The Infinite Game: Chapters 10 & 11 | Book Club with Simon

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to book club. This is the final book club we have for the Infinite Game. Where's my copy? It's somewhere around here. The Infinite Game. So I'm a little sad, but as you all know, we added a spontaneous additional book club for Together Is Better, which we're going to do on the 21st, August 21st, same time, 1pm Eastern.

And so it'll give you two weeks to read Together Is Better.

And it's a lovely little book. And we can do that because quite frankly, if I'm honest, I didn't want this 10 because it's like the highlight of my week. We are live on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. We have people coming in from around the world. Really exciting. Hello, Scottsdale, Arizona. Hello, Qatar. Hello, New York. Hello, Ethiopia.

India.

Australia. Man, you're up early in the morning. Uk, Columbia. Man, this always blows my mind. Arizona, Philippines. I've eaten balut. Well, I tried to, then I got a little bit grossed out and I didn't eat it.

I just love how we're all here together. South Africa, West Virginia, Turkey, the Netherlands. Just such a fantastic grouping of everyone.

As everyone knows, book club is not about reading a book. It is about coming together and doing something with each other. So I hope you've enjoyed it and enjoyed the conversations.

Thanks for sending in your questions. We're going to be going through two things today, chapters 10 and 11, of course, a little bit at the end of the day, which is existential flexibility and the courage to lead. So I thought I would have a little special guest today. Are we good on special guests? We're good on special guests, yes. Okay. I'm going to assume we are. I don't know. So hopefully this will work. An organization that has publicly stated that they want to be infinite minded, which is Airbnb. The CEO of Airbnb, Brian Chesky, a short while ago, about over a year ago, actually, he made a public announcement that he wants his company to be to infinite minded. So I thought, what an opportunity to talk to Brian.

And ask him how he found the courage to buck the system. So I think let's get Brian in here and have a little chat with him about courage to lead and existential flexibility.

Hey, Simon.

There he is. Brian, how are you?

How are you doing?

Good to see you back to back today. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Long time to talk. Good to see you.

It's good to see you, too. I know you guys been going through some very hard times. One thing which I don't think people realize, you know, you're in the travel industry. Your business lost 80% of its revenue in eight weeks, which is just astonishing. And unfortunately, you had to make some really difficult decisions and ask some people to transition away. What I love about you, and I just have to say this, is I use your company as the blueprint for other companies that are struggling how to treat people with dignity in this hard time. You were generous with people. My favorite thing is you set up an entire website. Was it airbnb.com talent?

Yeah. And with 500,000 people. So yeah, that we basically told employees so I'll just to jump in. But like so many people, they think they do three things. They try to give severance and you know, sometimes they, they, they go, they give. They don't quite go as far as they could. You gotta go as far as you can. The way they communicate, they hold back. Like they either don't give em all the information or they just kind of hold their emotions back. No one wants to see that. Like you want to know leaders have a heart because that tells you they care about you and you're going to be okay. But the last thing is we thought there's something that doesn't cost a lot of money. We can do what we can to help them get jobs. And my co founder Joe had a great idea. He said what if we took our recruiting team and we made them like equivalent of a job placement helping people leaving. And then we took it a step further. We said, what if we allowed everyone to opt in to post their profile so recruiters can contact them? 500,000 people eventually contacted them.

It's unbelievable. I know. We, we, we were looking for some help and we went to airbnb.com talent and we reached out to someone and they'd already found a job. So it was fantastic. I just love that you, you did it with dignity. And that's the most important thing. The thing I wanted to talk to you about was some time ago you made a very public announcement that you wanted Airbnb to be an infinite minded organization, which is a big deal. I've had conversations with CEOs behind the scenes where they've expressed interest, but nobody does it publicly. All the pressures on businesses these days are to be finite minded from your investors, from Marketplace, sometimes even internally. And you're not public now, but if you ever do, the pressure becomes even more overwhelming to be finite minded. How did you find the courage to basically buck the system and make this public announcement of the kind of company you want to build.

I just kind of started with a couple, maybe three realizations. The first is the companies I admired.

They were enduring companies, I don't know, like Apple or Disney or you name the company. The second is when you're a founder and you start a company. I mean, I don't have children, but you know, it is like your baby and the last thing you want to do is outlive your child. And the third thing is like, if you have a purpose, you have to ask yourself, well, like, I guess it's okay to be finite minded if you have a purpose and that purpose you achieve. But if that purpose is an ideal that you're constantly pursuing, then at some point, if you don't keep pursuing it, it doesn't happen. And I felt like the thing that we were doing or the thing we're trying to do is try to, you know, bring people together, connect them so they can feel like they belong. I just think there's so, I think that's something that people are yearning for now more than ever. And we have not even scratched the surface. And then, you know, you and I talked and you know, obviously you said what you've written in the book. And I always thought to myself, you know, it's really weird that we, we cover business the way we cover sports. Like who's winning, who's losing? By the way, a lot of the same people who like the stock market like sports. And so I understand why the stock market in sports, business and sports seem similar. They're not similar at all. I mean, even this idea of competition, I mean, competition exists. But in the technology industry, one of the things we learn is that you're not all fighting for the same pie. The whole point of technology is to grow pies. That's competitive, kind of what this industry does for the most part. And so you used to tell me, like, it's not about like winning or losing, it's about being ahead or being behind. And we have the most unbelievable examples of companies that seem like they were in the brink and they're now. And so I don't actually think it took a lot of. It didn't take a lot of courage for me. It just took logic.

I appreciate that you followed that logic. I mean, it's, I think you're underselling yourself. That logic is clear to a lot of CEOs, but they shrug their shoulders and say it's the system or what am I supposed to do? Or, you know, I wish I could change it. So, so what I Love is you're a young company with young leadership who, who is saying the future of business has to be different and you're. And you're taking the lead. So I appreciate your, your position so much.

I don't think it's as hard as, like, it seems really scary to, like, kind of go out on a limb at first. But the thing is that actually, like, like, who the hell wants to cheer on companies? Like, just like, it's like driving their car at the edge of a constant cliff. Like, who wants to do that? And do we really want to live in a world of all kinds of, like, I actually think there's a lot of support for an idea of a company just enduring. Like, when did that become controversial?

It's such a good point. After you made the announcement and you've been making the decisions to be more infinite minded, were there some things that were easier than you expected, and were there some things that were bigger challenges than you expected?

Yeah.

What was easy was for everyone to say they agreed with it. Because it seems, like, almost impossible to disagree with the concept. Like, well, if you don't agree that you want to have, like, a kind of intimate or enduring time rise and you're saying, yeah, I want the music to stop. Well, who wants to say that the hard part is actually changing how you do things?

Yeah.

Yeah. I want to be infinite. I want to, like, make the rail bear place. I want to do the right thing now. Let's still do these 10 things the way they've always been done. Yeah. And so I think what gets very, very hard is to say, change the scorecard about what success is. Because if you say something and you talk a certain way, you got to start walking that certain way. It means that, like, you know, how you run your board meetings, like, what metrics you have, who's on your board, and like, the things you pursue, like, they all have to change. And the moment you start changing mechanisms, that's when you start to really feel some of the. You start to feel like, feel that right. When it's the tangible actions.

Yeah.

People actually agree with you. Not when you say something, but when you try to do something right.

Right. Ain't that the truth? Ain't that the truth?

Also, when Covid hit, you know, we're talking about existential flexibility this week, a lot of organizations were forced to pivot and some struggled. They were just grasping for straws, double downing on their old business models, and they put themselves at the center of the equation. How are we going to survive? How Are we going to make more money? Those are the companies that struggled to pivot. Airbnb pivoted reasonably quickly, producing these live online experiences.

Can you sort of walk us through sort of how that decision was made? I assume you fell back on your just. Cause you fell back on, on that ideal that you have, and you just found a new way to do it. Just talk about how that, how it happened and how quickly it happened.

Well, first of all, it starts with knowing what, what business you're in. And we're not. We're not. We didn't start this company to be a travel company. We didn't start this company, get into real estate. Joanna and I started this company because we're deeply passionate about connecting people and belonging. And so when you do that, you say, well, there's many ways to connect. You think we invented or all the ways that people can connect. Of course we hadn't. So you start with that. The second thing you do is you just have to have a mindset. You know, Andy Grove, one of the founders of intel, and he said bad companies are destroyed by a crisis, Good companies survive a crisis, but great companies are defined by a crisis. I want us to be that third bucket. And you know what? So much of it's mindset. If you think you're going to win, if you think that this is going to define you in a positive way and you're going to learn something from it and it's going to make you stronger, it kind of happens, right? Like so much of your mindset of the leader becomes the psychology, the organization. And that psychology really becomes a collective consciousness. That mana, it becomes real. And so that was the thing. And we said every single opportunity is a moment. We have to pivot, move fast. So what actually happened was, first of all, you have to have the mindset. A mindset of hope, of optimism, of resiliency, that we're going to get through this and now you're going to get through this. But every one of these crisis is, is going to lead to a new point of innovation. Let's look for moments. And a moment happened. We with social distancing, we had to shut down in person experiences. Airbnb is known for homes, but we also have three hour activities that you can book with people all over the world, do really cool activities. They got paused suddenly. We started doing listening sessions with our host. It's important, by the way, to listen and be curious. And some of the. I don't think it's much in life you have to have ideas as much as be a receiver for ideas. Like it's not my job to have an idea and it's not our job for any of us to have an idea. I think we have to be receivers. We're like radio antennas. Like we just gotta get on the right signal and they'll tell you, people will tell you things. And people told us they want to host, but they can't do it in person, can they offer them online? And at first I thought to myself, no, you can't offer them online. We're about connection and connections in the real world. Then I thought to myself, well, well, if that's the case, there's not going to be a lot of connection anytime soon. So I quickly realized, and we quickly realized, yeah, we should get in on this. And within 14 days we pivoted the entire product line to offer online experiences. So now you can do we have 800 experiences, 200 Olympians. So we did a nine year partial with the Olympics, 200 Olympians, including Jackie Joyner Kersey, you may remember from Olympics. And, and then we had Tony Hawk didn't experience. So they did these like activities and you actually can meet them and go on kind of remotely be on experience with them. And so we did that. But I think so much of it as turning on a dime, I never wanted to just be focused on survival. If you focus survival, that's probably all you're going to get. And so I said I don't want to focus on survival. And so while all these other companies I saw were like kind of, you know, like just shuttering their businesses and just in defensive mode and preservation mode, I think preservation mode is a very dangerous place to be. And I think the more resources a company accumulates, the more they start worrying about losing things. Like a parent with an overactive amygdala worrying of the child is gonna like and putting the helmet on the child before they go outside, you're worried something's gonna happen at some point. They never live their life. Like you gotta like the same thing with a company. You, you got to be like concerned, but not so concerned that you protect the company from itself and you're afraid to do anything and you're just preserving resources. And actually that's the worst possible thing, ironically for shareholders. Shareholders need the company to grow, right? So this weird obsession sometimes that some people have with serving shareholders, it's not actually, it's not in the shareholders best interest. They need companies to create value and, and therefore they need to be focused on doing new things. People love. That's what needs to happen to create value.

I love it. Brian, I know your day is back to back today. I am so grateful that you took time to stop in with us and show us what courage to lead and what existential flexibility looks like in the real world. Such a pleasure, such an honor. Thanks so much for taking the time.

Well, thank you, Simon.

Well, that was a treat for me. I got to tell you, you know, to somebody working at the scale of Airbnb, to hear what goes through his mind and how he thinks about his business, you understand that existential flexibility for. And I wrote about it, but what fun to hear it. And by the way.

I didn't know what he was going to say.

But so much fun to hear that when we talk about existential flexibility, for the leader who makes that existential flex, they actually think the risk is not flexing. He actually said it wasn't that hard. For the rest of the world, who's afraid to make those flexes, it seems crazy, but for the leader that actually makes that flex, they actually see the greater risk in not blowing things up. They see the greater risk in not flexing. And I so appreciate even his statement of courage. I think he's humble about it.

But how he resorted to listening, and we've talked about that a few times throughout this book, which is, you don't have to. If you're the leader, you don't have to have all the ideas. And I think too many leaders think that they have to solve all the problems, and they didn't. They didn't actually come up with the basis of the idea of these live online experiences. They thought it was impossible. You heard him say it. When the host came and said, we want to do this, he said, well, you can't. It's impossible. But what they did was they listened, they heard what people wanted to do, and they simply pivoted their business to provide that platform. My expectation, what I expect to happen, I don't know this. I haven't talked to Brian about it. But what I expect, what will happen, which is once we go back to somewhat of a normal world, where we can travel again, that Airbnb will probably have a blended business. They'll probably have both. I don't think this will be something they abandon. And I think that's the sign of a good existential flex, that you're not doing it to simply put a band aid on the times, but rather you found a new way to market and a new way to spread value. We've certainly gone through this ourselves. We couldn't rely on live events anymore. We, we now have our live online classes and I can guarantee you it's here to stay. We think it's actually a wonderful way to spread the message. So very grateful to Brian. Thank you very, very much for joining us. That was really wonderful. Let's take some questions from the outside world, from everywhere. Ohio has one. Here's one from Rubik's. Rubik's asked me what happened to the open Playbook. Man, you've been following my stuff for a long time. Thank you. Rubik's. Back in the early days when I was first experimenting and talking about the infinite game and the principles of the infinite game and developing an infinite mindset, I used to talk about having an open playbook.

But as many of you who follow my work may know, I do all my thinking out loud. So if you go back and look at early versions of everything, you'll see me trying to work through the ideas and work out the ideas and sometimes I develop and they grow and change. And so I realized Open Playbook was actually not quite accurate. It wasn't just this open mindedness. And that's when I changed the term and somewhat of the definition of an open playbook to existential flexibility. I think it's because it was more profound and more robust than what I was tinkering with with Open Playbook. But Rubik's gold star for catching that. I absolutely love that. Hello, Saudi Arabia, Scotland. Montevideo. Amazing. Iran.

Lovely to see you all. Okay, let's do some more questions. We have a question here from get your flex on book club. Love it. From Nancy Bertulli. How do we know when it is time to make an existential flex? And how do we find the courage to bet the farm?

So how do you know when you when it's time to make an existential flex? So existential flexes happen when there's political changes, technological changes, cultural changes, and we realize that our business and whatever we're selling, whatever we're offering, sometimes our culture is actually, if we follow out the logic, not viable. And you read about the example of Kodak, the invention of the digital camera, the engineer who developed the digital camera, who invented the digital camera for Kodak back in the mid-1970s. That's how old that technology is. He said in 10 or 20 years there'll be no film cameras. You can just follow the logic. And it was the senior leadership who chose to put blinders on. And so any customer focused, vision focused, just cause Focus leader. It's kind of obvious, quite frankly. I mean, it was. If you go back to the example I gave of Steve Jobs and Apple pivoting to the graphic user interface, you know, an organization that's obsessed with making things simple to use for a customer, the technology is out of the bag. They didn't invent it, but they could. They could. You could follow the logic that this thing is easier and better than having to learn an entire computer language to use a personal computer. And so why not be on the front of the wave rather than the back of the wave? So I think for. If you have a good just cause, if you have a clear sense of vision of where you want the organization to go and what you're trying to advance. I mean, I wish I could give you a better answer. It's kind of obvious, you know, the. And you have discussions with your. With, with your people in your company, and it's kind of obvious to everybody because we're all vision. Focused on the vision. And then. So when you find the courage, you sort of turn around to the people to the left of you and turn to the right of you. Like, you know, we're going to have to do this. Yeah, I know we're going to have to do this. You know, it's going to hurt us in the short term. Yeah, I know it's going to hurt us in the short term. Do you think we should do this? Yeah, I think we should do this. And you do it. The courage comes from checking with the people to the left and checking with the people to the right, and everybody goes. This is way more exciting. And what you often find is that when the change is made, that's.

It's like.

It's kind of like. It's kind of like jumping off a high dive, right? The hard part isn't the falling into the water. The hard part is just the initial little leap of faith. A little jump. Once the decision is made, actually the excitement kicks in. And that's sort of a remarkable thing you would think would be fear, but it's actually not. Once somebody makes the decision, the excitement kicks in. That's definitely been the case at Airbnb. Once they made the decision, the excitement went up from internal and from hosts. Good question. Sarah Hembury, how are you? From Tallahassee, Florida? She asks. Our book club is primarily middle and high school teachers, along with parents and community members. And along with parents and community members, education, the epitome of. Of what could be the infinite game, is a pivotal moment right now. Yes, it is. If small pockets of schools and leaders take the chance to shift the idea of purpose of education, can their existential flex impact the larger national system which focuses more on finite goals? Amen. Amen. Amen. It was just what Brian said. He was quoting Andy Grove, the founder of intel, which is for bad companies, a crisis will destroy them. I don't remember the exact quote. For good companies, something else. And for great companies, they'll reinvent. And I think never let a good crisis go to waste. And one of the things that I think is forced education to do in this crisis is look at how it teaches. Of course education is an infinite game. School is finite. But education should be last, should last our entire lives. I would hate to think that people think their learning is done when they graduate high school or college.

And I think it's forced.

It's kind of like what happened when the Internet showed up in publishing or in movies, which is, it forces you to look inward and say what actually do we do and how do we do it? And I think that schools have mixed bag and whether they've really properly embraced.

Online and simply transferring all the classes to online, I mean that's not it either. But it's some sort of this blended model. And I think the more forward thinking school districts are sitting down and saying, okay, the world has changed. We have to equip young people to be productive members of society and teach them basic skills and give them a basic education so that they can survive. Given that the world is the way it is, if we were starting a school from scratch today, if we were a startup, if we said, okay, we're starting a school from scratch, how would we build our school for this marketplace? And I think to reinvent oneself for schools to reinvent themselves, it's an amazing opportunity. And I think because of the structure of school and the standardized tests and the short term metrics, I think that opportunity really didn't exist in the past. It was just you couldn't do it unless you were a private school. But I think that for all schools, public, private and otherwise, it's an amazing, amazing opportunity now to actually reimagine what education could look like into the 21st century. I hope those conversations are happening and just like Brian explained, invite outsiders, invite students, and to reimagine what school could look like, take information in doesn't mean you have to do what they say, but it means you get to take in all the new ideas and something may spark some inspiration.

I'll add one editorial piece. I Think one thing that all schools should be doing and could be doing is building leadership education in for their students and leadership education in for their teachers and administrators. People go into administration, they go into leadership and nobody teaches them how to lead. We should be teaching listening skills to students. We should be teaching effective confrontation to students. We should be dealing, teaching how to deal with stress to students. These are skills that they have to deal with in the, in the future world and they are not being prepared for them. I'd rather see that happen than calculus. Speaking from a non mathematician, you're getting.

A lot of questions about what your T shirt says.

Sorry, I'm getting questions about what my T shirt is. It's just, it's a, it's a Japanese print. I like Japanese stuff. I saw it on Uniqlo. It was on sale, so I got it.

Okay.

Ashley Van Diver. Yes.

How can you put these ideas into a company that isn't flexible?

How do we put these ideas into a company that isn't flexible? So the most common question I used to get was what about these millennials? And I did a thing, I did a video and answered that and that question went away. Which is kind of good. The most common question that I get now, every single time, the most common question is what if I believe in the infinite mindset? And senior leadership is so finite minded, how do I, how do I, what do I do? Well, if we adjust to an infinite mindset, we accept that a, we can't affect, we can't change people, right? We can only change our own behavior. We can't force senior leadership to change, especially if we have no direct contact with them. But we can choose to become the leaders we wish we had, right? So the whole idea is say, is to, is to work within the system you've got, of course, but to say, okay, we're going to build an infinite minded team and so amongst the people you work with and it doesn't matter if you're in a leadership position or not, remember, leadership has nothing to do with rank. Leadership is the responsibility to take care of those around us. So you can take care of your boss too. Hey boss, you okay during this Covid, how are you?

And start embracing those practices. You know, if the organization doesn't have a good just cause, tell your team what your just causes and say why you love this job and how this job is helping you advance your just cause. Start building trusting teams. Start making the people you work with feel like someone has their back, that someone cares about them as human beings. That you create a space where they can be open and honest without judgment.

You study your worthy rivals so that you can be a better leader. But also ask the team what other teams inside the company are better than we are at certain things so that we can come an even better team not because we want to beat them, but because we want to improve. Build that sense of constant improvement into the team. Be willing to change certain things. Very often companies do things because that's the way they've always been done. But nobody's ever asked, does it have to be done this way? And nobody ever asks, can I change it? And very often the answer is we don't know why it's done this way. And yes, you can change it. Ask the questions. I tell you one quick funny story as a side about asking questions. Long ago when I had a job, I worked at a large ad agency and it was a fairly common experience where my boss would come into my office and say, the client wants this by Wednesday, get it done. I'd be like, it's impossible to get this done by Wednesday. And he would say, I don't know what to tell you, you have to get, the client wants it by Wednesday. So one day I called the client and I said, hey, I got this thing that you asked for, when do you need it by? Because they said you have to have it by Wednesday. And they went no, I can have it by Friday or Monday, that's totally fine. It's because somebody said when do you want it? They said Wednesday. And we went okay. And then it became the point is ask a question. Sometimes we have more flexibility and more freedom than than we think we do. And then what ends up happening is you build this wonderful high performing team. If you have an open minded group of leaders, even if they're finite minded, they're going to look at what you're doing in your high performing team with higher loyalty, better relationships and they're going to say what are you guys doing down there? And they may want to learn from you. If they're completely just in their own world and short term metric driven, they'll just leave you alone because you're high performing. And eventually some of the people will leave that group and go join other teams. They'll either move on or get promoted out and they'll bring everything they've learned and they'll take it to those teams and they'll build high performing, infinite minded teams and eventually the tail wags the dog. Unfortunately, we don't know how long it takes. Depends on the Organization depends on the culture, depends on the people, but the tail can wag the dog. I saw it happen with 100,000 person organization and it took two years, which I think is unbelievably quickly. And it was completely without senior leadership's help. We saw the whole organization pivot just because the people started to embrace new ideas.

Sarah and Nicola, the Rath girls from Swindon. How are you? You've mentioned some small companies that have made an existential flex in response to Covid. What major companies do you think have managed it and who are the ones who are truly playing the infinite game?

I think that. Well, we heard from Airbnb. I mean, I think that is a great example of a very large company. And even despite the fact that for very practical and unfortunate reasons, realistic reasons, survivable, literally existential reasons, they've had to ask some people to transition off, they've done it in a way that, as we talked about with great dignity, other big companies. I was quite impressed by Nike in the early days of COVID They were like the first company that started redefining.

Being at home and talking about how we can still be athletes at home. I was pretty impressed by that. In terms of what other big companies have. Have made a good pivot. That's a great question.

Nothing comes to mind off the top of my head. I will post something. I think that's a good question about big companies. The problem is, is that big companies, especially public companies, they struggle to pivot. And maybe one of the reasons I'm struggling to. Something, I'm struggling to have something come to mind immediately is because it's probably few and far between. What tends to happen with large companies is, is they tend to knuckle down, they tend to double down on the old or wait it out or try and just cut expenses.

I think television and movies. They were a little late to the game in the pivot, but I think we're starting to see it there. They're starting to learn how to adjust. Things are becoming smaller and more efficient. They're realizing they can make things from a distance which they never thought were possible. So I think we're starting to see a little bit of that.

What's that? Okay.

Moving on.

My question is how do you manage.

Employee motivation during this period? Somebody asked me about. Sorry, I'm going to interrupt. Somebody asked me about Netflix. I don't think Netflix pivoted. I think Netflix, their business just works really well for the time we're in. I mean, it's, you know, I'm not sure they actually did they. Did they really profoundly change the course of their business? I don't think so. I just think that kind of like Amazon, it's like, boy, boy, does your business benefit from this day and age? So I think that was just good luck, quite frankly. Sorry, sorry, Sarah, what was the question? From Amit. From Amit? Yes. How do you manage employee motivation during.

This period when there's such a sense of.

How do we manage employee motivation in such a period of uncertainty? We have to remember that we're all human beings and we're going through trauma. And so if you had a friend, I assume everybody here has at least one friend. You're in a book club, so I know you have at least one.

What would you do for a friend? We have to. We have to accept that everyone will go through the trauma of COVID Everyone. There will be no avoiding it. There will be no compartmentalizing it. Some people go through it early, some people go through it late. Some people, it will linger. Some people, it will go quickly. Some people will be recurring. But we are all going through some sort of trauma. And just to know that somebody is there to care for us.

That'S the most important thing. If somebody's performance is down or you see them looking a little bit despondent or a little bit quiet on a zoom call on a meeting, immediately just pick up the phone when that meeting is done and be like, hey, you were a little bit quieter. They just want to check in on you, make sure you're okay. Don't expect them to come and open up to you, and all of a sudden you're going to become their therapist, you know, and if they don't open up to you, it's fine. The most important thing is that they know that you care and they know that you're there and just keep doing that. You know, motivation is going to go up and down. It has for me, it has for everybody on this call. It's going to go up and down. And, you know, it's a delicate balance of needing to. To continue to.

Give people the tools they need and help support them so they can do a good job. But if we see a little step back, that it doesn't mean that they're a problem. That means they have a problem. And so this is where good leadership. It's like good parenting. Sometimes you yell at a kid and sometimes you don't. Sometimes you sit down with them, be like, hey, what's on your mind? And it's knowing to recognize the signs and find that deep.