Why Grit and Systems Matter More Than Hustle

Awake at the Wheel | Ep 89

In this episode, Brittany Rastsmith discusses the psychological traits that contribute to successful entrepreneurship, emphasizing the importance of grit, resilience, and intrinsic motivation. She explores the challenges of hustle culture, the necessity of support systems, and the significance of mentorship. Brittany also highlights the need for effective leadership and systems to foster growth in startups, while addressing the disconnect between founders and employees regarding motivation and expectations. The conversation concludes with actionable advice for entrepreneurs to audit their time and focus on productivity over busyness.

Find Brittany on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brittanyrastsmith/
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Book a call with Brittany: https://calendly.com/brastsmith/30min

We want your questions! Future episodes will feature a new segment, Rounds Table, where Malini and Dr Amitay will answer your questions, discuss your comments, and explore your ideas. Send your questions to rounds@aatwpodcast.com, tweet us @awakepod, send us a message at facebook.com/awakepod, or leave a comment on this video!

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Transcript

0:01

I do truly believe that the brain of an entrepreneur is different than, let's say, a normie. I would work right next to them at their right hand, turning these visions into processes and systems and an ability to, actually do what they were trying to do, not just dream it, But if you don't have any of those things. I think that it's probably very difficult to create a good life. We're just we're just not meant to be alone. Hello and welcome to awake at the wheel. So in today's episode, we are joined by Brittany Rastsmith and she is a founder as well as a startup mentor who helps business owners to turn their big picture visions into executable systems and tangible results. So, as our listeners know, both Oren and I are business owners, working in our private practices, and I personally have written quite a bit in the past with regard to the role that having a strong knowledge of psychology and psychological concepts can play in providing strong leadership and building a successful business by way of having the right mindset. As a business owner, as well as developing some very important skills. One of the most important and most necessary, in my opinion, being resilience. So Brittany, welcome. Thanks so much for being with us today. We're excited to dive into this conversation with you. But tell our listeners a bit more about you. Well, hey, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here today. I have been working in startups and small growing remote businesses for more than a decade now. A few different flavors, including. I've spent not an insubstantial amount of time building and training a wrap wraparound program. So I am I'm very familiar with some of the, intersections between business building and psychology. Actually, before that, I went to school for anthropology. So I really love coming at business from a perspective of understanding why people do what they do. I think it gives you a very competitive advantage. Okay. So in your work with business owners, with entrepreneurs, what have you found are some of the psychological traits that are most commonly present in those who are the most successful? What are the things that I think is incredibly important is to find people who have strong intrinsic motivation. People who are externally motivated are not going to have the grit that they need to stick it out when things get hard and really successfully build their business. You have to be motivated by more than just the promise of success at the end. The people that I've worked with who are the most successful have a deep burning passion for some part of what they're doing and a really strong belief that what they're doing is important and what they should be doing. And I think that that, gives them the gas that they need to go through times when, as we all know, business can feel really hard and like you're beating against the wall. Yeah. So you mentioned grit. Can you talk a bit more about that? And you know what that means and how that shows up specifically in business owners? Sure. So when I think about grit, there's a lot of different ways that you can define grit. But when I think about it, I really think about it as being a combination of perseverance, not wanting to quit as soon as things get difficult. Being a little stubborn, knowing that you have something to offer and that while you need to sometimes pivot how you operate, who you offer it to, what that's going to look like in almost every variable, it's it's being stubbornly committed to knowing that you have something valuable and that you are going to bring it all the way to the table or to market. I don't I put too many metaphors in here. And so it's that that passion, that stubbornness, but also it's being able to contextualize setbacks. I'm realizing as I'm talking about this, I'm talking a lot about disappointments, hard moments, setbacks. And that's because I have never in the whole history of the time, I've been working with founders, met one who hasn't had a really serious step back or series of setbacks. Nobody exceeds from day one and then just goes up from there. That is not how business works. And if you don't have the fortitude to keep going when things are difficult, you will not have a successful business. Absolutely. I think that's the inevitability and reality that a lot of people don't necessarily recognize when they have the idea of starting a business. And yeah, there's there's more tough days and great days, at least from my own experience, I can say that. But, that's that resilience and that grit that is absolutely necessary to be able to move things to the next level. But on that note, what would you say are the characteristics that you've noted that maybe people have that contribute to them not being successful? So I think the absence of grit in the absence of resiliency, but what else? I mean, I'm one of the big ones we've talked about in terms of, what you just said, but also having this external motivation. But another thing is, and I'm not sure a pithy way to say this, but I've noticed that some people, when they experience a setback and contextualize it properly. And I called my my dad the other day and said, oh, great news about my business. And he was like, what? And I said, I realized that I had been using the wrong word here, and it was pushing me off of my, ideal customer profile, and it was making my message reach the wrong people. And he was like, Britney, none of that sounds like good news. And when I first discovered that, I was of course, upset at myself, I'd been doing this marketing at cross-purposes to myself and, not getting the results for my labor and and blah, blah, blah. But after thinking about it for, oh, two minutes, I realized, hey, this is great news. I know what I should be doing, and now I can do it. But, it is not, I think, natural for everyone to reframe that way, though. It's absolutely something that you can learn. And if you can't reframe what you're doing as growth towards something that is difficult and messy to achieve but worth achieving, so that your pivots and your setbacks become steps along that path, you're going to have a bad time, because sometimes those are the only successes you might have for months. Can I jump in? Absolutely. Okay, so I have long that I've got many patents, you know, in different fields. And, you know, some are very, very successful, within their field. Let's just go with the successful ones. But they can never be an entrepreneur. And they admitted they say that. Okay. And I do truly believe that the brain of an entrepreneur is different than, let's say, a normie. And just the same as the a brain of an artist, the brain of an athlete. Okay, there's just something different, right? So, so I gotta ask you, it doesn't mean that not everybody can be an entrepreneur, but not everyone can be an entrepreneur. Naturally. So if someone is not a natural entrepreneur, but they say, I really need to do it, what do you think? If I talk about framing, I think framing is so important. And Malini listed a bunch of qualities. But if someone is not a natural entrepreneur, what could you give them or what you could shift in them that would make them more likely to succeed as an entrepreneur? Well, I will tell you that I don't think I was naturally an entrepreneur. I came out of, college and went right into grad school, and I was a really a traditional type A, I needed everything to be perfect, which serves you very well in a narrow context, but I think we know sets you up for a lifetime of struggle and anxiety. But after I left Epidemia and started really working, I worked for a series of entrepreneurs, natural entrepreneur visionaries is what they're called, people who have huge ideas and are so unafraid to take big swings, but who are often not very good at translating that into the kinds of systems and processes that let you build a scalable business. And that's what I did for a long time internally, is I would work for these people, and I would work right next to them at their right hand, turning these visions into processes and systems and an ability to, actually do what they were trying to do, not just dream it, not just raise the money for it, but actually bring it to fruition by having a bunch of repeatable, often dull steps that happen in the right order, in the right way, every day. And in doing so, and the closer I worked and the tighter those partnerships grew, and the more I became exposed to the risks and the uncertainty and the change. I started to develop this mindset for myself. The first time somebody quit that I really depended on unexpectedly, or we had to make a major business pivot because we took a gamble and it failed. Or, we tried a new product or service and it crashed and burned. I did not handle it well. I was not I was not the kind of person to go, wow, there's going to be a successful entrepreneur. I cried, I got angry, I blamed myself sometimes. I blamed my team all kinds of unflattering emotions and actions. But over time, as it happened again and again, as it does, and as that failure turned to failure, turned to success, and I was part of it over and over again. I started to learn to trust that as long as I kept trying and pivoting and learning and trying again, that eventually we would succeed. And that I started to really understand what was important to make something successful or not. And I guess what I'm really saying is that was that exposure to that in real time over many, many years that really helped me shift from someone who has no business in a startup, let alone leading one to somebody who spends all day, every day working with founders right in the mix very successfully. And I guess that would be my advice, is that if you really want to be an entrepreneur, but you don't feel like you have that yet, find a way to gain yourself some exposure. Maybe I'll work at a startup. The uncertainty will trickle all the way down to the bottom. I promise. So speaking of startups and entrepreneurship in general, I think that there is a shifting narrative out there that hustle culture and, strong work ethic is now being viewed as toxic. But at least in my view, and in my experience, work life balance isn't a thing, especially in the early years of the business. When things get tough, you've got to put the work in and there isn't a lot of room for, you know, maybe the approach that that others may want to take. So what do you say to that as far as hustle, culture and work ethic are toxic? Well, first off, I think that people are confusing a few different things, are conflating ideas that don't necessarily belong together. And when I think of toxic cell culture, I think of somebody who is busy all the time for the sake of busyness, and a lot of what they're doing might not be terribly productive and might not be moving them towards their goals, but they like to feel busy. That's what facile means to them. And I agree that is toxic. There's no point in killing yourself 80 hours a week if you're not moving the needle while you do it. Like if I'm going to do that. And I have been phases of my life when I have worked excessively and still not enough, but I made darn sure that what I was doing was really important. As if you focus on your goals and the impact you're trying to create and what you need to have happen, whether it's finding new customers or building a new product or launching a new community or whatever it is that you're doing. If your work is driving towards that, then yes, dig deep, work hard, be prepared for some late nights. But if you're just being busy to be busy, you get all the negatives without any of the positives. And, I'm just curious what your thoughts are. So again, I have many patients in like let's say a certain industry and for whatever reason they want to get out, they want to start, they want to be an entrepreneur. If they don't necessarily have like a good cushion or, you know, nest, they was nest egg, but, you know, like the safety net and everything. Would you recommend that somebody kind of sort of put aside sleep double downs, keep working. But, you know, start putting the getting the fingers out there, trying to start the business while still safely ensconced within their existing work. Or do you say, no, you got to just, you know, put everything aside and just go 100% in that and only that. I don't know if you can answer that in, you know, in a blanket form or what are your thoughts on that, those two scenarios. Okay. So first off, I just want to put the big caveat that I think you put out there too, which is that everybody's individual situation is a little different. But it when you launch a business, no matter how great your ideas and no matter what you're doing, you can expect at a minimum there to be several months where you're not really getting any money for your efforts. If you can't float that, if you don't have enough and savings that that makes you uncomfortable, then you need to do something else to make money. In the meantime, it could be staying at the job you have now, or maybe you downshift. Maybe if you really hate what you're doing and it's already sucking you dry, you leave that job once you've got another much easier job lined up. But that's going to pay you enough to support you until you've got your business really going. But I think that when people just quit, especially if they've never done a business of their own before and they have no plan for how to make money in the interim until that picks up, which again, it's going to be at least several months. But sometimes it takes years is not uncommon for it to take more than a year. Having not enough money to be able to make that journey is going to be so stressful. It's going to put so much pressure on an already pressure build situation, going to be hard on any of your relationships and your responsibilities. I would never recommend that someone that doesn't have to just take the leap and try to start their very first business, with no kind of income or safety net. That sounds terrible. Okay. Now that said, there are a lot of ways you can do contract work. So there are tons of middle ground, right? Like, I had a period several years ago after my son was born that I guess it was a while ago. He just turned 11. But where I didn't want to work, where I was working anymore for a variety of personal reasons. I was in child welfare, and it just became too difficult. Once I had my own child. And I wasn't ready to dive into a new full time thing. So I thought I would just take contract work for a while, and it was pretty easy to get some reasonably well-paying contract work at at suited my own pace in the interim, so that's always an option too. If you have a strong skill set. So as far as the entrepreneurs that you mentor, what is typically your recommendation as far as external supports and what I mean by that is, you know, of course we as individuals have to have, all of the strong characteristics that we've spoken about. But what else needs to exist? So for example, like friendships and social circles and marriages, because I think we can all agree that, like, business does impact all of those relationships. So what what advice do you give to people in your mentorship program with that? So one of the things that I think it's really important to think about is who you're going to go to for what you don't want to go to your mom, who's a chronic worrier and who will take every slightly negative thing as a sign of the impending apocalypse to talk about your whether or not you should pivot your business model because she's going to freak out and tell you to just go get a regular job and stop threatening your grandchildren's stability. Right? You don't want you need at least one person in your corner who knows the realities of that startup life and startup life. Now, who gets what it's like to start a business who's not going to be thrown by what are totally normal things? Because what you need them to be able to do is to reassure you, hey, this is totally normal. This happens to everyone, right? You need someone who's going to be there for you emotionally when you're not at your best, and you can't go to your mentors because you don't want them to see you being quite this upset, someone who just loves you. You need people who you can talk to about other things so that your business doesn't become your whole life. It's it's important to have a rich and varied social network for humans. Just just for everybody. This isn't about entrepreneurs. We're social creatures, as I know you both know. But it is especially important as you're starting this new part of your life to identify the kinds of new needs that you're going to have that your current social network doesn't currently support, and to find people to fill those needs, whether they're formal mentors or just people who are informally willing and able to have these kinds of discussions with you. Yeah. So on the topic of mentorship, I'm so fortunate to have, like I would say, the best possible business mentor ever. And, you know, it's just the the way that things went. And a lot of luck surrounding that. But how do you recommend people find the right business mentor. So I want to make a distinction first between business mentors and, what I actually do, I do mentoring through Growth Mentor and some other places. But what I actually do is I come in and I help people build systems that allow them to stop being directly involved in every part of their business themselves, so that they have the ability to grow. And there are a bunch of different people out there that do work like I do, or other things. Set up a marketing plan, figuring out your sales, whatever that will come in, and they can help you with that. But when we're talking about mentors, what we're really talking about is somebody who is willing and able to have high level, sometimes abstract, sometimes personal discussions that help you think through your problems. They're not really doing anything. They're there to help you, get the benefit of their advice and clarity. And so with that in mind, when I think about finding a mentor, I personally I'm looking for someone that has some kind of specialized experience that is above what I have. That's where I'd like to grow Aspirationally I'm looking for someone who's accomplished the thing I'm trying to do, so that I can learn from how they did it and try to emulate as much as it makes sense, their path to success instead of inventing it for myself. And can people do it without a mentor, in your opinion? I think that people who don't have the proper social support, whether it's a business mentor or, a romantic partner or friends to go out with and let off steam, or family that supports them, or you don't have all of those things. But if you don't have any of those things. I think that it's probably very difficult to create a good life. We're just we're just not meant to be alone. And so while I don't want to say that no one can build a business without a business mentor specifically, I will say that if you don't have anyone in your life that you can have thoughtful, productive, resonating conversations about both the struggles and the triumphs of the business that you're trying to build, it is going to be harder and more lonely than it has to be, and it's going to be hard and lonely anyway, so there's really no reason to make it worse. Yeah. So when it comes to the work that you do with building systems and helping entrepreneurs take a step back and, you know, not be in the business day to day and you know in the weeds so to speak. What do you find that the biggest motivation is for individuals wanting to take that next step? Well, look, there is a hard limit on how much you can grow if you have to stay involved in every part of the business yourself. If you're making all the decisions, everything is being run through your hands. You're acting in lieu of a system. I always say, if you don't have a system, you are in a system. And if you are the system, there is a low ceiling of how big you can get. That's it. If you want to grow any bigger, you can't because you're not pushing the work out of your hands. There's a lot of other things, right? People hate that it's consuming their whole life. People hate the feeling that they can't go on vacation or take a day off or go do a thing at their kids school, because as soon as they step away, everything stops. People hate feeling all alone, but the reality of the situation is that by the time most people come work with me, though of course we could have done something earlier to alleviate any of those things we just talked about. It's because they've hit their ceiling and they've realized that if they don't get serious about creating a system that is not based on a cult of personality around themselves, that they can never get any bigger than they are, and they'll never have any of their own time back until they quit. Yeah. So from a psychological perspective, and I'm speaking both as a business owner and as a clinician that works with business owners, what do you think gets in the way of them recognizing that sooner? So like you said, they they come to you at a point where they eventually recognize this should have happened sooner rather than later? So what gets in the way? Well, I think there's a lot of different things that boil down to the myth of the the founder that we tell ourselves there's a rich mythos in our culture about what founders are. And part of it, are these pithy little things that founders say to each other all the time that are so destructive things like, nobody will ever care about your business as much as you do, so you can never expect anyone to do the work as well as you do. Or, no one will ever understand your business like you do. So if you take yourself out of any part of the decisions, it'll start to fall apart. There's just this idea that if you let any part of your business slip out of your direct grasp, that it's going to fall apart in short order. And, this is backed up by the fact that if you try to withdraw without installing good performance management systems, good processes, good ways of tracking outcomes, not tracking people, tracking outcomes directly. Doesn't matter how much people are sitting in their chairs, it matters what they're accomplishing. They should be very clear about that. But anyway, if you try to pull away without creating these systems first, you do see a massive degradation in the quality of work being done and sometimes the work stopping completely. And so when people look at it and go, oh, look, see, this is just how it has to be. If you pull back and stop being directly involved, everything falls apart. Which is really shocking if you think about it, because we live in a world of huge corporations, giant global businesses, clearly there is a way to get other to people to do work on your behalf. But but founders sometimes are told over and over again it's all on you until they start to believe that no one else can do anything for them. Which is crazy if you think about the world of specialization. Modern business lives in. Yeah, and I don't want to put words in your mouth here, but I think in large part what you're saying, especially when it comes to startups and founders, what potentially is lacking is a knowledge of strong leadership and how to execute strong leadership, how to hire the right people. I always joke that I'm a seven and a ten, and I hire ten that attends because I want people who are smarter than me helping me run my business successfully. But I think that comes from me being able to or having been able to learn appropriate leadership and how to find the right people. But that said, I also think that in the early stages of a business, a lot of times people who are moved into leadership are more, out of availability and, they just happen to be there rather than out of skill and ability. So I threw a lot out there, there. But what are your thoughts surrounding founders and leadership skills? Well, first off, I think that the Peter Principle is alive and well, regardless of whether you're a startup or an established business. That is kind of the way it works, right? You do well at your job, you get promoted, you get promoted. At some point, you get promoted into management. And when you stop being good at your job, you stop getting promoted. So you stay at the job that is your worst one, which is it's a travesty, honestly, the way that we don't train people for management. And I think that's true at startups as well as anywhere else. And I do think that a lot of founders don't have, I'm reluctant to actually just agree with you that it's leadership skills, because I think that leadership skills is a really loaded turn term that goes back to things like culture and, a lot of ideas that become super important at a stable state, but that can actually be really destructive when they're introduced too early. I've seen more than one startup fold because they brought in some kind of operations expert, some big dollar operations expert who tried to make everybody have the same experience that the last big foundation he worked at. And it's not sustainable in an environment where you still need people to be able to pivot quickly and regularly and be responsive to new information, and people's roles are getting reshuffled. It's just it's not necessarily stage appropriate developmentally for the organization. And those earlier stages, I think it's less about classic traits of leadership, and it's more about creating real transparency and clarity so that decisions are documented. People know where to go for information. There's real process that's written out in a way that it doesn't live in someone's head, that the way that everything is being managed, performance wise, is absolutely crystal clear and has the supporting data underneath it so that you can figure out how to change. Because the one thing that is absolutely true about startups is that they have to be nimble to stay on their toes. Classic question. It's a total I think it's a pivot. Okay. But something you said, and I hope I can formulate the question properly because it just jumped out when you said it. Statistically speaking, I guess we can infer that there would be far more people, let's say, working for a startup, because that's, you know, in the last number of years, startups have become more popular, far more people working for them than operating them or running them. Right. So I'm just curious when you talked about this, you know, the entrepreneur mindset about the, you know, like, basically the entrepreneur has his or her own, let's say, intrinsic motivation to do it. They have a vision. They have all these things that they want to see happen, and they are more passionately, invested in it. And maybe financially than anybody else will be. Okay. And so they have a certain mentality. I have many patients who've worked for those people who are either at the bottom or at a tier quite a bit below the top, and they're never going to be the they're not going to be a co partner or something. Okay. And so this person comes in with this mindset, this perspective, this drives this vision. And they expect everybody below them to have that same mentality including you better be prepared to give up family life whatever for a certain period of time. So again hope I can articulate the question properly. But what do you think about, let's say, about that disconnect between this perspective and trying to impose it on the people below who, you know, you know, maybe they have some vision, maybe they want to be an entrepreneur one day. Maybe they're trying to, you know, get some kind of mentorship, but they're never going to yield the same benefits and they don't have the same risks as the person at the top. Yet they're being told to sort of have the same mentality or this in being implied. I hope the question makes sense. It does. And I love that question. And I love that you said, how do you impose that mentality on the people below you, because so many people think about it exactly like that. How do I make my staff care about this in the way that I do? And in startup parlance, you call it taking ownership, right? You want them to really own whatever their function is because doing a function means following the steps as they're written out and hoping for the best, but owning it means paying critical attention. Is this working with this work better? What if I tried this here with this get more of the result and it's constantly trying to make it better. And as a startup, especially an early stage startup founder, before you're really scaling, scaling happens when you are this works. I know who my customers are. I know how we serve them. I know that it all works. Now. I'd want to systematize it so I can do it as much of it as possible. Right? Everything before that is about figuring out the answers to those questions. Who, really are my customers? Do I have the right ones? Am I offering them the right thing? Am I marketing it to them in such a way that I'm reaching them out? Blah blah blah? So when we're talking about that context, part of a leader's job is to figure out what is going to motivate all the various people on their team, and you got hired for this. You can't think about this after you have people on the team is not everyone is equally motivational. But you have to think about how are you going to motivate them to perform as an owner within their function. So if they're in charge of customer success, how do you motivate them to offer increasingly high quality customer success to get all of the benefits that come from getting increasingly good at doing customer success, right? And not just them being good at it, but documenting it. Systematize it being part of a larger process that eventually allows you to have ten, 20, 50 customer success agents instead of just that one who can do it because she just happens to be so charismatic that people respond to her. That's not good. That's not how you build a business. You need to be able to figure out how other people can do it too. Okay, so earlier we were talking a little bit about internal versus external motivation and the mistake that a lot of founders make at the space is they think, okay, I know how to motivate people. I'll offer them more money. I'll offer them bonuses. If they do enough good enough job, I'll offer them raises or promotions or whatever. I'm often promotions without raises because money's tight before you scale. The this kind of external motivation, as we know, has a very short shelf life and isn't going to last longer than you're being watched, basically. So you need to cultivate internal motivation. How do you do that? Well, one, it's by common purpose. A lot of founders have this strong passion that what they're doing is going to, in some important way, make the world better. And so they try to hire people that agree with them that their mission is important, and then they try to build that up through passionate speeches, through leadership, through, bringing up example. I worked at a startup where every Monday for our team meeting, we would start by reading testimonials from some of our clients, talking about how we changed their lives with our programing so that everyone would be in that headspace, as we talked about the work that needed to happen that week. But part of it is also about really creating room for people to have that ownership. I say to you, okay, you're in charge of this, but I don't give you the ability to make the decisions. I don't give you the ability to change, to test, to pivot, to figure out how to be the best darn customer service representative or whatever it is that's happening. Then what I'm doing is putting you in one of the most, stressful kinds of positions that you can have. And there's good research to show that this is true, that if you put someone in a position where they have a lot of responsibility, but very little power, it's extremely stressful. Right? And and that's what we do when we put the onus of creating impacts on someone without giving them the power to create the conditions to be successful. And so it's not just that you want to inspire the people that you're working with to really believe in your cause, which is a big part of it. I don't want to underplay that, but you also need to create conditions where they can be successful. They have a system to build on, and they have the ability within that system to try to test, to make things work the way they're supposed to so they can achieve the impacts that you're holding them accountable for. I hope I answered your question. I really did and it's funny because I was thinking more especially in line with today's discussion, that perfectly I think maps like that maps on to the discussion. And my pivot was more about I was thinking about the employees themselves, who, you know, again, are being sold a bill of goods, almost like, you know, everything that you said, if the person conveys it in a certain way and the person in the end says they still expect me, I get I think what you a lot of what you said mitigates this mentality. Okay. But they still say, okay, they, they want more from me that I'm willing to give because in the end, the capitalist, the entrepreneur, he or she is going to make all the money off the back of my labor. So I'm just wondering, because I have a lot of patients in that situation where how do you motivate the person you know beneath to say like, no, no, yeah, you're getting you're getting paid. You know, you know, maybe not as good as this person and you're being asked a lot or whatever, but, you know, how do you maintain that motivation on that lower end? Again, I think most of what you said would, apply to that. Is there anything else thinking more from that person's perspective? You know, on the bottom? Oh, yes. Thank you. There was one more thing that I had meant to say, which is that one of the beautiful things about startups, and one of the things that drove me to them, drew me to them in the first place, is that there is so much room for growth and learning new things. I'm one who I get very bored if I've solved the core problem I've been brought in to solve, and now I'm just stepping and repeating my work. It makes me very unhappy, and after a while I have to find something else to do because I can't keep working if I don't care about the problem I'm trying to solve. And, so part of it's about hiring. It's about hiring people that care about that. But let's say you get people in, you give them the problem to solve, you give them that interesting work, but you also want to give them those growth opportunities. Working at a startup is the only place I know that someone can go from being an entry level, customer success specialist to being the Director of Customer Success in a year and a half. Right? You go in, you build it, you do a good job, you get someone underneath you, you keep getting promotions, and before you know it, you're leading a team. It might take you ten years to make that jump in traditional stable state businesses. Yeah. So as far as what we've talked about today, we've spoken a lot about the different, personality traits, different relationships that we should have in our lives. But we like to end this podcast with, you know, what people can do? What? Something actionable that they can take from what we've spoken about today and implement into their lives. So, a broad question of asking, but, what would you say is some advice that you could give to our listeners as far as, you know, what they can do to make some changes or make some improvements. Sure. I think that one of the things that everyone who works in any kind of startup environment should do is they should periodically pause and take a hard look at how they're spending their time. Startups are chaotic. It's it's part of the nature of the beast. And in chaos, especially in an environment where everyone is trying to work as hard as they can and show how committed they are and pull their weight, it is really easy to get caught up in this trap of busyness over productivity. If you have two things on your plate and one is to solve a very difficult problem that you don't have the resources or frankly, any idea how to solve. And the other one is to spend two hours answering emails and going through slack messages invisibly looking helpful. It's really easy to choose the emails and the slack messages right? But it's tackling that difficult problem that's going to move you forward. And so for a lot of people who are overwhelmed, who feel like they're expected to work, 60-80 hours a week, who feel like they're never able to turn off their their phones and leave their email and are overwhelmed by the chaos. The smartest and simplest thing that you could do is to periodically audit how you're spending your time, and whether or not it is moving the needle. A lot of people discover they're in a lot of meetings that have no impact on any of the things they're being measured on, or that they're doing a lot of tasks that nobody cares about that are legacy tasks. I, I do some small amount of coaching directly with, remote leaders, and it is not uncommon for them to figure out they're spending 1015, sometimes 20 hours a week, basically wasting their time doing things that feel busy but are not moving the needle. And once you take all that stuff out, you can use some of that time to be more productive and to accomplish more. And you can use some of that time to, I don't know, take your kids to a movie, make yourself a nice dinner, not work all weekend. Because the bottom line is, you probably don't have 60 hours of productive work you need to do a week. Now, and I love that framing. And I think that does apply to all of the the different types of people we've spoken about today that find maybe find the more difficult thing to do and move the needle and work on making progress in that regard. Absolutely. Yeah. Okay. Well, Brittany, thank you so much for being with us today. This was a wonderful conversation. It was wonderful having you on today. It was a real pleasure. Thank you for having me. Thank you. And I have definitely as you were talking, I have a number of patients that I'm going to have listen to this, because I think they can really take a lot from, you know, from what you were saying, a lot of perspective reframing and, you know, and that that I think would really help them add some concrete, suggestions. So thank you very much for joining us. And, for what else? Until next time, keep your eyes on the road and your hands upon the wheel.