Before we get into this week's episode, a quick question. Have you joined us over on Substack yet?

If not, then consider this your personal invitation. Head over to chasingexcellance.

Email, sign up. It's free. It's the best way to get even more out of these episodes,

out of Chasing Excellence. You can get listener guides, essays, challenges, and more.

The link is in the episode description, so it's just a quick tap.

We would love to see you over there.

Okay, onward.

Hello and welcome back to the show.

Hello, Ben.

How the heck are you?

Hello, Patrick.

I'm good.

It's good to see. You get a nice little melody in that, a little softness to it.

I'm excited to this. Some number of months ago, I should have looked up when we did it, but some number of months ago, this year certainly. we took a chapter of a book called As a Man Thinketh by James Allen. We listened to that chapter,

and then you and I had what I think was a cool conversation about that text about some of the ideas inside of that text, especially obviously

as it relates to chasing excellence. And so I've had that in the back of my mind for a while.

I kind of want to do that again and maybe we'll do it again after this one. But this time around

we're going to do, we're going to do the same basic idea for a poem called If by Rudyard Kipling. Cool? Oh, yeah. Great. A little bit of context. We're going to listen to it. It's only, it's a short one. It's only a couple minutes. A little bit of context for folks. Rudyard Kipling was a British writer born in India in 1865, became one of the most celebrated authors of his era. We all probably know him best by as the author of The Jungle Book.

He won a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907.

He wrote if in 1895 or around 1895 was published in 1910 in a collection of poems called

Rewards and Ferrys.

It quickly became one of the most beloved poems in the English language, and in 1995,

...