The Power of Learning How To Learn (feat. Andrew Barry)

Hey everybody. Welcome to the Building Public Podcast. I'm your host, KP, and on this show, I interview world-class entrepreneurs, ambitious startup founders, creators, and builders on the internet who are boldly building the future in public. This podcast is my excuse to take you all on a curious journey to understand, learn, and hopefully be inspired by the worldviews, insights, and stories of these fabulous people changing the world. So far, I've gotten the rare privilege to sit down with the Incredible guests like Gary Vee, Alexis Ohanian, Kat Cole, Sahil Lavingia, and many more leaders. So check out the full podcast listing at buildingpublicpodcast.com. Now buckle up and get ready for our latest episode. Hello everybody. Welcome to yet another episode of Building Public Podcast. I'm your host, KP, and today I got a good friend of mine. I bribed him to be a guest here. Just kidding. This is an episode that has been in the making for at least 2 or 3 years. We've talked about, you know, being on each other's podcasts. We've like had numerous calls strategizing about, you know, career, life, business. And I realized that I never really had Andrew on my podcast. So like this year, wanted to start it with a bang, you know, made a list of the people that I really wanted to have on the pod. And of course, Andrew made the cut. Andrew, would love to have you. Happy to have you. Welcome to the show.

Yeah, I am very honored to be here. I'm very excited for this conversation. Like you said, we've been having these conversations offline. So it's It's kind of cool that we'll record this one.

Yeah. So Andrew Berry, for the folks who may not know about you, Andrew, give our audience a quick take, 30, 40, 50, 60-second take on who you are, what you're building, and what you're up to.

Yeah. So I run a company called Curious Lion. We're a learning culture advisory firm for primarily sales teams in tech. So any, you think of any sales team or a team of people that you've worked with, we help them become better versions of themselves a better, more high-performing team, and therefore, you know, better revenue generators for their businesses. And we do that by focusing on holistic things like culture and behavior change and skill mastery, those kind of things. So it's been quite a wild journey, though. It didn't start like that, as you know, I'm sure many that come on the show and many who listen will be familiar with. It's definitely not a linear path, but that's, that's where we are now.

It's an evolution. And even from what I know of Curious Lion from last year when we last talked about this topic, from now to now, it feels like there was a tremendous amount of iteration and evolution. So, but let's step back, zoom out to your entire career as a whole.

Yeah.

One thing that before, for folks who are listening and like, you know, this is something I have to put it out there, like Andrew, when I think of Andrew, what comes to mind to me is this guy is Mr. Education and you have such a great grasp of not just, you know, educating and like teaching frameworks and principles that are really helpful for people, but like, I feel like you have a way to inspire them to apply them. And I think that's sometimes a missing piece because, you know, education can be just very puristic endeavor. And you've— every time I talk to you, I walk away feeling like, man, this guy's figured out a way to get people to apply these in their businesses or cohorts or, you know, in their projects. And so— So I know you have a love, you have a heart for education. Curious Lion, I know you would describe it as an edtech company, right? But where did it all start? Like, you know, you didn't wake up one day and think, all right, education is my calling, let's get there. What was your career like? Give us a step-by-step inflection point journey of your career.

Yeah, so first of all, thanks for kind of pinpointing it like that, 'cause that is, I think, a big part of it. It's how we learn is the thing, the question that I've always been pursuing, right? How do we really learn? And I've learned, the answer to that question through my own learnings. You know, so the sort of stepping points on this journey are those things that I've learned that, and some very like specific things around like being part of cohorts and courses that like you and I have built. We both, I know, have attended. I, you know, I'm always signing up for new cohorts. I learn something new from them all the time, right? And like that idea of learning together and learning from your peers more than you do from, you know, your instructors and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, so that, I mean, that's where you and I can have bonded on a lot in the past, but— Yeah. Yeah, it all started in South Africa as on a career path to become a chartered accountant, a professional accountant. Here in the US, it's called a CPA, a certified public accountant. And so, yeah, in South Africa, I did that. I did the qualification, became a CA. I practiced for, I mean, you had to do an apprenticeship for 3 years. So, if that counts as practice, I did 3 years. But basically, as soon as that was over, I got out of there. But I didn't leave the firm. I was at KPMG at the time, I didn't leave because in that apprenticeship, like one of the core tenets or components of it is training, right? So live in-person training you do once or twice a year and everyone would get together. And I just like fell in love with the role of the people that were standing up in front of the room. And I like, I wanted to do that. You know, I wanted, I like to hang out with them afterwards. Like, how do I get this gig? How do you, you know, do that? So I basically figured out what that path looked like. made it happen. And so that, that moved me from Cape Town to Johannesburg, where I took on a job where I was just flying around the country for 3 weeks out of every month to teach.

For training?

For training. For like, so not, not actually even teach, to facilitate, right? So like we did these like big facilitator workshops. And so that was amazing. I had so much fun, met some amazing people doing that and really kind of fell in love with the practice of facilitation. And then an opportunity came up to come here to the States to learn, to develop the material that we were using. And so I didn't know if I was interested in the material development, the instructional design piece of it yet, but I did know I wanted to come to America and hang out and have a fun time for 2 years. So I jumped at that opportunity and came here and I've never looked back. I had the 2-year thing, it turned into 3. We could talk about visas here, I'm sure, because I know you've had to go through that. Yeah. So I did the whole visa thing, L-1 and stuff, and then got a green card through KPMG. And yeah, I just kind of took on that career. So here in the States for about 10 years, I did developing a material and then it went into, we had an executive education group. So now we were also, we were not just creating internal. So we weren't creating internal anymore, we're creating training, but we were selling it. So I got a bit of that like business development experience as well.

Right.

Exactly. Exactly. But all in this world of education, corporate education.

And how did that translate into starting Curious Lion?

Yeah, so I got to a point there. So I also like did a CPA here and everything I needed to like get qualified. And then that's how the green card came in. And so then I got to this point with that green card that I was, you know, now I had options, right? I wasn't stuck there. Not that I don't regret any of my time there. It was amazing. I learned a ton and I never would, I wouldn't be here if I wasn't at a firm of that size. But my time came up when I just, I was stuck in a bit of the, you know, rat race of work and it was just like the same thing every year. So, I also thought there was a better way to do what we were doing. At the time, I thought that better way was with high-quality video production. And so, I was very, yeah, I was like very big into that.

And this is what, 2011, '12? When was

this? This would have been, no, so I came to the States in 2009 and then I joined So then I joined a company. There was a bridge between Curious Lion, which was like, also for anybody listening, like, you know, taking these big— it looks like I left a big firm and I started my own company, but there was a really crucial— it's basically like 18 months where I joined a startup as a stepping stone, which gave me— it taught me how to like be self-sustaining and like figure shit out myself and all that kind of stuff. But I didn't— I was still getting a salary, you know. Like what we did at On Deck, right? Like it was, so you get like the best of both worlds.

You had ownership almost like you had the autonomy, but also you were, you know, you had a paycheck. Were you full-time there at that startup?

I was, yeah. So that was for, yeah, like I said, about 18 months. I, so it was actually started, it's a company called Lobster Inc. They were eventually acquired by Ecolab after I had left, but the founders were friends of mine from South Africa. So wildly successful. It was a lot of fun. It was in the hospitality industry. So we were working with Marriott and Hilton and companies like that. And so it was a job of, I basically helped them establish an office in the States and I ran that office for them. And then I eventually sort of took over some of the, yeah, yeah, like the sort of head of learning kind of role, you know? So like what was the product we were creating? And I learned there. So we had a bit, they had a big Cape Town office I'd often fly back to be at that was filled with film school graduates. So I learned a ton about the science of filmmaking from these people who, and we were going around filming at hotels and creating, you know, training for these big chains, these big brands. Yeah, so that was a good little stepping stone. And then, but like, I always knew like I wanted to do my own thing, you know? And so, yeah, about just over a year, 18 months into it, I took the plunge. I'd built up, like, I never forget, like, I, this is also like, it's so, it's easy to look back, right? And you can sort of connect the dots, but you never, you never know going in. Like I, so I had thought I had built up the courage to do this because I thought I had a friend who I used to work with at KPMG who had moved to JP Morgan. We had a great relationship. He was in a sort of buying, you know, had a bit of buying power. I was like, oh, cool. Like conversations that had started a bit. I was like, this is it. Like, this will be my first client, it'll pay, you know, this is like, this is worth the risk, you know? And to this day, I've never worked, I've never had a purchase order from JP Morgan. Never done any work with them, you know? But whatever it was, it was the thing that like gave me the confidence to do that. And then, you know, you just hustled, hustled, hustled, hustled.

So tell me about the first 3 or maybe first 6 months of your journey at Curious Lion. Like, what do you remember distinctly? Like, what was the mood like? What was the like mindset? in your head those first 6 months.

Yeah.

And so this PO didn't come. So clearly that, that, so you didn't have that easy start you thought.

No. So there was a period, so we were living in Harlem in New York City at the time, and which was great, you know, it was fun. Like Harlem was like really up and coming at the time. So there was like this, and I remember it was a summer. So there was this like, there was like a, you know, it was a building of energy and excitement. I was super excited, but it, it started to drag along and like You know, I wasn't getting calls. I wasn't getting emails. Like things weren't happening.

And your MVP was, what was your MVP? Like what was your offer at the time?

It was, I mean, geez, I look back, I had so much to learn. Right. So I didn't know, I didn't know anything about marketing, anything about sales. So like I was figuring stuff out, but basically what I thought I'd be doing is I would be basically like instructional design work for companies and really all it was—

Like a functional consultant just for instructional design. Yeah.

Yeah, but from the beginning, I always used the royal we. I like made it sound like it was a company, but it was just me, you know, like it was just me just figuring it out. And it was, I probably, yeah, right.

You were almost an agency, right?

Yeah, yeah, totally. And I was trying to, you know, trying to get in the door with companies like JP Morgan, like trying to pretend like I was a lot bigger than we were. But it was fun because I was learning. I was learning all the time. And I'll say there was a big unlock that came. But the other thing I started to do on the side is I was like, oh, I'm going to create courses and sell them. And I remember thinking it was the easiest thing in the world. And I just like, I would like make these videos and do these like, you know, splash pages, like create like landing pages and stuff. But like, I actually also knew absolutely nothing about it. And like, I cringe at those things that I was building then.

Well, that's a sign of growth, right? That's like, that's great. That means you've grown exponentially since then. Yeah.

And it's like, it's one of my favorite, I think, Julian Shapiro wrote about this and it's like he wrote a great piece that referenced a lot of the people that have talked about this before. And it's the faucet. I don't know if you've read that article, right? I needed to like get all that shitty brown water out. Yeah.

And it's bad rainwater out.

Yeah. Right, exactly. And it's, you know, it took me probably longer than I would have wanted. But I, so yeah, at the time I also started taking some online courses. And so like Rite of Passage, Building a Second Brain. I see Tiago's book there behind you. Yeah, he was on the pod too, of course.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So like I learned a ton obviously from those courses, but I also learned like that those to me, those indie, early indie course creators were the ones that really had figured out because they had to, right? Because they were like, the market was determined like their success, right? So they had to iterate fast and, you know, all the things that we know around building a business, because that's what they were doing. And through that, they learned what works.

Yeah.

Yeah. But they learned what works. They learned how people really learn. And it's about, and it's that cohorts and the accountability and the You know, the, the, just like the way you position content and what you get people to do with it and doing being the operative word, like getting people to take action and giving each other feed, all that sort of stuff. And that wasn't happening in corporate at all, you know? So yeah, around that time I opportunistically made friends with someone at a company who had just joined a company called PagerDuty who went on to IPO and they're a massive company now. Yeah. Yeah. And so this was pre-IPO and she had just joined and she's like, I don't have any budget right now, but we kept in touch and she was, you know, she great. We became really, really good friends. And a year later, she came back to me. She's like, I've got this, you know, a little bit of budget, got this little idea. And so we started doing small, you know, small little POs together, little SOWs. And then, you know, one thing led to another and then to another. They're still a client of ours, you know, one of our biggest clients. And it was at PagerDuty and with her. Her name's Felicia. Her name was Felicia Jones. She passed away sadly and suddenly last year. Oh no. And it's very tragic because she was an incredible woman who had An incredible vision for how to develop talent. And so, and it was, it was amazing to, to work with her and get to bounce ideas with her. And so I give her a lot of credit for a lot of the ideas that I now talk about, you know, all the time, because it was, she gave me a chance to actually put them into practice at PagerDuty, you know, and it was, it was amazing.

Yeah. Remember we always talked about belief capital, right? When you were on deck. And I think one of the things that I always thought that was interesting was it's those people who spark that imagination, who kindle that fire in you, and then they give you that sort of keys to the kingdom too. Like, even I felt that when I was at On Deck, and, you know, to an extent when you were there too, we all had these hypotheses around like, here's how I would want to do it, here's how I want to test this. And then I felt like we were empowered to do them.

Definitely.

You know, I agree. First cohorts, and like, you know, you had a fantastic cohort on that, course creators. Which I still remember, like, one, it was like crazy. Those times were crazy. Like one of the best buzzing, you know, thing that I felt from outside in. And I know a lot of friends who took that. So it's those people who not only open the door, but like say, do the thing that you want to do. Like, you know, like put your philosophy into practice. They're the special ones. They're always the special ones for me. Totally.

Totally. And also I'll never forget her. And you're right. It was belief capital that was backed up by like actual Yeah, yeah, that's right.

Yeah, yeah. Also gave you means to kind of extend your runway and be in business. Yeah, that's fantastic. I mean, that is a great segue to talk about how we learn. And, um, I think it's, it's a topic that's so close to my heart. And I remember one of my first conversations with you, we jammed on this for like, I don't know, 45 minutes on a call. Yeah. Because I found out that the best way that I learned was not very obvious to me growing up, despite the fact that I was an academic and I was, I was, I was a topper, I was top 1%, all these things. But I did it by cramming facts and data, like, you know, the very Indian, the desi way. And like, I never really enjoyed it, never really— it really didn't drive me as much. Yeah, I just did it just for the books, right? Only in the last 5 years I fell in love with learning. But I realized this framework around you have to first seek, you know. And this is my framework, and I want to hear your framework. There's like the triangle that I've said I keep thinking about. There's this seek first, which means you have to really be curious. And really, you have to— it has to come out of your personal curiosity. You can't fake it. It has to be authentically curious, which is what I try to do on the podcast as well, in my Twitter as well. Anytime I try to not be curious, it always bombs. Yeah. Anytime I'm genuinely curious, I gather this weird, like, confidence to ask the thing that most people are afraid to ask because I'm doing it for myself selfishly. There's that curiosity, there's the seeking thing. And then once you seek, You hear new insight and then I go to do. Immediately apply that insight. Because if you're not applying it, it evaporates quickly. And then you go, you know, like there's so many insights that we've heard of which sounds smart, but we never applied. So we don't even know if they work. So you go from do and then after do you go to teach. And that's my favorite thing, which I never knew. Because I thought you just, you know, learn and do, learn and do. But actually when you teach, you learn twice because you're having to revise it in your head before you say it out because you don't want to sound stupid. Yeah. caliber, they will actually ask you really intellectually stimulating questions so you cover all the bases. So that's the triangle that I have in my mind where you, you learn, you do, you teach, and then you come back to learn again, fill the gaps. You know, it's worked tremendously well, but it cannot do it alone. You can't do it alone.

No.

You will need other peers who are also on the same path with you for this to come to fruition and for this, for you to like really reach that top level. You know, what has been your journey Oh yeah, that's

a good question. And I think the answer is what I put into what we do, right? What we're trying to create, which is— so a few things. You mentioned the word curiosity, and like, to me, it's so key. It's no coincidence that Curious Lion is the name. Yeah, right.

Of course.

It all starts there, 100%. I love the triangle. I totally agree with those points. I think these things could fit in one of those 3, but just for added nuance. I often talk about reflection and it's like reflection is kind of built into that, like the teaching part, there's reflection, but like also after doing, you should reflect. So just, you know, making sure you hit that one. And then sharing often comes before teaching where it's just, here's what I've learned. Right. And then, and then like, you know, that sort of gives permission.

I feel like reflection and sharing are like 2 adjacent steps, right? When you reflect. Totally.

Right. Exactly.

Reflecting private in your journal. Right. Oh shit. Yeah. You can take those lessons and put it on content and then that's sharing with others.

Yeah. Exactly. Building in public is a great example of all of this. Yeah. So yeah, so I had learned that through my journey as this is, and now it serves me well, right? Every time, like right now I'm learning about business development and sales process because that's the function I need to be focused on building for Curious Lion. And so I'm doing, I'm following the exact same approach, right? I went to an event and that's the one that we were talking about off offline in Atlanta. Now I'm like putting into practice these things. I've got a little accountability group that we're sharing what we're learning. So, so yeah, put that into practice. Now flipping this, right? So I always think of this through the lens of how do we teach others, right? You know, like, and so I think this also brings a key point, which is if anybody out there, you know, is, is also just thinking of this for themselves as a learner, you can't force someone to learn, right? You can't, you can, all you can do is create the conditions for learning to happen. Yeah.

Wow.

And what that means to an individual is that when I stopped thinking of learning as like, to your point about cramming, yeah, for like, as we taught at school, right? Like learning as this like point in time event that has, that is like, you have, there's a completion date, right? Like learning doesn't end, right? It does. There's no end. You can't learn and then you've learned all there is to learn. Like you, as soon as I started thinking about learning is like lifelong learning, like I'm always learning, learning is a process. then it just unlocked everything. Now I'm learning all the time. And one example of this, I encourage everyone on my team to share. We have this thing, we have this scoreboard, like we track key metrics. And one of them is, what have you learned this week? And I say that like, it's anything. It doesn't have to be something related to work. So we've got someone who's like interested in Greek mythology and another one who's like learning about gardening. You know, it's like, that's, it's just so like, and to me, the value of that is you recognize that you're learning all the time.

Yeah.

And then you can start to think, how are you learning? Right. And then you can start to get better at that.

Yeah. No, I think you touched on something brilliant there, which is, you know, I actually don't think a lot of people actively think about their weekly reflection and like even think like, what have I learned in the last week? Or even like, what have I learned today? And the more you exercise that, it has to be a muscle, something like that, where learning, I think, is like a muscle where the more you feel like you're learning, the more you want to learn. you know, like newer things and you get curious. And what happens is you just tend to observe reality more. A lot of people I feel like are just like sleeping at the wheel or like, you know, they're just, you know, not observing, taking in. There's this beautiful saying once I heard where like, if you aren't feeling astonished by world around you every once in a while, you're freaking sleeping, you know? And I thought that was so crazy because adults, like, as one thing that I love, and I'm curious to hear how you feel about Leo, is that I challenge myself when I'm next to Neil to be as amazed about everything that he—

Yes.

You know, it's hard to be amazed as an adult because you have this cynical point of view. Like, we see people on Twitter, we see people on LinkedIn, everyone's like dunking on each other. There's this cynical nature to adult life. Like, everything is a joke, sarcastic. But that awe and wonder that kids have, you know, about the basics, and that is how you create the next element in the periodic table. Right. You don't create the next— you don't invent it by just saying, oh, by being cynical. Right. And I think we lose that as well sometimes because we just get carried away. You know?

We do. We do. We get distracted. We get— our attention is weak. I mean, it's constantly getting pulled from us. It's like forces against it. You have to take control of that.

You really have to be around people who are curious as well.

Yeah, totally. And so that's— yeah, exactly. It goes back to, you said it was the beginning of all of this was authentic curiosity. Whenever you have that, you are able to follow that rabbit hole. as long as you need to, right? So it all starts with that. And there's— and motivation is an element of that as well. So if you have authentic curiosity, motivation will be there as well because, yeah, you know, you'll want to keep learning about it. So that's super key. And oh, the point— yeah, just sitting with my son, like, I— that was— it's actually such a gift to have that in your room, in your home. Yeah. You know, to like remind you like, oh shit, like without a doubt, the best times I have with him is when I'm sitting there with that like same wonder. Yeah. As a state of being. And yeah, it's so much fun.

I mean, I am just like— it feels— the other thing that I learned from Neo, which, you know, I know it sounds really silly. I know at like a meta level, this sounds silly, like 2 grown-ass men talking about their toddlers learning from them. But I think that is the point because this is considered silly to most majority of the population, and hence they're missing the point. And when I watch Neo, who's like 21 months old, for anyone listening, Leo is 3 years roughly close to. Right? Uh, Andrew's son Neil just doesn't give up when he fails. I am shocked. Like, he has no ego and doesn't give a shit what you and I think. If he wants to, like, get that— he's, like, trying to reach for things. If he wants to get that ThinkFridge magnet on the fridge, he will get it. He will jump, jump, jump. And sometimes you're like, are you crazy? It's 88th time and he's still trying. You're like, what the hell, man? Like, you know, and So there's this unbridled optimism in him that I love. And I'm like, wow, I'm not around people like that a lot. A lot of my age people are freaking cynical. People are cynical about Web3, people are cynical about AI, people are cynical about any boom, any trend. Instead of peeling the onion and trying to discover what's inside with curiosity, and if you don't like it, fine. I think we just like—

Right.

Quick to brush things off, quick to give up as well. Like even with business, what I— the thing that's been shocking to me, Andrew, the last 3, 4 months, and you'll get a laugh at this, is that when I talked to you last time, I think both of us agree, can agree that we both thought that I had enough business skills to be an entrepreneur, be a founder myself, right? Definitely.

In fact, I probably told you to.

Well, you told me to, I remember. Yeah, go for it, KP. All right, I left On Deck. After that, we— I joined day one. Just as a—

Yep.

One last, you know, chapter, one last stepping stone. And I felt that I was doing exactly what I was doing at On Deck, which is kind of, I'm just extending this inevitable thing. Like, if I want to be a founder, I got to go figure this out myself, do it. And so, day one was awesome. No, I think I had no complaints, lovely team. But I was like, okay, this, I gotta go do this thing. Since November, I've been punched in the face every week. By reality and by things that are out of my control. And it's so fascinating, frustrating actually, you know?

Yeah.

Lots of fascinating depending on how I look at it.

Yeah, exactly.

Right? I'm like, how can you? And I just taught 500 people how to build business at On Tech and I'm like punched in the face, you know, in November and December and January. I'm like, wow. You know, and so back to your point around like you think one thing and you enter the arena.

Yes.

The arena changes, the conditions changes, market macro conditions change, you know?

Yeah.

All these things change and you're like, wow, you know?

But,

um,

yeah,

but, but going back to it, and then I've noticed that sometimes there's self-talk in me says you're trying too hard, you're trying too many times when I'm comparing myself with my peers. But when I compare myself with Neil, there's no such thing as you're trying too hard, trying too many times. Yeah. Because he doesn't understand the concept of failure. He just like will keep trying until he gets it and then he moves on to the next thing. So back to what I asked you about the first 6 months, In retrospect, you probably don't even think about it today on a weekly or daily basis about how the 6 months were.

No, no. But it

was important for you to go through that.

Yeah, 100%. And I think that's, I think, is a key point that you just teased out about also about how we learn. And that is, by the way, I love that you said, you like, it felt like you're reading my mind because the man in the arena sort of speech came into mind and then you said into the arena. So, it is, that is, so that was me at Lobster as well. I was like one foot away from the arena. It wasn't until I put my foot in the arena and took those punches, you know, to the face that you learn. Yeah. And so like a key part of learning is realizing that, I mean, this is like, it's become trite now to say this, but it's actually like, I don't think people like fully understand what it means. Failure is important.

Yeah.

Failure is learning.

Wow.

Like really, really understand that. Like be okay with failure. I say this to my team all the time. I'd much rather have you make a mistake than not do anything at all and be paralyzed by fear or, you know, whatever. Like, so that for me is just like, you've got to deal with the consequences of it and like trust the process, trust yourself that you will deal with it. Like, that's— and that's how you build resilience and all, you know. There's just so many benefits to this, but it's hard. I mean, it's hard. It took me until my 30s to get the courage to try.

Right. And I think, you know, failing, you know, there's a lot of people, like, probably because of school and how we learned initially, We failed in private in school in a way.

Yes.

Because you were like most people, like who knew that you had a D in math or science? Like maybe like 25 people. Now the whole 45,000 people followers that I have will get to see that MKP is failing in public, you know?

Yeah.

So the hit is harder if I fail or if I'm like, you know, picking myself up. But that's exactly why I think you should keep going, you know? And so the more I think about it, it's like, This is why a lot of people are so attached to W-2 jobs. They're so attached to not taking a risk, not following their heart, because they don't want to fail and look like a fool in front of their friends and family and the world, you know. But the other side of failure is learning, in what you just said. I thought that's brilliant, you know, like failure is just the means

to learn,

to learn,

to learn.

So, and, and all these indie creators that you said learned much faster is not a miracle, not, it's not an accident. It's because they just went through that tunnel many, many times over and over again because they had to.

Yeah, they had to, to get product-market fit and build a sustainable business.

The number of business ideas I've tested in the last 40 days, insanely high compared to the last 3 years because I have to. Because I have no—

Well, that's a lot. There's no 30 days. That's a lot coming from you,

right? Coming from me, given like I already— like, you know,

but you already did a lot.

Yeah, but Andrew, this hits so different. Like, this is so different because But the 31st, as a grown-ass man, you know, I have a family, the money doesn't hit the bank account. So there's no paycheck. And so I gotta keep paying the bills and like it hits different compared to side projects. And like, it's kind of like—

Right, right.

Like it's like dating versus committing and marrying something. It's like different, right? Like casual dating is not. So now I look back at my own self from when we both worked together at On Deck and something like that was cringe KP. That's like nothing. This is the real resilient KP because I'm like, every day I'm getting punched in the face. And that kid was— he was like, yeah, I had the talents, I had all these, you know, all these great things. And I— but I played it in the easy mode. Like, I had a huge paycheck from On Deck helping me every month. And I'm like, they get to be— I get to be me. Now I'm like, whoa, this is, this is, you know, different. So I have more respect for people who are in the arena now.

Exactly. And I think you'd agree with me when you say that those side projects never really had a chance to be anything truly big because You didn't have your entire heart and soul behind them like you do now.

Yeah. And the commitment and like, to your point, like when I'm working with a client now, I'm committed. They've never seen me. So they're shocked. They're shocked because I worked some of these clients, you know, part-time, like, or I would do like some growth consulting, some product hunt help here and there. I would like barely show up because I had this entitlement that I don't need this. Like, I'm like, I got— I'm me, you know, like, I don't need this. Now I go 120% in every project because I need this. But also, this is the standard that I have to set for the next few years and months, you know, for me. So I'm like, I got to live up to my own, you know, I have to embody this excellent standard that I want to set, right? So I can't like dick around. Like, so I'm like very, yeah, like a lot of my clients were like shocked that I'm like hands-on. I'm like, yeah, hands-on. Yeah, you're getting some KP now.

Yeah, well, you know, and I think that's an important thing for anybody who's thinking about doing this. And like, again, I only say this stuff with the benefit of hindsight, right? This is not something, you know, kind of going in, but like you have to do that. There's an element of like you have to pay your school fees, right? You have to like earn your dues in doing this. Also in doing that and being fully committed and hands-on, you're gonna learn, you're gonna tighten that feedback loop and that learning flywheel so much, like so much, you're gonna lock it in. So there's just so many benefits to this. Yeah. And so like, I kind of like wanna say to people like, it's gonna be okay. Like, you just have to fuck up. You have to lose some money. You have to make mistakes and you have to piss people off. And like, don't worry. Like, the market's big enough. There are a lot of people out there that like it. You will find your people. You will find your stuff. And this is the only way to do it is kind of just bash through walls.

Yeah. I mean, there's no half measures, right? It's like, yeah. But it's been quite a humbling experience, man. You know?

It is.

It's quite a humbling experience. So, moving on to some of the frameworks that you have developed over the years, you know, do you want to touch on like one or two really impactful frameworks that really helped you or you've seen them benefit people?

Yeah. So, the one, like, this was just something I started sharing online was this idea of the circle of learning. But that is essentially that triangle you drew out is that. So, that was— I was surprised, quite frankly, how much of an impact that had on a corporate audience. That felt like kind of obvious. But that's one of these cool things that I think you might have written about. We definitely maybe talked about it. It's like, it's the— actually Nicholas Cole and Dickie Bush talk about Nicholas Cole. It's like, what's obvious to you is the stuff that you should be talking about, whatever. Yeah.

Even the belief capital stuff. Like you and I, I think we just know in our DNA what it means. But when I talk to some people, they're like, they don't get it. And so they haven't had that lived experience that you and I have. The other thing, well, exactly. Like as an immigrant in America, I was an H-1B, you were an L-1. What's obvious to you and me is the visa stuff. The visa maze, the visa circuits that we had to jump through. That's very obvious and we accepted that and we, you know, now we have green cards and so, but that's not obvious to even my wife who is American, who didn't have to go through any of that shit. So when she sees some of the documentaries, like I have a big chunk of, she's like, wow. And I'm like, yeah, coming back to America. And she's like, you know, so your lived experience is your moat. I think a lot of people don't really lean into it, you know?

Yep, because it's too obvious to them.

It's too obvious. And you think that, oh, that has to be, Something Fancy TM. No.

Right.

Right?

Right. Yeah, it's actually the, like, if you're able— the skills in expressing the simplest ideas in the most sort of clear way possible, that's sort of the game, right? I've been— Marketing.

Andrew, I've been like the last, whatever, 3, 4 months, I've been sort of going back and looking at my own life and my own career, my own history, and like kind of like thinking at what is obvious to me. What is thing— what are things that I said casually at On Deck to you or to a bunch of people like, and I'm like, because that is not that obvious to a lot of people out there, right? You know, your philosophy around continuous learning, the lifecycle, that I don't think that's very, very obvious. I know a lot of people who don't know that framework. Yeah. So yeah, not looking to recreate the wheel and like come up with like something that's like too fancy, too sophisticated. Yeah, I'm returning to the roots, like even building public, which is so obvious to me. Yeah, even now today there are still debates on indiehackers.com, producthunt.com, and like some bunch of podcasts People who are still debating the merits. And I felt that when I was in no-code, this is 2018, I saw the debate of no-code versus code doing— being so distractive. And like, that's not the point. The point is that leverage the technology, build something awesome as a non-technical person, and move on. Why are you engaging with this bullshit, you know, like political debate on this? Right. There are people still debating about these 2 things, and I'm like, I can't believe it. I made a career. I moved on from the career out of it. And you were still debating about this.

Still talking about it. These are the people that don't want to get in the arena.

Right.

Right.

And they're like waiting for the right sort of war cry to jump into the arena. Yeah. And ironically, I also expected this and I want to hear what you felt. I've, for the longest time in my life, I knew that I was going to start something on my own, right? It was this subtle, quiet calling I always had. But the thing that got me into the arena after day one I was hoping, I was looking for a siren, but I just heard a whisper. It was not a siren. It was just like, just do

it. It's inside as well, right?

It's very quiet. It's not like a, yeah, now I know exactly how I'm gonna win. Let's go.

Yeah.

You know, I just jumped in. So I'm curious how you felt when you first—

Yeah. Well, it's exactly the same. And this is why I loved everything you ever wrote and said about building in public, because to me it is, I learned about that through you and then it became the mechanism for turning that voice, that whisper inside into a roar.

Yeah.

Through the process of engaging with like-minded people. Yeah. So by putting your ideas out there, you are inviting feedback. Yeah. That feedback is gonna be negative and it's gonna be positive and it's gonna— and it's your job to like navigate through that and learn from what the feedback from what, you know, so you still have to own, you still have to take ownership of it. You can't have your, your winds swept, you know, every like your sails or whatever swept every way from one negative thing takes you this direction. One point, you know, you have to, you gotta like welcome that feedback, take it on board, learn from it, figure out, and then iterate and iterate. You know,

you remember, you remember the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire show and there's this, uh, audience poll thing they do where like if you don't know one of the lifelines, exactly, you don't know the answer, you ask the audience. Ultimately, you still have to press the button. You still have to decide. Like, you just don't go blind if they're like saying, oh, you know, the You're not gonna click flat, right? Like you use your own. So I think building in public and the feedback that people are always asking me of this, KP, like, what do you think about people? Like, I'm like, it's an educated guess, but I'd rather, much rather have that over blindly guessing.

I totally agree. And building in public to me is the cheat code for making that guess easier. It makes it so much easier. So, and let me, I'm gonna give you this example now, 'cause this is the show to do it on. And it's like coming, I'm only gonna start this on Monday. Which is, I know people will probably listen to this later, but by the time you listen to this, it'll be early, early days. And

we'll include it in the show notes so they can go there.

Awesome. Awesome. And so I'm going to do the KP playbook here. I'm going to try and make this as practical as possible. I am working on this idea called total enablement. And it's a way to, a container to describe all the things I've talked about for what I think is the bottoms-up holistic approach, the best way to train sales teams. Okay. And that's what, that's what we do. That's our, that's our work. So Total Enablement is the— and again, Nicholas Cole, I learned from him, like, it's the category. I'm attempting to create a category. Nice. That is not— I'm not trying to push the offer that the— we have an offer, of course, but it's the category. I want people to look at this and go, I can get behind this and I can make it bigger. I can contribute to the idea. Right. And we will benefit as a company for sure. And because it'll— but we'll benefit in ways not just from sales, we'll have people that go, I wanna be part of that movement. So I'll, hopefully we'll find talent pipelines and partners and suppliers and, you know, all sorts of stuff. So that's kind of the goal. And so I've written, I've spent the whole of January writing an essay on what this idea of total enablement is. It is now 10,000 words. Wow. I actually just printed a draft that I'm happy with like this morning. Okay. So that is now gonna get turned into, this is the thing, I don't know if people have done this on LinkedIn yet, But it's the KP Playbook, and this is what I'm going to attempt to do. So, every week, Monday through Friday, I'll be posting. I'm going to basically post like pages from this thing. It'll make sense as a standalone post. But yeah, but if you follow, in theory, if you follow my account every single Monday through Friday for however many weeks it's going to take, you will basically read this entire essay. Right. And so, like, so I'm going to do that. And then I'm going to like do some cool stuff, like try to add like comments at the bottom to give people almost like a back button and a forward button. You know, it's like jump to different parts of the post and stuff. Right. And then, so what I hope happens from this, and look, this could totally flop and like, you know, and we'll go back to the drawing board and that's fine. But like, this will tell me very quickly.

And that's the price you should be willing to pay, right? The failure is the means to the end.

Totally. This will speed it up so much. That's why I say it's a cheat code because it will tell me definitively whether people care about this or not. If they don't, fine, I'll go and write another 10,000-word essay or whatever, you know, but I'm gonna find out. And so, that's basically what I'm doing. And so, it's gonna go out there and we'll see. And like, yeah, I mean, it's like, we really just will see. Like, if either people I think are gonna come kind of get like, the imagination will be captured and people will start to, you know, jump in and add to it and you'll see that visibly in these posts, or people won't care and it will fizzle out. And then look warm. Yeah. And then I'll go off and do my next thing and people, no one will remember that and it's fine. You just keep moving forward.

I think it's, you know, the one metaphor that comes to me is it's kind of like playing a melody and seeing if it resonates and then making the rest of the song. Totally. And it's like you're looking for the hit, you know? And I think I made an expensive mistake recently, Andrew, and I haven't shared this with anybody, but I want to since on the theme of transparency. I recently finished writing the 18th chapter of my book. Founder's Manual, which is you know my digital product called buildingpublicfoundersmanual.com. So folks, if you're interested, check it out. But man oh man, I I went into it not with the sense of curiosity. I went into it to put a stake in the ground, which is something that I shouldn't have done. And and I'm not not this nothing to do with total enablement, but it's like my story where I teased out this. And I went into the cave and built the whole thing in silo, which is not what I do.

Right.

I'm a really public guy, right? But because I was afraid that I was not giving them enough comprehensive, like, end-to-end material, I had to go away and just kind of write the whole thing, get it out of my head, put it all in the doc. So, I estimated 6 chapters and 12 days. as a deadline. It took 18 chapters, 43 days to finish. So I learned, you know, about myself in this journey is that I am untrustworthy when it comes to building in silo. Like, I cannot— Yeah. If I say, if I'm left to my own means, if you ask me to draw an elephant, I'll draw you a safari.

Yeah.

That's the problem. Like, it's just because I'm an educator. Like, you're an educator. Like, I have so many things to say, so many topics to cover, so many angles to cover.

Right, right.

But is that what the student wants?

Yeah, no.

I crush it.

You don't know, right?

I crush it in live workshops and live sessions and live Q&A because I always wait as the listener in me comes in and like, I always wait until what they— what I hear what they want and then I give that plus a little bit more. But if there's nobody there telling me what they want, I imagine what they may want and I just write the whole freaking Mahabharata, you know, epic, like the whole, the grand story, right?

Right.

And then I publish it. And then so what happened was the publish— I published it, it was great. I mean, like, it felt a relief because, you know, when you write something that long, I'm sure the 10,000 words, you're like, a sense of relief when it's finished, you know.

Mm-hmm.

But people have moved on and—

Yeah.

Like, I lost that sort of the momentum that I created for this initially. And now I had to go back and recreate the momentum over and over again. And I felt like this is so unlike me. This is so unlike me, you know? On one hand, I was proud that I published a massive behemoth of a digital product. Respect to everybody who creates digital, it's not easy, right? We talked about this. You said this earlier too, it's not easy. It looks easy, but digital products are not easy. But at the same time, I realized, man, no. The next— the lesson I learned was going forward, I will never ever build anything in silo without learning what they want, you know? That's— And it's a very hard lesson to grasp, even for me, the Build in Public guy. It's just hard.

That's cool that you shared that with people because I think everyone like looks and because you do build in public and they're like, oh, he must be building everything in public. Right. But so it's cool to say—

That was my fail. That was my failure. And I hit publish. I felt that I was, like, I felt that I should acknowledge this as a failure because I could have done this the other way. Like actually the real KP would have done this chapter by chapter teasing each chapter. And like throwing out some chapter names and seeing if it resonates or not. Because here's the thing, we just throw out a chapter name on Twitter or a link on LinkedIn post and write like 4 or 5 blur— I mean, uh, bullet points, not really fill it out. And if it got 1 like, I can kill the chapter. But if there's another chapter that I throw out and that, that's like resonating in like 55 comments, that's the one that I should write. I never thought of it this way. Totally. I just went into like my old school teacher mindset. Or like school might say, oh my God, I gotta write a curriculum, I gotta fill this out. No.

Yeah,

you don't fill in the blanks. This is music, live performance. You have to play melody, let people resonate, kill the rest, and that should be your single, like opener, right? And this is the lesson I learned. I'm like, damn, next time I'm gonna do this, that's what I'm gonna do.

Yeah,

yeah,

I love that. That's a cool, cool story and a cool analogy. The, the You know, put a melody out, see how the audience responds. There's another like side benefit to that as well is that other musicians could hear it and they're like, oh, I'm going to lay a bass line on that. You know, like, so like that also happens, right? When you put stuff out in public and like people that can actually help you on that journey as partners or employees or whatever also start to come out of the woodwork, you know? And then, so there's just so many benefits.

When you do the final piece with all these 6 to 7 people involved, involved, they all feel like they were part of this. So they will amplify the heck out of it, right? And this is how— what we learned when we did the founding mentors or founding fellows at On Deck.

Yeah, right, exactly.

We laid out invitations. We didn't design— like, I remember you were like, you— the announcement was out, the founding fellows got the invitations to join. I think like there was a bunch of these sales materials going out and you still didn't have your curriculum yet.

Yeah, right.

And I— same thing with ODSC. And I think that's, that's, that's a good thing, you know, because the curriculum came from my conversations with people My interviews on

Twitter. Yeah.

But actually real interviews. Remember we did the sales interview? Like, yeah, like bring them on and I would ask them, why were you starting with no-code? And they would say something like Webflow or whatever. And I'm like, oh, well, if 8 out of 10 people on my this week's interviews have said Webflow, I gotta get Webflow on there.

Totally. You know,

so I

think, yeah, it's so many, so many benefits to this. And that's a, that's a good, I guess I just, I love, yeah, I mean, this go back to the same point you made earlier, but just if people need to remember this, that even the Building Public guy found this hard to do. Like, this isn't, this isn't easy.

And it is not intuitive for us. I think it's not intuitive for us as humans, you know, because of probably decades of school system or whatever. We just see, right, when you see the word curriculum, you just see that, oh, it's a fill in the blank, let's go fill it in.

Yeah.

Instead of saying curriculum should be co-created.

Yeah.

Who needs it most.

Yeah.

Right. Um, so 100%. One last point about, give us a 30-second recap of what does actual total enablement mean? I know, start with what does enablement mean?

Yeah, so enablement, it's a funny thing. It's a function that exists per— so first of all, I only learned about this. I didn't know this role existed at the beginning of last year, beginning of 2022. Okay, so it's like I just discovered it. The role itself is only 10 to 12 years old, which is like kind of blows my mind 'cause, you know, it is like a legit function in— so the interesting thing is primarily B2B SaaS companies. Okay, so there's this whole world. So it's like Salesforce were one of the first people where, you know, when they brought everything from on-prem to the cloud, they could now suddenly sell to everyone everywhere in the world, right? And so now they needed to scale this like gigantic team of sellers for the product of Salesforce. And to do that, they had to get an enablement function. Like it's all the, so how do we get, how do we make sure these sellers have everything they need when they need it to be able to be great sellers? Right. Right. So everything from training to the tools and tech that they need to the talk tracks and sales scripts and everything. everything, right? So that's like the origin of it. It's only been around for 10, 12 years, kind of around the time Salesforce sort of got going. And so I got into this community on LinkedIn throughout last year and not expecting anything of them, just getting to know them. I started inviting them on my podcast and I learned that they think about learning culture, the thing that I'd been talking and writing about for a year before, to— they think about it the same way. They just never called it the same thing. Mm-hmm. And so, total enablement. So, the other thing I realized last year is that no one buys learning culture. It's not like, you know, like people that are in this world get what it means, but like they're not signing the checks, right? Their boss doesn't buy learning culture. It doesn't seem self— it doesn't seem value, like self-evident. So, I needed a word. I needed a way to kind of position it a little bit better. Category. Essentially, right. Yeah, category. Exactly. So, total enablement And is a repositioning of the same things I've been writing around learning culture, but focused on sellers. And now here's another cool thing I actually learned in doing that is that, and we know this, like you and I, like kind of coming up in the startup world and it's like the more like niche you can be, the more, the better.

That's also hard to do. Just like the public thing.

It's also really hard. It's so hard to do. It's really hard. Really hard. It's taken me, again, it's taken me 5 years of this company to like figure this out. But niching down, what I've learned is actually helps me. I use language that is more specific now. And so now it has more meaning to the right people, right? And that's really cool. So now I'm not talking in like vague platitudes anymore. I'm talking in like really specific practical stuff. And now people go, yeah, I get, I know what that is, you know? And so, so that's kind of—

You know, the metaphor that came to mind, because, you know, I know you and I, we You speak how many languages? Do you speak like at least 2?

Just 2. Just 2.

I speak 3. And like, there are people that we know like speak 6, 7, 8, right? And I think what is the metaphor that came to me is so stupid, but I have to say it, which is when a lot of the times we, you know, people, when they have an offering, they try to be multilingual. Like,

yeah,

every possible language, you know?

Yeah.

Like, we appeal to everybody and all the sensibilities and all that.

Yeah,

by doing that, you're really not appealing to anybody. You know, you're like, you're just like a collection of vanilla. Yeah, right. As opposed to if you can appeal to a dialect. Now that's like not even a language. Yeah,

yeah,

straight up. Yeah, I— if I met somebody on the street, if they speak the Telugu dialect— the Telugu is the dialect that, you know, the version of Telugu that I speak is so unique that if I see someone talk to me or talk to Neil about, about anything in that dialect, I'm like, there's an instant connection right there. I'm like, whoa, this is cool, you know? But that means niching down, right? You can't just have a broad, you know, thing and like appeal to everybody. And it's hard. It's hard to get our minds to agree to this.

Yeah. Yeah. I think the biggest fear of holding me back up until now was like, if I'm too niche, like it didn't make, it just felt like I was like not going after the biggest possible market.

Yeah. The TAM discussion and the niche discussion are So like, yeah, they're so contradicting.

Yeah, exactly. And yet, like, all you have to know is that it's, you actually have to first, you have to niche first so that you can, you can then, you can always scale up. You can always, you know, get different verticals or whatever.

The one thing too here, Andrew, this is something I'm struggling with too even now, right? Like I do, I have a vast surface area of offerings right now, right? I help early-stage startups with growth. I do like podcasts. I have the Twitter content creation, community building. I'm also struggling with the same thing with the kind of like I can do many things. But to your point, like I, until recently, I haven't over-delivered on any of these. I know these, I can do those.

Yeah.

But to over-deliver, you have to pick one. Like literally like over-deliver as in like that person should be shocked that you're doing this for them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

And that can only happen if I pick one. And I keep thinking about this, what would be the thing that it's so easy for me because of who I am, my background, unique experiences, et cetera, that if I just did 100 or 110% of something, that would look like 500% for that person. And they will be like telling their friends because that is the hard part to get any category off the ground or any of the offering off the ground. It's that it has to be so good that they think you're cheating. Yeah, they think that they're getting the better end of the deal. Like Alex Hormozi talks about all this time, like it doesn't matter how much the price they're paying, they should always walk away feeling like they're getting the better end of the deal even though they're paying $250K.

Yeah, right.

Yeah, if they feel like they're getting a million-dollar value.

Exactly.

Like this, this, this guy's an idiot. They should feel like an idiot for undercharging them, you know?

Exactly.

But that can only happen if you choose one area and then just go ham on it.

Oh, exactly.

You know, and, um, something I'm learning the hard way. Yeah,

yeah, I learned that the hard way up until, um, like sometime last year, honestly. Like, it was also 4 or 5 years of lessons and punches in the face because I got so— I was like so shy. Even like On Deck, for me, that whole thing was, um, a great experience and I'm really glad I did it, but it took me away from what I'm doing now. And it was cool, it was fun, it was sexy. I also learned a shitload. I learned marketing and stuff a lot in doing that. So that has helped. But yeah, it was only in stripping. I had a lead gen business because like I thought, you know, I had built a way to do it that was good for me. And so I thought it would be great for that. I had that on the side. I did some learning communities after On Deck. At the end of last year, I just stripped all of it. So the lead gen went away luckily at the beginning of that year. But yeah, no, then I stripped all of it away. And now this year, all I do is total enablement.

Yeah.

And the offer related to that. That's it.

I love it. I love it. I think even like choosing within sales as a function, a sub-function called sales enablement, I think is so disciplined, you know? And either, no, you'll learn very quickly whether it's resonating or not because it's very clear. Exactly. You will go talk to these enablement leaders.

You know how to find them.

Right, you know how to find them. You can search them on LinkedIn. Yeah, I'm so happy for you, man. I feel— Yeah, thank you.

No, I just wanted to say like the same thing we said in every other cool, like this has been series of insights that you and I have managed to tease out from our hard-won experience. It's also not easy, right? Yeah. Letting go of all the things and focusing is also not the easy thing to do. And it's taken, you know, yeah, we're still learning how to do it.

I have a whiteboard next to me and then there's like a word that's like focus on there. It's so hard focusing on one. I think especially in this increasingly interconnected, expansive world we live in right now, which is like, yeah, everyone's got a portfolio of projects. You got the podcast, you got You got LinkedIn. When you have so many things and then there's business, like the actual sales, actual stuff, like,

yeah,

which, you know, focus is so key, you know. And again, another thing that I'm like, because I don't have a paycheck now, I'm unemployed, fun-employed, I am like ruthless now. When I spend like an hour on sales, I'm like, I do 15 push-ups and then go to the sales thing. I'm like, I'm gonna just destroy you because nobody is as hungry as literally as I am hungry in this one hour.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, I'm like thinking about focus means timeboxing something saying, okay, this 2-hour window, I'm going to do sales and I'm not going to think about anything else. Phone's going to be on another room or something. I'm just going to go on the call, whatever I'm going to. So, this last hour and a half with you, I felt this is the highest energy that I've ever given for this podcast interview, period.

Same.

Literally. And, you know, this level of presence is I think is focus because I can't really do this monk-like focus. I'm not that. I can't do this like, oh, just do one thing 1,500 times. Like, that's not me. The closest thing to great focus I can come to, I think, is being absolutely present and destroying distractions in the moment.

You know what this reminds me of is I actually just watched it this morning and it was just like, I don't know how I got onto it, but it was Rick Rubin, you know, the music producer. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He wrote a book or something recently.

Yeah. Yeah, I think so. So, he's been on like Ferriss and he's been on a lot of like podcasts and stuff. And this was on Huberman, Andrew Huberman's podcast. And it was a YouTube clip of the podcast and it was around his creative process specifically. And Rick Rubin describes it as, you know, he shows up with, you know, for the recording and like, yeah, like he gets into like how like, you know, it's not him that creates it. It's like, it's not him that makes the magic happen. The musicians have to do it, but like he can be there to create the conditions. Yeah. But this is the key part. He said his creative process is like, he goes in there and he's like fully 100% like his whole self is in that, that thing. Yeah. For, it could be 40 minutes, it could be 5 hours, whatever, like that time is, right? But he is fully in it. And then he steps out of that thing and he completely forgets about it. Yeah. He doesn't think about it at all. And he moves. And then this is the, I think this is the part that really clicked for me. It was like, he's like, I don't then just go and do nothing. I have project A, B, C, and D. And so I'm going, you know, one to the other and I'm going into it I give it 100% for however long it takes and then I get up and I don't think about that project again and I do the same thing with the next one and the next one. And like to me, that was just like, yes, that's exactly what I've been doing.

Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, when you swim, you swim. When you run, you run. You should think about that. You can't be thinking about running when you're swimming, you know? Like you just have to be immersed quite literally in what you're doing there. Presence. Yeah. Dude, this is fun, man. This is amazing.

This is always, always fun.

I felt like if the folks who are listening, you know, um, I hope that you got the sense of the sense of being a fly on the wall of how a real KP and Andrew conversation, because this is exactly how our convos go, have always been in the last few years. It's a blessing and it's an honor to have you as my friend, and our energies are so aligned about many, many things, Andrew. So thank you so much, and looking forward to Your, you know, baller year, man.

KP, man, thank you for saying that. Thank you for saying all that. And I mean, just for— I've learned so much from you, man. And so it's always cool to come here and we have these like these moments to almost like consummate those. Yeah, you recharge, but also consummate those learnings and like kind of discuss the stuff and like and recharge as well, man. I walk away with so much more energy than I came into it. So yeah, thanks for having me.

Of course. Welcome.