is when the only thing that you ever reward is people putting out fires. You get a lot of people who put out fires, and so they let fires happen so that they can then put them out. As opposed to the person that goes ahead and does their job day in and day out so that there are no fires. They never get recognition. Leon:                                     15:45                     Charity majors, uh, about a year ago talked about this, that one of her techniques was to recognize people who, um, first of all, people who pay down technical debt, that that was one of the things and that got higher praise than, uh, either fixing a bug or you know, resolving a crisis because that was valuable. But also she made sure that she recognized people who submitted things to, you know, submitted their code and there were no defects. That submitting with zero defects was more valuable than bug fixes. Because it meant there weren't, you know, cause it meant everything that it meant. And I think that that was really good. Josh:                                      16:28                     I would suggest that being consistently good at your job and our job is to either build things, fix problems, whatever it might be. That individual who did everything that they were asked to do and the things that they weren't asked to do without being asked. That is unfortunately, truly exceptional. Doug:                                    16:49                     It's true, New Speaker:                    16:50                     I hate to, I hate to be that type of person, but I tell my kids all the time, "It is not hard to be exceptional. You just need to be consistent and transparent. That makes you exceptional because so many people are not both consistent and transparent in the things that they're doing." So my name, maybe for us, we're like, Oh that, that's cool that they're, my boss recognized somebody who wasn't exceptional. But what's your boss was really saying was, "Hey Sally, that was really awesome that you did those things." And you know, the backhand was "All the rest of y'all need to look at what Sally's doing and say, Hey, this is what's valued, not you off saving the world, you know, from a calamity that you created." Leon:                                     17:41                     Another point just bringing in, um, a Jewish habit. So there's a Jewish tradition that you're supposed to say at least a hundred blessings a day, which is actually not hard in the Jewish tradition because there is a blessing for just about everything from the moment you wake up, before you even get out of bed, there's a blessing for, 'thank you for letting me wake up this morning' to a blessing for going to the bathroom. Yes, there's a blessing for it to go to the bathroom. There's a blessing for every bite of food in your mouth... Every bite of food you put in your mouth, there's a blessing for everything. And so that's the first thing. And, and uh, we can recognize, I think regardless of your religious tradition that when you say a blessing, you're saying 'thank you'. But there's a deeper level that I think is worth pointing out, which is that in, in the phrasing of a blessing, it's not. "Thank you for this thing." "Thank you for this apple." Thank you for... You're saying 'thank you for this moment.' "Thank you for this moment where I get to have this apple; where I get to get out of bed; where I get to go to work." I get to, you know, all these things. "Thank you for bringing me to this moment in time because that wasn't a guarantee." And the result of that for many people being that thankful, being thankful for every moment and saying, did I get my hundred blessings in today? Because that's, that's the goal. Okay, fine. That you become more grateful for things because you're looking for the things to say thank you for. Josh:                                      19:13                     I'm disappointed Leon. I thought when you were going to talk about Jewish traditions, you were going to invoke the holiday where we all get drunk. Leon:                                     19:21                     There is one of those, there's the get drunk holiday. There's also the eat cheesecake holiday was also, yes, there's also the eat fried foods holiday. This is an entirely other podcast episode. Um, Josh:                                      19:34                     Holy crap. I should have been Jewish. Doug:                                    19:38                     Well now that you're an ex-Mormon you still have an option. Leon:                                     19:40                     There's... Okay. There's no, okay... Yes, I'd like to point out Judaism does not have a tradition of proselytizing. Uh, everyone, everyone goes to heaven. You don't need to be on the team. And everyone can, can participate in some of these holidays even if you're not on the team. Uh, and, and my house is always, we have an open door policy. So you're welcome to come for the cheesecake holiday or the fried foods holiday or the get drunk holiday. Josh:                                      20:02                     I was going to say, who needs to proselytize when you've got holidays, like get drunk, eat cheese cake and eat fried foods. Like, Oh my goodness. Leon:                                     20:10                     Okay. Not all at the same time. There are separate days, separate days, Josh:                                      20:14                     But I thought you had like Christmas every day as a... Leon:                                     20:18                     Okay. Alright. And I think what we're doing is we're a.tually demonstrating another idea, which is really to experience joy and laugh, laugh at things, laugh at moments, try to bring more laughter in. If you feel like you're work in IT is becoming really hard to take, finding ways to bring some laughter in, whether that's listening to a really good funny podcast or I know some people who watch, you know, slapstick, they watch, um, old, you know, 1930s, um, like the Marx brothers movies or whatever. Whatever tickles your funny bone, you know. Three Stooges or um, Monte Python or whatever it is that that does it for you. But bringing more laughter into your life makes a difference. That just laughing helps. Josh:                                      21:08                     I agree. I also recommend laughing at yourself. Leon:                                     21:12                     For some of us it's easier than others. Doug:                                    21:14                     I have no problem with that. I'm about the funniest thing. I, uh, Leon:                                     21:20                     right. Doug:                                    21:20                     I don't have to wait too long to see me screw up. Josh:                                      21:22                     I mean, being self-deprecating is something that I do really well and I don't know if it's a me being Canadian or me being British or me being Canadian and British, but self-deprecation is a way for me to laugh at myself. I I, for a long time I took myself pretty darn seriously and to be blunt, it nearly killed me. So now I take myself seriously when I need to be serious, but I also know that there's an awful lot in life that is not nearly as serious as we make it. Leon:                                     21:53                     Yes, exactly. Now I will say that laughing at yourself, especially as a way to diffuse a tense situation, even if a tense situation is in your own head, is wonderful. Sharing that at work is sometimes not safe. And I want to recognize on this podcast that not everyone is in a situation where they feel like they can highlight and laugh publicly. "HAH I just screwed that up, that was pretty funny, wasn't it?!?" Because not only will the answer be no, the answer will be "and it's going to get you, you know, everything you say can and will be held against you in a court of public opinion." Doug:                                    22:27                     I did. I did that. I, I've, I've rarely worked for a large corporation because I always thought I wouldn't do very well there and I have now proved it because, well no, there, there was a situation where we just, we didn't meet something and it didn't, it didn't work and everybody was like really down and there was nothing we could have done to, to have actually accomplished what was supposed to been accomplished, so I made a joke. Cause really what are you going to do? And it was not taken well at all. It's like I was, I was accused of not taking the problem seriously. And the answer is yeah, no I knew the pro... And I also knew that it wasn't our fault. There was nothing we could have done. We were torpedoed by another department intentionally (because big corporations do that) and everybody was down about it. It's like why should the, why should this team be depressed? Because of what happened. But the humor was not taken well in that situation. I no longer work for that company. That's not the only reason. But enough episodes like that pretty much made it easy for me to be in the 10% that get chopped. You know, any place that automatically chops 10% of their, their people every year? You can get, I'm going to be in that. I'll eventually be in that 10% for some reason. Josh:                                      23:34                     Oh, that two letter company that we love to hate, hate to love. I don't know. Leon:                                     23:40                     Yeah, yeah. No, that's a, that's a challenging one. But I think also, Doug, what you're talking about that, um, again, contextualizing what you're doing. You know, putting it into context, put, you know, framing it in a way that says, Hey, you know, let's just be clear about this. Whether again, for the good or the bad, especially when something doesn't go well, the ability to be grateful, the ability to be thankful, the ability to see the humor in it also means recognizing that really, what are we doing here? Like at the end of the day, we're writing software. And just one story about that. Um, one of my really good friends that I grew up with is Lee Unkrich, who for many years was a director at Pixar and just retired from there not too long ago. And he was on the team working on "Monsters, Inc." And they were in a, they were in a meeting room. It was day one and a half of what ended up being a three day effort to come up with one particular sequence in the movie, which is where they got thrown out of a door and they're in the, you know, the Arctic or something. And they meet up with the abominable snowman. And they're trying to work one gag and they couldn't quite get it. And in again, at day one and a half, Lee stopped everything and he said, "I just need us all to recognize that we are here being paid a not-insignificant-amount of money to come up with the perfect pee in the snow joke. That's what we're being paid to do right now. And we just need to recognize how incredibly awesome our jobs are." Josh:                                      25:17                     I want that job so badly. Oh my God. Leon:                                     25:20                     Right? Because there was a lot of pressure in the room. Like we've got to get this right. Josh:                                      25:25                     I used to work for a major automotive manufacturer, one of the big three. And when the line shut down, it was, it was an awful lot of money a minute that was not being realized because they weren't working. And I used to say to people, I worked in support, uh, in, in one of the, in a couple of their facilities for a period of time. "We're not curing cancer here folks..." Cause people, I, I, I have never been, I've never been in the military, but I have been torn up one side and down the other because of the line going down and some shift manager freaking out. And I'm just like, we are literally not curing cancer. I switched companies and a few years later I was working for a company that was helping cure cancer. Leon:                                     26:17                     Okay. Context, Josh:                                      26:19                     Jokes on me, right? Uh, but I, I think we need to remember that even when we're trying to cure cancer or... There's only so much that you can do, you can only move mountains so far and then that's it. I mean, don't it. Yes. It's not a laughing matter. When you, when you fail to deliver in spite of your best efforts and someone dies. Not a laughing matter. But we can be grateful. The effort that we put in, I could never be a first responder because I would want to save everybody. And that just is not what happens as a first responder. Uh, uh, an, uh, a friend of mine, uh, is a doctor and I, I remember listening to stories from him being an intern and the people dying on the gurney as he was doing his ER rotation. And I thought 'there was no way,' just no way I can do that. But on one hand, I'm very grateful that I, I'm not a doctor. On the other hand, I'm also very grateful that he had the wherewithal to understand that he couldn't save everyone, but he was going to give 100%. and every day he was like, I give it, I give him my all. I can't save that person who came in with, you know, shot seven times. And being grateful that you put in the effort. That is really okay. Doug:                                    27:41                     I was going to say, even though we're looking for ways to be grateful, when you know that you've done the best job that you can do, that's the time to be great. That's the time to be thankful. Even if nobody else knows that you did the best you could and that's assuming that you bring your, you know, the best you got at any given day, sometimes the best you've got is not all that great. Leon:                                     27:59                     A number of decades ago, Doug and I were working at the same company and I had a situation where in the evening I was working on a, a co, a client's computer and the hard drive completely and utterly crashed. And this person lost all of their data and I really kind of lost it, uh, because I was working on the computer at the time and the hard drive crashed and I, it was early enough in my career that I did not know what to do and I did not know how to take it. And I spent some fairly emotional minutes in your office. Like, "I don't know how to face this person. I don't know how to deal with this. What am I going to do?" And you said, "You know, the system died on you, but you didn't take a hammer to it. It just died. Hardware does that. And you did everything you could. They didn't have backups. That's not your fault." And put, you know, both putting it in context and basically saying everything you just said about you did the best you could, you don't need to carry this. And I did anyway. Because, right. And it was a sleepless, you know, sleepless night until, uh, the angry words were said and the client recovered their composure. And you know, we moved on from that and a week later I was able to look back with a little bit more perspective. But, um, a, I was grateful to have somebody who had a little bit, you know, a little bit better perspective on it. But also, um, I was eventually able to have that point of view that I had done everything I could and this happened anyway and you know, I, and I was there. And in one respect I was there to at least be able to say "It was a blah... It was at this and a this and this and then this happened. "And explain to the client coherently the sequence of events so they could at least be prepared for it next time and wouldn't, you know, at that client took religious backups after that. So, you know, lessons learned, Josh:                                      30:06                     Call me, not surprised. Leon:                                     30:08                     Um, any final words, any, any last thoughts before we wrap this up? Josh:                                      30:12                     You know, I, I do. And because I know Leon how much you love when I quote songs. And because I think in this particular case we missed talking about something that we uh, that we should be grateful for. I am going to quote James Taylor from his song. "You've Got A Friend." The first verse says, "When you're down and troubled; and you need a helping hand; and nothing, nothing is going right." I mean it sounds like every day in IT, right? "Close your eyes and think of me; and soon I will be there; to brighten up even your darkest night..." (When you're on call.) No... That's not what James Taylor said, but I mean you just shared a story about how Doug was there for you. Having friends and IT having friends when you work in IT that aren't in IT is really powerful. But I think that having friends who also have been there, they've gone through the experiences that they, you can commiserate with them, you can laugh and have joy with them. You can cry and probably string together a fairly long sentence filled exclusively with curse words. That is also very powerful. So my final words have, have friends and listen to James Taylor. You've got a friend. Doug:                                    31:31                     My final word is you can't be grateful enough. I mean, if you think you've done it all yourself, you're wrong. If you think you've screwed it all up yourself, you're wrong. Just be grateful for what you've managed to accomplish and that just makes everything goes so much better. Leon:                                     31:45                     All right. And with that thought, I'm going to close it out with a quote from Mr. Rogers. Um, there's now a movie out that highlights this, but it's something that I have, uh, kept up on the wall here in my office and talk about from time to time. Mr. Rogers, when he received a lifetime achievement award, uh, he said something that just has stuck with me forever. New Speaker:                    32:05                     "All of us have special ones who loved us into being. Would you just take along with me 10 seconds to think of the people who have helped you become who you are, those who cared about you and wanted what was best for you in life? 10 seconds. I'll watch the time." Destiny:                               32:22                     Thanks for making time for us this week. To hear more of Technically Religious visit our website, https://www.technicallyreligious.com, where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions, and connect to us on social media. Josh:                           32:36                     To quote Jacques Maritain, "Gratitude is the most exquisite form of courtesy."  

In the fall of 2019 a series of fortunate events led Technically Religious contributor Leon Adato to take a journey of a lifetime. He transformed an unexpected convention trip to Barcelona into a mission to bring a Torah back to the US from Israel. Like the movie that this episode is named for, along the way he experienced unexpected challenges and met larger-than-life characters who helped him on his way. Listen now, or read the transcript below. Kate:                                     00:00                     Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experience we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion or lack thereof. We're here to explore ways we make our career. Is IT professionals mesh or at least not conflict with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. Josh:                                      00:24                     In the fall of 2019 a series of fortunate events led Technically Religious contributor, Leon Adato, to take a journey of a lifetime. He transformed an unexpected convention trip to Barcelona into a mission to bring a Torah back to the U S from Israel. Like the movie that this episode is named for, along the way, he experienced unexpected challenges and met larger than life characters who helped him on his way. I'm Josh Biggley and the other voices you're going to hear on this episode are my partner in crime, Leon, Adato. Leon:                                     00:57                     Hello. Josh:                                      00:59                     Alright, Leon. You know how this goes, time for some shameless self promotion. So tell us who you are and where we can find you. Leon:                                     01:06                     Fantastic. I am Leon Adato, as we've said, probably three times already. I am a Head Geek at SolarWinds. Uh, you can find me on the twitters @leonadato and you can also read my pontificating about monitoring and other things at adatosystems.com and I identify religiously as an Orthodox Jew. Josh:                                      01:26                     Wonderful! And I'm Josh Biggley. Uh, this is the first time I think we've officially announced that I am a TechOps Strategy Consultant with New Relic. Uh, super excited about that. Started two weeks ago and I feel like I'm living the dream. Leon:                                     01:40                     Mazal Tov, mazel tov! Josh:                                      01:41                     Mazal Tov indeed. Uh, you can find me on the Twitters, uh, @Jbiggley. Uh, I've actually shut down all of my, all of my um, non-work related discussions maybe I'm just tired of social media. I don't know. Um, but I do identify as post-Mormon. Um, so Leon, you, you had a trip. Leon:                                     02:02                     I did. I did. And, but before we dive into the particulars of the trip, which is sort of the central part of this episode, I want to talk about something that I think is near and dear to a lot of it practitioners, which is travel hacking. Josh:                                      02:16                     Oh yes, yes, please. Leon:                                     02:18                     Because a lot of the, a lot of the parts of the trip that I took were predicated on or were built on my ability to, um, travel both comfortably and also efficiently. Um, you know, not being independently wealthy as I think all of our listeners are. And if you are a listener and you're independently wealthy, please consider taking a sponsorship. Um, we would love to, we'd love to have your support. Um, in any case, uh, I wanted to take a minute and talk about some things that I've learned over the last five and a half, almost six years as a head geek doing a lot of traveling. And Josh, I know that you have stuff to contribute. Josh:                                      02:57                     I'm actually going to do a lot of listening here because, uh, as part and parcel of my new job, I'm going to be doing a fair bit of traveling. So, uh, I mean I'm going to take some notes. Uh, wait, no, hold on. We're going to put the details in the show notes. I'm not taking notes. Leon:                                     03:11                     Very good. Okay, good. I, you know, and we forgot to mention that earlier, so that was a nice way to slide it in there. The first point, especially when we're talking about non US/Canada travel is all you need to do is get to Europe. Everything else is cheap. Once you do that, just get to Europe. I think a lot of Americans, and I'm assuming also Canadians, um, think, well, I'm going to go from, you know, France to Italy to this and they feel like they have to book it all out from the American perspective and you can, it's going to cost a lot of money. The reality is that just land anywhere in Europe, it doesn't have to be your final destination. It doesn't even have to be on your itinerary. Wherever it's cheapest to land get there because once you're on the continent at that point, getting around is ridiculously cheap. You live, for example, uh, you can get a one week pass on the train system for about a hundred dollars US and that allows you to get on and off the train as much as you want. So you can go from city to city and if you get someplace and it's like, wow, I didn't even expect to be here and it's beautiful here and I want to spend more time, fine, stay here and get on the train tomorrow or the day after or whatever. Also, there's a lot of cheap airlines, um, easy jets, one of them, but there's others. So again, just get into the region and from there you can build your trip off of that. Another thing is airline travel points are your friend and therefore, um, you want to work those points. And just to give you an example, a round trip ticket from the U S to Israel on United. I happened to be a United flyer. That's my airline of choice a is 80,000 points. Round trip from Barcelona is 30,000 points. You know, I was already, as we'll get into, I was already going to be in Barcelona, so I was able to build off of that to go do something else. Credit cards are a great tool for travel if they make sense for you. I'm not insisting that people get involved in credit cards. You get into credit card debt. I know that it's a slippery slope for a lot of folks, but the reality is that there are a lot of cards you can get that come with a signing bonus and you get 50, 60, 100,000 points. That's a European trip right there. Just that, you know, especially if it's a credit card that you know you're not going to use after that and you've got the, the willpower to do it. Josh:                                      05:25                     I liked that actually. I did. I didn't use that piece of advice. Um, when I started my new job, I, I, I am an Air Canada flyer because I'm in Canada and there's really two airlines, so yay. Star Alliance partner. Um, right. Got out, went out and got myself a credit card. They gave me, uh, a bonus for signing up and then a bonus if I spent more than X number of dollars, which wasn't a problem because it's also their credit card, I used to reimburse all my expenses. Leon:                                     05:50                     So as an IT pro, as long as your company doesn't have a thing against it, use that credit card. First of all, you get all of your perks if you use that card rather than the corporate card. And yeah, you get, even if even if the dollars are going to be reimbursed, you get the points for the miles. And to your point, especially if you know you're going to do a lot of travel, take a look at, you know, a lot of credit cards and a lot of airlines have a card that gives you club access. It costs. For example, the..., I have the chase United card. It is I think $400 a year for a fee. Now, $200 of that are refunded to me if they're travel related. It doesn't matter whether we're talking about taking a taxi or an Uber or Lyft or a hotel room or an extra bag that I'm checking in or whatever, whatever it is, those $200 get reimbursed right off the top second. If I need to get something like nexus or global entry or TSA pre that's covered, you're automatically covered with that, but on top of it, it gets you automatic access to the airline club and the reason why you want that there's, there's the living, the high life aspect, right? You walk in there, they treat you nice, you free drinks, there's food, there's even showers and stuff like that. That's nice. However, that's not the perk. The perk is that there's a different category of travel agent who works inside the club and I really believe that those agents are exclusively graduates of Hogwarts, school of witchcraft and wizardry because they will make things happen that can't happen anywhere else. I have gotten can't, you know, flights canceled, bumped off my flight, missed my flight, whatever. And I walk into the club and I tell them, Hey, this happened and type, type, type, type, type, Mr Adato, I've got you on the very next flight. There wasn't a very next flight. There is now. Oh wow. I mean like they literally conjure a new airplane. I don't know. They're magic people. That is worth the price of the card right there is having that, that fallback. So that's another thing. You had something about your status. Josh:                                      07:57                     I mean, I don't do a lot of traveling, but I am, I got silver status, um, uh, on Air Canada this year and I am five segments away from getting to gold status when traveling first, getting on the plane before, um, you know, zones three, four and five is pretty awesome because everyone wants to take their non-checked bags with them. So everyone's trying to cram their carry-ons. So you get in early, you always are gonna find some carry on space second, um, you, you're going to get your pick of seats. I mean, not first class. Sometimes you get a first class upgrade, but you're going to get that premium economy. Um, so you actually have leg room. Um, and I mean third, you just want the ability to access some of the perks that come along with it. Like, Hey, if you rent at the Marriott hotels, you automatically get, um, 250 or 500 points. Little things like that. And I think that's another hack. Let's make sure we're stacking our, um, our rewards. You know, if Air Canada and Marriott have a, an agreement which they do, um, Hey, um, fly air Canada and stay at a Marriott hotel. Fortunately without even planning it, I always fly Air Canada, uh, or star Alliance partner. And I also, um, usually stay at a Marriott hotel, uh, when it makes sense, uh, only because it was really close to, um, you know, our, our previous employer, um, and made just perfect sense and there was, it was a great rate. So yeah, I mean, find those, find those synergies and uh, and work them. Leon:                                     09:33                     I will also say don't get sort of psychologically locked in. Sometimes it doesn't work. Sometimes you can't fly your preferred airline, you can't do that. But you know, have an eye for that. And then the last thing, and this is something I think as Americans were less, I don't know, less comfortable with, is the whole cell phone thing. You know, because America is so just geographically big and the carriers cover such a large range. I think once we get into the European theater, uh, the idea of what do we do with my cell phone comes up now, I will tell you I solved this this year by moving to Google Fi which rides on top of networks in almost every country. And so I didn't have to think about it. I landed and literally got a message. "Hey, good to know that you're in Switzerland right now and we've got you covered." Like literally a pop up on my phone came up and said, but as a non-American, you know, what advice do you have? Josh:                                      10:27                     The advice that I've always been given and that I know that a few friends of mine who travel extensively always say is, um, don't roam Europe. Yes. All the cell phone companies. And including, you know, bell who I'm now with so that I can call the U S without unlimited calling. Um, they will tell you that you can roam for like $12 or $15 a day. The reality is don't roam. If you're going to be in Europe for any period of time, buy a SIM card. Um, I mean there's, they're like $25 for unlimited calling, uh, uh, a very generous helping of data. Uh, if you're going to use all of that, you should probably get out and see the sites a little more. Leon:                                     11:09                     So my son, this is going to factor into the longer story, but my son is, uh, in Israel in a hundred gig data SIM card is effectively $12. Leon:                                     11:19                     Oh, come on! Leon:                                     11:19                     If you're going to be there for a week or two or whatever it is, and you're going to use a hundred gig of cell data yet, like you said, you're doing your traveling wrong. Josh:                                      11:28                     You are definitely travel or you're, or you're traveling all sorts of, right. I don't know. Maybe you're live streaming. Leon:                                     11:34                     Yeah, maybe a live streaming. Sure. Okay. Josh:                                      11:36                     Streaming your entire trip. I mean, not, maybe that's a thing. Leon:                                     11:38                     Okay. So that's, that's, you know, part one, travel hacking, just general travel hacking ideas. And some of that will factor into the story. But I, I think we want to pivot now into the story of me bringing back the Torah. Um, again, the Frisco kid for those people who aren't familiar is a wonderful movie with Gene Wilder and Harrison Ford story of a sort of a naive rabbi from Poland who travels across America to deliver a Torah to, uh, San Francisco. Uh, I felt very much like that along the way. Where it started was that I was set up to go to VMworld Europe this year, which is in Barcelona. And when I realized that that was a thing, I immediately decided I was going to take a cheap flight to Israel to visit my son who's there at Yeshiva. Josh:                                      12:22                     No, wait, hold on, Leon. Yeah. Um, I think last time we talked your son was struggling with Yeshiva. Leon:                                     12:29                     Yeah, he was. And in fact, um, when we talked about it, he was coming home. Like that night there was a flurry of activity. There were some correct course corrections made and some assurances made. And in fact he was able to feel comfortable staying with 15 minutes to spare. Josh:                                      12:46                     Wow. Fantastic. Leon:                                     12:47                     Yeah. So he was there and you know, he's doing, he is doing much better and growing and learning and doing the things that you want to do. But I was going to be there and I thought this is a wonderful chance for me to check up on him and see what he gets to see. And so I did that. And like I said before, the flight from Barcelona to Israel is significantly cheaper than the flight from the U S so it made a lot of sense. You know, I found the cheapest code partners that I could find and I got those flights booked. And so I mentioned to my, to my rabbi, just in passing, I said, Hey, I'm going to visit my son and he's, you know, in Israel. And he said, Oh, if you're going to be in Israel while you're there, can you bring a Torah back with you? And I said, well, yeah, sure, I guess. Sure. And he immediately, his entire tone changed. Like he was surprised like, well you mean it like will you ask me to, sure. Is that, are you sure? He must have asked me if I was sure five times until finally I said, what are you not telling me about this? You know, because I thought I'm bringing a Torah back. Is there something else I should know? Is there some major risks that I'm unaware of? What's what's going on Josh:                                      13:47                     Now, to be clear, we are talking about the first five books of the old Testament. Right? Leon:                                     13:53                     Right. So, so in this context, when I say bringing back a Torah, it is the scroll and we'll have pictures of it in the show notes, but it's just, it is, it is a, you know, scroll of parchment may, it can range in size from let's say, you know, two feet long and you know, kind of like, you know, eight inches wide and maybe 10 pounds and it can get, they can be larger than that, but, Josh:                                      14:14                     okay. Well I just wanted to make sure that Torah wasn't code for, I don't know. An alligator. But apparently you can't bring on the airlines. I, I, Leon:                                     14:24                     They really don't allow emotional support alligators anymore. Josh:                                      14:28                     Oh, weird. Leon:                                     14:29                     I know. I know. Um, so yeah, it's, it's a fairly specific object and, and non-dangerous it doesn't bite or anything like that from an it perspective because we want to talk about the technically part as well as the religiously parked. I was immediately struck by what happens when you volunteer for a project that nobody expects you to say yes to. My rabbi had made a comment sort of as a, and I took it seriously and all of a sudden he was sort of stuck like, what do well, but nobody would say yes to that. And, um, you know, we, I think many of us have been in that situation with projects where it's like, Hey, who wants to do X? You know, who wants to write that ebook? Or who wants to, yes, please. May I? And I was like, no, you don't. You don't really want to do that. I'm like, Oh yeah, I totally wanted to. Josh:                                      15:16                     Uh, I think we all definitely need a Leon Adato on our teams to, uh, write all the documentation, uh, in fun ebook style. Leon:                                     15:24                     Yes, absolutely. Um, I think that, you know, for any tech writers who are here, you can men, you can talk in the comments to this post on TechnicallyReligious.com and say I'm available and I will volunteer to write eBooks also, you know, uh, volunteer meaning pay me. But, um, so I think from an it perspective though, there's some lessons that we can pull from this just even at this point in the story, you know, volunteering for things that other people consider to be a hard job is a really good career idea. Josh:                                      15:53                     Yeah, I would definitely agree with that. Over the last five and a half years. Um, well, I mean, let's bring up the story, right? Hey Josh, it'd be really awesome if, you know, you joined, you know, Cardinal Health and you know, came to work for Leon Adato and then four days later someone quit on me. Leon:                                     16:15                     Okay. It was to become head gig and SolarWinds. Like, I couldn't not take that opportunity, but yes, I, Josh:                                      16:22                     Yeah, but yeah, it's saying yes to opportunities even when they're hard, like, Hey, will you fill Leon shoes? I'll try it. It works out really well. And that really set me up for, for my entire career at a, at Cardinal Health, right. I as a non-cloud engineer, I was the co lead of the cloud community of practice as a just an engineer, uh, air quote, just an engineer, not a senior engineer. Um, I was the enterprise monitoring representative on the smash committee. It's not a whole idea of always be learning and you don't know that you can or cannot do something until you volunteer to do it and Hey, why not do it in a, what should be a safe space, um, of work. Yes. It means putting yourself out there. Yes. It means being risky. Yes. It means you have to trust your colleagues, but Oh my goodness. If you're going to try something, try it with the tactical support of a really strong team. Leon:                                     17:19                     I also want to say that, you know, I got a lot of pushback from, from my Rabbi. Are you sure? Are you really sure? Do you mean it? Sometimes that's a warning sign. Sometimes when people say, you know, when nobody else is volunteering and the person in charge is, is really looking for that confirmation, it's a clue that this is not, you might've missed something. So ask questions. Not just the people in charge, but ask other folks, you know? But at a certain point, you also recognize that what appears to impossible or odious or frustrating kind of work that may not be how you see it. And that means that that's your superpower. So again, I love writing. I really do. And so while we're, a lot of other people in it will say, you know, write something. Are you joking? I'd rather take a fork through the eyeball. I'm like, I really wish I had more time to do this. That just happens to be the thing that I like. Recognize when that's the case and run with it. Josh:                                      18:19                     My super power is apparently financial models. Right? Which is totally weird. Since I failed math in ninth grade. So Zack Mutchler and I who were colleagues up until two weeks ago, despises financial models. He never wants to do that. And I'm like, Oh my goodness, please. Yes, let me, it's, it's my grounding place. If I can figure out how it works financially, then I'll go and figure out how the technology works. So, um, yeah, I, I will volunteer to do financial models any day of the week. Yeah. Leon:                                     18:50                     And that's something I would never do. Right. Okay. All right. So, so fast forward, um, you know, VMworld Barcelona is wonderful and I wrote some blog posts about it and then I, you know, went from there to Israel and had a great week with my son and had a great time. And I even got a chance to speak at cloud native day in Israel. Um, so I had called a friend of mine, Sharone Zitzman and said, "Hey, I'm..." She has kids. and she's Israeli, "...so I'm going to be there with myself. What's really fun things to do?" And she said, "Oh, you're going to be there. I'm running a convention. Can you speak?" Like Sharon, that's not why I, that's not what I called you for is to do another convention talk. But here I am. So I did that. Now, what's interesting about this, and this is relevant to this story, is that, um, the morning of the convention, it happens to be a Tuesday, uh, Israel executed an airstrike that killed, uh, uh, Palestinian Islamic jihad commander. And, uh, I know that it gets political. It gets into, you know, the whole middle East politics and things. So a trigger warning up front about that for people who feel strongly about it. But there was a, uh, an airstrike that killed this Islamic jihad commander and that triggered a retaliatory strike of 160 rockets that were fired from Gaza into Israel. And six of those reached Tel Aviv, which meant that the talk I was giving in Tel Aviv, you know, might not happen. And we were on our way from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv and I was getting emails that, you know, despite the fact that businesses and schools had been ordered to shut down, the convention was permitted to continue. Um, and then I got a call from the organizer who said, "You know, if you don't want to come in, if you're not comfortable, if it makes you nervous, I completely understand." Nope, we're on our way. It's fine. You know, 160 rockets, just another day in Israel. Here we go. So I went in and, and gave the talk and that was fine. So the next day, Wednesday I'm set to fly home. It's me, my luggage and the Torah. Um, so I need to describe in a little bit more detailed what this is. So the Torah is a scroll, it's on two wooden dowels. And um, like I said, it can be anywhere from say a foot and a half to three feet tall or long and you know, six, eight inches a foot wide when you roll it up and everything. So that's wrapped up, you know, packed up nice and tight and bubble wrap and wrapped in plastic and put into a a duffle bag that I can take with me. Then there's a box that goes in because, uh, some Torahs are just the scroll, but some come in their own sort of self contained container and this is called an Aron. So when I use that word from now on in the Aron is the box that comes in and this is a circular box. It's about two and a half, three feet high, about a foot in diameter. It's usually made out of plywood and covered in silver and has all sorts of literally bells hanging off of it. Uh, so that's, that's also there. Now the, the Torah itself cannot be checked as luggage. You treat it with respect and you know, I wouldn't check my grandmother is luggage. I'm not going to check the Torah, his luggage either. Um, so that has to come with me on the plane. Uh, you don't have to buy it its own seat, but you do have to bring it with you on the plane. It can't be checked as luggage. The Aron, the box can be checked as luggage. So that was all packed up. Also, it was wrapped nice and tight and foam and bubble wrap. And you know, a layer of plastic just to keep it all self contained. And that was in another duffle bag. And the Torah itself, uh, it turns out was about 25-30 pounds and the, our own was probably closer to 40 pounds. Josh:                                      22:24                     Oh wow. Okay. Leon:                                     22:25                     Along with my overloaded suitcase cause it had all the convention crap I had collected and a couple of things my son wanted to send home with me and a pita maker that I bought while I was in Israel for my wife, like one does. Right, right. All right. I just need to remind you at this point in the story that I had booked my flight, uh, my flights back and forth before I knew I was bringing the Torah. And it was also predicated on this convention trip. So my flights were Barcelona, Israel, and then Israel, Barcelona and work was paying for the Cleveland, Barcelona, Barcelona, Cleveland leg. So I had these two separate trips that, that dovetailed, that I booked before I knew I was bringing a Torah. And the second thing I wanna remind you is that there were 160 rockets fired from, you know, Gaza into Israel the day before I flew. And the reason I mentioned this is because of the flight home was on Turkish airlines. Josh:                                      23:13                     I mean... what??? Leon:                                     23:13                     It was on Turkish airlines. Yeah. Josh:                                      23:16                     So a Jewish dude. Leon:                                     23:18                     Yeah. Orthodox Jewish dude flying on Turkish airlines. Okay, I'm going to give this spoiler Turkish airlines rocks. They are amazing people. Uh, they, everybody was delightful and lovely. So I'm just going to, I'm going to put that out up front. Okay. However, I didn't know what to expect. I also want to point out that, um, it, Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv, the, the airport in Israel, all of the check areas, uh, are on the same level when you walk in the door, except for Turkish airlines, which is two floors down and off to the right in its own little section. And that section is predominantly a Palestinian Arabic travelers going back and forth. So I'm traveling as, as incognito as I possibly can. For those people who've seen me. I have little fringy things hanging out of my, uh, you know, out of my shirt, the tzitzit, those were tucked in a, I wear a kippah, but I was wearing a ball cap over it. I just wanted to be like as nonchalantly American as I possibly could be. Just again, didn't want to be in people's face, especially given what was happening, you know, that day and the day before. I get up to the checkout counter and delightful, a Palestinian young lady is checking me in and I give her the our own first because if there's gonna be a problem with my tickets, because I have three, I have three bags. I was only supposed to be traveling with one, they're overweight. There's a lot of extra charges on me. I want to make sure the, our own gets on before, you know, before anything else happens. So she asked me "Mah zeh?", what is that? My Hebrew is very, very bad. So in English I, I said "it's, um, it's a box that a Torah goes in?" I'm not sure if any of these words are going to have any meaning to anybody. And she looks at the duffle hanging off my shoulder and she says, "Zeh sefer Torah?" that bag over there, that's a safer tour. That's a, that's a Holy Torah? "Ken". I said, yes. "Ah, very good." She puts a fragile sticker on the bag that has the our own on it and she says, please take this off. We will use special handling for this. And then she takes my other bag, which is overweight and she puts a heavy sticker on it and off it goes. And then she takes my other bag and off it goes and I have my credit card out. I said, "I know this is going to cost." And she says, "There is no charge." Josh:                                      25:34                     Waaaaaat??? Leon:                                     25:34                     I know. I literally said, "no, no, I just gave you three bags like I have to pay for these " She says "No, no, no, it is all good." Okay. And then she hands me a card, she says, this is a pass for the VIP lounge. Please enjoy. Josh:                                      25:49                     Wow. Leon:                                     25:50                     Okay. So now I have to take the Aron to special handling. So I take it around the corner to the special handling air. It's where it just right there and these two Palestinian guys are, you know, you know Israeli Palestinian, Israeli guys are there and uh, they open the bag and it's of course wrapped in bubble wrap, wrapped in plastic wrap and whatever, and they put it through the x-ray. Now I just want to remind you, it is a, a wooden box wrapped in silver wrapped in bubble wrap, et cetera. What's that gonna look like on the X Ray? It's gonna look like a big metal tube. So these guys, these guys like we're going to have to open this up. It had been so carefully, professionally packed and look, you're going to do what you're going to do, right? You've got to do it. So they open it up and they're like, yup, that's exactly what we thought we were gonna say there. And then immediately pull out their own roll of bubble wrap and they wrap it up just as good as it had been before. Just boom, boom, boom, wrap it up, put it back in the bag and off it goes. Like no problem. No. You can also say that, you know, tourists coming back from Israel is something that is seen a lot at Ben Gurion airport. That's a pretty normal thing. So, okay, so I get through the rest of security. I get to the lounge, I have a delightful time in the lounge. Um, get on my plane. My flight is going on Turkish airlines from Tel Aviv to Istanbul. Of course, that's the, the, you know, hub for that. Change. planes, go from Istanbul to Barcelona and that's where I have to change flights again. So I'm stay overnight in Barcelona, get up the next morning, come back to Barcelona airport, and I'm basically doing the same thing all over again. I get into check in this time it's United and, uh, this time everything's going to happen except it's going to happen in Spanish. Now my Spanish is better than my Hebrew. Uh, it's not great, but it's better than than that. And so I get to the line and uh, you know, get through the line and I get up to the guy at the counter and he once again, you know, I hand him the Aron and I put it up on the conveyor and he says, "well, what's that?" All right, I'm talking to you in a predominantly Christian country. How am I gonna explain this? "Uh, it's a box that, that a Torah scroll, a Holy scroll goes into," I'm, I'm trying to figure out how to say this. And he spoke English, but I'm still, and he says, "Oh," like recognition dawned and his face, he hands me a sticker that's his fragile, he says, would you like to put that on here? Okay, fine. So I put the sticker on, he says, "okay, please take it off and we'll special handle it in the moment." And he takes my bag, the overweight one, and he takes the other bag and I pull up my credit card cause I'm going to pay. And he's like, "no charge." Like what is this? No, no, no charge. And again, he hands me a pass. He says, "here's a pass to the VIP lounge, please enjoy." Josh:                                      28:32                     Oh my goodness. Leon:                                     28:33                     Okay. He gets up. Now there's a line of people behind me. He says, please follow me. So I follow him. There's, there's other people, you know, it's not like he left the line waiting, but you know, I follow him around to where the special handling area is. And he says, please "put this up on the conveyor." Like he's standing, he's standing right there, but please put on me. So I put on the conveyor and I put it, apparently the wrong direction, "would you please turn it?" And I realized at that moment, he's not touching this thing. So I turn it and it goes and it goes on and he comes down and as we're walking back, he says, "We see this sometimes Shalom." Josh:                                      29:06                     Oh my goodness, I've got chills. Leon chills. Leon:                                     29:09                     So I go through Barcelona airport security and, and here I get stuck again because the Torah again is wrapped in bubble wrap, whatever. It's just this big blob on the x-ray. "Que es esto?"Kay the guy says, uh, "Halbas Ingles?". No. Okay. Here we go. There's, there's a phrase that you have that I try to say it's really bad. So for those native Spanish speakers, please feel free to mock me. "Una objeto religioso" it's a religious object. "Yo no comprendo." "Una scrol de Bible?" Like now I'm running out of words here to describe what a Torah is to the security dude in Barcelona airport. And so he calls the supervisor over and they have a quick conversation and she looks at me and she says a word, which if you're ever in Spain is the most important word you can possibly know in Spain. It's Vale. Vale means okay. In the same way that we would use it, it's a question. It's an answer. It's a statement. It's everything. Vale. So I say "Vale??" and she says, "Tu puedas va. Vale", You can go. Okay. So I go, I go to the, I go to the lounge, have another delightful time. I get on, uh, the airplane. I should mention one of the other things, one of the other issues. Remember I said the Torah can't be checked as baggage. So each time I'm getting on the plane, I'm worried that they're going to gate check this extra piece of luggage, this Torah, because it can't go. Never happened. Each time I would go to the flight attendants say, "I'm really sorry. I know this is sort of oversized. It's, it's a few inches larger than normal carry on, you know, but it's, it's a religious object." Again, I'm, I'm describing it in, in non-Jewish terms and it really, and they're like, "no problem. Put it right up there. It's fine." Like it was not a problem at all. Um, but back to your point about being able to check on early, it really helped to know that I was one of the first people boarding, so there was going to be overhead space. It made a difference in this case. So we're flying in and uh, you know, Barcelona, New Jersey, I land in New Jersey at Newark airport and that's when I realize I have this incredibly valuable object. How do you claim a Torah at immigration? Like how do you, Josh:                                      31:21                     how do you claim?... Leon:                                     31:23                     ...What is it worth? So I'm real quick texting a bunch of people like people do this, how do you do whatever they say? It's not worth anything to anybody else. Yes, you're right. We would pay a lot of money for it, but it's not actually on the street worth anything, so just don't claim it. It turns out however that something else happened. I have global entry. Back to the travel hacking. I have TSA pre. I also have global entry, which means that I can go through the really fast lane when I come in through the country, but I also on my phone have the TSA app, which allows you to do the claim form on the plane four hours ahead of landing and put everything in there and then the record's already in there. However, don't do both. It turns out that if you do both, it creates a conflicting record in immigration systems that if you're, if you have Global Entry, you simply use global entry, use the paper form and go through. I didn't know that, so I did both. So I get through personal immigration and they say, Oh yeah, if you're going to do, you know, so I scan my phone app and I show them my Global Entry and they're like, the Global Entry doesn't count because you did the phone app, it's going to create a conflict. Don't do that. So okay, fine. So then when I'm pick up my bags and I'm going to go through the check, I go through global entry and the guy sees the phone app and he spends a good solid like two minutes. "Why did you do that? You already have Global Entry. Why did you do the TSA App?" "I didn't know it was going to create a problem." This is... "Just please next time don't do that." And he waves me through an off I go. He didn't ever look at the fact that I had four pieces of luggage, you know, I'm a single guy going through, didn't even pay attention to that. He was more concerned about the fact that I had made an IT error. Josh:                                      33:06                     Lovely, yes, you had done the steps out of order. Incorrect. The problem exists between the keyboard and the chair, obviously. Leon:                                     33:17                     Right? So, right. PEBKAC rules. I am clearly the ID10T error of the day. That was the problem, not the toy, the ancient Torah scroll and the silver case and that, that wasn't okay. So I get through and uh, I get home and uh, one of the lessons to, to spin this back around again to the more technical is that I had, I knew the entire flight plan. I knew each of the steps along the way. I knew that I was gonna have personal security at these places and I was gonna have luggage security at these places. I knew I was going to have all these things. I had my steps in a row, but I, I took each step as it came. I didn't take a hiccup or an issue at one moment as a sign of things to come. Good or bad. I really, and I think that as IT professionals, we also need to think about that. That, you know, we have a project, we know what the project plan is. Things are going to work, other things aren't going to work. That doesn't mean it's a sign of how the whole project is going to go. That each moment is its own moment and doesn't necessarily have bearing on the next moment to come. Josh:                                      34:28                     Yeah. I, when we think about how, how do you build a resilient system, there are two things that you factor in. One is a system that is resistant to failure and a system that can quickly recover from failure because there is no such thing as no downtime. It does not exist. There will always be failures, right? And as IT professionals, we need to figure that out, not just in the technology but also in the way that we execute projects in the way that we execute our careers. I mean, it's all about that personal, professional resilience. Failure is going to happen. Roll with the punches Leon:                                     35:12                     And you know, don't, yeah, don't imagine the punches aren't going to come, but just because one step along the way knocked you down doesn't mean every step is going to knock you down. It's not. Um, so we got it back to America. Um, in the show notes, I will link to the live tweeting I did of the entire process and a picture of the Torah itself so you can see it in its, in its new home. But after I, I got back, I went over to the rabbi's house and the rabbi's wife and I were, and she said something very interesting and I have to give you a little bit of history. So as I mentioned before, um, the kind of Jewish we are or the culture that we come from is the Spanish Jewish culture. So that means that, uh, after the expulsion of the Jews from Israel in 72 CE, after the second destruction, they settled in Spain and they lived in Spain until about 1492 during, you know, the Inquisition. And then our family, my Rabbi's family and my family settled from Spain into Istanbul and they lived in Istanbul, in a little town outside of his temple until about 1920. And that's when they came to America. So when I got everything back and I was sitting at the house and I was talking to her, she said, you know that Torah stopped every place our family lived. And I got chills. It went from Israel to Istanbul to Spain to America. And if I had said to you, Hey Josh, you know, I just want bring a Torah back but I want to do this really, really cool thing. I'm going to stop every place or a, you would tell me, Leon, you are way overthinking this and just bring the thing back and be done with it. But it just happened. It just, you know, it just worked out that way. Leon:                                     36:49                     And again, from an it perspective, I think it speaks to that serendipity of life, whether that's religious or it or otherwise. Sometimes you know and have this in caps, you know, things happen for a reason. Trademark, copyright, all rights reserved. Things do happen for a reason. And it's okay to know that that happens. And sometimes you say, I'm just going to see how this works out. I'm going to let things happen. I'm not going to try to control the outcome. I'm not gonna try to make it be something, I'm going to let things go and, and just let it be. I didn't intend for that to be, my travel path, but it did. And, and the experience was that much richer because of it. Josh:                                      37:33                     You know, I, I had an interesting, uh, moment over the past month or so going through the interview process with new Relic and talking to a number of my current team members who were on that interview panel and explaining the journey that I had toward being someone who is, uh, an enterprise monitoring practitioner. And I realized in recounting the journey over the past 20 years that my very first job than IT laid the, the framework for me becoming a, a monitoring practitioner. I worked for a small company, uh, in Michigan that focused on call center software and they designed software that would connect to your PBX, uh, for your call center and would allow you to monitor the phone status of all of your agents and then would correlate all of that data up onto a big screen. That would allow you to run reports. It did call center monitoring my very first job and then my next job had an HP OpenView workstation and then my next job had an HP OpenView work station that I replaced with SolarWinds. It's a wonderful journey. Uh, I, that's, it's, it's weird. I think like you and your Torah story, uh, your Torah journey, you didn't realize the importance of that journey until you paused for a moment to reflect on the journey that you took. And I, I think we have to do IT as well. Sometimes we're so focused on where we want to get to that we forget where we've come from and the power that comes to us. I think that's important, right? Right. What we value in our IT lives. We have to take time to look back what we value in our personal lives and our religious lives. Yeah. You know, I think I'd like to end Leon with a quote from, uh, Ralph Waldo Emerson. So he, you know, prolific writer, um, wrote a series of essays and a second series and an essay entitled experience. He said "To finish the moment, to find the journey's end and every step of the road to live. The greatest number of good hours is wisdom." Destiny:                               39:46                     Thanks for making time for us this week. To hear more of technically religious visit our website, technically religious.com where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions and connect to us on social media. Josh:                                      40:00                     So you brought a Torah back from Israel? Leon:                                     40:03                     And all I got was this t-shirt...I mean, this podcast story.  

Hey Josh is back from vacation! So we ate at Sonic and talked about: Dora The Explorer Movie Will New Mutants ever be released? Disney Plus "What If" is animated? Avengers deleted scenes Christopher Robin Winnie The Pooh Kingdom Hearts Capcom Street Fighter Movie Chung Li Movie Mortal Kombat Movie casting   Yellow Spandex is: Rod KimVince CirinoJoshua Smith We're three casuals who ramble on about superheroes, cartoons, toys, and Nerdstalgia in general! Rod and Vince also have a band called RKVCRKVC: https://www.youtube.com/user/rkvcviewsInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/rkvcinstas/Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2MxfpG9 Josh has A Band's Life Podcast http://www.abandslife.com Josh's kids have a nerd channel called Nerd Schmerdhttps://www.youtube.com/nerdschmerd

Timestamps + Website: http://iamunplugged.com Heyy Coach... What can I Do about my oldest son Being Resentful.... 2:25 How do you deal with self condemnation. How do you forgive yourself. 7:56 I met this Guy on tinder, and we have been pursuing God together and each other. Could this relationship work even though we on an online dating site. So far no red flags lol 12:28 $$$ When it comes to relationships should a man always pay the bills or should both individuals split? (Rent,Going out to eat,Groceries, Etc) 16:20 How to know when its time to move out on your own?I live with my mom ,and I could never really find peace ,and time to myself,but she tells me" i'm not ready to move out on my own" 23:23 Is it okay to play the lottery? 27:26 Hey Coach! Hope all is well! Can you literally lose your salvation with GOD where HE walks away? Can that really happen? 29:46 can you speak more on night watch praying (at 3am?) 33:23 How do I attain self-discipline, when making time for God? I'm having trouble making time for Him, and falling to substitutes like TV and so on. 36:19 How can I be confident in my skills but still be humble 41:31 When surrendering to God . How do I surrender a guy I see every Sunday in church I really like to God? Especially when it’s not Gods will to be with him can I still be his friend or just cut it off? 48:38 do you think that by avoiding relationships (romantic) is making an idol out of them? 51:04 ​Hey Josh! love your content. Can you provide more clarity on Noah's son's Ham, Shem, and Japheth populating the Earth and creating the races? 52:41 ​how do you pray to get results? 53:51

You know you want it. Fear of missing out. The ‘Me’ Generation. The messaging from the world around us is that we should want what others have and, in our modern capitalist thinking, it’s a driver for some to succeed and exceed. However, the Old Testament has a lot to say about wanting what someone else has. In this episode, Leon and Josh explore what is wrong with “covetousness” and how it might be possible to harness that powerful emotion. Listen to it or read the transcript below. Leon:                                     00:00                     Hey everyone, it's Leon. Before we start this episode, I wanted to let you know about a book I wrote. It's called "The Four Questions Every Monitoring Engineer is Asked", and if you like this podcast, you're going to love this book. It combines 30 years of insight into the world of it with wisdom gleaned from Torah, Talmud, and Passover. You can read more about it including where you can get a digital or print copy over on https://adatosystems.com. Thanks! Roddie:                                00:25                     Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating, and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our careers IT professionals mesh - or at least not conflict - with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. Josh:                                      00:44                     You know, you want it. Fear of missing out. The 'ME' generation. The messaging from the world around us is that we should want what others have, and in our modern capitalist thinking, it's a driver for some to succeed and exceed. However, the Old Testament has a lot to say about wanting what someone else has. And today we're going to explore how to harvest that powerful emotion. Joining in the discussion today are Leon Adato. Leon:                                     01:08                     Hello again. Josh:                                      01:10                     And I'm Josh. Biggley. Leon:                                     01:12                     So I think where I'd like to start here is actually hit the religious side of this first because this is a really challenging commandment, made no less challenging by the fact that it's the last one you know, "you shall not covet" is commanding an emotion, which is already sort of a fraught concept. But on top of it, its commanding an emotion that you can't stop until you start having it. So you're really sort of commanding someone to "stand in a corner and not think about polar bears in the snow." Josh:                                      01:42                     I mean, now I'm thinking about polar bears in the snow. Thanks Leon. Leon:                                     01:44                     You can't stop it. You know, you want Josh:                                      01:47                     Well, I am Canadian. So I mean, I feel like I'm predisposed for that. Leon:                                     01:51                     Right, exactly. You, you, it's, it's practically part of the curriculum. So the, I think that's the first thing. And I think one of the points I want to make is whether this commandment is talking about the prohibition of a desire or the prohibition of an action, an actual action that arises out of that desire. Josh:                                      02:11                     So I like to go back a little bit first. I feel like there are some of our listeners who maybe didn't pay attention in Sunday school Leon:                                     02:21                     Guilty, guilty as charged. Josh:                                      02:22                     Guilty as charged? All right. Yeah, I thought I was the only one who was going to be confessing here. Leon:                                     02:26                     Nope. Josh:                                      02:27                     So this, this commandment, there's 10, right? Leon:                                     02:31                     Yeah. There is still 10. Josh:                                      02:34                     It hasn't changed? Good. These 10 commandments, where did they come from and why are they so important to - not just Judaism, but Christianity? If Rodey was here, I'm sure he could give us the context within Islam... Leon:                                     02:49                     Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. So the, in the old testament, or Torah, or five books of Moses, you would, uh,see the 10 commandments appearing twice. First in the book called exodus or Shemot in Hebrew. And then also in the book of Deuteronomy, the last book of Torah, or Devarim, if you're going to go with the Hebrew. And there's slight variations. They're not relevant for our conversation today. And what's interesting to me about that, that people have commented about, is that with with 10 commandments, they actually match up five and five. That the first five speak about the relationship between people and God. You know, the first commandment. And I will say the numbering varies from different religious traditions. That Catholicism versus Judaism versus, uh, I think, the Protestant branches number of things slightly differently. So if you have a copy of your Bible out, these numbers may not match up with the first commandment. In, in Jewish counting is I am God, which doesn't really sound like a commandment, but in Judaism we count it. And then the second commandment is, you shall have no other gods before me. But what's interesting is the first five have to do with the relationship between humanity and God and the second five have to do with the relationship between humanity and other humans. So on, you know, the first five, like I said, "I am God." "You should have no other gods before me." "Don't take God's name in vain." "Remember the sabbath" and then the bridge commandment, number five, "honor your father and mother." Then when you look at the other side, there's actually a parallel, with the first commandment being "I am God." The sixth commandment is "do not murder." Hmm, because you don't have a right to do that. You don't give life or take life. That is God's job. "You shall have no other gods except me." On the other side of it, that seventh commandment is "no adultery." You shall have fidelity in your relationships, both with God and also with... and so on and so forth, which means that if you're matching them up the way that I'm going through it, that "do not covet", the 10th commandment, matches up with "honor your father and mother," which gives you a little bit of a sense of maybe what was going on here, that there's something connected between covetousness, this jealous feeling, this jealous behavior; and honoring. And it doesn't match up by the way with stealing, which I think is the first thing that we might think if I told you, "Oh, they match up" and you were going to play connect the dots. You might connect covetousness with stealing because you'd say one directly leads to another, which isn't necessarily wrong, but I believe that coveting has more to do with respecting and honoring and recognizing someone else's autonomy and the earned status they have achieved. Again, honoring your father and mother. Why? Because they're your father and mother. Because they, by pride of place, because of who they are, you respect them. And the same thing is you shall not covet that somebody has earned that thing, that position that's in society, that job, that role, that accolade. Whatever it is that they've earned that and you shouldn't diminish or covet it - want it simply because they have it and you don't. Josh:                                      06:08                     You know, so you've brought up something that I had hadn't really considered. You raised this interesting idea of how this connection with a father and mother and coveting and I hadn't ever realized how many things in the world have gone wrong because sons and daughters have coveted the role that fathers and mothers have. In our house we love to watch documentaries about ancient history, and Egyptian arguments between parents and children led to some wild outcomes, usually death. Usually very violent, horrible deaths. And that, you know, happened in the Roman Empire... it happens in every empire, you know, the British was no exception, but it's just, ah, coveting! So is coveting always a bad thing though? Is there a way for us to channel this emotion, this coveting to something good? Leon:                                     07:10                     All right. So, in Jewish thinking, there is one situation where you are allowed to covet. Where you are, not necessarily encouraged to covet, but it's considered perfectly fine. And that's when you think about somebody else's knowledge. They're Torah knowledge. You know, their facility with the text, with the law, with the logical processes of thought that when they, when they analyze a text and they just bring some amazing insights and you say, "Wow, that I wish I could do that. I wish I could read with that kind of fluency." You're allowed to do that. Now we'll talk about why in a little bit, but I just want to put it out there that not all coveting is necessarily bad. And actually it's what you do with it. Josh:                                      07:55                     OK, so I think I've got the it equivalent of coveting people's Torah knowledge. Leon:                                     08:01                     Okay. What is it? Josh:                                      08:02                     Stack Exchange Leon:                                     08:06                     I actually saw the other day, somebody, you know, it's graduation time now, as we're making this recording, and a lot of people have on their little mortar board, "I'd like to thank Stack Exchange for this degree in computer science." Josh:                                      08:16                     So I think that is very accurate. As someone who doesn't code and who is rapidly trying to develop my Linux acumen. I rely on the generosity of others in providing their knowledge. And I'm always amazed at the things that people are able to do. And I think, and I remember distinctly... So for those who have not been following along, I've been in the IT industry for 20 years, or 20-ish years years. I've been a lot of places. I've done a lot of things. And the more things I do, the more I realize I have no sweet clue what I'm doing. Most of the time. Leon:                                     08:53                     You are that dog in the meme. "I have no idea what I'm doing!" Josh:                                      08:57                     That is me. That is, that is true. That's why I'm super grateful for stack exchange. I'll call out one of our mutual friends Zach Mutchler. Zach is really great for when he builds a script or does some sort of coding, that he will take and reference, "hey, I got this part of this code from stack exchange" or "this blog post". And not that the person who wrote that blog post or who posted that code to stack exchange is ever going to see our script internally. But it's just to let everyone know that, "hey, I didn't come up with this on my own." Right. I built... to use a quote that I love, "I stood on the shoulders of giants." So I think - I think - we can covet stack exchange like, like we covet Torah. Leon:                                     09:51                     So coveting someone's knowledge, whether it's secular or religious, I think is, you know, because again, no one is diminished because of that covetousness. It doesn't lead to those negative behaviors. In society you're worried about somebody stealing somebody's, uh, you know, and the other thing that that comes out of this is diminishing the other person, right? Putting them down to minimize their accomplishments. When you find a really awesome piece of code and you say, "wow, I can use this", give credit where credit is due, but as long as it isn't outright theft. And I think that's where things get a little bit squirrely. But as long as it's not, you're allowed to covet. However, you don't want to plagiarize, right? You don't want to retweet something as your own when it's not. You don't want to steal someone else's documentation and present it as your own. You don't want to present an idea that you heard at the water cooler as you know, "Hey boss, I just came up with this great idea!" Which, by the way, I'll say differs from brainstorming. Because in brainstorming, good brainstorming, there's a wonderful technique called "adding on", where person A says, "what if we built this out of hamsters?" And someone says, "okay, maybe not hamsters, maybe mechanical hamsters," and someone else says, "why don't we get rid of the hamsters and just use engines like we normally do?" And you know, you build off of ideas or whatever it is. That building on is not theft because you're specifically doing it for a purpose, whether you're doing it live and in person or you're doing it as part of a slack conversation or an ongoing email thread or what have you. Josh:                                      11:43                     Interesting that this past week I actually had two examples and both of them actually deal with the aforementioned Zach Mutchler. So the first one was Monday, - so we're recording this in the beginning of June. So last Monday was Memorial Day in the United States. Being in Canada, I worked while all of my American teammates were barbecuing and remembering the service men and women who had lost their lives. So I was working on this particular problem and I was trying to answer an email for somebody and it involved doing some testing and I did it and I documented everything I did and I sent it to this team. And Zack walks in on Tuesday morning and he's like, "Oh, you know, I documented that, right?" So then I had to turn around and tell this team that I had just sent this email to and written out all this stuff that, "oh, by the way, don't use what I just gave you because Zach did it so much better." Leon:                                     12:39                     Right. "Oops, sorry guys." Josh:                                      12:42                     Yeah, I mean, it was okay. And then, the other, the flip side was Zack is working on this new technology that we've gotten our hands on and he's been playing with it and he comes up with this crazy idea. He's like, "you know, we could totally get rid of this thing by using this technology." And I think that he said it flippantly. I don't think that he intended it to actually be a thing. And suddenly the light bulbs start going off in my head. And next thing we know, we've got this harebrained idea that we're pitching to some of our coworkers over in Lebanon about how we're going to solve this problem. And it's great. So I love this idea that, yes, I covet those crazy ideas that Zach has, but I totally give my team credit where credit's due. Yeah. I can't do this by myself. I need them. They need me. I'm crazy and loud and they're smart and methodical. It's good. Yeah. Leon:                                     13:39                     I had experienced with that a couple of years ago. Patrick and I were sitting there. So I live in Cleveland and I'll travel down to the SolarWinds main office in Austin, Texas about once a month. And we do a goofy videos and record episodes of SolarWinds Lab. And Patrick and I were talking about the episode we thought we were going to do and it dovetailed into this idea about how SolarWinds alerting could tie into slack. And we had, I think it was maybe an hour and a half conversation where we got sillier and sillier about it. But it was functionally silly, if that makes any sense. I went back to the hotel room and stayed up way too late and got the beginnings of an ebook and I came back in the next day and showed it to Patrick and he said, "oh my gosh, I can't believe you did this!" And he took it. We basically didn't do anything that we expected to do that week because on Tuesday he was writing the code that sat behind all these crazy ideas that I had written about, but I didn't know how to execute cause I'm not a good programmer. But Patrick is an amazing programmer and he wrote the code. And then we're bouncing back and forth, you know. "But what if we do this?" "What if we did this." By the time we got to recording the lab episode on Wednesday, it was a completely different beast. And by Thursday we had most of an ebook finished and ready to be published because we kept on building off of that stuff. And I think the mutual jealousy of, "I can't believe you did that. That's amazing." "How did you even know to do that?" And we weren't trying to one up each other necessarily, but like one person's thing and that drive got us to do the piece we could do. Like "I could never have written like that." "I could never have coded like that!" So it was that positive feedback loop of, you know, and I think maybe that's the flip side of coveting, the flip side of jealousy, is respect. I'm not sure if that's 100% true, but it just came out of my mouth and I like it. So I'm going to stand by it. Josh:                                      15:47                     When you're dead, someone in college is going to quote you and it's going to be, you know, "this really intelligent and philosophical mind, Leon Adato once said..." Leon:                                     16:00                     And there's going to be few people who are like, "No. No, no, no, no. I knew him really. He was fun. He was funny to watch. But you have to know the real..." Yeah. Um, so as a strong ally for women, for persons of color, I want to point out that coveting comes out in IT in a horrible and a horribly consistent way, which is summarized as, "she literally just said that." That when I have been in meetings or my coworkers have been in meetings and a woman around the table will say something, and it's like crickets. Nobody says a thing. And five minutes later a dude says it, and everyone responds to it. That is, I think, one of the worst examples of modern regular workplace, often in IT, covetousness, that we covet someone's else's idea so much. And at the same time are threatened by the person who presented the idea that it has to be restated by someone who is more acceptable to us in some way. And it's awful. It's just awful. And when you're present for that, calling it out. And also as a middle aged white dude, being the one to call that out can be really helpful becauseit is relieving the effected person of doing that emotional labor of having to defend themselves and wonder if it's worth it and wonder if anyone else even noticed it or is everyone accepting it? So, back to the negative like that is flat out covetousness and it should not be tolerated. And if you see it and you're wondering, "well, it's not my place to say." Yeah, yeah, it's your place to say it's your place to call it out and help out and, and just stamp it out. Josh:                                      17:50                     Yeah, I agree. And I like to say to my team - and we actually have both racial and gender diversity on our team, which is great - Yeah, I like to say I'm willing to spend my social capital to help you achieve the things that you want to. And I don't always say it in exactly those words, but look, if you are a middle aged white dude in IT, first you're part of the majority and you are also in a position of privilege and use that privilege to help establish a parity that has never existed within our industry. It's just never been there. Leon:                                     18:26                     So I'm just going to evoke the quintessential geek example of that, which is a Star Trek. The original series, when all the other cast members took a pay cut to that Nichelle Nichols could achieve pay parity with everyone else. They found out that she wasn't being paid the same and they just wouldn't stand for it. And so you're doing effectively the same thing in a social, IT, credibility kind of way. The other thing about IT, and I think this, we can close this section with this, is that covetousness and it comes out in all of those behaviors that I think make the workplace less fun and more toxic. Putting down others simply because they have an idea that we wish we had. The whisper campaigns that serve no purpose except character assassination because you perceive them as a threat. These are all, they're just not pretty, I will say from a Jewish standpoint that gossip is treated, is considered from a Jewish legal standpoint as triple murder. Josh:                                      19:32                     Wow. Leon:                                     19:32                     Yeah. The punishment is considered that from triple murder because you're killing the person you're talking about. Character assassination. You are harming, you are deeply spiritually harming the person who is listening to you because now there's no such thing as brain bleach. They can't get that idea out of their head. And you're also hurting harming yourself. You're harming your own reputation and credibility in a way that may never recover. And so, again, if you want to take a look at it from the religious standpoint, gossip is triple murder every time you open your mouth. So don't. And even if you're not going to take it from that standpoint, it's just not a good way to be. Josh:                                      20:11                     Oh, that's pretty powerful. You know, as we've talked here and again, I stand by my previous statement, I usually end up learning more from these exchanges that I think I offer, but... Leon:                                     20:22                     That's not true. It's not true. I get so much out of these. Josh:                                      20:25                     Okay. Well perfect though. You know, the symbiosis is good, right? Yeah. That makes nature happy. It makes you and I happy. This is a good thing. I had this conversation this week with an individual, and I don't think he, he's ever going to listen to those podcasts, but I'm not gonna use his last name. So at the company I work for, there's this program called "Emerge". And it takes either recent, well, I'd say recent in the past few years, college grads, and it brings them into this program. And this Emerge program takes these young men and women and puts them into a three year, basically an exchange program. So they'll start off year one in one job, and then they have to move to another job. And then in the third year they can kind of pick the job that they want to be in with the intent that after that third year, they'll likely end up in somewhere in that field of study. So this, this young man joined our team a little over three years ago. He was a music major - very, very talented musician, definitely a geek, right? Knew enough about IT, but we dropped them into learning Splunk. And if anyone out there knows Splunk, I've got a lot of respect for you because I've had to try to learn Splunk administration twice now. And this is relevant to the story. So this young man came in, we threw them at Splunk, we threw him at having to learn AWS. So having to learn Linux, having to learn scripting. And he really embraced it. And then after a year he rotated off and I thought, "wow, this is great." So last these past couple of weeks I've been trying to reintegrate myself into Splunk administration because we've had some turnover on our team and I had to fill a gap. This past week I had a chance to sit down with this same young, his name's Matt. And Matt, he said, "Hey Josh, can I give you a call?" So I said "sure, why you don't give me a call." And he said, "I want to show you some things. And he was sharing his screen and he was walking through some... he works on our sec ops team now, and they are our large Splunk consumers. And he was exploring some things with me and he's like, "Hey, I just want to show you, there's some things... I don't want you to be offended." I said, Matt, "No, this is so awesome. I love that you are teaching me. I am so excited that we have switched places, right?" This student has literally become the master. And he was a little flabbergasted by that. I don't know that he's necessarily had that experience before, but I really in that moment I coveted the knowledge he had, but I maybe like that Torah knowledge, I really covered it in a way that made, made him validated. And I think, I think that's the key, right? If we can, if we can take our desire to covet and use it like, you know, my wise Jewish friends do and allow people to really feel - I like that word "validated" and I've been trying, I've been wracking my brain trying to not use it again - but to validate people like just to listen to his demeanor when I said, "no, please teach me." This is great. I love that you are instructing me and made me feel good. And I got the benefit of like he brain dumped on me. It was great and I was like, "oh, now I get it. I understand now and I'm better for it and he's better for it."  Doug:                                    23:39                     Thanks for making time for us this week. To hear more of Technically Religious, visit our website, https://technicallyreligious.com, where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions, and connect to us on social media. Leon:                                     23:53                     Yes, we just got biblical on your ass. Josh:                                      23:56                     You know that thing you're not supposed to covet?    

In IT we know that the only constant is change. And for the most part, that's OK. What is difficult is when standards or processes are framed as immutable, and THEN they change. How do we adjust when the company spends $5million on a data center expansion, and then moves everything to the cloud 2 years later? Or when Windows abandons the GUI and goes to CLI, while Cisco moves away from IOS commands and on to GUI and API-driven interfaces? Does our religious/ethical/moral background help (or hinder) us from accepting and adapting to these moments in our work as IT pros? In this episode Kate, Josh, and Leon try to unpack the question and formulate some answers. Listen or read the transcript below. Leon: 00:00 Hey everyone. It's Leon. Before we start this episode, I wanted to let you know about a book I wrote. It's called The Four Questions Every Monitoring Engineer is Asked", and if you like this podcast, you're going to love this book. It combines 30 years of insight into the world of IT with wisdom gleaned from Torah, Talmud, and Passover. You can read more about it including where you can get a digital or print copy over on adatosystems.com. Thanks! Kate: 00:25 Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experience we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion (or lack thereof). We're here to explore ways we make our career as IT professionals mesh - or at least not conflict - with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. Leon: 00:49 Last week, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints made an announcement which sent shock waves through the Mormon community and tremors throughout many other religious communities as well. We'll get into the details about that in a minute. But it caused us here at Technically Religious to think about how supposedly immutable truths, whether we're talking about replacing Latin with English during mass or Microsoft's adoption of open source, affect us and how we deal with those changes. Joining the conversation today is Kate Asaff Kate: 01:17 Hello. Leon: 01:18 And Josh Biggley. Josh: 01:20 Yeah, it's still cold in Canada! Leon: 01:23 and I'm Leon Adato and it's slightly warmer here in Cleveland. So Josh, do us a favor and run us down just the main points of the announcement from last week. Josh: 01:34 Sure. So this announcement was made in early April, and in order to understand it, we have to go all the way back to November, 2015, and maybe even a little further. So the Organization of the Mormon Church, or the LDS church, or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, is such that it's a top down organization. So the President, or prophet, of the church, he makes a declaration, often he has to get his two counselors and the other 12 men that sit on the quorum of the 12 apostles. And then those 15 men make these proclamations. So in November of 2015, the church released a policy internally, that was leaked, and then they had to address it publicly, that said that any child who had parents who were of the same gender, so you're in a same sex-relationship or a same-gender relationship or if you are trans-gendered - first, they were now labeled apostates. And that's really heavy language within any religious community. There's one thing to have transgressed, but there's another thing to be considered an apostate. And then in addition to them being an apostate, they also said that no child whose primary residence was with those same sex couples could receive any ordinances within the church. So that spans the entire gamut of: You could not be blessed as an infant within the church; to: you couldn't be baptized; to: if you were in the church - there are certain things that you that you undertake within Mormonism, you know, if you're a boy at the age of 12 (and now the age of 11) you can receive the priesthood - just things that you can't do, many of those rites of passage. So last week, and of course we're recording this in the early days of April, so last week the church came out and said, "Hey, that policy that was put into place in November of 2015? We're going to change that policy. And we're going to make it so that now if you are the child of an LGBTQ family, you can be baptized as an infant, you can be blessed within the church, under the understanding that of course the church is going to reach out to you and, throughout your lifetime because you are now officially a member of the church, once you're, once you're blessed and in the LDS church. That's a huge change because leadership within the church and members at large - admittedly myself prior to my transition away from Mormonism - defended that policy with a couple of talking points. First and foremost that the prophet, he specifies what is the will of God. He speaks for God. He's God's mouthpiece on earth. And second that this was an act of kindness, because we didn't want to - as a church - we didn't want to have people, with their children attending the Mormon church where the Mormon church was teaching that their parents were apostates. And then having to go home to their parents and say, "Hey mom and dad...", sorry... I got... hey, look at that. "Hey Mom and mom, dad and dad." Or "Hey, mom and dad, you know, dad and dad or mom and mom. You're an apostate." Or "You know, we think that you should be excommunicated." And all those horrible things that go along with that. So yeah, that's um, that was huge. I was pretty... I'll admit I was pretty pissed off on Thursday. Not because I disagree with the change that children should be allowed to join whatever church they want to regardless of their parents. I was just pissed off because lots of people put a lot of time and effort into setting aside their personal views and trying to make it so that they align with what they were being told from the top of the church. And then the church went, "Hey, by the way, we're going to change." Leon: 05:36 Right. And you'd actually mentioned in an earlier episode when we talked about opposing as you follow, you said that that was one of the things that caused you and your family to move away from the Mormon church for a while. And then you came back and you suffered censure and a bunch of other things for those views. So you directly experienced some of that just for expressing an opinion. Josh: 05:58 Yeah. And that actually goes back pretty far in my marriage. That goes back probably 15 years ago when that particular experience happened. I mean, just to give some context and then, and I know that we want to talk about this as a foundation for IT. And I think there's a great parallel. And Leon, thanks for calling it out. Harold B. Lee, who was the president of the church from July of 1972 until his death in December of 1973, he said this: "You may not like what comes from the authority of the Church. It may contradict your political views. It may contradict your social views. It may interfere with some of your social life. But if you listen to these things, as if from the mouth of the Lord himself, with patience and faith, the promise is that 'the gates of hell shall not prevail against you; yea, and the Lord God will disperse the powers of darkness from before you, and cause the heavens to shake for your good, and his name's glory." So, you know, pretty powerful language from the LDS church. Fortunately in IT, apart from Mac users, right Kate? Nobody thinks that their salvation from any of their other platforms. Leon: 07:09 I think actually, yeah, there is actually a Mac airbook that blocks the gates of hell. Kate: 07:14 It's actually an iPad. Leon: 07:18 Oh, of course. It would be. And that, with making a little bit of lighthearted humor is where I actually want to go, which is the IT aspects of that. But before we dig too far into that can we think - the three of us - can we think of any other analogs in religions that may have been that same kind of thing? Again, I'm not talking about the fact that things change. I'm talking about things that were supposedly immutable, or somewhat permanent, and then the group, the organization sort of pivoted away from it. And, and I brought up one which was the change from the Catholic mass from Latin to English, which you know, happened I think in the seventies, if I remember correctly? I could be wrong because I don't pay very much attention to that kind of stuff. But I remember that it caused quite a bit of a stir, Josh: 08:13 Yeah, the ordination of women in the United Methodist Church, which happened well before I was born back in the mid fifties is an interesting one. Again, linking it to Mormonism. A woman named Kate Kelly founded an organization called Ordain Women. She's a lawyer and an activist and she was excommunicated by the LDS church in June, 2014. So everyone kind of waits for the day in which women will be ordained within the Mormon church or within the the LDS church. I don't know if it's going to happen, but we certainly see that adopted. And that's a huge thing, right? Because traditionally, you know, as far back as tradition goes religions tended to be very patriarchal. Where, you know, men were the heads, the household, they were the heads of the church. And so for the United Methodist to allow women to be ordained officially, even though it had been doing it for a long time, unofficially. That was huge. Kate: 09:04 It kinda reminds me in the 90's when the Catholic Church decided to start allowing girls to be altar servers. I remember there was a cardinal in Boston who had saw these girls serving and before the proclamation came from the Vatican, the story I heard was that he told the congregation, "Get these girls out of here." He didn't want to see them serving and that it was something, obviously 20 years later it has stuck with me Leon: 09:34 With religion you have things that really are dogmatic. Sometimes we throw that word around somewhat flippantly but religion actually is dogmatic. It has, you know, strictures or rules that are, at least in the eyes of it, internally immutable. And so you've got that. But pivoting to the IT piece, I want to talk a little bit about, about that. What are some of those changes? It's not going to change and then it does and you have to suddenly cope with it. What are some of the ones that we've either heard about or experienced ourselves? Kate: 10:08 Well since you guys were poking fun of me a little bit earlier as being a devoted Apple fan girl I will bring up the 2006 when Apple changed from Motorola to Intel processors. That was a huge thing for the Apple community and you know, many of us had spent years structuring these complex arguments as to why RISC processors are better than CISC processors and you know, insisting that megahertz and gigahertz aren't true measures of processing power. And then all of a sudden, like everything for us was just blown away overnight. Now Macs were Intel based and we kind of had to let go of, you know, our are sworn allegiance to the Motorola chipset. Leon: 10:56 That's, I'm going to say funny, not funny ha ha, but I just had, I would never have expected that to be overwhelming to a community. But I can see that the way that you describe it, I can absolutely understand that you had an emotional investment in a particular hardware standard. Josh: 11:16 Yeah. Well, I think that functional workspace, right? You know, Kate, you talked about defending the position of you know, RISC processors. That's why it's good. That's why it's the thing that makes Apple as awesome as it is. And we all go through that. You know, I've been in the industry long enough that I remember walking into data centers and seeing literally big metal, there were mainframes sitting on the data center floor. The idea that we would virtualize? It blew people's minds and I was like, I thought that was a great idea. Let's virtualize, let's get density. I will admit to being a little slower to adopt a shift to cloud because it, it put in place some barriers to entry for me. When I started my career, I loved the idea of networking, although I'm not a networking engineer, but I loved the idea that you could plug in cables and lights would start blinking and things just work. You know, there was, there was a command line and I actually, I had a reputation for asking questions in class, like "How do you do that from the command line?" But it got beaten out of me. I was that guy. But it got beaten out of me because Windows was the thing, Windows and at the time, a Netware were the platforms for for server managers and that's where I was headed. We've made this swing to having to code, and I don't code, but everything is code now. Networking is code, storage code, servers are code, everything is code. I'm made a very firm stance early in my career that I didn't want to code because I wasn't good at it. I'm still not good at it. I feel like I'm fumbling with 14 hands tied behind my back. I don't know what the analogy is. I just feel dumb. I feel like I'm the guy smashing his face on his keyboard trying to make things work anytime I code. So I get it. Those shifts are hard, and they're not hard because we don't, I don't want to accept the shift to cloud. It's hard because it makes me address other deficiencies in myself that I don't know that I'm 100% ready to address. Speaker 1: 13:24 And I think that that's actually a good point is that the change, the changes themselves may not be so troublesome, but they address either inadequacies or perceived inadequacies in ourselves and we don't like that. We don't always like to have a mirror held up to it. Sometimes I think it's not that though. So given a quintessential example, and I think many of us in IT have experienced this, where on Monday the business says, "Hey, you know, this event is occurring," whether it's a merger or an acquisition or whatever it is, "but don't worry, nothing's going to change for you. Everything's going to be just fine." And then Friday, metaphorically, they say, "Oh, by the way, we're shutting down the location" or "You're being let go" or you know, "We're moving this entire department to merge with this other department" or whatever it is. And, whether it happens in days or weeks or months, "You first told me nothing was going to change. And then it did." And that's the part that I think a lot of us have a hard time coping with. Don't tell me that it's not going to change when you know full well that it is. Enough times in business, things change and everyone says, oh yeah, we had no way of knowing that was going to happen. Those changes are unpredictable and so you just deal with them. But when it's clearly predictable, that's the part I think that is more difficult for us in IT to deal with. And I think that's the whole point of vendors offering what's known as LTS, Long Term Support, for something, like "We promise we're not going to pull the rug out from under you for x years." Josh: 15:09 I want to make sure that we understand or at least that we agree that IT is not religion. Religion is not IT. There's certainly some overlap and are dogmatic beliefs on both sides of of the row. But I tweeted earlier today and I'm going to read it, "A gentle reminder that you are more than your nationality, favorite sports team, political party, or religious ideology. Be more than the sum of your parts. Be better than your weakest part. Be human." And I think that that applies to IT as well. You might have been the person who was responsible for gateway computers, probably cause you liked cows. I don't know. Just because that is what you've always done doesn't mean it's what you always need to do. You are more than capable of transitioning and learning something new. And a coworker of mine, Zach, if you're listening, shout out, he will, he will admit that I am not a great scripter, but I'm also more than capable of being taught how to be an okay scripter, you know? Under his tutelage, I've become kind of useful with powershell and I have even remotely built some shell scripts recently. So it's possible you can be something more than what you thought you always were. And that is really a beautiful thing, both in IT and in humanity. Leon: 16:31 And I've written about that in the past. And I probably will again in response to this podcast about that's actually not what you are. You might be, you know, a Cisco IOS command line jockey. You might be, you know, you might know everything there is to know about the Apple platform, whatever it is, but that's not actually what makes you a great IT professional. What makes you a great IT professional is your sensibilities. The fact that you understand how networking works, how hardware reacts with software, how architecture and design and you know an idea converts itself and moves through the pipeline into an actual product. Those are the things that make you a great IT practitioner and those things will persist even when the foundational platform - software or hardware - change. But again, just to drive it back again, the point is that, you know, we know things change, but when we are told something is not going to change and then it does, what do we do about that? So my question does our perspective, our outlook, whether it's religious or philosophical, whether it's moral or ethical, does that make it easier or harder to deal with? Kinds of events that you know, we promise it won't change it than it does. On the one hand, I could see someone saying that if you are heavily religious, you come from a strongly dogmatic frame of view, then you carry with you baggage of what "forever" means. And when a vendor or my employer says "It's never going to change, we are standardizing on x," and then they change. That can feel like a betrayal because I brought along, "No, no wait, you said the f word, "forever", so you know that means something to me and you just broke your promise." That could be much harder than somebody who might not have, like I said, that baggage coming along with it. I don't know what, what's your take on that? Kate: 18:36 We talked about this a little bit before, but what I found was interesting about that question was that as an atheist, I obviously have a somewhat fluid view of, you know, how the world works and how things are. I am also, technology-wise the quintessential early adopter. I'm the first day that it's available. I will consume it, upgraded, download it, in any way that I can get the new stuff. I'm on board. Josh: 19:03 So I think that that makes you Kate an IT relativist. There's this great thing within Mormonism about moral relativism and how it's such a bad thing, which that is a whole different discussion, but I think that the very best IT practitioners are those who can balance a bit of that. Conservativis... can't say that word... Conservativism plus that moral relativism within IT that you see the changes, you're willing to bring them in, but you do it in a way that requires that you parse them through your personal and your community experience and then say, "Yes, that's something we actually want to bring in to our enterprise. We're willing to adopt it." You need to know about it so that you can also say to someone who has read a shiny brochure or seen a vendor pitch about how amazing a product is and say, "Nope actually that's not something that we want to do and here's why." And being able to speak to a multitude of points. I think makes us great IT practitioners, if you are just that sole sourced individual who only knows about one technology, you're going to find yourself in some IT challenges. I've got a great friend, who coincidentally is also ex Mormon and his name is also Josh. Interesting point. It's interesting for me to listen to him talk about his challenges within his career. He's a great DBA. He is actually not just a DBA, but he designs databases and he's worked on a bunch of different areas and he has really struggled because he thinks that he's only in that data space. And I want to say to him, "Hey Josh," which is a little weird cause I'm calling my name, "Hey Josh, you need to understand that you're better than what you think that you are because first, you're willing to look at your career and figure out the parts that are really useful for you and you know where your weaknesses are." That, for me, is the big part. Are we willing to look at what we're doing today and understand both its strengths and weaknesses and then leverage the strengths and minimize the weaknesses by adopting other technologies? It would be kind of like me saying, "Hey, Mormonism is still really awesome," - which I do think. There are some wonderful things about Mormonism, but I also am willing to adopt some ideologies from Judaism. Thank you Leon. And I'm also willing and very open to adopting that moral relativism that comes along with atheism and other non traditional religious beliefs." Leon: 21:36 I definitely think, Kate, that we have a new topic idea on the horizon, which is whether or not being staunchly religious makes you more or less likely to be an early adopter of technology. I think as an IT person, I really want to solve that problem because I like new technology and I would hate to think that I'm predisposed as an Orthodox Jew to like not want to do the things. Of course I could be an outlier. I could. So Josh, to your point, I think that that IT is not like religion in the sense that no matter how strongly a vendor or an organization says that something is never going to change, it's gonna. Right? Yeah. I mean we just know that that's the nature of IT, is that things are going to change and probably sooner rather than later when you look at the long game. However, I think one of the things that makes this issue, you know - "It's not going to change," and then it does - similar in both religious and IT contexts is what we as people hope and expect from that event. Which is, I think, that whoever's making the change needs to be transparent about it. I think they need to be intellectually honest about it. And they need to be consistent about it. And what I mean by those things is that they need to say that "This change is happening. We saw it coming, even if we couldn't tell you at the time, but we're telling you now that we knew it was coming. We just had to," you know, whatever it was, the merger was coming, but we couldn't say anything because blah, blah, blah, legal, blah, blah, blah, Wall Street, whatever. Right? Um, it needs to be intellectually honest. We're doing this because it supports our brand values. It supports our corporate goals. It, you know, whatever. And it needs to be consistent. And I think most of all, if people were hurt by that first statement, this is the way it is. "This is the way it's always going to be." And then it changes. And people were hurt. You know, an example that happened a couple of jobs back for me: $5 million investment in a data center, building it out, putting tons of hardware in there, and then they moved to the cloud. What are you kidding me? Like, we just bought all this stuff and the company did say, "We know we hired a lot of you for your depth expertise in on-premises data center operations. And now we're asking, you - we're in fact demanding - that you move to a cloud based model. We know that some of you are going to be upset by this. Some of you may want to leave. We're going to support you in whatever decision you make, but this is the direction we're going. That kind of statement makes it a lot easier to accept the, "We never will... Oops. We are" kind of thing. And I think just to tie it back to our opening topic. I would hope, although I'm not in the community, but I would hope that a statement is made to the families that were hurt within the Mormon community for, you know, the years of being called, you know, apostates and all that stuff, and say "We're really sorry about this and we're going to do what we can to make it better." I would hope that that statement would be forthcoming. I guess time is going to tell. Josh: 24:55 Time will absolutely will. Unfortunately Mormonism does not have a history of apologizing. The unfortunate reality of some of the current leadership has come out specifically and said that the church does not ask for, nor does it offer apologies. Kate: 25:12 A long, long time ago I worked for MCI Worldcom and, if you recall, it is now Verizon business. It was sold to Verizon about 18 months after the CEO promised all of the employees that he was not looking to sell the company. MCI is also a huge company. It had definitely been in the works. So your comment about honesty really struck home with me. Nobody likes to be blindsided by change, but even more, nobody likes to be lied to about it. Josh: 25:45 Thanks for making time for us this week. To hear more of Technically Religious, visit our website, technicallyreligious.com, where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions and connect with us on social media. Kate: 25:59 To paraphrase and old Greek guy, "the only constant in IT is change."

How many of you have ideas that are literally stuck in your head ? You have a gift or a talent but you never take the time to really focus on operating in that gift. Instead you continue to do work you hate every single day because it’s the safe thing to do. The guys this week discuss this complex and what really happens when people fail to make the decision to start. Why are people afraid to start ? Why are they afraid to fail ? The guys, along with Josh, discuss what’s real and what’s fake when it comes to taking the leap of faith and going after your dreams. Time Stamped Topics: [02:10] - ET on TV [11:00] - Jalin & ETA [26:12] - When Is It Time To Start ? [37:17] - Why Think Negative ? [55:28] - When Things Are Not Going Right [1:03:40] - Lessons Learned [1:07:10] - Hey Josh ! Listener Perks: Organifi is giving our listeners 20% off of their order just use the promo code “SUCCESS”. Their superfood green juice powder allows you to get your greens anytime anywhere while on the go. Health IQ is an insurance agency for the healthy conscious individual. To see if you qualify for up to 25.5% off of your life insurance visit www.healthiq.com/success. Gems From The Podcast: “When you’re a champion you understand there’s wins and losses.” “Stop waiting to make the right decision, make a decision and make it right.” “The longer you sit and wait the more you start to talk yourself out of it.” “It takes more energy to focus on failure.” “If you’re going to take a risk take a risk on you.” “You can’t lose when you’re learning.” “There’s one sure fire way to win when you make that decision is to move and move fast.” “Turn the pressure into something positive.” “Pressure is good, stress is NOT.” See ET Live: March 4-11th, 2018  Phenomenal Life Cruise March 18, 2018 Take Control Dallas May 20, 2018 Take Control Boston Get connected with a network of over 3,500 people who listen to ET, and embodies the work ethic and spirit of ET. To learn more about Breathe University. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts.

I decided to take a look inside my crowded Instagram inbox and this following DM caught my attention so I had to put this out for you guys. It read: "Hey Josh, I'm in an entrepreneurship class at the university of Southern California and we have a project in which we have to interview an entrepreneur. I would love to meet with you briefly or have a skype call with you and share your skills and ventures with my class. My class meets tomorrow at 6 pm, so would it be possible to schedule something within the next 24 hours? I apologize for the incredibly short notice. I had another entrepreneur lined up to interview last night But he unfortunately bailed out. Thanks for your time, Nikolai @nik.sys" Here are some of the questions he asked me about: What exactly was your first business venture and what obstacles did you encounter in the early stages? How did you overcome these obstacles? Did you have any major competitors? If so, how did you plan to differentiate your product? How did you deal with risk prior to start-up?