The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Secret of the Magic eyePad: Putney Hick Inventor Adventures–Book 1 (Putney Hicks Inventor Adventures) by Marsha Tufft

Episode Date: November 18, 2023

The Secret of the Magic eyePad: Putney Hick Inventor Adventures–Book 1 (Putney Hicks Inventor Adventures) by Marsha Tufft https://amzn.to/40M3g6j https://dl.bookfunnel.com/2fywtzbmuh 2021 Readers' Favorite GOLD MEDAL WINNER 2022 Wishing Shelf Book Awards Silver Medal WINNER 2023 Moonbeam Book Awards Silver Medal WINNER She dreams of becoming an inventor. First, she has to survive middle school… Putney Hicks just wants things to go right for once. A socially awkward girl dropped among rich kids in an experimental STEM institution, the anxious twelve-year-old can’t seem to see her own potential. But life sprinkles in a surprise when she receives a mysterious tablet housing an advanced, talkative intelligence. Wondering if the friendly pixie in the device is alien or supernatural, Putney is determined to keep it safe while exploring its possibilities. But when competitive art and science projects lead to an ill-advised bet with a wealthy mean girl, the would-be engineer may be in way over her head. Will Putney’s mysterious new mentor help her make it through her first week in class? The Secret of the Magic eyePad is the award-winning first book in the Putney Hicks Inventor Adventures middle grade series. If you like girls in STEM, preteen drama, and clever innovations, then you’ll love Marsha Tufft’s lighthearted tale. Buy The Secret of the Magic eyePad to click through to fabulous fun today! What Readers’ Favorite says: ★★★★★ The Secret of the Magic eyePad is a sci-fi adventure book for children by Marsha Tufft. Twelve-year-old Putney Hicks is a science and math prodigy but often finds herself struggling in social situations. Putney is about to start seventh grade in a new experimental STEM school when she receives a mysterious gift from Miss Pepper, her favorite teacher from Kodiak Elementary. The gift turns out to be an "eyePad," containing an advanced interface of a holographic pixie named Sam... Her only problem is Sue Wexford, a rich girl who never fails to embarrass Putney. However, with the upcoming Science Fair, Putney is determined to beat Sue in the design challenge. Will she succeed? ★★★★★ Geared to readers aged 10-15 years, Tufft’s book is a masterpiece with a great storyline and even greater lessons. The novel will surely generate a love for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) in young readers. It will teach them to think critically, enhancing their problem-solving skills. I loved the learning curve Tufft incorporated in the plot, depicting the prototyping and designing steps that led to the perfect invention. The innovative curriculum at Putney’s school maintained a balance between science and art and highlighted the importance of healthy competition and teamwork. These lessons were complemented by an intriguing and fun plot featuring newly blossomed friendships, a little bit of rivalry, and a few instances of sleuthing. Tufft included just the right amount of magic to hold the plot together. The colorful illustrations were at once informative and relaxing. As a reader with a scientific background, I found The Secret of the Magic eyePad to be a unique resource suitable for including in school libraries and reading assignments. ★★★★★ Marsha Tufft does an incredible job of writing about science, curiosity, and self-discovery. There is something magical in this book and readers will enjoy that part of the story. But the part about product design is written in a fun way and packed with information and insight that will fuel the problem-solving skills of young readers and ignite their imaginations. The Secret of the Magic eyePad is written in the first-person narrative and it is a humorous voice that reflects the thoughts and feelings of a young character. It is filled with fun activities, interesting characters, and lessons on solving problems. It is as realistic as it is magical. About the author Award-winning author Marsha Tufft loves snorkeling ...

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That thing grows like a weed. It's crazy, man. And Chris Voss 1 on TikTok. Chris Voss Facebook.com. We have an amazing multi-book author. And she's got her newest book out. We'll be talking about today. And her series and everything that's so darn inspiring.

Her new book that she has out, we'll be talking about, is Putney Hicks, Inventor Adventures, and the Putney Hicks character. And I believe there's a newest book that we have out. And Marsha, tell us what the newest book title is. Well, the newest book actually came out last year. That's the Sea Turtle Spy Project. And in that one, so basically Putney Hicks is this 12-year-old girl who wants to be an inventor, but she doesn't know how. And she's trying to figure out who she is and how she can reach her goals and her dreams. And she's transplanted to a new school. So we go with her on different adventures from book to book.

And then in the fourth book, I wanted to do a sea turtles, uh, theme and I'm an engineer problem solver, um, turned, uh, award winning author to inspire kids in STEM.

But for the fourth book, I actually invented a nest screen, um, But for the fourth book, I actually invented a nest screen collaborating with Amber Coon Sea Turtle Patrol Hilton Head Island that is saving baby sea turtle hatchlings from becoming misoriented from artificial lights behind the nest. Oh, wow. So I actually solved a real problem. That's part of the book for, that's part of the plot for book four. There you go. And so there's there's four

books in the series and a fifth prequel to my understanding this is a the the short story prequel which um you can get by signing up for my newsletter and uh it tells the backstory of sam so the first three books we just see sam as this magical interface on this tablet, this computer tablet that defies normal capabilities. And she takes this holographic appearance, kind of like Princess Leia in the first Star Wars movie, but in green legging. So it's a cross between Peter Pan and Princess Leia. And she's not telling Putney who or what she is, really. Putney has to guess, and then

in the backstory, we find out, okay, she's really advanced artificial intelligence. And we still don't have the full story on the tablet. So she's kind of hiding in plain sight, but, you know, so if you kind of think of I Dream of Jeannie meets Man From U.N.C.L.E.,

there's this kind of character that everybody wants to find out about. And Putney's got to protect her secret. And Putney doesn't even know all of her secrets. There you go. And what age range is Putney? Putney is 12. So she's in seventh grade and she's moved from Kodiak, Alaska to Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. So couldn't be more different.

And the people she's going to school with couldn't be more different. So you are an award-winning author and engineer. And you've been on a mission to empower girls in STEM, science, technology. Engineering and math. There you go. Clearly I flunked all those in second grade and been flunking them ever since. And you use experiences from circling sea turtles to teaching her dogs new tricks. You inspire the readers through the putney hicks

inventor adventure series um it's kind of like the nancy drews it's built for the stem age i like this you know because there's enough books about mystery solving and stuff like that and so you help bring fun and fascination to uh and science to science to life, uh, and all that good stuff. This is pretty amazing. Cause like I said, there's always these books about, I don't know, vampire teenagers and books about,

you know, solving mystery. You know, there was, there was all those mystery series, but I like this. It makes it fun for young, late young women to be interested in STEM.

And, and hopefully to help them see how amazing they are and that they don't have to be like their older brother or the kid down the street that tinkers on bicycles there is not just one stereotype of hobby that you have to have to be successful in stem, I really passionately believe that your hobbies, no matter what they are, can be the secret to unlocking your problem-solving potential, which can set you up for success, no matter what career you go into. Because let's face it, I'm targeting middle-grade kids, and that's a little bit early to commit to a career. Yeah. Well, I mean, it depends on what country you're in you know some countries

that's that's a coal miner right there but um yeah so you know what i'm really trying to do is get them to see themselves as problem solvers and teach some skills that you know okay things that i've learned from working at ge for 35 years in the aircraft engine industry, it's like, okay, I learned rapid prototyping. I learned optimization. I, you know, as an engineer, you know, I've gotten math all the way up through partial differential equations. But, and I even use algebra in my hobbies. But one of the main barriers to success in STEM, boys and girls, has been lack of confidence in math skills. Oh, wow.

And I tackled that in book two because we had this amazing Christmas event that I organized. Our budget kept getting cut at the end of the year. So we had our Christmas party in February. And I got permission. Our whole group could take Friday afternoon off and I got permission to use the pool at the fitness center. And we had a cardboard boat regatta. So we had, you know, we had an hour to design our boats, an hour to build them. And then we had an hour to race them and test them in the pool. And I got so hooked on that.

Of course, engineer Gates was like, okay, you can use a little simple formula to predict buoyancy and size your boat. And we guys were talking about battle boats. And it's like, okay, how do I, how do I do an unsinkable boat? And I came up with this kind of cardboard raft design. So I did all the water displacement, you know, in a raft and we won every race. We were unsinkable the other boats forgot to waterproof the inside sometimes you know one one boat forgot to put the duct tape around the the plastic tablecloths on the outside so they were dragging you know but i got so hooked on that i had to make another version to take the hilton head to take my dog surfing in the ocean.

And, you know, and then that was so heavy. I made an over-designed tank. I had to design a beach cart to haul it to the beach with. And then I came up with this ultralight, you know, fabric shell, marine-grade fabric shell and foam insulation cord that did the displacement thing. And I have two versions. I still take my dogs surfing in the ocean and Hilton had on that and have a blast. But I've also volunteered with Girl Scouts of Western Ohio

and GE volunteers. And so since 2015, I've been involved with the afterschool activity. And then we did STEM summer camp beginning with 2016. So I've been designing experiments each year for STEM summer camp and two years i've done the buoyancy experiment and when the girls see this really gorgeous hunky golden retriever standing on a surf boat they just start drooling it's like

oh wow and i could do it's like when they see it's like here's a simple math recipe and you can use that to size a surf boat that harry can surf on the ocean with and they're they're the lights come up you know the light bulb goes off in their brain i have one girl asking me it's like oh so i could design a surfboard and they start getting the idea that math is magical it's just a tool to help you do cool things. And if we can show the relevance of math, let's face it, most teachers have not a clue what engineers do. I mean, unless you're an engineer,

most people don't know what engineers do. You know what doctors, lawyers, detectives, and policemen do because you see it on TV every day. But engineers, it's like, you know, so it's like you go into algebra and there's all these word problems and it's like, oh my God, my brain hurts. I don't know how to do this. In fact, I was pretty much an A student, but I got to see an algebra.

I have to tell you, I struggled with word problems. Really? And I tried to keep it from my parents, but when the seat came home, the report card, I couldn't hide it anymore. There you go. And I had to do something really hard and scary for me. I had to go to my teacher and ask for help.

And I actually had to go and stay after school to get the help I needed. Oh, no. But you made the commitment. Once I got it, it was fun. Yeah. Let's face it. Doing hard stuff can be really, really addicting and fun.

Yeah, rewarding. Yeah. I mean, nobody plays video games that are boring. If they weren't challenged, they wouldn't do it. That's true. And there's probably a lot of math, technology, coding, gaming algorithms. There's probably so much math in a video game. It's insane.

But the key is you kind of you have to watch the words you tell yourself. So you can't say, oh, I'm crappy at math. I just I'm not good enough. I don't get it. You just have to say, oh, I'm crappy at math. I just, I'm not good enough. I don't get it. You just have to say, hey, I can get this. I just, I can't, I don't understand it yet. But if I get some help, I can do this. And you got to get in the habit of telling yourself, I can do this. Another problem we've seen with, you know, I've participated in the Greater Cincinnati

STEM Collaborative. So I've gotten to go to a conference and gotten some really great national input on I participated in the Greater Cincinnati STEM Collaborative, so I've gotten to go to a conference and gotten some really great national input on how to get people more engaged in STEM and what the problems are. And one of them, not surprising, is parents' attitudes about math. You have some parents just saying,

oh, I'm not good at that. I didn't need that. You don't need that. You'll never use that. So if you have parents reinforcing that math is no good, you don't need it, or you can't do it, you're too stupid to do it, then it kind of sets the kid up for failure. And what you really want to do is set them up for success and say, hey, math is really cool. And it may be hard, but it's worth sticking it out and getting it because you're going to be able to do some amazing things with it.

There you go. You know, and you're right, it impacts people's self-esteem too when they can't do math or algebra. Mine was severely impacted because I couldn't figure out math beyond 2 plus 2. I'll admit it. I did a shortcut on the plus two. I'll admit it. I did a shortcut on the multiplication tables. I was like third grade. I was so stressed out.

I thought, oh my God, I'm supposed to memorize all this? Yeah. I can't do it. I'll never succeed in life unless I master the multiplication scale. But I had an older sister. So it's like, well, i'm related to her she managed to do it i must be capable of doing and it's like if you stop telling yourself you can't do it and just knuckle down and work at it that's half the battle there you go uh you know that makes

sense i mean anything that you have to master in life, it takes time. And it's part of, you know, just the equation of what you have to do. And I think one of the things you've mentioned is the 10,000-hour rule. Tell us about that. Okay. So there's this book by Jeff Colvin called Talent is Overrated, and he talks about the 10,000-hour rule. So it's like,

if you look at Mozart's pretty well regarded as being this child musical prodigy, you know, but Jeff posits, and he's not the only one to do this. Tiger Woods would be another example. It's like, these are kids who started at their craft at a very early age, like age three or whatever. And they just happened to have fathers who were in an extraordinary position to mentor them and teach them. So that, you know, his theory is it takes about 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, dedicated practice to master anything. And if you're starting at a very young age, then you're way ahead of everybody else. So he gives the examples of Mozart's early compositions

weren't very different from his peers at a comparable number of hours into their career. It's just he started so much earlier, he progressed way beyond what they were able to do. So, and one of the things that I found is like, I was lucky to have some training and educational skills in one of my assignments at GE, where I managed the technical education programs and worked with a couple of professors at UC Teachers College. And so, the key thing there was that you're learning, I lost my train of thought there, but,

oh, the motivation piece. Okay. So, motivation is linked to success and learning, but the relationship goes both ways. So if you build successful experiences, you build the motivation. So if you set them up for success, you know, they can become motivated, be successful. So that motivation is a huge chunk. And if you start with hobbies in your interest, oh, that's the other piece. Okay, there's different types of content. There's facts, concepts, generalizations, and problem-solving skills.

And problem-solving skills are generally the most difficult for teachers to teach. Because let's face it, you can't lead them to a solution. They have to figure it out on their own. You can give them a process, but unless they're making the choices, it's like using a GPS to find a destination instead of navigating using a map and directions. It's like, okay, the GPS leads me. I don't have to think.

I don't have to remember. I just have to follow the GPS. But the cool thing is problem-solving skills are the most transferable of all content that's taught. So I can learn problem-solving skills with painting and clay and sewing and woodworking or whatever hobbies I have. If they're self-directed hobbies, I'm solving a problem. Okay. I may not be qualified to solve a problem in mechanical engineering because I may need specialized knowledge for that, but I'm learning a process for how to learn and how to solve problems so that, okay, I can leverage all my hobbies that i was doing as a kid in elementary school and i actually did because when i was sophomore year in purdue and got my first

electricity and magnetism was like oh i i don't know if i can do this. And I had to make a choice. You know, it's, you know, yeah, it was a flunk out physics course, but I had to decide. My parents were not happy with me. I had to decide if I was going to stick it out or if I was going to be a quitter and change majors. So when the rubber hit the road, it was, okay, can I do this? And it wasn't the high school physics project that won awards, including one from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers that gave me the confidence to continue. That was one project. But when I thought about it, it was all that stuff I'd been doing since I was a kid, you know, dreaming up projects, problem solving, figuring it out on my own. I figured, you know, at the time I called it creative. I knew I was creative.

I figured I just had to learn a new medium. With what I know now, I would say, I'm a problem solver. I can figure this out. So if I take responsibility for my learning, instead of giving it to the professor oh the professor sucks the teacher's assistant is crappy and can't speak english you know the way they graded the test had me thinking that current was invented at nodes you know you can make excuses and say, Hey, it doesn't matter. Um, other people are learning this stuff.

I have to take responsibility for my own learning and I have to figure out how to learn it. And I can learn it too. There you go. And you've, you've pushed a lot of this data and knowledge into your book series for young adults, uh, with the, with the Putney Hicks series. And you've got a total of five books. Now you've won 2020, into your book series for young adults with the Putney Hicks series. And you've got a total of five books now. You've won 2023 Chrysalis Brew Project Winner, Book Fest Book Award, Gold Medal Winner in 2023,

Gertrude Warner Middle Grade Awards, and American Fiction Awards finalists in 2023. And that's on book four. On book four. On book four. There you go. Yeah. So let's do some honor to the rest of it. 2021 Reader's Favorite Gold Medal in book number one. 2020-22 Wishing Shelf Awards.

She wins a lot of awards, people. They really like this thing. The 2023 Moonbeam Book Award Silver Medal winner. Congratulations. And the Moonbeam Award, which just came in the mail this week, is really cool. It's almost like a time turner. Oh, really? There you go.

Some of the awards give you medals, so that one was a really cool one. Congratulations. But probably the big medals that you're achieving is inspiring young girls and kids to get into math and consider stem as a possible pathway to their life you know it certainly beats some of the stuff i've seen on instagram that's for sure well and and the other thing is um so stewart brown wrote a book on play and he interviewed people at um to propulsion labs who found that you know okay so in the 50s and 60s a lot of the engineers and it's true all over the country you didn't necessarily have to have a college degree to be an engineer there were a lot of non-degree engineers working think about

wright brothers they didn't have college degrees but they grew up working with their hands problem solving and figuring things out okay when it got into you, I don't know if it was the 80s or whatever. At one point when they were hiring new hires, they were finding that the new hires that just had these fancy college educations. Okay. I'm a college graduate, bachelor's, master's and PhD. That sounds pretty fancy there, Mar they found that but i did a lot of hobbies growing up and what they found was this the new hires that didn't work with their hands didn't have hobbies where they were working with their hands were not as effective at solving

problems and the ones that did they could see solutions that other people didn't. So, again, it's that learning that you do from working with physical objects in space and putting stuff together and figuring things out. You get a broader perspective. Almost any product, okay, we've got 3D printing now, but there's still a lot of stuff that needs to be machined. And if you have a visualization on, okay, what this turbine disc looks like, and okay, now I'm designing a feature that's going to be very hard to machine. I mean, it's possible to design stuff that you cannot physically manufacture, except with 3D printing. So having practical experience with working with your hands, with 3D things, you know, woodworking, clay even, sewing, you know,

there are an awful lot of women of my generation who grew up with sewing as a hobby. And a bunch of us are quilters now. And when I think about it, there's another reason for that because you don't learn to sew without ripping. And so thus you learn how to fail and you learn, okay, this isn't perfect,

but it's functional and I've learned something and I can figure out how to do something better next time. So my sewing, I learned industrial engineering. I can figure out how to do something better next time. So my sewing, I learned industrial engineering. I learned, you know, workstation setup, how to keep my seam ripper and my scissors nearby, the screwdriver to change the needle on the sewing machine. I learned project management, how long it was going to take to make something, what the best order of sequence of operations was to be efficient. I learned how to, you know, kind of have my checklist so that I didn't put the zipper in backwards or, you know, the sleeve the wrong way, you know, so you learn all these troubleshooting tips and things that, okay, they don't have to teach you then when you're at work,

because you learned them as a kid, you figured them out on your own and that's tremendously valuable pre-work experience that's going to set you up for success later in life there you go and uh so you incorporate this all in the book try and teach some of these lessons in the book and in the books i should say uh to try and inspire young girls and see how the math, the science, the technology can be utilized and thereby give a better life. Because sometimes that was the problem I had with like math and algebra was you're like, when am I ever going to use this? Well, and that's the other thing, because when you, okay, stories change attitudes, but they're also, it's the next best thing to doing it yourself because you're solving problems you're triggering dopamine and serotonin releases there there's an emotional content you're using both sides of your brain to process information so it's encoded and stored more efficiently than just going to a math book and looking at okay this is the equation for

a rectangular solid the volume of a rectangular solid, the volume of a rectangular solid, now calculate a volume. You know, it's like when you see it through story and you see a use for it, it's like, oh, okay, I don't have to follow the steps. I just want them to see that there's value for this. So I'm setting them up for relevance in motivation so that hopefully when they get that next hard class it's like you know i want to be i want to see the fun side of math i want to master this because it's going to be my best friend yeah and i like how you've you've titled the books inventor adventures yeah so it makes it fun you know the covers of the book have got fun images on them

and stuff like that. Did you do the illustrations as well? I did the interior illustrations. Okay. So I figured, honey, her dream idol is Leonardo da Vinci. She wants to be an artist inventor. Oh, really? I figure I only have to draw as good as a seventh grader and I'm sort of an amateur artist. I do have watercolors are my favorite medium, with acrylic being a close second. And I've got a set of watercolors up at our dog training club in the entrance. That's awesome, Sauce. And so people, I love this concept because, like I say, I had a hard time understanding, like, where are we ever going to use this math stuff?

And, you know, people would say stuff like, well like well you know use it if you're an astronaut you're just like i'm gonna share my whole astronaut thing and how do we get from there to here but you know you telling these stories and mapping them out and creating the adventures to be fun and interesting and engaging makes it enticing so that people can i think i'm doing a commercial here for you uh makes it enticing so that people can, I think I'm doing a commercial here for you, makes it enticing so that, you know, it can inspire the minds of these young readers and they can go, hey, maybe, you know, maybe this is fun. You know, like you said earlier, sometimes you have a teacher that just doesn't like my driving ed teacher. He was mean and nasty and he said some really ugly things to everybody that most of you won't pass this class in the first day. So I showed him and didn't pass this class the first time.

And so then I had to turn another six months of his class. And teachers can do that. They can, you know, teachers can really, they can either change your life, like we talked a lot on the show, or they can, you know, they can really ruin they can really ruin your experience of certain things. And so it's great that you kind of have this as a teacher in these books. That's my goal, is to get kids excited and have fun and have a fun adventure, and they learn a little something along the way. Yeah. And try to break it down so that it's relevant and something that they can use

there you go that they can see themselves doing the solution i came up with for the sea turtles totally within putney's skill set because she can sew and she had some of the materials i actually used in the invention there you go so you try to test all the different things out there in the real world with your dogs. Yeah, I write. Yeah. So what's your vision for this series? Are you going to keep going? Are you going to keep expanding her adventures?

Well, I'm kind of at a pivot point here where I need to make a decision. So I'm trying to get more readers into my system um before i go ahead with book five and right now kind of on my heart is okay there's this non-fiction book i need to get out which is out um i call it in my mind how to train your human the training game almost a problem solving approach to learning because what i've learned is dog training, motivation, relevance, all of that's directly when you train your dog, and I teach them a lot of cool tricks, they are learning a problem-solving approach. In fact, I just shot a short YouTube video I can get you the link to.

It's like five minutes long where I tried it on Mooney. It's like he learned the box trick. He figured it out in two minutes, 30 seconds, and then we did a smaller box and he solved that one in under a minute 15. But it's like, it's the whole concept of problem solving and how to mentor somebody else's problem solving skills. Because as a facilitator, it's so easy to say, I want to help them to the solution. I want to lure him into the box. And so it's really easy to say i want to help them to the solution i want to lure him into the box and so it's really hard to just reward incremental progress and so this really short video is like okay at first i'm just rewarding him for looking at the box then he takes a step closer and puts

his nose over the side i reward that eventually he puts a foot in okay he gets an extra treat for that and he gets two feet and then it gets to a point where it's like okay i'm trying to up the criteria too fast and he's like frustrated it's like oh you know it's like okay so i have to go back and reward earlier behavior but as i said within you know two and a half minutes he figured out to get all four feet in the box was the name of the game. So with dogs and kids, we're all problem solvers. The problem we as adults have is that our kids and our dogs are not solving the problems we want them to solve. Yeah.

I need mine to do my math for me. That's what I need. We haven't motivated them to solve those problems. I need them to also get jobs and start paying rent, damn it, and clean up around the house. I'm tired of vacuuming all this fur. So, yeah. If you figure out a way to train your dog to do that, let me know. They're never going to vacuum, though, because the vacuum is enemy number one, evidently, according to Dog World.

Yeah, golden retrievers in particular don't. But and then there are a lot of cool tips and tricks for, you know, how to, you know, strengthen that problem solving muscle. Like, you know, breaking it down to small pieces, celebrating small wins, you know, really making sure when you recognize it's your choice, you can choose to be the hero in your own story or you can choose to be the victim. But if you choose to take action, you know, the sky is virtually unlimited. So you can if you choose to take responsibility and learn and figure out how to solve your problems or reach for your goals. You know, sometimes it's just a matter of breaking it down into small enough pieces that you can tackle. But once you start tackling that and, you know, you're getting yourself on this positive spiral, you're building motivation, you're building success, it helps you take the next step.

And then if you can incorporate, incorporate you know things that bring you joy so your hobbies you can work that in then then you're really on this really powerful spiral of success there you go and and you know it's it's something that uh everyone needs to learn about i could have used more stem help when i was in school because i i just didn't i just didn't get the big picture. People are like, you're going to use this someday. And, of course, no one uses algebra except just scientists and smart people. I use it for sewing.

So when I'm designing a quilt and I'm figuring out how much yardage I'm using, then I know, okay, this pattern I need, you know, a fat quarter will make a 13 by 13 square. And okay. For my trim, you know, if I take my perimeter, divide it by 40, okay. That gives me how many lengths and I multiply it by 2.5. And that gives me the yardage I need for my binding. So all these simple little things, you know, you can design your own stuff if you know how to use math yeah otherwise you use somebody else's designs that's true and uh yours are better the you know it's more fun to do your own thing yeah i mean i hated multiplication tables i hated math when i

was young but then when i started my own companies you know somebody had to do the accounting at the beginning because you don't have money to hire an accountant. And so I started doing it and I started seeing the benefits of math and how important it was because you, you know, you got to have, you know, if you're making a profit or a loss and you got to know, can I afford this? Yep. And when you look at, you know, ROI, return on investment, your company, you got to know how much of a percentage this is and what it is. And it was kind of funny. I hated it in school, but somehow subconsciously it all inlaid. And I'm fairly good at multiplication.

You know, I can do a lot of stuff in my head if it's not too, you know, if it's not too big a number. The other thing is just because you hated something in the past, don't tell yourself you're a failure at it forever. Because I was always not confident with probability and statistics. The teachers always threw it in the last two weeks of the year. I never got good at it. See, statistics are my favorite thing.

I love statistics. I love it now. I love it now. Yeah. And I love design of experiments. I love it now. I love it now. Yeah. And I love design of experiments. I learned all that, but I, I was taking,

I was working on my PhD and it was relevant because I was analyzing test data. So I needed, I needed it then. And because I had a use for it and suddenly I was taking graduate courses that helped me to learn and design effective experiments and analyze the data I was getting. It was like so cool. But sometimes it's just a matter of having the right problem at the right time so that you're motivated and then you get the right resources.

So, you know, just don't let yourself tell you that you are not good at something. There you go. You're not motivated to learn it yet. When you're motivated, you can do just about anything. Yeah. Just eat the bite. You know, I always think of it when I need to learn something. Eat the apple.

Not the apple. Eat the elephant. Eat the frog first thing in the morning. Yeah. There's always that too. But I eat the elephant one bite at a time. So if you've got something major, like you got to learn this math or whatever it is, eat the elephant one bite at a time so if you've got something major like you got to learn this math or whatever it is eat the elephant one bite at a time take a bite you know and just just uh master it um or you can just eat the frog in the morning that sounds like a

sounds like a nasty ass breakfast to have but it was mark twain yeah it's like if you eat a live frog first thing in the morning nothing else worse will happen to you the rest of the day. And of course, he's not advocating eating a live frog. But it's like, do the hardest thing first. Because when you wake up, that's when you have your greatest mental energy and your decision-making energy. And as you get down, you know, the end of the day, you're tired. It's like you don't have as much willpower. You can't muscle through the hard stuff as easily i just realize i actually do that mark twain stuff the hardest part of my day is just waking up getting

out of bed five second rule uh get out of bed fast five second rule when you wake up give yourself five minutes and get yourself out of bed do not hit snooze yeah don't do this let get yourself out of bed. Do not hit smooth. Let's get out of bed and act on it. And that's, I had to do that to get book one finished. There you go. I was rewriting it. The first draft was so bad.

I don't really have an option. My problem is once my dogs figure out I'm awake, you know, they get a treat when I'm making coffee. And so now I've screwed myself because basically as soon as I wake up, they're like, hey, dad's awake. Dad's awake. And they start running around, jumping on the bed, looking at my face.

And I'm just like, you know. And I've had to teach them. It's like in the middle of the night, dad's just getting up to pee. We're not getting up for the treat part. He's getting up to pee. I'm coming back. We're not doing this whole thing. And sometimes they get confused at what's going on.

But they've kind of learned. They know when the moment is dad's waking up. It's probably because the Google alarm goes off that I use. He has his own internal clock. Sometimes I can get him to sleep in a little bit more, but most of the time it's sort of like, oh, I think it's time that mom and dad should be getting up. Yeah.

Yeah. So I'm going to get them up. You know, my dogs hear that T word, the tree word. Oh boy. You know, there's, there's no end of going crazy once they get that. In fact, I have Huskies, so they give me a lot of hell in the morning. They cuss me out if I don't get to the tree back soon enough. And, you know, I'm like, I'm trying to get the blood out of my eyes and figure out where I'm bleeding from. Give me a break at 55.

It all hurts. So, yeah. So this has been really insightful and wonderful. And I'm glad you're expanding young ladies' options and giving them, you know, different things that they can look at and encouraging people to get into STEM. You know, we really, we really try to get people into, you know, find something you like in life. I think one of the biggest problems we have in our schools is we don't do what the English do where you try and find what really works for people as a trade early on, you know,

kind of what they're geared for. It's like, we just kind of throw everything at them and we're like you figure it out dissect frogs and biology and here's some art and some history and see what you like which is kind of i suppose a good way but you know i would have rather done stuff that i liked in high school in fact i slept out of high school and actually did stuff i wanted to do in high school uh which made it more enriching for me. So maybe there needs to be more of that. Everybody's a little bit different. And I kind of feel like I pretty much like just about every class I took.

So I was one of those kids that was, you know, easy to learn. And I was lucky I had a lot of good teachers. You know, there were some things that were just like okay not even close no no way am i going to be you know majoring in social studies and history and you know so it was for me it was like you know kind of art and math and science and yeah i liked writing too yeah but i I figured I didn't know enough to write something. I figured I needed a lot of life experience before I tried to start writing something. So now it's kind of my second career. There you go. And there's no end to what people want to do. And that's the great journey of life. So thank you very much for sharing all this.

We're going to look forward to the new books and all that good stuff. Give us your dot coms. Where do you want people to find you on the interwebs? Okay. So my main website is putneydesigns.com, E-T-N-E-Y, designs, which is both a noun and a verb.

And I'm in the process of starting my own author website, which will be marciatuft.com. Oh, there you go. marciatuff.com. There you go. And with two F's in the middle, I believe, right? Two F's in a T. So a lot of people sound wrong, or they want to put a vowel in the middle of that, because they just can't handle three consonants together.

They do that to me with Chris Voss. They do two S's on the Chris and one S on the Voss. And I'm like, like you know i've been named chris for 55 years travel this world and uh i would notice if i ever bumped into another chris that had two s's but i have not so i'm not sure where you people are coming up with that it must be really just a bad case of dyslexism uh every, every time I see it, I'm just like, how did you get the two S's fucked up on that one? But there you go.

Um, people have STEM experiments. So in the books, I try to keep the heavy lifting out of it, but in the back, I give you a link to my website where I have, um, STEM experiments,

more details for what you can do. If you want to get into greater depth on some of the projects from the books there you go and there'll be a link there'll be two links on the chris voss show page you can look for where you have a link where people can get a free ebook they can claim through december 31st 2023 i should put that because people watch these videos 10 years ago um and you can get her award-winning first book in the Inventor Series, The Secret of the Magic iPad. And so if you click that link, you'll get that for free.

And then also her Amazon page for her first book. There'll be a link there for that as well. And of course, as always, just remember that we've got Christmas coming up, folks. So if you've got those young nieces, nephews uh kids cousins you want to you know it's hard to buy for kids you know because you don't know what they

want you know i don't know i just i just give them a great christmas presents great christmas presents and it's better than socks let me tell you socks when i was a kid and i love my aunt my grandmas but give me a break already um no they're wonderful people so uh order them up for that give them away use it for christmas gifts uh a great thing to do support the cause for girls and stem uh thank you very much for coming on the show marcia really appreciate it was um delighted to come thanks so much for inviting me chris and it was a delight to have you as well we'll change some lives here and all that good stuff and uh there you go uh thanks for tuning in order the book was the books wherever fine books are sold the putney hicks inventor series and uh starts with the secret

of the magic ipad you can see the box set on the internet and all that good stuff so order it up go to goodreads.com fortunes chris foss linkedin.com fortunes chris foss see the box set on the internet and all that good stuff. So order it up. Go to Goodreads.com, Fortuness Chris Voss, LinkedIn.com, Fortuness Chris Voss, see the big 103,000 group on LinkedIn, the big newsletter that's over there as well is really hot. And then go to Chris Voss, Facebook.com, Chris Voss 1 on TikTok, and there's something else I'm missing. I don't care. Thanks for tuning in.

Be good to each other. We'll see you next time.