Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 370: Fake imposter syndrome and opposite ends

Episode Date: August 21, 2023

This episode is sposored by OneSchema, the best way to build CSV import into your product. Check OneSchema out at https://oneschema.co/softskills In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hello Jave and Dames, Long time listener short time Dev. Big fan of the show, my confidence in my skills as a programmer has always been pretty low so having a podcast centered around the “soft skills” instead of more complex topics like “Covariance and Contravariance”, “Temporal Logic”, or “Basic Addition” gives me the strength to press further on. Onto the question, how do you gain more confidence in yourself as a developer and not feel like a burden to your team? I’m a recent graduate with a bachelors in CS. During my time in University I struggled and took more time to grasp many of the concepts than my peers. After somehow graduating I was too scared to even look for a programming job for a full year. After being encouraged by some amazing people I finally applied and started a job as a Junior Dev for a software company and I’m now in a constant state of screaming internally. Everyone there is so much smarter, the training routine consists mostly of being given a project then having to stop another developer for help. And we program in an IDE and language that is so underused and underdocumented that I won’t name either for fear of doxxing the company. I actually like the job, my coworkers are super nice. My project manager is the same and cares about the team. I’ve finished the projects given to me on schedule so far and of course it’s pretty nice making more than minimum wage + tips. Any advice on how to gain confidence? I’m programming and learning in my off time but I’m still worried one day they will see me for the weak chain in the linked list I am and will delete me from existence and linkedin as I’m assuming is standard for firings in the tech world. P.S. If you tell me to quit my job I will simply find a second job to quit, Checkmate. Listener SuperSonny asks, My boss and myself have a difference of what is a value added activity to the company. Even when we agree that our end goal is the same our approaches are night and day different. We have discussed this many times and understand we are different people but can this relationship work? This has created a lot of tension in our work relationship. Can two people at different ends of the “thought process” spectrum work together?

it takes more than a healthy disdain for your own code to be a great software engineer this is episode 370 of the soft skills engineering podcast and i'm your host jameson dance i'm your host and self-disdaining software engineer dave smith soft skills engineering is your weekly advice show about all the non-technical stuff that goes into the technical field of software development like how to balance you you kind of need hubris and disdain at the same time you need i guess i swing wildly between the two so that's part of why i'm so good the hubris keeps you going even though you know yeah in six months you're going to look back at your work and say this was the worst thing i've ever produced yeah you look at someone else's code and think how could they

possibly do this and then get mad and write it and maybe make it better and then six months and by someone else's you mean your code but from a little while ago the past is a foreign country past me is a different person that's right oh do you want to thank our patrons dave yes we'd like to say thank you to nick kantar brayden canes john grant travis sanders nick hathaway oladapafadi ragnar jonathan king web tau awesome end-to-end testing will angel monkey face emoji ira chan patreon.com we're hiring tuscarawas ohio notice jameson that i know how to say it Craig Motlin, I Love Mavis, Alice Jost, Owen Shartle, Jenny Kim, Cody Sales, Kent C. Dodds, Noah Fraser-Logue, the re-elect Jamison Dance Committee, Santa Hopar, and the re-elect Jamison

Dance Boogie Brigade, thecomputersciencebook.com, and Trash Panda. Thank you so much to everyone who supports at the level where they get a weekly shout out. We will say anything that is safe for work that you can type into the Patreon name field. Are there Unicode characters for like musical notation i know you can put little quarter notes and stuff in in emojis but i wonder if you could actually compose a score and then we'd have to sing it i'm thinking the combination of subscript superscript and normal text plus musical notes you might be able to get a three note score there is a staff emoji it's got a treble clef on it you could just do like guitar tabs too oh yeah then we'll sing the guitar tabs right i often confuse recognizing something with knowing

something and so i hear you say tescarawas however you say that ohio and my brain goes yeah i know how to say that exactly i've heard dave say that before i totally got it yeah i got it next time when i have to say it it'll be fine yeah and it's it's not it's so funny how we oh yeah good thing that never happens anywhere else in my life yeah exactly just pronouncing these words that come from patreon yeah not like in school when i had to learn stuff and yeah recall it for a test yeah i know this material i remember being in class and these things were presented yeah when someone else says it i recognize it yeah i know it actually honestly jameson okay i gotta wax philosophical for just a moment, but I've taught classes before, software development classes,

and I always convinced myself that I was doing a good job teaching if I was entertaining, engaging, and if the students seemed attentive. But then I realized that that wasn't really the purpose of teaching and that I had to actually test to see if they were retaining the information. And so I started asking questions and I realized that they were, I think that exact phenomenon was happening. They felt good because I was entertaining. And then when I actually tested to see if they had retained any of the information I shared, it was like 0% retention, but they all really enjoyed the class.

The thing you were teaching is that Dave is cool. It was more, it was more of a personal brand development than anything else. Yeah. Dave is your friend. Today we will learn that you like Dave. And you know, it's very consistent with my crippling need to be loved by everyone. Well, you can pull it off. So as long as you keep pulling it off, nothing will ever go wrong.

We should read some questions. Shall I read the first one? Yes. This is from an anonymous listener who says, Hello, Jave and Dames. Long time listener, short time dev. Big fan of the show. My confidence in my skills as a programmer has always been pretty low.

So having a podcast centered around the soft skills instead of more complex topics like covariance and contravariance, temporal logic, or basic addition gives me the strength to press further on. On to the question. How do you gain more confidence in yourself as a developer and not feel like a burden to your team? I'm a recent graduate with a bachelor's in CS. During my time in university, I struggled and took more time to grasp many of the concepts

than my peers. After somehow graduating, I was too scared to even look for a programming job for a full year. After being encouraged by some amazing people, I finally applied and started a job as a junior dev at a software company. And I'm now in a constant state of screaming internally. Ouch. Constant state of screaming internally. Well, time for work again. I have this image of you walking into the office and the screaming starts and then you walk out and the screaming subsides. Yeah. Not fun. Everyone there is so much smarter. The training routine consists mostly of being given a project then having to stop another developer for help

and we program in an idea in language that is so underused and under documented that i won't name either for fear of doxing the company i actually like the job my co-workers are super nice my project manager is the same and cares about the team i finished projects given to me on schedule so far and of course it's pretty nice making more than minimum wage plus tips yeah any advice on how to gain confidence i'm programming and learning in my off time but i'm still worried one day they will see me for the weak chain in the linked list i am and will delete me from existence and from linkedin as i'm assuming is standard for firings in the tech world that's right p.s if you tell me to quit my job i will simply find a second job to quit checkmate

oh we've been foiled bamboozled checkmate i have got to use the word checkmate more often yeah it's so funny oh product manager you want this feature well that's going to double the estimate checkmate oh my goodness oh man this is one of my favorite written questions maybe of all time this is really funny i love it i love the complex topics like basic addition ah i've heard the words covariance and contravariance before so i believe i know what they are yeah and you can probably pass my knowledge any further if it's multiple choice i can i could do pretty well without knowing what it is boy i remember learning about this i think i

even remember the name of the class that i learned this in but i just can't remember what it is now i'm googling instead of thinking about the question me too back on track okay i give up so on the question or understanding what covariance and contravariance that was quick you didn't even give any advice i'll have to come back later on the covariance thing okay basic addition i pretty i have a pretty good handle on though depending on the number of digits. Temporal logic is just like time goes forward, right? Yeah, it only goes forward. I assume that's what it is. Yeah, exactly. Then I got that down. Yeah, I pretty much move forward through time very consistently. Almost every day. Temporal logic stuff is easy. Yeah, I almost never

go backwards in time. You have finished your projects on time so far. It seems like it's going okay yeah and most of the time most projects don't finish on time i feel like yeah that puts you in i don't know top five percent of performers in the industry yeah yeah i mean i assume the scope of your projects as a new employee and a more junior dev is a little bit smaller so that can make it easier that can also make it way harder because you don't know what you don't know and the thing that someone thinks takes a couple days could take someone without specialized knowledge and much longer, but I don't know. That's, that's one data point that you are not an imposter. I like, I really hear this idea a lot of everyone in my job is

so much smarter than me. And I would rephrase that to be everyone at my job has been there longer than me and have already bumped into all these rough edges that I haven't bumped into yet. And they're just speaking from bruising and not from actually being fundamentally smarter than me. and i i just see that over and over and over and and one day after you've been at this job long enough someone new will start and they're going to think you are so much smarter than them because you've just been around this code base and this processes in this company for longer yeah yeah you know the least that you'll ever know about this code base in this company and technically that's well i'm going to stop talking you're going to know you're going to learn more

over time that's what i meant you you you are you're at the bottom of a hill and steadily climbing it and looking at people who are further up the hill going that's right that's right what what kind of superhuman folks are these and yeah they just started earlier how did they get up the hill so high yeah how did they show up and be halfway up the hill yeah exactly they built this hill oh yeah i boy this is so common i i gotta say i have interacted with thousands of engineers at this point in my career i think probably over the last 20 plus years i've worked at some of the most prestigious companies well one prestigious company and many non-prestigious companies and i just gotta say like there are a lot of really smart people out there and there are a

lot of not really smart people out there but it's very unlikely that you i mean just speaking mathematically it's very unlikely that you really are on that like three sigma standard deviation bottom end of the bell curve on smartness and the people that you're looking at at this company are on the other end of it what about this feeling that it seems like this is carrying over from earlier in their in their in their career where they were i don't know maybe feeling like other folks other people understood stuff faster than them in school in cs specifically yes yeah yeah for sure i mean that and i gotta tell you students who grasped concepts in my computer science program quicker or slower that was not a strong predictor on their performance in industry in my

experience yeah i mean i guess there's probably some correlation among students who grasp stuff really well but it turns out that once you hit the workforce there's a whole bunch of other stuff that play into your success a lot more than just your ability to grasp theoretical concepts in computer science take tests and score well like for example your work ethic you know showing up on time communicating with people understanding requirements being complete and comprehensive in your work, your ability to test and pay attention to details. Like a lot of these things just aren't really the same as grasping new computer science concepts. They're just a very different skill set. And it looks like you're doing great. Yeah. I mean, you're, you're a great communicator

or you asked a great communicator to compose this message for you. You know, a great communicator. This really was a really well-written question. We, we quite liked it. so you've got that going for you yeah i mean there's definitely i i believe that raw programming ability is probably roughly normally distributed and i feel like as long as you're somewhere towards the middle of the bell curve like there are people way at at either end but yeah if you're not at either end a lot of the other i think i'm just repeating what you said a lot of the non-technical skills heavily influence your your ability to get stuff done yeah like your actual value to your your cold your stone cold value as assessed by a completely unemotional corporation

is influenced heavily by these other skills meaning your ability to keep and keep a paycheck coming in yeah so i just started a new job yeah it was about six weeks ago now and i'm working with someone who who built a lot of the code and knows everything about it and and just has for for any question the answer ready to go instantly because of a combination of their ability and experience and i feel some of this too of like i i could not have gotten that answer ever for some of them and sometimes certainly not in the amount of time it took but that's fine i don't i don't have to perfectly overlap with everything this person does and and is yeah and and i have other skills and aptitudes and experiences that that also contribute so maybe

a way to think about it is is yeah there's kind of this upward path of your familiarity with the code and growing as a developer but also there's other stuff that you bring that nobody else brings to the team and i assume some of it is excellent written communication skills these seem great maybe you get to write the jira tickets and they'll be incredible and they'll all end beautiful if you tell me to do this i'll just do that checkmate yeah yeah i love that i also think people in general benefit from and this is both for the question asker but everyone else benefit from recognizing that there will always be co-workers who are smarter than you and there's just nothing you can do to change that and it doesn't really diminish your value

and I frankly I love working with super smart people because yeah I just I guess I just have this hope that some of it will rub off on me I love it too I learn stuff from them and our team gets to do things I would not be able to do on my own if it were all up to me yes that's another way to look at it is not you're this imposter but you have this opportunity to assume they are all just way smarter than you which is not true but say it is cool you're gonna learn stuff maybe one more thing to address is like sometimes there's this fear that they all secretly think i am dumb right or we'll all find out how little i i know yep i think as long as you're open with what you don't know there's a lot of

grace given to new people in the industry and new employees absolutely where it where it gets bad is when you pretend like you know stuff and then people start to question every time you you seem to know something wait are you actually faking it or yes you really know this thing but i yeah i found things get better when i raise my hand and say i don't know what that means yes you tell me And then three other people go, I'm glad you asked because I never would have. Yeah. Yes. In fact, it's kind of a paradox where the only way to truly be an imposter is to hide

your ignorance or try to redirect people away from it. Yeah. But everyone else, I don't know, they just appreciate. Well, I can't speak for every human on the planet, but I will anyway. They appreciate people who are clear about where their knowledge gaps are. Because that's how a team works. don't they should exactly exactly and i gotta tell you like i you know having worked with so many engineers over the years i've probably got three or four who stand out to me as just the

smartest most capable engineers i've ever worked with and i'm trying to think i think what i'm about to say is a true statement but most of them have expressed to me that they have had self-doubt as well and so if those people people who among like a thousand engineers are the best that i've worked with even they have self-doubt that means you shouldn't because everyone does apparently it's just not justified it's not justified in any case you're completing tasks on time you're asking lots of questions you're curious and you're learning and that's what it takes and so no one's going to find out you're an imposter and then delete you from the doubly linked list and delete all the references to you which no one ever does correctly anyway on any interview so don't worry

it's actually it is actually impossible to delete from a linked list correctly uh that's why that's why your job is safe there'll just be a use after free error hidden in this company forever and that's okay one last thing i'll say about this you can try to gather some outside information one thing your manager should be able to provide to you is a kind of assessment on how they think you're doing and it's probably going to be you're doing fine and and that might be useful to hear maybe you're secretly worried they think that you're that you're a burden on the team or underperforming or whatever and and it can be useful to hear them either tell you that explicitly which it'd be great to know it would or but they probably won't your fears a little bit

yeah don't you find most most managers like even if you do come to them and say i want to know if i'm meeting your expectations most of them in their moment will just say oh yeah you are you're good because it's so hard to say no you're not meeting my expectations for a lot of people yeah that's true and that's just and that's just going to contribute to your imposter syndrome more so i apologize well then maybe that maybe that this is part of the purpose of performance reviews is to provide a checkpoint that is guarded by process and bureaucracy to make the manager put effort into actually evaluating someone because it is hard to do off the cuff yeah it maybe you have one coming up maybe you don't you could also ask your manager hey i'd like

in a week or two to talk about my performance can you can you think a little bit about feedback for me and help me help me know how i'm doing so i don't want to put you on the spot right now but i want to talk about it and give you time to prep. Yes, I agree with that. Give your manager time to consider what really is the most important thing to say to you. And as always, we advise this all the time, but ask very specific questions. Is the quality of my work meeting your expectations? Score me on that, you know, one to 10. Is the speed with which I deliver meeting your expectations? Is my process for asking questions and getting clarity from the team burdensome you know score me and just make them be very specific and and then when they say it

accept the answers because they're probably going to be good i'm just reading i'm just reading this question i'm thinking you're probably doing great but accept those answers and stop troubling yourself with this you know try to reshape the way you think about yourself as this imposter who's constantly hiding from the the police that are going to discover that you're actually a fugitive on the run from the truth and the truth is you're terrible it's just not it's not reality yeah all right have we answered this question yes and i just want to say that at the end of every question i think we got to work the word checkmate into it a little more checkmate that's pretty good we've answered the question check and mate

jameson have i told you my one rule there's a lot of one rules maybe hit me with this one rule okay my one rule is never build your own csv importer my one rule is to never say never well building a CSV importer always seems like it would be so simple. It's just commas, new lines. How hard could it be? Well, no. Have you heard of byte order marks, escaping, header mappings? Oh, you need Excel format too? Oh, and your users have comma separated values inside their comma separated values? I've actually tried to do this at a previous company. We tried to build our own CSV import and it was almost done for like six months because to get it working in just the initial setup is pretty swift yeah and then there's so much extra that goes into it to really

polish it to give error handling and user feedback and handling all the unexpected stuff that isn't like the test data that you feed into it before you call it done well i have good news for you there's a new product that i wish had existed for the last 20 years to save me from myself it's called one schema one schema provides an api that takes care of the pain of building csv imports it gives you automatic field mapping data validation and much more get world-class csv import into your product without reinventing the comma separated wheel go to oneschema.co slash soft skills that's o-n-e schema.co slash soft skills all right do you want to read our next question dave yes this comes from a listener named super sunny who asks my boss and myself have

the difference of what is a value-added activity to the company. Even when we agree that our end goal is the same, our approaches are night and day different. We have discussed this many times and understand we are different people, but can this relationship work? This has created a lot of tension in our work relationship. Can two people at different ends of the thought process spectrum work together hmm nope question answered in a word no checkmate i think there's a lot going on here it's it's it's not just two peers it's it's a your boss and you so that makes it complicated complicates this there's there's added weight given to their end of the spectrum,

even if they're not pushing on it deliberately, just from kind of structural power, I guess. Yeah. So I think what you're saying is to solve this problem, just parrot back what you think they'll say and conform to it. Well, that is one solution. Probably a common approach to this situation, actually.

Yeah. yeah and it sounds kind of scheming when you say it that way i think a lot of it is his subconscious nudges that people end up doing not not deliberately deciding i choose to suck up to my boss but just kind of get pushed that way a little bit yeah because my boss signs my paycheck and i want to do things that make my boss happy so yeah there you go even when we agree that our end goal is the same. So I'm going to start with that one because that feels easier. If you agree that your end goal is the same, our approaches are night and day different. Having a shared agreement about what outcome you're trying to achieve is super important because it theoretically

can free your boss up from caring as much about how you do it. And if your boss has to do some of the work with you because of capacity or role or whatever, then this gets a little more complicated but you could see a situation in which the boss kind of outlines the outcomes that you're trying to achieve and then says tell me how you're going to do this and you present a plan and maybe they don't agree with the exact approach it's not the way they would do it but if you can convince them this will achieve the outcome we want then it should be easier for your boss to let go of the how yeah as much and in fact i wonder why it's so important like why is this such a point of struggle that this person had to write in about this issue if you're if you have such good

alignment on the outcomes why why is there so much consternation about the the method of getting there i i fall into this sometimes where i want the outcome achieved and also i want it done the way i would do it even if i'm not doing it just like of course that's the right way to do it yeah because it makes sense to me. Yeah. Yeah. That's how I would do it. So that's how it should be done. And I guess this isn't going to help you because I'm giving advice to your boss, but this is an important skill to develop as a manager is being able to delegate work and kind of abstract over how it gets done as long as it achieves the stuff you want it to achieve. This can apply at the like low level of kind of what's our coding style and and all the way up to more abstract

things but but like at the at the you could think of it as maybe there are two developers arguing over the code and the code works it does the thing but is not written the way one of the developers would write it okay and that can be a conflict if they're kind of stuck on it needs to do the thing and be written how i want it to be written and part of the role of a manager is to help other people get stuff done not just direct them to do the thing that you think they should do to get the thing done but that one's easier because you have a shared end goal i mean it's still hard i don't want to say it's easy there's even a bigger problem of disagreement over what what the end goal is or if you should even do this thing yeah exactly you even approach that

doesn't appear to the issue to be the issue here which is actually a really good thing no no it is the end it's the first sentence my boss and i have a difference about what is a value added activity to the company oh even when we agree that our end goal is the same so sometimes they don't even agree that the end goal is the same got it got it got it yeah i would like to plant a thousand trees to improve the environment right and someone else is like i would like to destroy the environment because i hate it i guess i don't know what the opposite of that is to accelerate our uh colonizing mars efforts perfect more trees to burn our end goal is the same good point yeah because i was i was going to go down the path of if you

agree on the outcomes then i've got some suggestions on how to how to align on the methods but if you can't even agree on the outcomes then it's just challenging and oh man i i'm i'm such a rule follower and conformist that i would probably just defer to my boss's way of doing things and and then because of stockholm syndrome i would come to love it really those trees did need to be burned i love the smell of pine ash yeah oh cedar just has a nice flavor i do think that when it comes to disagreement on methods or even outcomes i find that if you can list the pros and cons of each approach or eat out each outcome and get agreement on the comprehensive list so like do you agree that these are all the pros and these

are all the cons then you can you can actually have a discussion about which set of pros and cons you like of for the two outcomes you know so two outcomes each with their own set of pros and cons. Now you're comparing pros and cons and saying, which of these problem sets that we're going to create for ourselves do we like the most? It becomes a question of, can I accept the cons or do the benefits outweigh the cons? That's a much more rational way, at least that I believe it's a much more rational way to work through problem and decisions than saying, do I win or does my boss win yeah it it sounds like a problem of difference i assume you're both coming with ideas of here's here's useful things we could do and i also will assume it's not like your boss

thinks your idea is actually negative it's more like well if we do that thing we won't be able to do this other thing that i think is is more valuable i i wonder if there's some some higher level this is where there's a lot of like fuzzy corporate values alignment stuff out there but i do think it can help with questions like this of of what's the framework for us to think about where value lives. That sounds so fuzzy. I hate what I just said. No, I think I get what you're saying, which is you need tenets. Okay. Say it good now for me. I think I just did. Oh, I interrupted you. Say it again. I refuse. I just can't even align with you

on the outcome here. No, I think what you need is tenets. You need to agree. And maybe before you even have your next discussion, you need to agree on what the tenets are that are going to cover your value decisions. What's important to the company? What's important to the team? And decide what you favor, X over Y. We favor time to delivery over code quality, or we favor customer revenue over JIRA ticket hygiene. There are topics here that are coming into contention with one another. And I think the problem is that no one has articulated a clear guideline for what takes precedence. At least that's one possible explanation for what's happening here. And so this is something I try to do with my teams. And I think I sometimes

succeed at this, where I try to give my view on what's, I'm suggesting a course of action, but not just suggesting the course of action. I'm also trying to explain what the underlying tenets are that led me to that course of action, or to that outcome that I think is valuable. And if you can put dollars on these things, that makes it a lot more clear. Because you can say, you know, this outcome is more valuable to the company, because it will produce this amount of revenue over this time period you said it good good job you did a good say this is why i come here each week if if you it's sort of like the discussion earlier about agreeing on outcomes and kind

of abstracting over how you do it but bumping that up one more level where if you if you have some shared understanding of of broadly where you're trying to go then your boss doesn't have to have every idea of how to get there anymore and um it can help channel the energy of of the team into coming up with stuff that might be useful for that instead of just like what is every good idea do you have any good ideas and the answer will always be yes people have ideas lots of them are good and and then you have to kind of shoot them down until the ones that match the way that the place you want to go, live still instead of saying, here's kind of the boundaries for what we're looking for. And there is another way to fix this, which is I am guessing that the fact

that you and your boss are having so many disagreements, it might be a symptom that your boss doesn't have enough people to manage. And if you can just add like eight more people to your boss's roster, I promise you this disagreement will go away because your boss will not even have the time to get into the weeds about what you're doing. yeah you'll be able to do whatever you want and there will be a long delay between if you destroy something you'll have a few weeks probably before they'll figure it out that's true and then it's too late because that you'll have switching costs on your side now it's like yeah but it's already in production that way so do you really want me to go back and revert it um given all the new stuff

we have coming down the line yeah i like that that sounds like a pragmatic answer it kind of Honestly, I'm only half joking when I say it because this is a low leverage pattern that your boss is engaging in, I believe. And by leverage, what I mean is that one of the things that makes organizations work well is that you have leaders who can direct the activities of multiple people, but not have to actually do all the activities of those people. And so if your boss is getting involved in all the low level decision making of all the people on their team, it's actually low leverage because your boss is not fully utilizing the

intellectual capacity of their team members to enact their vision. And maybe you disagree on the vision. And of course, that's kind of a problem. But in a typical organization, the way it's structured is so that the boss can give vision, and then human beings with brains that work well, can enact that vision at scale, and accomplish things that the boss could not accomplish on their own. You know, and I think a lot of times in management, especially when there's a lot of layers of management. You have people who just kind of feel like it's their job to kind of just understand what's going on and then maybe report status up the chain and maybe make sure that there's no blockers on the team, but not actually give vision and direction to the

team. But that really is why we have leadership roles in a company. And so I suspect that what's going on here is maybe a lack of vision. It's just so easy to criticize leaders. So here I find myself slipping into that yeah uh and we just know about five sentences about this person so i think our criticisms are justified clearly whenever i do this then i stop and think but surely nobody's doing this for me yeah right like i must be above clearly nobody's looking through a keyhole at what i'm doing and finding fault with no they would give you the full benefit of the doubt understanding that there's so much more nuance than what they understand and and you must be doing a great job that's what i think every time i think of you oh good i think i can

continue on then check well have we answered this question check check mate check mate my ego is preserved yes all right what can people do if they would like their own questions answered dave well go over to soft skills that audio and click the ask a question button where you can fill out our form and bonus points to anyone who incorporates the phrase checkmate into your questions. We really appreciate those questions, by the way. We love it. Also, a reminder, if we have answered your question in the past, please use that same form to tell us how we did. Was there any catastrophic events that happened as a result of taking our advice or rejecting it? And very few people do this, by the way, which tells me that our advice is probably so bad

that people don't actually survive long enough to come and fill out the form and tell us how bad it was i prefer to think it's so good that they become so fabulously wealthy that they ascend to another level and are just above the petty it's not worth their time yeah it's like you wouldn't bend over to pick up a hundred dollar bill yeah exactly i'm running an empire here i don't have time to fill out your forms yeah that's what i think happens okay let's take it checkmate so yeah join join them make your own empire ask a question okay all right i think we're done we will see you next week