Melody Wilding: Have you ever told yourself you’re going to start doing something differently? Maybe it’s speaking up more in meetings. Finally setting boundaries with your calendar, making time to think instead of just reacting all day. And then a week later, you’re right back where you started. And then you beat yourself up about it.

You tell yourself you just don’t have discipline or you are not the type of person who can stick with things. My guest today says, there is nothing wrong with you. You just haven’t learned the skill of working with your mind instead of against it. I’m talking with Eric Zimmer, author of How a Little Becomes a Lot The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life, and the host of the wildly popular podcast, The One You Feed.

Eric’s story itself is a case study in the Power of Transformation. Flashback a few decades ago, and he was battling with a heroin addiction that left him homeless and facing prison. And it’s this approach that he discusses in his book. It wasn’t some watershed or epiphany moment. It was the result of little decisions to do A and then do B to say yes instead of no.

It was those little moments that helped him turn his life around and achieve the success he has today. So let’s dive in.

Eric Zimmer:

Melody Wilding: Eric, welcome. I am so happy to have you here we are turning the tables because you graciously had me on your show when my book Managing Up came out, and now you are here. So tell us the title of your first book. Your new book. What is it called?

Eric Zimmer: It’s called How A Little Becomes a Lot The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life.

Melody Wilding: So good. So good

Eric Zimmer: Thank you.

Melody Wilding: all

Eric Zimmer: The cover looks great too. You gotta see the cover. It’s outstanding.

Melody Wilding: I love the cover. And this idea just feels so apropos in a time where all of us feel incredibly overwhelmed.

Eric Zimmer: Yep.

Melody Wilding: all the things we need to do by all of the messages from social media. That’s big more better. And the title for this book, it comes from a Tanzanian proverb, if I’m correct. That is called Little By Little. A Little Becomes a Lot. Now on this show we have a lot of people who are in the corporate world. Business world. There was a big obsession with like, we’re gonna go big or go home. Moonshot. 10Xing. There is this massive pressure to achieve goals. So how do we get ourselves on board with this very different approach of little by little, when it may be the opposite of the messages we’re getting?

Eric Zimmer: That’s a really good question. And I think that even if you look at going 10X on something or you know, moonshots, you’re still stringing one action in front of the other. You’re, you’re doing one thing and then you’re doing the next thing. And look, some people don’t need a little by little message if you’re killing it already on everything you wanna accomplish, all the changes you wanna make.

Hey, you don’t need to do little by little, but there are a lot of people that are not in that spot. They find themselves like, oh, I know I should be 10Xing it. But I spent two hours today at work on Twitter. Oh, I know that I should be exercising regularly ’cause that would help me be even more effective at work, and yet I don’t keep doing it.

And so those are the sort of cases where little by little actually is really powerful. And when I say little by little, I mean something very specific by it. I mean low resistance actions done consistently over time in the same direction. So low resistance can look very different for different people.

a low resistance for somebody who has not exercised in five years might be a 10 minute walk around the block. Low resistance might be a 45 minute jog. I, it just depends. The resistance has to be low enough that you do it consistently. And then we have to be pointing in the same direction.

And so even on a 10 x or a moonshot, right? That, that we are aiming at something in, in particular. And a lot of what happens with us, particularly in today’s world, we are bombarded with all the ways we could change to be better people, to be better parents, to be better workers, to be better, um, in better shape, in better mental health.

You name it there, there’s, we get so many of them. You can’t change all of that. At once, you can’t even change. Frankly, we couldn’t change all of it if we had a thousand lives compared to all we get. So like little by little is saying like, let’s focus on what’s really important. Let’s break it down into steps that I can follow.

Let me think about how do I keep taking those steps consistently, and how do I make sure that it’s all pointing in the same direction?

Melody Wilding: Okay. This is, this is brilliant. I think, you know, there’s such elegance to this idea, right? It, it is so foundational and fundamental. What are some examples of how you have applied this little by little concept for yourself in your own work, in your own career, so people can start to wrap their heads around what, what does this look like day to day for someone who has lived this philosophy?

Eric Zimmer: Sure. Well, I mean, I have a podcast that’s been downloaded over 50 million times now. It started 12 years ago with Chris and I putting out an episode, and we made a commitment to ourselves every Tuesday for six months, an episode would come out. And we did that. And at the end of six months, the show was going better than I thought, but we weren’t huge successes.

But we kept putting out episodes and I could say, and then we moved to two a week episodes at one point, but every Tuesday and Friday. Since we moved to two episodes, there has always been an episode of The One You Feed that shows up in your podcast feed. Now, sometimes we’re re-releasing, but even then we are, we are re-recording an intro.

We’re talking about why it’s relevant now we’re. We’re putting it in there. And so that’s just little by little by little over a long period of time. And if you look at our growth, it, it is very much that. It’s just this general gradual creep up. Now some people have. sometimes bigger successes than that, that happen more quickly, but there’s that old phrase, right?

You look at an overnight success and you’ll see, you know, the 10 years that came before it and what those people were doing for 10 years was little by little doing that. We all know this on some level, we have all sorts of cultural phrases. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and you eat an elephant one bite at a time.

We all know it. But we don’t like it, right? We don’t. We live in a culture that prioritizes fast, easy, quick, instantaneous things, and that’s not how real change and the subtitle of the book, small Changes for a More Meaningful Life, meaning important changes don’t happen like that. They happen little bit by little, and they have to be maintained long enough. For a little to become a lot.

Melody Wilding: Hmm. Let me, say something that’s coming up for me right now where I, I consider myself a late bloomer. I take things more slowly. My husband and I always joke that we take the slow train and something that I find is I really judge myself for that. I look at colleagues and I say, Ugh, they just, they work so much faster than me.

They scaled their company faster than I did. So how do you advise, or in the book talk to people who may get into a lot of judgment around moving at this more steady incremental pace?

Eric Zimmer: Well, the core philosophy of little by little doesn’t mean that you can’t move quickly.

If you can keep going quickly. Right. It’s, I mean, it’s the famous tortoise in hare story, right? Like, years ago I was training for a marathon with a good friend of mine and I enrolled in this, team in training, leukemia, raise money for leukemia.

’cause I thought it’d be great if I run with some other people. And soon as I got into that, I suddenly found myself wanting to run with the fast people. And I could. I could. I could keep up. Fast forward two weeks before the marathon, and I have stress fractures in both legs. My friend who was like, yeah, do whatever, whatever, fine go, who just kept slowly going along is the one who completed the marathon.

And so yes, there are some people that can do more, can go faster, can keep it going, then we can, but they often have advantages that we don’t have, that we don’t see. And I think a lot of the people who are gonna listen to you and who are gonna listen to me are people who are like, well, yeah, and you know what?

I actually want some sort of life beyond just that. I don’t want to just crush it, right? I, I, I call my, I call my people sort of like, depth oriented achievers. Like they really wanna do well, it’s important, and yet they think and feel a little bit more deeply. And so for people like that, I think that it’s okay to be slower if that’s what, what it happens to be in your case.

And I think the comparison is a really big issue. And when we compare, we often tend to compare like one point to one point. Alright? I’m comparing their company revenue to my company revenue. Okay, well, and there’s is, you know, 25 million and mine’s 1 million, but I need to bring more, a lot more information in for that to make sense. How long have they been doing it? What are they after? What’s their home life look like? What’s their health look like? What’s, you know, do they spend time with friends? I mean, there’s so many factors. I, I interviewed a woman, named Ellen Hendrickson and she said that when you’re thinking about comparison, flood the zone with information. Meaning like, let’s say you are, self-conscious about your height.

Okay, well, what else? What about your hair? What about your sense of humor? What about the friendships you have? What about you? Just bring it all in and at a certain point you realize now you’re comparing apples to tennis balls. We’re all different, and so the more that we believe we have to be on someone else’s script, the more we are just going to suffer. Versus finding out what works for us.

Melody Wilding: Mm-hmm. Now you were, go back to that, formula you gave at the beginning for was

Low resistance actions done consistently over time in the same direction. Okay. Let’s talk about the low resistance piece, ’cause

Eric Zimmer: Yeah.

Melody Wilding: another area where our own mindset can rear its head.

Eric Zimmer: Yep.

Melody Wilding: you talk in the book about there being a difference between saying, I don’t want to and I don’t feel like it. What is the difference between those two things? How can that reframe help us? Like for example, talk a lot about communication on this show and Listeners are needing to have a difficult conversation with a direct report or their manager or a customer, and they are telling themselves, I don’t want to,

Eric Zimmer: Yep.

Melody Wilding: so what does that reframe about?

Eric Zimmer: Yeah. This is bringing up a question that I think is fundamental to a lot of what I do, which is being able to ask the question of what do I want most versus what do I want now? So, let’s take your example. It’s a, it’s a, it’s a conversation that I quote, unquote, don’t want to have. Well, that’s not entirely true.

Some part of me wants to have the conversation. Some part of me thinks the conversation’s important. The wiser part of me knows I need to do this. But when all I say is I don’t want to, I don’t want to, I don’t want to. I’m re I’m, I’m in a battle with myself. And for me, when I say, oh, I do want to. I just don’t feel like it.

For me, that switches it into being about a mood. I do want to, it’s important to me. I don’t feel like it. It’s a mood. Oh, moods come and go. Do I want my moods to run my life? I mean, if you have a mood system like mine, I can assure you that’s a terrible idea. You don’t want your moods running your life.

And so for me, that’s always been a really helpful reframe. It gets it back out of this battle with myself into a little bit more of like, okay, I do wanna do this. It matters.

Melody Wilding: Mm-hmm. I love that. it, brings more agency to the decision as

Eric Zimmer: Yes. Yes.

Melody Wilding: Yeah. There’s, there’s another, psychological effect that you talk about. You know, being a nerd, I was so happy to see this come up in the book. ’cause I don’t think this gets talked enough about, it’s so fundamental, pun intended.

It’s called the fundamental attribution error. And it’s when thinking our mistakes are situational. When we make a mistake, it’s, oh, it was the conditions or the circumstances I was up against. When someone else makes a mistake, it’s, they’re a jerk. They’re an idiot. They’re absent-minded.

They don’t care about me. Right? They’re character flaws. How does this bias show up when we are trying to create change for ourselves? How does it trip us up?

Eric Zimmer: I think that what happens with this bias is, is exactly as you said, I am being situational about what, when I do or don’t do something and, and we are imparting to other people the, belief that they’re not good people. And we can see this in our culture today, right? We, we, we see this in great detail.

Like I, I’m guilty of this when a politician from the party I don’t like does something, I think they’re disa, let’s say they run a hateful ad. They’re mean, and they’re spiteful and they’re dragging down our political discourse. And if a candidate from the side that I do like does the same thing, I go, well, they just have made him do it.

I mean, he has to do it because this is the environment we’re in. If you don’t do it, you’re not gonna win. Right? I’m giving people radically different interpretations. Now, where this comes to change on our own side is we do want to begin to understand why and how we evaluate ourselves. Because, we sometimes that fundamental attribution error, we do the opposite to ourselves.

We don’t look at the situational things that happen. We look at the changes. We’re unable to make as foundational flaws in who we are. And one of my biggest messages, most important messages is that change is a skill. We can learn to get better at making change. By the time somebody is really making their third or fourth try at something, there’s a whole lot of, I’m just the kind of person who is lazy.

I don’t finish what I start. I just don’t have enough discipline. I don’t have motivation. And so this is almost a flipping of the fundamental attribution error in being able to say like, no, there are reasons that you haven’t made the changes you wanna make up till now and you can learn to do differently.

Melody Wilding: Yeah, it, and it’s all the more true for those of us, who are more observant and emotionally sensitive and perceptive of what’s happening around us, that we do tend to internalize all of that more. I sometimes like to say we’re so self-aware that it almost goes all the way around and we become self-conscious.

Right. You’re

Eric Zimmer: Yes.

Melody Wilding: hyper self-aware Yes. That you, you have this, reverse self-blame of an. And the dangerous part about that. I would love to hear your perspective on this. I hear this in what you’re saying is that it becomes your identity. I’m just not the type of person that speaks up in meetings.

I’m not the type of person that goes for the stretch opportunity. I’m not the type of person who can stop working at 6:00 PM. I have to burn midnight oil, right.

Eric Zimmer: Yep.

Melody Wilding: then we act consistently with

Eric Zimmer: Yep.

Melody Wilding: We create this self-fulfilling prophecy. How do you get out of that then?

Eric Zimmer: Well, let me tell you a story.

Melody Wilding: Yeah.

Eric Zimmer: my, a lot of my backstory is, is addiction. I was a homeless heroin addict at 24. I was looking at, going to jail for 50 years. I had hepatitis C. I weighed a hundred pounds, so I clearly had a serious problem at one point with opiates. It was a long time ago, but, but I, but still fundamental problem.

A couple years ago I realized I was, I, my mom had fallen and she’d gone in the hospital and this was about the second time this had happened. And when she, when that happened, I would become her primary care caregiver. So I’d go get her groceries, I’d do all the things for her, I pick up her medicines. And I realized one day that sitting in the passenger seat next to me was Oxycontin.

Like the good stuff. I would’ve probably robbed you at gunpoint all those years ago for that. And today, not only was I not fighting not to take it, I wasn’t even thinking about it. And I say that story because that’s the depth of change that is available for us. And so that idea of I’m not the kind of person who speaks up in meetings is well.

You could be. You can be. There’s a way to get there. And so if I was able to go from way over here to all the way over there, which believe me, I would’ve thought was completely impossible, if you’d asked me, I would’ve said there is, that could never happen. Maybe, maybe, maybe by the, by the hair or the skin of my teeth.

I could grit my way through and not get high. I would never have believed that. I would just be like, all right, not a big deal. And so we have to believe we’re capable of change. You know, Carol Dweck, you know, Made the growth mindset semi-famous, but it’s, it’s the key. And that’s why I say change is a skill, not a, not, not a fundamental character flaw.

It’s not who you are. You don’t know how to, up until a certain point, every time that I tried to get sober, before that I failed every time. It wasn’t like just one time. I had failed a bunch of times until I didn’t. And change is the same way. We may have tried to make a change a number of times and it not worked until we get the right skills, the right plan, the right approach, in which case then we are able to do these things that really matter to us.

Melody Wilding: Gosh, it’s just such an incredible story and thank you for sharing that. I know it’s such a, it’s such a part of your mission and why you do all of this work and there are. Yes. You know, addiction is so serious and beyond the scope of what we usually talk about on this show, but to your point, the psychology of the change that underlied it is you had to, had to not shut the door

Eric Zimmer: Yeah.

Melody Wilding: you had to continue thinking this is a possibility for me.

Eric Zimmer: Yep.

Melody Wilding: And, there’s another concept you talk about in the book. It’s called The Middle Way, this idea of avoiding the extremes, which we know for anyone who has a more intense or even a more addictive personality. my hand here, you know, you, operate in extremes, right? Black or white. It’s good or bad.

I’m doing it all the way, or I’m doing nothing. How have you. Navigated out of that and how, how do you guide other people to do the same? Why does that even matter?

Eric Zimmer: Well, there are some things, in my case, mind altering substances that I, I have to take an extreme position on. I do not do them.

Melody Wilding: Yeah.

Eric Zimmer: I just don’t seem to have a middle switch. And there sometimes in life we find those things, but in general, avoiding the extremes. Tends to serve us well. So you just mentioned it right there.

Either I’m doing it perfectly or I’m not doing it at all. One of the things that most happens to people when they’re trying to build a new habit, a new behavior, is that they will do okay for a little while, and then inevitably they will fall off. And the tendency then is to think, well, I blew it. Even on a, even on a daily basis, let’s say you’re trying to eat really well and you end up in the morning having a pancake for breakfast.

Most of us will be like, well, F it. I had a pancake for breakfast and I’m off and running. And it is, you know, it is a decadent day through and through and often that can lead to the next day and the next day. Whereas a, a middle way approach would be like, okay, breakfast didn’t go very well, but there’s still lunch.

There’s still dinner. A middle way approach allows us to say, oh, well, I’m trying to exercise five days a week, and in the beginning I was doing none, and now I’m doing three to four every week. I’m not quite where I wanna be yet, but I’m doing better than I was. That’s a middle way approach and that serves us very well.

Another middle way approach, let’s say you plan to go to, Yoga class after, after work, and you’re packing up your stuff and you’re going out the door and your boss walks in and says, Hey, I really need that report like now. And so you spend 30 minutes doing it, and when you’re done, it’s too late to get to yoga class.

An all or nothing approach is like, all right, forget it. I’m just gonna go home. A middle way approach might be like, okay, I’m gonna stretch for 10 minutes in my office. I know some yoga moves. I’ll do 10 minutes of it here in my office, or I’ll do 10 minutes of it when I get home. That’s again, the middle way, and that middle way allows us to keep momentum because if we’re aiming for perfection, we’re going to be disappointed all of the time.

We need to aim for something that’s sustainable. I often think with myself when I’m trying to do. Like, I wanna meditate daily and I want to exercise six days a week. Those are just sort of standing long-term goals for me. And if I’m in about the 85% range of those, I’m like, that’s fine. Because if I’m meditating 85% of the time, but I can do it month after month, year after year, that 15% is irrelevant.

It just goes away. Same thing with exercise. Yeah. If I’m able to exercise 85% of the time, five days a week, month after month, year after year, again, I get almost all the benefit.

it’s really common for us to look at it and go, oh, well, I messed up. I messed up. I guess I can’t do this.

Melody Wilding: Exactly. Yeah. The, the chuck it. F it is is a huge thing, right? Oh, this meeting didn’t go well. Today’s a waste. I might as well just doom scroll

Eric Zimmer: Yep,

Melody Wilding: on Twitter or Instagram, right?

Eric Zimmer: yep,

Melody Wilding: then you only feel worse at the end.

Eric Zimmer: Right.

Melody Wilding: I love this idea of, um. Sometimes I think about it like you were saying, okay, the morning didn’t go well. The afternoon is a new, is a new day. Like we always have another decision point.

Eric Zimmer: Yes.

Melody Wilding: you know, I think of the kind of, AA idea of every, you are sober one day at a time, right?

Eric Zimmer: Yep.

Melody Wilding: every day is a new choice. You are recommitting to that for yourself. It’s kind of similar in that

Eric Zimmer: Yeah. There’s another recovery idea, which is just do the next right thing.

Melody Wilding: Mm-hmm.

Eric Zimmer: Just do, okay, whatever happened earlier today, doesn’t matter. What’s the next right thing to do right now? What’s the next right thing to do right now? And that is sort of a little by little embodiment. If you just keep doing the next right thing, most of the time you’re gonna have a life that you want.

It’s gonna matter. It’s gonna be good.

Melody Wilding: Yeah. Well, what’s great about that too is also the right thing, quote unquote, can and should change by what you need in that moment, right? Sometimes the right thing is push through, right? Push through.

Eric Zimmer: Right.

Melody Wilding: this. It’s, it’s gonna be, you’re gonna feel better at the

Eric Zimmer: Yep.

Melody Wilding: you, if you stick with it, you go for that workout.

Sometimes the right thing is, you know what? You are on the verge of not feeling great, and maybe if you go try to push through that workout, you’re gonna set yourself back even more. So why don’t you take it easy tonight and just, yeah, go do a walk around your block. It that requires. Tapping back into listening to yourself, which is exactly what you were talking about earlier, that you have

Eric Zimmer: Yeah.

Melody Wilding: what’s meaningful on your own terms, not just this blind commitment of, I said I was gonna do this, so I I have to push through and do it.

Eric Zimmer: Yep. And there’s a middle way idea here also because. It’s good to know what side of that fence you tend to be on. Oh, I’m the sort of person that tends to push through even when I shouldn’t. So I’m off to that side a little bit more. Oh, I’m the kind of person who makes excuses often for myself. So maybe what I need to do if I’m in doubt is push through.

And again, the idea of a middle way is that wherever off the side you are, you if you move back towards the middle. It’s gonna be good. And so it’s really hard to know. Like, I know for me, my tendency is to push right through. So I’m getting better as I get older at being like, ah, hang on a second. I, I don’t feel good.

Or, you know what, A 30 minute nap would be good. Or actually taking a Sunday off. You know what, that’s valuable because I’ll be better on Monday. But I know other people in my life who are the exact opposite of that. They will give themselves any reason not to do the thing they set out in front of them.

And so tho we need different things, me and them.

Melody Wilding: Yes. And knowing those tendencies

Eric Zimmer: Yep.

Melody Wilding: key. Yes. a moment ago you were giving an example that had to do with a difficult boss, and I wanna dig into that a little because you have a interesting formula in the book that says, suffering equals pain times resistance. So if the person listening has a difficult coworker or manager, which is probably their pain, how can they reduce resistance to that to actually lower their level of suffering?

Eric Zimmer: Yeah, so let me. Sort of lay out each of the parts of that equation. So let’s take suffering as just the total amount of anguish, pain, suffering, that something is right, and the formula is, suffering equals pain, times resistance. Pain is the bad boss, right? That’s bad boss. And you may not be able to do anything about that.

Resistance is all the things that you do in response to that. For example, I don’t deserve this. I should not have a bad boss. Um, I am always picked the wrong career. I can’t be, you know, I carry the boss home with me and I think about them all night. There’s all these forms of resistance. And the reason I love this formula is it says that suffering is pain times resistance.

So let’s say pain is a fixed variable. Your boss is a five pain in the ass on the on the chart, right? And you’re resisting it at a five. You have 25 total units of suffering. If you can turn that resistance down a little bit, if you can accept just a bit more. Let’s say you turn it down to a three, you suddenly have 15 total points of suffering, and you didn’t change the underlying situation at all.

I don’t believe we get to turn resistance down to zero. I think that’s actually to, to go off a spiritual deep end. I actually think that’s what enlightenment is, is your resistance is just zero. You’re just like, whatever happens I am completely cool with. Right. Most of us are never gonna be anywhere near that, but we can lessen our resistance and thus lessen our suffering.

Melody Wilding: Do you have any, examples of how you have been able to do that? Because I

Eric Zimmer: Mm-hmm.

Melody Wilding: someone may say, I love the sound of that. How do you actually execute on that?

Eric Zimmer: I think a lot of it is to, first we have to build the awareness of how we’re talking to ourselves. What are we saying? Another thing that I often say is extreme language causes extreme emotions. So if I’m constantly describing my boss as horrible. Awful. She always does this. She never does that. She’s, when I’m using those kinda words, I’m sort of amplifying the whole thing.

So a very simple thing would be to just tone it all down a bit, a little bit. Like I, you know, I don’t like it when my boss does that thing. My boss more often than I would like, does do ask me to do this. But that’s very different than my boss is horrible. She’s awful. She always does this. She never does that.

So that’s a very simple one. We just look at how we’re describing a situation both to ourselves and others, and we turn down the volume a little bit on it. We don’t have to turn it off. This is not about pretending that good situ, the bad situations are good. But it is saying, okay, we can resist a little bit less.

So that’s one way of doing it. I mean, another one for me, and I tell a story in the book, about, a pretty dramatic example of where this took me is that I just say yes to things that happen. Something happens. I don’t like it. In my mind, I just sort of say yes, yes, yes. That doesn’t mean I don’t change, try and change things.

It doesn’t mean that there aren’t situations that need my influence, but, but moment to moment saying yes to what’s happening. Is really helpful. There’s a, there’s a, a gentleman I’ve interviewed for the show a couple times named David Rico, and he has a line, I don’t think I’m gonna get it quite right, but he says, yes is the brave ally of serenity and no is the accomplice of anxiety or something like that, right?

When I’m saying yes, I’m bringing about more serenity. And the good news is if I can actually turn my total suffering down, I can also think better about should I get a different job. Maybe this job isn’t right, but when I’m all emotionally churned up all the time at a at a 20. Again, if I can bring that down to 15, I can think a lot better.

So it doesn’t mean that we accept things that we probably should change, it just means that we learn to work with them more skillfully so that we can change them if that’s what’s needed.

Melody Wilding: Yes. Seeing it more objectively, it’s like, I am here now. How do

Eric Zimmer: Yeah,

Melody Wilding: forward with

Eric Zimmer: exactly.

Melody Wilding: Reality that is here now rather than expending energy on fighting it and trying to change it, which you can’t. Yes.

Eric, this is. an enlightening conversation. You used that before. I, there’s just so much goodness here. Whether you’re trying to make a change at work in your habits there, in your career, overall, in your personal life, principles are just playbook for that across

Eric Zimmer: Across.

Melody Wilding: So where

Where can people, connect with you? Where

Eric Zimmer: you can.

Melody Wilding: find the book? What’s the best place to send them?

Eric Zimmer: If you go to oneyoufeed.net, that’s O-N-E-Y-O-U-F-E-E-D.net. You can find out all about the book there. You can also find about the podcast and anything else that we have going on.

Melody Wilding: Amazing. Thank you.

Eric Zimmer: Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.