rest, the job search, and hiring for teachable skills w/paul gower who is an engineering team lead at kin insurance and conference organizer for little rock tech fest.

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Hello, hello. Thanks for listening to Guidance Counselor 2.0. Listen, I want to give you a quick rundown of what this podcast is and what you're about to get into as you listen to these episodes. We had Guidance Counselors in middle school. We had Guidance Counselors in high school, but we didn't really have Guidance Counselors in college and now as professionals. We don't really have anybody to turn to ask a quick question to learn something about the job search or to navigate your career. And so that is what I want this podcast to be for you. I want it to be a tool for you to navigate the job search and your career.

So that being said, I hope you enjoy this episode. And if you need to reach me, Taylor at vaco.com is how to get in touch with me old fashioned email social media at tdssent, d-e-s-s-e-y-n. And finally, please rate and review this in the app store because I want this to be discoverable for others so they can navigate their careers. Hope you enjoy the episode. All righty. What's going on everybody? morning. Well no one's here yet but I got to sound excited when we go live. It's great to see you all this morning. Happy Tuesday. Excited to be with you all. Twitter space. We are live.

It's great to see you all. We got Joe. Joe what's up? So just so I love Twitter man. So Joe Joe Flato. Joe hopefully I'm not mispronouncing your name but so Joe as I tweeted last night I got done with hockey at like 11 15 last night. I left the rink at 11 15. And basically I love Twitter. I love the power of networking because Joe tweets. I mean, I've never met Joe before Joe is in New York and he's a hockey player. And he's like, Hey man, like I just got done to play my men's league. Well, position click at a whole entire conversation with a gentleman I've never met on Twitter about hockey in the tech space.

I love Twitter. Twitter is great. Joe's good to see you man. Uh, Miss cuts great. See you as well on Twitter space. Christina. Um, Benny, it's great to see you. Uh, for those of you who are tuning in morning, I'm really excited to hang out with Paul's morning. I like Paul a lot. I like Paul. You, um, even if he didn't let me speak a little rock tech fest, but I like Paul even more because he let me speak at the rock tech fest. So for those of you tuning in this morning, I wanted to give you a rundown of kind of what this is right.

So, guys, Scott, two point out was formed out of COVID in March, 2020. I'm a recruiter, I'm surprised. I deal with engineers, I'm an engineer and recruiter specifically. And I was working, this is not a humble brag, I was working 14, 16 hour days. And I was like, man, there's gotta be a better way to have conversations and scale my conversations with the engineering community. Because the conversation I had with developer A at 8 a.m., that conversation was probably pretty applicable to developer Z at 6 p.m. And so I wanted a place where I can share knowledge, right? At scale. And so that's what this is.

The second thing, the what this is, a networking platform. I'm an introvert. I have realized, Paul, I'm talking about this a lot with his wife and I need, I enjoy networking through social media because it's a little bit easier, right? You can, you can check a person's profile out. You can see their common interests, all that. And it's a lot easier to approach that person. And so what I want to do is create a space every morning where people can come in network and say, hey, the reason why I tell people to encourage people to say, hey, let me know your tune in from, even if it's just dropping your favorite emoji, is because we're not in the metaverse yet.

We don't have goggles on, that'd be pretty tight. Once we get to that point, guidance counselor 2.0 and the metaverse would be sick. But we're not there yet. So like if you're watching this and you don't comment, then people don't know you're here and you could lose out on the opportunity network. It was so interesting. I was talking to a gentleman yesterday and I was like, if I were you, and I'm gonna give this advice to everybody on the show right now, especially for people who are on the job search, like Randall and a few others who are here, if I were you, I would literally search every episode that I've done on Unicorn Finders or my other podcast and on guidance counselor 2.0.

And I would connect with every single speaker that I've had on. Unicorn Finders is gonna be a lot of like founders, CEOs, a small company startups. And then Guidance Council 2.0 is kind of everybody. And if I were you, I would try to network in DM with every single person I've had on. So I'm gonna give that tip away. I talked to somebody yesterday who's coming out of college and I wanted to share that information to the NASA. So I wanna give another quick shout out to Render ATL. I'm a part of the Render ATL crew for 2023. I'm one of the hosts. So if you use the code GC2.0, you get a little discount code.

I'm gonna give a shout to people who are tuning in here. So we got Dev, Josh, Ricardo, Randall, Kylie, what's up, bro? Anna, Chris, Jara, yes, introverts, unite. Derek, it's great to see you. All right, cool. Now for me running my mouth. That was a really long intro. Sorry about that, Paul. So Paul, I've seen Paul speak many times, and Paul spoke on a topic at Code Plews that I was really passionate about. And I wanna talk about today. So Paul, before we dive in, give the people what they want. Who are you? What do you do? And we'll go from there. Sure, yeah. So I've been in software development for quite a while, straight out of college, went into that space and have enjoyed a very flourishing career in it.

Last 20 plus years basically doing software development. In the last probably five plus years, maybe six, seven, eight years, have really been delving into the agile space. So I'm marrying the ideas behind software and technology and how to solve problems with software, and then also the human side, right? So how do we apply the agile principles and practices and stuff like that as well? And yeah, so I currently work at Ken Insurance as an engineering team lead. Really enjoying to work with their teams there. Basically an engineering team lead is a partner with the engineering manager and also the tech lead to help teams flourish and do great work.

And so I kind of focus, my primary focus is on the process and how the team is doing things and how to improve that. Whereas the tech lead would be more around how they're building it, architecting it, stuff like that. And of course, engineering management would be more around the people side. So those three together is the trifecta of like how we build amazing teams here at Kin. And yeah, so excited to talk today with you. I love that. So real quick, one of those shameless plug for you, a Little Rock Tech Fest. Talk about it. It's around the corner. And why should people consider coming out to Little Rock next month.

Yeah, so we run a tech fest, or a conference here in the Little Rock area. So central Arkansas, so if you know where Little Rock is in Arkansas, it's the center of the state. And we bring people from all over the state to come and level up their skills, right? Learning about different technologies and things like that. The reason we call it Little Rock Tech Fest versus like a code or a agile or whatever, is we try to get a good mixture of all those types of topics. So you may have some topics on soft skills or what I would call human skills. I'm trying to change my vocabulary there to make it a little bit better.

But also it could be like we're having a lot of talks this year on cybersecurity and stuff like that. So if you're into that or trying to learn about that space, we have a lot of great speakers coming from all over the country to speak at that conference. And it's been a great, we're actually glad that we can relaunch it this year because you know, COVID and everything like that, we took a couple of years off. And so we're just getting back our feet under us and enjoying and excited about creating that space for people to come and collaborate and learn. Yeah, absolutely. I will be there.

So if I'm there, you should be there. So if you are in drivable distance of Little Rock and drivable is different for everybody, but I would highly recommend it. I went, I got accepted to obviously present in 2019. And it was an amazing event. Paul, I've been kind of pimping you out last like two weeks. Basically what I've been saying is I call it more of like a upper mid-size conference, like five to 700 people. It's not super tiny, but it's not super big. I think it's a perfect, perfect place for people to meet a lot of people but still build really good connection. So I'm excited to hang out with you next month.

All right, so let's get into the meat potatoes of this. Cause everyone's like, Daggum, you've been talking for seven minutes. I'm still, we still haven't gotten to what we're gonna talk about today. Rest. You're not the first person that started to talk about this. I've had probably two or three interviews on the show now talking about rest, but it's becoming more of a thing. Talk about why it's so important. I know this obviously very passionate top of yours, but if we can say, Hey, hiring managers, are you working rest in and hiring manager goes, why? What would you tell them? Yeah. I mean, there's so much material out there on this space to, to get to the point of understanding that it's actually a muscle that we should we should all be working on.

As I did more. Rest is. Yeah, so rest in it of itself is, right? And so it's interesting because definitely in America, for sure, if you go outside of America, it's less popular. But the popular way to approach work in America, for sure, is running the cantaloupe both ends of the stick. There's so many cliches out there for that, right? Being busy all the time. I'm crazy busy. I love being busy. And we have this badge of honor that we kind of where of being busy all the time. And as you dig into more and more of the research that's out there, you'll find that there are so many people that came before us that were great scientists, that were great contributors to society of innovating and growing us to where we are today, learning about how do we build electricity and all those things.

Like go look it up. I mean, it's amazing the research that's out there around people that were able to innovate in that space, but they were very protective of their time that they would do resting. And it's not just taking a nap. There's so many other facets to that. I'm happy to talk more about that too. But yeah, there's multiple ways to quote unquote rest to continue to improve your innovation, to create your creativity, just being able to allow you to be more of a human, right? We forget about that sometimes coming from the Industrial Revolution, right? Where it's like, we're not all machines. So how do we balance that in our day to day?

Yeah, absolutely. A few more people tuned in. Chelsea's great to see you, Trey. I'm a man, Victor, Kayla, Yolanda, and Omar, it's great to see y'all. Thanks again for hanging out with us this morning. So it's kind of crazy, and I've been more fascinated with rest recently, hearing, bringing people on, talking about it. And I've really tried to apply it to my own life, and it's crazy because in the eight years I've been recruiting, recruiting is just very much like, put your head down and go. Like, go, go, go, do, do, do. And what I've realized for most of my careers, I really haven't had the chance to just sit back.

And I think people, and I'm interested here at Daucelyness, about people correlating laziness and rest is the same. When in actuality, it's not. And so I wanna ask you, like, what does a good rest look like? Like, you know, is it watching TV? Is it going on a walk? Like, what would you say is the best type of rest? Yeah, I mean, it's, I don't want to cough out on the answer, but and give my consultant answer, right? But it depends, right? It depends on the person. Well, that's why I was hoping what you would say. Yeah. There's no really right answer. There's no like prescription of thou shalt go and nap every day for 20 minutes.

Otherwise you can't be a great human or whatever it is, right? But like for some people, like I would just use my wife and myself as an example. Like I'm the kind of person that I've really not enjoyed napping during the day because it kind of throws me off and I don't think it was good to rest at night. Thank you. But my wife loves that and she takes an app and she gets back and she's rocking her role in that afternoon afterwards or whatever. And as you look into the studies of that, like one of the books that I read that was really informative in that space was rest, why you get more done when you work less by Alex Payne.

And he wrote about like 10 different ways, six of them were like how to use rest in a way to stimulate your creativity and the other four around how to sustain your creativity. So he does approach it from like a creativity standpoint, But that's not the only way that it does when you look at rest. Like I was reading a leadership book just the other day that's talking about you have to lead yourself first before you can lead others. And the idea there is you need to have some of that solitude time again, rest. Like what does that look like? Do you just like there were people in the book that they talked about that would just go for a run and they would go for a run without audio on because they wanted to have that space to, you know, think, come up with the decisions they need to make, being able to assess and your brain just kind of be in that state of flow to help you make those decisions that are difficult as a leader.

For sure. I want to ask the audience Twitter spaces, go ahead and tweet at me on how you rest or how you find rest. Also let me know and this goes to everybody. Just comment. Let me know what maybe a schedule that you do for resting. Maybe tell me if you don't rest, right? Like I have not rested for about eight years in my career and I'm still trying to put guidelines around it. I definitely want to hear from everybody. Twitter spaces again, if you just want to tweet at me and then just anybody's watching on LinkedIn or YouTube, just comment and I'll throw it up on the screen.

Yeah, look at this, Josh. I was recently told by neurologists that if you don't rest, you're at a higher risk of seizures and other neurological disorders. That's crazy to think about. Yeah, I've been, my wife got into a nutritionist and then I got into the nutritionist as well. And one of the things that I've never talked about in my life is cortisol levels. Now listen, I am not a scientist by any means. And I'm not smart. I don't want to talk out of my ass here. But I know somebody in a, let's say sales industry, that and I believe this is right. I could be wrong, but I believe this is what I heard from somebody that essentially this individual got cancer because their cortisol levels were too high.

And cortisol is stressed and adrenaline. When I went through my nutritionist, my blood work up, literally my nutritionist goes, are you stressed? And I was like, yeah, all the time, why? She goes, your cortisol levels are through the roof. And so for the last year, I've tried to bring down my cortisol levels. I don't drink as much caffeine. I'm trying to put more rest in kind of my day. And believe it or not, actually feel better. So Paul, wanna see your thoughts on this. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's just from the standpoint of if you think about it, there are studies that show that your brain, when it's so a lot of people, let me just take a step back, right?

So a lot of people will like start like potentially poo pooing the idea of us needing to rest. Like, well, that may be your lazy, right? Like we talked about that a little bit at the beginning, right? But the idea is that when they've done brain scans now and done research on this, when your brain is at rest, it's as active, if not sometimes potentially more active, then when and you aren't quote unquote resting. That could be sleeping, that could be napping. That could be going for a nice walk. Like there's multiple ways to rest, right? It could be deep play. There's multiple ways. But your brain is still active.

It's active in a different way. You're activating that subconscious. So the idea there is you've got to be able to, like almost I've heard of people say is like defragging your brain for those of us that have been in the tech industry for a long time where we used to have to defrag our hard drives. So your brain, if you're not defragging, there was another study that showed like the chemicals like you're talking about, right? the chemicals, the stress chemicals are clean essentially out of your brain as you rest. So it's imperative that we think about that and talk about that as a society because that's something that can definitely absolutely affect your health.

100%. So I want to get to some responses here. So Twitter, thanks again for tweeting. Let's kind of go over these. I love it. Joe coming in hockey is my rest. Joe, same. Same. lose by one that sucks. Can't stress about Joe for more on Twitter spaces. Can't stress about work in life when you are locked in on the ice. It's very true. Eric. It's just a good morning. Christina goes at T. Dustin. It's so hard for me to find time to rest. I always feel like I'm on the go. I've been trying to get better and trying to take breaks more frequently. Christina I struggle with the same.

My biggest advice. People are struggling with rest walking on Like like my wife and I we joke about it. My wife was never a calendar person ever and then when she met me She was like, okay, I you're right. I need to you don't encounter Well, so we now we now send each other calendar invites whenever she's doing something under something because we don't have a babysitter So we're always you know making sure someone's home and literally my wife and I was like if it's on the calendar I don't know about it. Like it's it doesn't exist. So really try to set time aside for that I want to get to a few more other comments.

Deb, haven't rested much other than a two day vacation in Florida a year ago. Deb, take care of yourself, buddy. Calming and centering your central nervous system anyway with creativity and ultimately productivity, Jesus can't read today. Unplugged rest works best for me. No screens, no device, at least 10 minutes of meditation. Love that. Chris comes in, naps are great for me in the middle of the day, but if I don't have time to just outside a few minutes, is really refreshing. Randall comes back and he goes, we collect toxins from all the stress all day. Deep compression, sleep decompresses your blood into your brain when you sleep, which makes your body pump.

I did not know that. Yep, that's crazy. Chris goes a short nap under 30, otherwise it throws off sleep. Yeah, 100%. Turn off screens while work on a hobby. I love that. Paul, a lot of comments here wanted to get more of your thoughts just on this whole topic. Yeah, I mean, one of the things too, like you may have heard, you know, as I would say, America has the high driver mentality, right, of like working and, and you've heard probably the book from Malcolm Gladwell around outliers and how do you be an outlier so there's this drive and people a lot of times to be a performer at work and like really show that they're really willing to do whatever it takes to continue to further their career or whatever right and so for those that have read the book outliers you talks about this whole 10,000 hours of deliberate practice right and so So what's interesting though is if you look at that 10,000 hours, it kind of breaks down to be about a thousand, a thousand hours a year.

So 10 years worth of deliberate practice. And that breaks down to be like around four hours a day, five days a week with a couple of weeks off, if you do the math, right, in that range, you can math check me on that, right? But it's around that range. And most people talk about it as like a 10 year kind of window of like becoming an expert or outlier, right? The idea there is what is not factored into that, which maybe Malcolm missed, maybe he did on purpose or maybe he just didn't think about it was how much rest happens during that window, right? And so like during that same window you have over 12,500 hours I would recommend somewhere in there of deliberate rest whether that's taking time to go deep play.

Like you said hockey exercise, I forgot to mention in that book where they talks about different ways to rest exercises absolutely a way to rest, right? It's not just inactivity, it's that muscle. 30,000 hours of sleep and that 10-year window. So the things that we forget about a lot oftentimes, because we focus on only the quote unquote busy part of that conversation, is absolutely that rest. That's key to becoming a outlier, becoming a person that can do what they need to for their work and be a high performer. Have, so one of my guests, her name was Kishaw. She spoke at Render this past year, and I had her on the show, you know, we talked about working, resting your sprint cycles, you know, trying to just upper upwards communicating to management like listen, you know, we need to rest the team, you know, they worked till 3 a.m.

on a weekend. Have you gotten those conversations at all at Ken insurance or anytime in your career? Absolutely. So at Ken, there's been a couple of conversations with the team that we've asked about like, how do we want to do that? So sometimes what we've put on our calendars is what we call ice breakers. So it's kind of a get to know you because we're a fully remote company and it could be tricky sometimes, right? To get to know your teammates and stuff like that. And so we'll have like when a new member joins the team or just on a regular cadence will set up an icebreaker that we just get together, we'll play an online game together.

We'll just shoot the shit, just talk and hang out or whatever, right? Like it's not like a super structured thing, but it's like some way to get to know each other a little better. And so whenever I was doing some research as well for the talk I gave this summer on rest, I asked on LinkedIn as well in Twitter and a couple of people responded with how they integrated rest into their day-to-day and their teams. And it was exactly similar to what we've done at Can Insurance, right? They would make sure they blocked out at the end of the day every day or whatever it made sense for the team to kind of have that space to one, build relationships, but two, just to kind of do things that aren't work-related, right?

Like it's all fine and good to get to know each other at a work. And I'm not saying you have to be like best friends of people at work, but it's also that that human connection can help us work better as teammates, right? And so building that space in at whatever cadence makes sense. I think ours is like every couple of weeks, we try to do it like a half hour to a 45 minute window of here everybody come here's a meeting invite on your calendar. Like you said, calendar kind of drives it, right? And so it's actually saving that space to have that time.

I love that. I love that. Yeah, I mean, listen, I'm going to encourage y'all. We're going to move on to the last two topics today because time flies when you're hanging out with friends. but I would really challenge you all. I'm definitely a phone guy before bed. Right? I'm sorry, the two I am, but I would challenge you all. I get up in the morning and I try to have, like I try to actually stay off my phone as much as possible in the morning. So I challenge you all, listen, if you're feeling a little burnout, take some time, go take a walk, get out in the sun, that helps a ton because it really does pay off.

All right, Paul, so as you move on, like I said, I still wanna hit these last two topics real quick, we could talk rest for 30 minutes, but I think these are two important topics as well that I always try to cover when I get hiring managers on the show. So first off, let's talk about qualities, and I'm obviously looking at my notes here if it's not obvious enough. So what questions do you need to ask yourself, right? So as a job seeker at some point in your career, right? And as somebody who sees job seekers, who you interview people and all that, what's just some advice for folks interviewing for their next job right now?

Yeah, I think oftentimes if I look back on my career, the parts where I stumbled the most, wasn't as much answering the questions people had for me, but was not preparing beforehand, questions that I wanted to know about the company I'm going to. Right. And so it's that like, well, what, what kind of culture do I want to be working in? Like, what, what would that look like? And, you know, asking, you know, hey, what are your pairing practices at your company? Do you all allow it? Like, are they, is it a negative approach? That is it positive? Like, is it encouraged? Is it not like all those types of things?

Like, what are you doing today? And like, how are you applying the agile principles in your org today? Are you, you know, or just the culture stuff, right? Like how, how, you know, how often do people tend to take off work, you know, is it encourages it part of that, you know, culture where, well, you're, you've got a limited vacation, but you know, you really don't use it kind of thing, right? Or whatever, what does it look like? And so some of those questions, you know, you've got a great thing on your website that I love, and I've used in the past as well. So if y'all don't know that, go to Taylor's Twitter profile, you can look at his link to his link there to go look at questions to ask and interview.

There's a lot of great questions in your list for sure as well. But you know, the ideas is instead of focusing just on answering their questions, come with your own. And it also shows that you're being thoughtful about this, right? Because when I'm as a hiring manager, I want to make sure that people aren't just coming for the next big paycheck, right? Yeah, money plays. That's the way it feels. I think that summarizes perfectly. I've never had someone say it that way. Right. Because you don't want like, yes, we all want to provide for our families. Yes, we all I want to level up in whatever way that is.

Maybe it's the culture is better. Maybe it's the salary is better or whatever, but it can't always be about the money because if it is, what's the point, right? And so the culture does aspect, again, I don't necessarily subscribe the idea of like, I'm going to work with my family because let's be honest, I go to see them and Thanksgiving and it's great and I love my family, but do you want to work with them all the time? Probably not. So it's a balance there, right? Between, yes, business, personal kind of stuff and there's relationships that go on with that, again, being human. So come with some thoughtful questions.

And it shows that you're not just looking for the next paycheck, right? Like it's, yeah. You know, I've never looked for a job, but I would say that would probably be my biggest issue is would be coming up with questions to ask, right? Cause I'm so, the way I am, I'm always onto the next thing, right? So it's like, hey, great interview, tailoring any questions. I'm good, let's go to the next one. But like, it can come across as like, bro, you just want an out and wanting a paycheck I do actually want to be here and I love what you just said. I've never had someone say it like that before.

It's just, it makes it come across like you're just wanting the next paycheck if you're not constantly engaging. And also shout out James Holland's head. He actually came up with those questions as well. That's actually mostly his list. But one of my objectives for the next few months when I can free up some time, I want to kind of bring in more interview questions and create more documents around that. Cause I think people really struggle with that. All right, last thing. Well, before we go to the last thing, can I say one thing about that to add on to that? So a lot of people, the buzz right now is this whole idea of quiet quitting and stuff like that, right?

And the reality is, I mean, if you've heard, if you heard Gary Vee talk about it recently, if you don't follow him, he's a great resource to look at from a learning around business and stuff like that too. But I love the way he phrased it, where he was talking about people aren't just quiet quitting. They're going, hey, I can go and work at your company and make 50 grand, 75 grand or whatever. But I could also go in the gig economy and there's more opportunity available. So there being more thoughtful a lot of the younger generation instead of where when I grew up, it was like you had to go get a job at a brick and mortar somewhere.

Right. Now you don't have to. Right. So like what is it that you're offering to people that are want to join your company to let them go, okay, I'm willing to take a bet on your company and come work with you, right? So it's that idea and same way, then taking a bet on you as being an offer to come work with their kids. So it goes both ways. It's not one sided, right? That's why I'm saying like as you ask those questions, it gives the hiring managers to know this person's being thoughtful about the particular situation. They're not gonna just leave and go make the same money doing Uber and Uber Eats and all the other stuff or whatever they wanna do, right?

On the side. They're here because they find value in whatever we're offering. So yeah, I love that. All right, last question. Around what you look for, right? So I always, when I get a hiring manager or an individual in leadership like yourself, I always want both sides of it, right? I want what you look for in a job search side in the hiring side. So this side, what's the biggest piece of advice for hiring managers right now, just straight from you and kind of your philosophy around hiring? Yeah, I often find that we get hung up on the particular tech stacks that we're looking for.

Like, oh, our shop, it's a rail shopper. Oh, we're a dot net shopper. We're Python or whatever. And that's great, right? Like it's good if you have two candidates, they're almost the same and you're vetting them. and like one of them has a little more, or has experience in that tech and the other one doesn't, that might push them over the edge, right? However, that stuff is teachable, right? Like language stuff is teachable. And if they can show their aptitude during your interview process and whatever way you're doing in your process, I recommend you have some way to know can the person learn, right? They don't have to be super difficult, but some way to know this person is aptitude and they're willing to learn.

Once you know that, it's more about, and people say like culture fit or whatever, It's not as much about that as it is the skills to me that are harder to train and teach. Do they represent those? Like, are they collaborative? Do they show a desire to be helpful and like encouraging on the team? Because it's nothing worse than like having one bad apple make it a very negative toxic environment, right? You've probably seen that in your career, people who are looking for jobs now maybe see that in their career where they're like on a team and there's that one person. And I've been that person before in my career.

And I try not to do that, right? But it's easy sometimes to get in that negative space. And so figuring out how to help your team continue to get better, you've got to think about those pieces that are harder to train, like, you know, human skills is what I would refer to them as, right? That kind of stuff is very difficult to train, not impossible, but difficult or harder. And so how are you, how are you gauging that in your interview process? Do you have questions that kind of flow with that and help you know how the person sits with some of those things. Exactly.

Yeah, that's so true. I think, and that's kind of what I look for with my team, right? Like, are you a good post person and are you motivated? I mean, that's really all I care about. I mean, like I can teach you what the .NET tech stack is, right? Like I can teach you what node is, but what I can't teach you is to be communicative. I mean, I can try, like you said, you can try. I can try to teach you to be motivated, But the end of the day, like you have to have the engine yourself. And if you don't have the engine, then it's not going to work.

And that's why I, that's why I tell you this. Cause I know I know some people are watching this show right now and will in the future that are struggling to get a job and may have gone to like multiple like final rounds and not get it. I will tell you this, if you are making it to the final rounds of interviews, you've won in my perspective cause you're getting the app bats, right? I was talking to an entrepreneur the other day and he and I were chatting And he was like, man, I just, I keep getting to these like massive business deals and they're falling through.

What am I doing wrong? I said, I don't think you're doing anything wrong. I think you're doing everything right. Cause you're getting a seat at the table. You're getting the at bats. Sometimes it just doesn't work out. But the thing is, is if you're getting yourself into the situation, you're actually doing what you need to be doing. Yeah. And I'll tack on to that, right? Like what we don't see in society today, which is the good and bad of social media, right? Because people aren't necessarily, I mean, some people are getting better at it, but most people I would say, Blakely, aren't posting the at-bats where they failed.

Correct. Right? So you're seeing a small glimpse into the window of like the hundred times that entrepreneur A or person A is applying for jobs and they had a hundred nose and they had the one yes. So you see the one yes, not the hundred nose. And myself included, right? I struggle with perfectionism, right? And so like I struggle with being, I'm very risk averse at times, right? And so like how do you encourage that? And I think that's just being open and honest about it, right? And so hopefully we'll continue to see that trend of people starting to share more about the things they're struggling with as opposed to just the great wins.

100%. All right, last question. I totally forgot to ask my guest this yesterday. I've been, I've been off for three weeks. I'm not in my routine at all. All right. Last question. So we had got, so the show's called guidance counselor 2.0 because we had guidance counselors middle school and high school, but now when we need them the most as adults, we don't have somebody to turn to from a career perspective, right? Now they're just called therapists, which I'm a big fan of. But that being said, what's your biggest piece of career advice to your younger self? Don't be afraid to put yourself out there, right?

Like that risk aversion that I've struggled with throughout my own career is definitely can get in the way, right? You don't have to be perfect. Just get out there. Because like you said, you get the at bats sooner or later, you're going you're gonna hit it, right? If you don't ever get it back, you're gonna miss everyone you never try. Exactly. That's so good. And then the final comment here on Twitter, Twitter spaces, Terry comes in, goes, seen the importance of rest, made me think of this article I just read. I was out of the Atlantic, it's long COVID has forced a reckoning for one of medicine's most neglected diseases.

And then it looks like it is on rest. So check that out, the Atlantic. Cool. All right, well Paul, thank you again for hanging out with me this morning, man. I appreciate it. Everybody. Thank you again Twitter spaces Facebook LinkedIn YouTube Twitter tick-tock. Thank you all for tuning in. This has been great. A lot of questions a lot of engagement today I connect with Paul if I were you Paul's really passionate about this topic around rest So if you need to pick Paul's brain, please reach out Let him know that you found him obviously from guidance comes with 2.0 because again if we're talking about strategy around DMing Paul's gonna likely If you respond more, if you say, hey, I saw you here, because that brings obviously like some sort of connection, right?

So again, bring that up. And Paul, thanks again, man. I appreciate it. And we'll see you next month. All right, see y'all, bye. Hey, you did it. You listened to an entire episode, and I am very grateful, because you know why? There's a lot of podcasts out there. There's a lot of episodes, and I myself rarely finished an entire episode. So I appreciate you so, so much for listening. Quick reminder, please rate and review this podcast in the App Store. I want this to be discoverable to others. And the only way that happens is if you take the time right now and rate and review it.

Please, like right now, unless you're driving, then don't do it. So thank you again. If you need to reach out to me, tailor at vaco.com or at Tdastin on all social media handles. And I hope you have a fantastic day.