you know what I want to talk about, Neil? I want to talk about how losing someone can actually

completely reshape you in business. And so this is a tribute to my mom because I lost my mom last

week on a Thursday. The moment she went, there's two main things that happen. One, you can probably

imagine. I was like, okay, fine. It's probably, it's probably time to start dating someone seriously

in honor of my mom, right? Because she's always wanted me to get married and have, you know,

grandkids and all that for her. But two, the moment she passed, I was like, whoa, like,

the way she's covered for everybody, like, you know how a parent, like, will do, they'll overdo the

things that, for their kids, right? Meaning that they'll take care of things that

they shouldn't be taken care of. They'll shield you from everything. They'll protect you to the very

end, right? I realized that in the past, not so much anymore now, I've gotten a little better over

the past few years, but I've always done that, almost as if people in my company were my friends or

my family, right? And I would shield them from these things.

And what's interesting is we have this leadership meeting each week. I didn't join these last two weeks, right, because of all the things that were going on. And I kind of wanted to see how the team would

deal with these things. And so what happened was I have a call recorder that joins those to look for

compelling content ideas. And I saw a line in that that was actually very compelling and said that chaos is always present in the business, but it's usually the

leaders that absorb it. And I was like, oh, whoa, that stuck with me. It's like props to my team

for observing that. But also, in my mind now, I'm like, you know, I'm just, I've gotten better

over the years, but I'm even more after she passed.

I was just like, yeah, I'm not going to treat people the same way that I treat friends and family where I'm going to protect them and coddle them at all costs.

Sure, I'm going to protect them as if they're part of the, we're part of the same team, but we're all here to perform at the end of the day. And so I think what instantly clicked for me was or reinforced

for me is like, yes, I'm going to do everything it takes to grow this business, but I'm not going to do

everything I can to just be at all places at once. Because at the end of the day, I'm just one person.

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