Overcoming Mediocrity (ft. Jeff Gaura)

Thanks for tuning to Digital Voices Podcast, where we chat digital transformation challenges and opportunities across healthcare and life sciences. And now, your host, Ed Marx.

Ed here, and we're gonna change things up today and really happy to do it. So we always have guests, not always, but the majority of our guests, of course, are from industry. We like to go outside of industry maybe once every 4 or 5 weeks and learn what's happening there so we can apply it back to healthcare. And this one's even more unique as it's not even going to be around digital, but really more around leadership and coaching and reaching max performance and all sorts of good stuff. And so our guest today is my friend, Jeff Gara. And so Jeff is with us and We'll get right into it, but I just wanna say, hey, welcome, Jeff.

Hey guys, thanks for inviting me.

So Megan, we're gonna touch on coaching a little bit. I'm curious, have you ever had like a coach for anything in your life? Not really. No, you know, I had that short stint of cheering in high school and I danced. So I've had teachers and coaches a little bit, but not for any extended period of time.

What about when you were in school? Did you have like a thesis advisor or anything like that?

I think by the end of our drop, you and everyone else will wanna have a coach. I know I've benefited greatly from coaches in my life and continue to do so. So let's jump right in. So with Jeff, Jeff is the CEO of Threshold Academy, but does much, much more than just Threshold Academy, former CEO of a tech company. And so we're gonna get into all that, but he's a storyteller, author, coach, as we mentioned, and also an adventure travel guide. So Jeff's like the Renaissance leader. So, it'll be a lot of fun. And, Jeff, we first met, I should have really counted back the years, but it was on Team USA. So, we're both avid triathletes and duathletes. And, I think we were in Zofingen, Switzerland, probably the first time we met at the World Championships.

It sounds reasonable.

Like 20—

'15.

Yeah, '15.

It'd have to be 2015.

Yeah. And, I think you probably beat me and it was at the end that I actually met you. We were just collecting our gear after the race. So you didn't beat me by much if you were still in the athlete's—

You gotta have that in there.

But yeah, I'll make up that gap someday. And so ever since then, we, we just sort of bonded because of not only the commonality of Team USA, but also we both have a deep faith. And, uh, and so we really bonded over that. And so throughout the years, we'd see each other at the national championships, at the world championships, and we've always tried to be there for one another and see Yeah, we'll get into some of that. But yeah, that's when we first met. So it's been 7 years and we'll continue to meet up. So we have World Championships. Well, we'll meet each other again at the National Championships in Texas in April of 2023. And then we have World Championships like the next week or something in Ibiza.

That's right.

Yeah, pretty crazy.

I'll be at your house Wednesday to Saturday.

Nice.

Then I will see you in Ibiza the following Thursday.

Perfect. Yeah, it's gonna be crazy. And I think we're actually maybe at the same hotel as well. So lots of fun, but I'll see you before then 'cause we might talk about that as well. Anyways, songs on your playlist, everyone wants to know, especially like a triathlete, a world-class triathlete. What sort of music do you listen to, Jeff?

So you are what you listen to and what you consume and what you put in front of your eyes. So I have a whole series of power rock songs by artists that have been around, you know, 40, 50 years from, you know, Boston to Rush to Journey to Foreigner to, You name it, those guys. But I also like a lot of the modern genre, too. I like Miranda Lambert. I have some Taylor Swift on there. But if you combine both of those genres together, I would say half of it is what you'd call contemporary Christian music, some music with a message behind it, you know, more meat than, say, country music where you're talking about your girlfriend or some whiskey. I like stuff that's talking about eternity and asking the question, what if, on the deepest possible level. Because I'm a former musician— I don't know if former is the right word. But a former performing musician, a former recording artist, I always love listening to what comes out of the mixing boards because that used to be my thing. I played a bunch of different guitar instruments and I keep thinking all the time, ooh, if I could play this song, I would've changed that chord. I wouldn't have used an F sharp minor. I would've changed that to an F sharp major. That would've sounded— stuff like that. Yeah.

No, that's very cool. I certainly don't have that skill. Is there a particular song that you listen to like before every race? One song or a couple songs that you normally go to, or is it just kind of—

I do. I have one. Mandisa, African-American female Christian contemporary artist. She has one called Overcomer. You're an overcomer. You're an overcomer. And that connected with me when I was injured trying to race in my first national championship ever in Arizona. That was a long time ago. I think Reagan was president or something. Okay, maybe not, but it was a long time ago. And I was injured and I did not have it in me to compete with the best in the country. But I knew I was an overcomer. And in my warmups, I just said, you know, regardless of this neuroma that I have in my foot, I'm going to go as hard as I can because I get to take a couple of weeks off when I'm done. And it worked perfectly. In fact, if I ever meet her, I will tell her the whole story because I was very much trying to get away from everybody and pray and sing that song out loud to myself while I was getting ready. And it made a huge difference. I mean, if that hadn't happened, I never would have met you.

No, that's cool. Yeah, I'm sure she'd appreciate hearing back about that. What about a personal life message or mantras or some sort of thing that guides you And all that you do.

Yeah, so my wife wishes this would guide me more. Like you, I had a moment when I had a catastrophic event. I had a bicycle accident. I flew off of a bridge, fell 31 feet before I landed in the riverbed below me. Fortunately, that portion of the riverbed was dry, but I ended up spending 4 days in a trauma unit. The doctors called me Trauma Patient 1. Because I didn't have any ID and I couldn't speak because my, uh, my right lung was blown. And, um, I couldn't write because I had broken all the ribs except one on the right side of my body. So I was trauma patient number one for about 36 hours. That was kind of the moment when I realized that, um, any day could be your last. And, uh, what are you gonna do with it? What are you gonna make of it? You know? And that literally kicked into a writing career for me. And it helped me fast-track doing a lot of the stuff that I do, including— Coaching your nephew.

Yeah. And so I've seen the pictures and people who— I think it was the Blue Ridge Parkway area. And what speed? I mean, so it's hard, like when you describe it, it sounds dramatic enough, but you must have been going pretty darn fast. What was your speed when you—

So Garmin says I was going 68 kph, and I went from 68 kph down to zero in 2.3 seconds according to my Little bike computer that was sitting on my handlebars. So what's that, like close to 35 miles an hour?

Yeah. Wow. And I hit that and then I flew off the bridge. Yeah. Yeah. That's super dramatic. Can definitely relate, as I think my listeners know. And, um, we're glad you're here and having this talk. But yeah, yeah, you can tell already you're a person of, uh, a lot of different skills and talents and experiences. Why don't you share your story a bit with us about when you grew up and to where you are now? Because it's taken a lot of twists and turns.

So, um, my father was a World War II vet and he was, um, He had all the PTSD that came with killing people. And my mom was raised in an orphanage. So she was abandoned by her father when she was 6 months old because he'd met a new woman and she was not going to let him raise a stepdaughter in her household. She was going to be having kids just with him, and that was all she wrote. It was very painful for my grandfather, but my mother overcame that quite a bit. She graduated school, met my father, got married, and then my parents ended up having 3 kids. I was the last of 3 kids. So, um, As a result of that, my parents were always fighters and they really never cared much about the current circumstance because they know it can always be better. They never really were focused on how bad things were. They always had a good uptick sort of view on what was in front of them. My father was homeless when he was one of 7 children. He remembered sleeping in a barn in Tonycourt, New York for some days during the winter while his parents tried to figure out some housing for him. And so things like that that you normally think would be a worst-case scenario, he doesn't look back at that as being a bad worst-case scenario. He was without a home. But he had family, he was out of the elements, even though he didn't have a heater, he didn't have snow coming in, he didn't have wind. There was lots of hay that they could put their blankets on top of, which is pretty darn warm. It's like an insulating effect. So he doesn't look at the worst-case scenario, like, I'm gonna lose my job and my house, as being that bad of a scenario. For him, the worst case isn't so bad. And that was good for me because a lot of the adventure stuff that I do with people, I have to help them overcome that fear of adversity, that what happens if. Part of what we all have to do in life is overcome fears. And I'd say the biggest one is the fear of failure. And the generic human response to the fear of failure is, well, don't try. You know, what does your mom or your wife like to say to you when you leave each day? Stay safe. Well, Ed, if we stayed safe, nothing would ever get done.

Right.

We would still think the Earth is flat. We would have never traveled to the moon. Airplanes would have never been tested. Right. There's no way we would have put motors in cars and sent them down the roads at speeds 10 times that of a horse. This whole concept of stay safe is, is completely diametrically opposed to the human experience.

And so you kept going in your career, and at one point you owned your own tech company.

I did, and I sold it in 2018 in October, you know, a couple months before COVID happened. And, um, I gathered all my friends that I— well, that's not fair. I gathered people from various industries whom I knew and could trust, people whose opinion mattered to me. Some of them I really didn't know that well. And I gathered them in the house and had a professional facilitator. And I said, guys, I am 52 years old and I do not know what I want to do when I grow up. Let's spend 8 hours exploring that as a team. And this facilitator walked— it walked everybody through the process because she'd done something similar. But normally for companies, when they're either trying to get rebranded, restrategized, help everybody get on the same page. Well, she did that with my identity. And she was excited to do it. And she did a great job of doing it. And what came out of that was that I'm a teacher. I'm a storyteller, and I like to take people out of their comfort zones safely. And so that's kind of what I do, and that's how I created Threshold Academy. It's, it's an entity that's basically my family, and we do these really crazy trips, and we take people from places of mediocrity to places of excellence.

Yeah.

Do that with athletes. I coach athletes. It's the same thing. You have to do that if you're a leader. You have to take your employees, however mediocre they are, and get them to step up to the next level. I just do it, you know, for fun on the side.

And along the way too, we can't forget you met this beautiful woman and you have a couple kids. They're adults now. And one of them, at least one of them's on Team USA. And so you get to race with one of your kids.

I do, which is crazy fun. In Denmark in 2018, he and I were the only father and son duo there at the World Championships. And that was kind of fun. I think you spent some time talking to him there as well. There's multiple husband and wife combos. at the World Championships. Seldom are there brothers. It's just too unique of a thing. But the father and son thing was pretty awesome for me. It's probably my favorite picture of all time I have with my youngest. My oldest married his high school sweetheart and he works for a local sports entertainment team here in town. And they have a 1-and-a-half-year-old girl that my wife loves to go see. She goes down there every chance she can get. And the oldest— I mean, the youngest one whom you know, the Team USA kid, he's finishing up at Arizona State right now. He's on the triathlon team there and he's He's looking forward to doing it again next year. He's got a leadership role on the team and he kind of loves it.

That's great. Yeah, so very fascinating background. And I want to sort of hone in a bit on leadership and Threshold Academy and the whole coaching thing. You have a podcast too, right? That's called something with threshold in it because I listened to it.

Threshold Stories. It's people overcoming adversity.

Yeah, so not all of it is, uh, your coached athletes, but it's just People from all walks of life that have overcome adversity. Yeah, it's really good stuff. I've, I've been a faithful listener, I think, since the beginning. So you were an athlete first, and then how did you figure out, like, hey, coaching is important? Because as we talk about this, Jeff, I want our listeners, you know, to really make the connection between what we do as executives. We're, we're athletes. We're, you know, there's something similar between an executive, a leader, and, uh, being an athlete. That's the sort of the metaphor and comparisons I want to be making throughout this. But when did you— so you were an athlete, you were pretty successful, but when did you realize, hey, coaching's a real deal and it helps to improve performance?

Yeah, the segue into coaching, it's kind of my identity that it's a big deal. When I was a young boy, I was a Boy Scout, the leader of our scout troops. I was the senior patrol leader and I earned the rank of Eagle. And I realized that I was just very energized When I could see somebody who was totally mediocre and see them step up and get energized, excited, and actually start seeing that they were making a difference. Not that I was seeing they were making a difference, but they could see that they were making it.

Yeah.

Joey Segers, Chip McMiggins. I'm remembering names from 45 years ago. You know, I see them on social media, but, you know, they went from mediocrity, mediocrity to, you know, excellence right before my eyes. And all I did was task them with things that they couldn't do. Or didn't think they could do, and be there with them as they gave it a shot, as non-judgmentally as I could possibly be. And it's always amazing when you do that. If you take somebody who doesn't have the experience with doing a task and you give them the resources, it's amazing how often they get energized.

Yeah. You've been coaching through Threshold since, what, around 2018, 2019? Correct.

I've only been at it— this is my 3rd year of doing it. Now, I figured out I can't ever coach more than 7 people. That's about as complicated as it can possibly be for me. I don't know how many people roll up or report to you, but I found that once you hit 8, it ain't great. I don't know how Jesus did it with 12.

Yeah, no, that was, uh, yeah, he was, uh, well, he had a little divine inspiration probably, but you're right. Yeah, the, the best number is like somewhere around 3 to 5, I found in my, in my life. And yeah, even in the Army, it's sort of that way. You know, when I was a platoon leader, I had, you know, 1 platoon sergeant, 4 squad leaders who actually reported to the platoon sergeant. And yeah, as a company commander, I had 4 platoon leaders. Yeah, once you get too many, it doesn't work. It's not fair to the student athlete, right? So what are some things— I know you've had tremendous success, so, uh, just kind of building your credibility here as we jump into some leadership things, tell us about the success of your teams.

Yeah, so on my athletes, uh, it's kind of interesting to do this. We're having a gathering in March for people whom I work with, and in that batch of people— and I'm not going to say I'm their coach because that'd be an exaggeration, but I'm certainly a mentor for them all. You know, I have like 3 world champions and 27 times— I had one person reprimand me and say, no, I've made the podium this many times. 27 national championship podium finishes, which is quite an amalgam of people and a lot of success with it. It's a blend. I have older athletes. I got a guy whose name is Matt. He's 51. And then I have young athletes who I work with, like my son Alex. A younger woman named Carolyn. So there's really not a genre per se that I work with. It's obviously independent of education, because if you're an athlete, it's all about discipline. And although theoretically you're supposed to get discipline in school, not everybody does, right? Some people can walk through it. And I would, to jump to your question though, the connection I would say between coaching an athlete and coaching in a company is that you have to demonstrate by example what discipline looks like, right? If you tell people, communicate with your customers, communicate, communicate, communicate, and you don't check What kind of message is that? Or if you're screening calls from people that report to you because you've got yada yada going on and you tell them, hey, you need to be there when a customer calls, what kind of message is that? Especially when they see it happening. Like, if you're in a situation, your phone rings and they look down and they can see on caller ID who it is and you don't take the call, that's the loudest leadership there is. Scrap whatever you say in your meetings and you just, you just wreck the boat. So that discipline is pretty important.

Yeah, and I like— you take a whole person view as a coach. So can you talk a little bit about that? It's not just, uh, improving your— getting a PR, or what's called personal record, at each race. You take a much more holistic approach.

I do, I do. Some people think triathlon as a sport is swim, bike, run. It's, um— I like to think of it as body, mind, and soul. So your mind is, you know, the ultimate source of your thinking. And it's a tissue, right, as we understand, but it's also one of the most powerful ones because the mind can control everything. So I share with people how important it is to do the discipline and stay focused on what's in front of you and not do more than assigned and don't do less than assigned. It's a commonplace thing when I tell somebody to do a 30-minute walk, I'll come back and see that they covered 3.1 miles in 30 minutes. I'm like, guess what? You didn't walk. That meant you averaged 10 minutes per mile doing whatever game you were doing. So you didn't walk. Easy days are supposed to be easy. They're not supposed to be hard. But also, probably the most important thing is I pray with all my athletes and I pray about them as well. And sometimes I'll just text them and I'll say, hey, I just prayed for you. And I don't know why I just did. It just came to my mind and I did that. I know within my first group, there's a couple of guys and they gather every week for a Bible study independent of me. They just met through me. But this has nothing to do with me. They have their own Bible study that they're doing amongst themselves. And they don't know this, but that really energizes me to know that they've recognized that as an athlete, integrating the message of Christ into who you are and what you do is powerful and relatively easy. A lot of people think it's rocket science to figure out how to incorporate faith with athleticism, and in general, it's not. I mean, how many times, Ed, have you prayed while you've been running?

Yeah, all the time. Get to the finish line. I pray to pass Jeff. I was like, where's Jeff? I gotta pass him. I think some of the moments I treasure the most, I know you do and your athletes, you know, is, yeah, it's great when you get a podium finish and get a PR and, you know, you do great things for our country and it's very, very satisfying. But it's the prayers right before the race, you know, when we gather and we just huddle up and we don't care what people think. We're just there. We just wanna glorify, you know, God and everything that we do. And in same in the workplace, you know.

So so you don't know this story, but it's your story. So when you and I were in Romania together, and we were we did only one event together in Romania, and it was the shortest rent event of the whole experience there. And we were together for much of the event, and at the last section, that last little run leg that we were supposed to do, because the way the course was laid out, we kept seeing each other every minute. Yeah, just because of that. And every time you passed me. I was praying for you. One, I was praying for you not have a heart attack, but two, that you cross that finish line with the right attitude, right? As opposed to, did I catch Jeff, yes or no? If no, then feel bad. If yes, then feel good, right? I didn't want that. You didn't want that either. But every time I saw you, because your wife was there as well, that my prayer was very consistent. Let Ed cross this finish line feeling good about Ed. And when you came across the line, I think you had a flag. I asked him to give you a flag where you carry a flag. Yeah, yeah.

For sure.

Totally. The look on your face was like, thank you, God, for answering that prayer.

Yeah. And thank God the race is finished. Because it doesn't matter how short or long these races are, you give everything you've got and, you know, you're depleted at the end. Which, you know, again, going back to leadership, right, it's— you don't want to hold back. You want to give everything that you have in the workplace to whoever you serve in the workplace, and you want to be your very best. You don't want to shortcut anything. Sometimes it's tempting, right, in a course to— a couple things— to give up, to throw in the towel. But you don't. You keep your eye on the prize, the finish line. You understand those things. So what are some other comparatives, do you think, racing and being an athlete and in the workplace? We're just riffing here. So one is you talked about the discipline, and then two, the vision of finishing these races. And then you mentioned another one, which was encouraging one another, right? through prayer or just through, hey, shouting out at someone, raising the hand, thumbs up, whatever, just to encourage them. We need that in the workplace too. Hey, thanks for all that you're doing. Even though we're professional or not professional, we're professional amateur athletes on the world stage and we are representing our country. And so we want to do so in a very faithful way that makes our country proud. So what other comparatives do you think there are between You know, some of that which we do as an athlete, and for our listeners, they may be marathon runners.

Yeah, so I would say one of the easiest things you can do to pull out that coach, the human coach inside of you, and this costs you nothing and it has no measurable ROI. The temptation is to conclude that it's going to take time, so therefore I shouldn't do it if there's no ROI. That's the temptation here. But just put a little thing on your calendar, a reminder once a day, call somebody who you haven't called in a long time who's worked for you, under you. And thank them. Maybe you can't call them, maybe you just want to do a text because you're not interested in this long, drawn-out conversation, which may happen. Or you don't want to do an email for, you know, you just, you just don't. I would, you know, a text message saying, hey, I just saw some of our marketing material on the shelf, looks really good. Send.

Yeah.

Or, hey, um, I just talked with this customer, they were proud of the work you did. Send. Very short things that cost near nothing at all. And that becomes totally contagious, especially when you see that person later and they have a smile on their face. when they see you that they don't have necessarily when they see their direct report, or they don't have on their face when they see the customer that they serve, whoever that customer is, internal or external. You know, that free offering of good job or that free offering of thank you, you can't put a— there's no way you can stick a worth on that.

Yeah, that's, that's good.

Well, we forget to do it. We get caught up by the next meeting. I got to be in a meeting in 3 minutes. Guess what? You can send a text to somebody who did a great job 2 weeks ago in less than 3 minutes. I promise you.

Yeah.

And in fact, you can probably do it while the meeting is being introduced, as everybody else is chatting and people are saying thank you and that you can probably do it right then as well.

Those are really good points. And you're right, it's something that we get too busy and we forget, or maybe we don't need encouragement as much, or we don't think we do. And so we attribute sort of that same expectation to someone else. But we always have to remember that everyone is unique, right? When you coach your athletes, You customize, you personalize the way that you work with them, and some require more.

Yeah, I have to—

some require—

I don't have much cut and paste when it comes to athletic plans. I have cut and paste for workouts, but not plans.

Yeah, it's in the same way in the leadership with people, that everyone's different and you should treat them as such and understand how they like to be worked with and things like that. So, Jeff, one area that we skipped over, you started your adulthood in the Peace Corps, and that has led you to this sort of adventurous spirit you still have today. And you go back and you take groups of people with you, and you just got back on a pretty exciting trip. We had a lot of FOMO. What is that? FOMO? FOMO? Fear of missing out over here while watching all your pictures. But yeah, tell us a little bit about that and how that sort of shapes who you are as well. Sure.

So when I was in college, As I was getting ready to graduate, I had— I could have pursued the route that I had studied, which was theoretical physics, and taken a job at General Dynamics in St. Louis working on something called the F-14 fighter craft. Brand new technology. Now it's antiquated. And I just got convicted. I said, I need to go out and do something and give back, because if I go to work for them, all I'm going to do is take, take. It's going to be more salary. I said, I'm going to go give back. And I decided to join the Peace Corps. And after I went through the process, I ended up in Nepal. And everybody knows Nepal because of— if you've ever seen a Paramount movie, there's a picture of a mountain with stars on the top. Most people don't know that's one of the mountains in Nepal. Granted, it's a virtual one, but still. But it's home of Mount Everest and I don't know how many of the world's top 10 mountains. It's the size and shape of Tennessee. It's got a population of something like 30 million and change. So it's pretty densely populated for places that can be populated. But I just fell in love with the people. I was young. I learned the language. I can read it and write it and speak it. I had a tribe that I lived with. I can do the same thing with much of their language, certainly not all of it, but much of it. And when I came back to the United States and I began my regular life, I basically forgot about Nepal, like almost all Peace Corps volunteers do. They have good memories, but I decided I wanted to get back and get reconnected with some of the people I worked with, some of my students. And over the years, I just kept staying close with these people. So I had 2 kids— I call them kids— who, you know, they were from lower-class families. Their parents didn't have much of anything, but they basically lived with me. I had a little mud hut on the Indian border in the middle of a valley with some jungles nearby. I was a schoolteacher and I worked in and around the local schools and they were like 12 years old, but they hung out with me. I helped them with homework. They got to read my National Geographics. They got to experience what it's like to be an American. I was on them about taking risks and not playing it safe and all that goes with it. Well, now one of them is an elected official. He's a politician at the—

Wow.

Nearly highest of levels. He introduced me to number 2 in Nepal when I was there. And the other one is a headmaster of a school and college, CEO of a college, or a— they call it a college over there. But he's, you know, he's got 50 employees who are all reporting to him. And I literally talked to those guys monthly for 35 years.

Yeah, that's cool. Yeah.

Which is a whole long time. I know all their families, their kids. In fact, one of them, his daughter is probably like 8 or 9 years old right now, but she's gonna probably do 10th grade or 11th grade here in my house at some local school. I'm just gonna make it— I'll be 60-something years old at that time, but so what? I can keep going on and doing it. So anyways, from there came the idea of, if you know these people, you can read and write and speak the language, and you love trekking and hiking, why don't you make up something? And so I said, okay, let's spend a week in the high Himalaya doing— there's 5 major treks in Nepal that gather all the attention. I don't like Everest. It's the highest likelihood of illness, crappiest views of all the treks. Not that it's bad views, but compared to the others, it's not the best. So I pick one of the other 4 ones and I just cycle through them. I do different routes and I take people with me. So they hike with me for 8 or 9 days and then we go back to my village for 3 or 4 days and I let them see all the work and all the people. We've been— that they— that have been a part of my life for 35 years. It's cool for them because they get real Nepal. They get to see people's families, people who don't have exposure to tourism, and that— it's very powerful for them all.

Yeah, it looks incredible. I know Simran and I have always been wanting to go, and some year it'll, it'll all work, I'm sure. But yeah, that's pretty cool. And then finally, I know as we wrap up here, you also write books. So in the show notes, we will drop your books, where to find your books, where to find Threshold Academy, your podcast.

Sure.

Because you're such an interesting person, Jeff. So we covered a lot of area. We could go for hours. Unfortunately, we're limited a little bit in time, but we covered things like, uh, leadership and the Peace Corps and, and music and just athletes and Threshold Academy.

What did we miss, or anything you want to double down on as we I'd kind of like to challenge everybody to, um, get with their friends and find out things in their life where they're mediocre. Maybe they're mediocre at taking care of themselves. Maybe they're mediocre at staying in touch with family. Maybe they're mediocre at that. And get those same people who you trusted with that question to help formulate a way to overcome mediocrity, because that's my MO. That's my life song. I want to see people overcome mediocre. And for the most part, our culture is going to tell you to stay mediocre because it's safe. Overcome mediocrity. That's my, my challenge to folks. That's why people hire me as a coach. Yeah.

No, I love that. That's a great way to end because, yeah, it's no fun being mediocre. And I certainly don't want to ever be myself. So, Jeff, thank you for being our guest. Thank you for being my friend. Such a fascinating person. Miss you a bunch. Look forward to seeing you at these events that we spoke about in March and April. And thanks for all that you do to make the world a better place.

All right, see ya.

That wraps it up. Digital Voices.

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