Episode #113: Ruth Nelson on Recruiting

🎙️ Beyond the Offer: Ruth N. Nelson on Finding the Right Fit 🏐✨

Ruth N. Nelson has lived every side of the recruiting process—Division I head coach at Houston, LSU, and Iowa, U.S. National Team coach, mentor to legends like Flo Hyman and Rita Crockett, and now the founder of BYOP® (Bring Your Own Parent) and GoKids.

In this episode, Ruth shares powerful lessons every athlete and parent needs to hear about the realities of recruiting, how to prepare for opportunities, and what truly matters when choosing the right college fit.

Her decades of experience prove that recruiting isn’t about chasing offers—it’s about finding the right environment where athletes can thrive in school, in sport, and in life.

👉  Learn more about Ruth’s work at Ruthipedia.com, and find more recruiting tools and resources at CoachMattRogers.com. 

Significant Recruiting Resources — Take the guesswork out of college recruiting with Significant Recruiting: The Playbook for Prospective College Athletes, sport-specific Recruit’s Journals, and the Significant Recruiting Launchpad. Practical tools to help families research schools, stay organized, and build a smarter recruiting strategy. Learn more at CoachMattRogers.com.

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Welcome back to The Significant Recruiting Podcast. I'm your host, Matt Rogers. Today's guest is someone who has shaped NCAA recruiting conversations for decades, hall of Fame volleyball Coach Ruth N. Nelson. She's coached at Houston, LSU, and Iowa helped guide the US national team and mentored some of the greatest names in volleyball history. But Ruth's influence goes far beyond the sidelines. She understands the recruiting process from the inside out and has spent her life helping athletes and families navigate it with wisdom, honesty, and vision. From developing programs like the BYOP and Go kids to coaching athletes who became Olympians in Hall of Famers. Ruth has lived every side of recruiting and she's here to share with you the lessons, strategies, and truths that every family needs to hear. So grab a pen. You'll want to take some notes. Let's jump in with one of the game's true innovators, Ruth and Nelson. Go, Ruth Nelson, you and I just had a great conversation on coaching and your history and I love everything you're doing with the little ones and teaching them how to be their best versions of themselves, but also how to be athletes to have discipline. I want to get a little bit into recruiting with you. Okay. 'cause it's such a huge topic in our world, and I feel like everything's gonna change in the next two or three years. I don't even know if we're gonna have an NCAA in the next two or three years, right? And I can guarantee that it's gonna look a lot different than it does now. Uhhuh, you're able to be at 30,000 feet like I am and be able to look at this a little bit differently now. What are you seeing in the world of recruiting as you're seeing these little ones get older and older? You've been with a lot of these little ones since they were four and now they're in high school and some are off to college. What are your thoughts on recruiting right now and how parents should be looking at recruiting and what should they even be thinking about recruiting? Probably it was about maybe 10 years ago a friend of mine who was in the telecom business with me. We started a service called Collegiate Athlete Educational Program, and we put together checklists for freshmen, sophomore, junior seniors before the NCA ever did it. And we presented it with one of my former colleagues, Carol Cars, who used to be the AD at Illinois. She, we went to the NCA and presented, but nobody would sign an NDA. Okay, so when somebody don't wanna sign an NDA they, that means they're gonna look at what you're doing and if you, if they like what you're doing, they're gonna do it, so they saw what we'd done with the checklist and all that. And because we had the first intro was free, and then you had another workshop, which we call it workshop too. And it had a lot to do with the financial side. How to recruit, you know how to do, and it's really how do you develop the relationship between the parent and the athlete. We would go through the introduction and they would have to fill out something and then they would turn it over and then they would switch papers and the parent would go, I didn't know you wanted to go outta state, and the kid says mom, I did, but. You sounded like you wanted me to go to where you graduated from, so you, this introduction did that. So when we did that first, that kind of introduced it to me. Okay. So the NCA, then they start doing their freshman, sophomore, junior took it from us. Of course they fired that guy, that, did all the whole thing and just never, for me, I'm a creator. I can't go someplace and stay there for 10 years, yeah. Andy was at you. I admire those people. Me, I like to create, get it going, and I'm off. I'm off to another topic. 'cause Kathy Debor said to me, Ruth, this is COVID. What are you doing? What's going on with your training? I said, Kathy, I've been doing Skype training for 10 years. She goes, oh, I guess you zoom is okay. I said, no, zoom is great because I can do all my, I can flip up a here this, I can share this group. And so when you really start thinking about the recruiting aspect, I was doing that in 95. I'll say the one of the first things that I said, and that was get a Gmail account that has your name and your graduation date in it@gmail.com. Okay? I said this in 1995. Okay? And as a matter of fact, there's one, the little girl in the pink, she still has hers. But the point was, is so when the college coach gets an email, everybody's texting all that, but sooner or later you got it. I don't know how anybody, I haven't figured that out yet, how anybody keeps their work that organized on their phone unless they sync their phone in their computer together. Yeah, because you're looking through a lot of folders. Okay. On your phone. Okay, so over here I said if a college coach gets something, it says 2032. They're gonna put you on the back burner, but when it comes to 2032, you're gonna be the first one. 'cause they're gonna forget those other names unless they were on that five to 10% list. So That's right. So my thinking with this educational program, it was a nonprofit and I've had, I did some seminars. I, certified facilitators, that's what they were called. Yeah. And I was way ahead of the recruiting game at that time, and yes, you were doing video, but we were doing video. I started doing Zoom, one college coach says, Hey Ruth, I wanna, take a look at this. I said I'll do something open on Facebook, which means everybody can see it. So it's not just for you, but anybody. So I'd zoom that in. They go, okay. I definitely am interested in her. Okay, so this is. 15, 19 95 to 2000. So this is way ahead, doing streaming and everything. And Skype was the biggest thing, and the problem, it'd always go out on you and all that, but I still used it. And a lot of that international people still use Skype, but now they've gone over to all of, so recruiting. So what is it that I thought that you needed to be doing and that is that you needed to have those things? And I'll never forget, it probably was like maybe five years before COVID and Russ came to Dallas and he was at Lone Star, which is probably the biggest qualifier in Dallas. And he is over there and he is got his paper. He is checking off who's taking walk to the kids, where are the kids doing during time out? What are the kids doing? Not paper on a phone. Actual paper. Yeah. Oh, no. Yeah, he did just paper on phone and in, in reality, you have to look at that there. That's why say the separation between, I call it a relationship that you have with your parent. Okay. And this is my thought was as a freshman. 25% should be done by the players, 75% by the parent sophomore, 50 50 junior year, 75% kid, 25% parent senior year. The kid does a hundred percent. You start doing this when you're in seventh and eighth grade, you start thinking about, where I might like, but the parent's doing all the other about education and keeping their grades and, but there it's always this, I say doors are open when it comes down to two players. The player that has better grades has some chance, many times of getting in that university and catching the coach's eye, not because they're smart, but maybe because they were smart enough to make good grades. And then you can find out. So you're, it should be make the best grades. You can stay healthy and you'll have fun. If any of those are distracted somehow these two, you're not gonna have fun. 'cause you're not having fun when you're hurt. I'm sorry, you're not having, you're not having fun if you don't make good grades, because I guarantee your parents are gonna be on your tail end about it. So you almost have to figure out, 'cause everybody always talks about how can you have fun playing? You have fun playing by keeping the ball in play. You don't have fun playing by serving the ball over 17 times and no one gets the ball. So it relates to the recruiting side. How do you have fun? You make great grades and you stay healthy. So what's happening now, kids by whatever pressure it may be, are getting injured or staying injured more often. So you have to figure out what is it? So I always say, okay, on a scale of one to five, five, I need surgery. One, I got a hangnail. Figure out what your body is telling you. Then you understand what you can and can't do. And to me, if you ask every great athlete, they're gonna tell you that I need to take time off. But an athlete that's not, and I consider great, it doesn't mean that they're Olympic. 'cause you can be great at something and not have won the national championship. Somebody said, Caitlyn Park is not the best because she never won a national champion. That's got nothing to do with it. Nothing. There's a lot of other aspects that have to do with great. So finding that medium now parent and the kid then has to be able to tell the parent where they are, and a lot of times. Because we've had to tough it out during our time. 'cause we never had trainers. It doesn't mean that we were doing what was right with for our body. We did it because we wanted to play. But now there is an extreme. Okay, got a kid that has shin splints. Doctor says, lay out two and a half weeks. Ari says, wear high heels. Put you at a different angle, takes the stress off. It's okay, come on. You can still serve, you can still, set the ball. You can still do you, in here. Maybe you're not gonna be jumping, maybe you're not gonna be turned, but it's gone to the extreme. Oh my God. You gotta cushion, you gotta do, i'm still saying, at least I think I am. And I've been hit in the head by Patty Alde and Flo and every single person ever, and knocked in. I saw stars and got back up and I'm not saying that you should do this, but I'm just saying there's got a parent has to figure out where the parameter is. Yeah. So now let's relate it to recruiting. Okay. The kid must call coaches, the parent. Thank you. Didn't call the coaches. The parent may encourage the player. I'll never forget Ebony Nbu, who was the number one, recruited Nebraska. She visit there, she ended up going to USC two years and transferred to Texas. We were on our, everybody got mad at me because I had her set up recruit calls to 20 schools. 'cause they were very interested. Okay. So I had it down like five o'clock, 5 15, 5 30, 5 45, and we did that once a week. We get on the phone with Russ. Russ says, this sounds like you're getting ready to date my son. Speed dating. She had her questions and she had, she'd gone on their website because to me, when a kid wants to, is getting interested in a college they're getting thousands. Okay. When I was at Iowa, I had a thousand on my list. And the one person that I talked to more often was Kristen Focal, who ended up going and playing basketball at Stanford. She was Dial America Award winner with Tiger Woods. Okay. Her mom let me talk to her and Tara, because she said she didn't want anybody else talking to her. I knew at Iowa our academics weren't as good as Stanford, but her mom let me, because I just talked to her about recruiting and I think the bottom line is this. I've got one kid right now, we're talking senior year. I said there's still options, but they're limited. That's right, but it doesn't mean that you don't end up getting to the place that you will absolutely love. But I'm gonna tell you this. When we started CAEP, we said, you should be thinking about this school if you weren't going to play volleyball, right? Is this the place that you wanna be for four years? One of my Gen Z kids said coach Ruth, you know what I think I'm gonna do? I think, I'll go to this school and if I don't like it, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna go in the portal. That's right. Okay. And, okay, so my point is, you go and win a national championship, somebody's recruited you for three to four years. How do you leave that school? I don't know what's happened to the loyalty? Guess where it starts? Somebody who used to be in two clubs in seven years now is in seven clubs for seven years. So my daughter just went through that. Exactly. So you, so there has to be, this is what I believe in club. 'cause they'll always ask this question, do you think I need to play? At the top club in order to be recruited. Okay, that's one. Second, do I need to play in the club that wins the National Champion or goes to the junior national championship? Okay. Next is, do I need to play in a local club where I can afford it, I can get good coaching. We're not gonna go to nationals. I always say, then guess what? Your work may be a little bit more in a little bit different direction because you've gotta gain the interest of those. And I'm gonna tell you this, watching a streaming is so much easier than shoving in that VHS. You bet you it is. Oh, I watch so many of those. And the DVDs in my, one of my athletes started this it was 18 years ago. She put her DVD and put one of the popcorns in it and enjoy your popcorn while you watch me play. We thought that's some smart recruiting. I like that. Oh no, we did. I like that. Did all, we did all kinds of stuff like that. That's great. And now it's really, the highlight. Okay. It's like huddle because kids can now pick da, do that. But high schools have to realize they need to let those kids share those huddles, because I know they don't wanna even see that because of recruiting with, since when does two high school teams play in each other mean the difference of your job? I'm not sure. There might be a few, but not many. So my question is, are we putting all the emphasis. On winning. Winning? Or are we putting the emphasis on player development? Okay, now I go in all these, groups and I listen. I don't, Hey, I answered one time and my friend from Canada says, Ruth, do you, there's 200 threads on what you responded. I go, I did. I didn't even, that's not, I didn't even say that. So I quit doing it. So what I started was my wikipedia.com. It's in the eyes of me. This is what I see, because I don't want to go and put, now I promote my own stuff, but, so it comes back to the recruiting. Yeah. How much visibility and how soon I did this with these little ones, 12 years, what? We're talking 20, 34. Okay. So we're talking four years old and now, you're they're 10 years old, nine and 10 years old. And I think to myself. I was ahead and I, you were Kathy divorced, says you're 10 years ahead of everybody else. I said, yeah, but you know how frustrating that is because it's like people don't even wanna talk about that. They just go, Ruth, I don't have time. Nobody has time now. Nobody has time to thank you. You call customer service and you say, could I do this and this? I said, could I speak to someone who speaks English so that I can understand and they hang up on me? Now what kind of customer service is that? Exactly. So think of this. Think of how many college coaches don't respond to kids who send emails. They have no idea if the college is interested or not. Okay. I understand. Hey, don't tell me about numbers. I had a thousand on my list at Iowa. And I had one assistant coach, not four plus a fifth, and plus graduates. Yeah. At Houston, I didn't even have an assistant coach for eight years, I had an assistant coach. It's crazy. See? So when people say that, I think it's like my boss at Special Olympics who was my boss at telecommunication. He was the former AD at Northwestern Mutual. Northwestern in Chicago. He was a former SMU. He was a former associate AD at Stanford when Title IX went in. Okay. So he's someone who under, he said, work smart. Work smart. I says, okay, I'm working smart. And he goes, no, you're working long. Yeah. You're not working smart. Yep. And so for athletes to say, and I always say this, have you sent your schedule? To those coaches that have been on your list right before the tournament. As soon as you get to schedule. 'cause now they get the schedules out early. Okay, we're done with the first day. Did you send, go back to your room? Did you go and send something out that, here's my schedule for today. Are you on top of the amount of time that you spend so that you can get that coach's attention? The coach very rarely. Will be walking by and just happen to see you. They might see you because a coach like myself might be on the court and I see somebody and I go, Molly, when she was at Cincinnati, Hey, come take a look at this kid, da. Or I'll take a video and I'll send it out to 15 college coaches. And I go, they go, Ruth, my God, she's over the net. I said, yeah, she's over the net like this. And she's playing middle and she's not recruited and she's not committed to anybody. Okay. Ruth, so it's, it takes people. To help and I call it, you've gotta have your group of people that you assign as an athlete, certain aspects of your recruiting, and, but you are responsible for making sure you do what you're supposed to do. If you're supposed to be going and studying. You can't be doing the recruiting, so you should allow yourself your one hour. Twice or three times a week, and maybe it's less in the freshman year, sophomore, but you have to do more now in freshman and sophomore because now they can call you in June of in sophomore year. So I think that changes. Now, the NIL side of it, I'll tell you what, you can mon if parents can monitor an Instagram account and then when they get to high school, let them do it. But you can monitor what goes on. Kids find all kinds of ways it, but I don't think. In reality that you should spend hours and hours. But I think it should be of the kids playing soccer, the kids doing this, they're getting their all around skills. They're getting, they're in the talent show. They're in this. I think coaches want all around players, okay? Coaches want ones that have played other sports. I don't think you have to specialize. Until you're like 14, 15 years old, assuming that you're wanting to go big time. And I say big time, say top 50 schools. Yeah. But, I just think that, so for me, educating parents at this age group, I think the hardest thing is parents are afraid they're gonna get behind, so they think more is better. And I call it. As much as, I hate to say to use this term, drinking the Kool-Aid, 'cause everybody Yeah, they do. Yeah. And all the Christians that did all the, oh, Jimmy and all those guys who drank the Kool-Aid, but they think it's the same flavor. It's not, the flavor's different for every kid. Like I, if I've got a kid that's growing, then I've gotta pay attention to what that kid is doing in jumping. That brings the whole performance training side into this. Yeah. And I've got a 10-year-old that's doing some performance training but she's doing coordination, agility, balance and all that kinda stuff, which I think is fantastic because if they're not getting that in another sport, like she's quit one of her main sports, so she's not getting that movement out on the field and stuff. You need to supplement that somehow, but you've gotta learn to limit. Okay, this is what an 8-year-old said to me. I said, did you jump rope your three minutes every day? Coach Ruth, I don't have time. I says, okay, 24 hours. Okay, how many hours do you sleep? She says, 12. Okay. How many you have left? 12. Okay. How many hours do you need for eating? She goes, okay, this is this. I said, how many hours you go to school? Okay. I said, you got five hours left. You don't have three minutes to jump rope. In, in reality, you, this takes time to go through that process that I just did. But if you're asking a kid to be committed to something and it can't be something, they go and they say, okay mom, I don't like this anymore. You committed to this eight week program. Okay, you've gotta do it and you've gotta show, okay, don't Rolling eyes, all that kind of stuff. I go, don't you dare roll your eyes to your parents and you mustn't even think of doing it to me because, and it's, what? It's all comes from my background. Like you said, it came from your background. What can parents do? They can be aware. They can be aware of, I just looked at your volleyball recruiting book. I didn't, you know that, is that recent? The journal? Yeah. I'm gonna send you one. Yeah. Okay. Because I think what you've been doing is something unique. I wish that I would've seen. It's almost like you think you're on the internet and you know what's going on, and you really don't. And Sue says You gotta listen to this guy. He's doing some great stuff. And if Sue's saying that from the recruiting side, because she knows what's going on in the recruiting side at the very top level. She sure does. Yeah. Yeah. And the fact is that a lot of stuff they are doing. People are using, just like you said, I'm, I'll listen to you're using, why should you, why do you need to recreate something that's already created? That's right. But what you've done is with your journal is what I have the kids do when they go home. They're to write the keywords down, write the things that they did better this time, write the things they did better at the end of the session than they did at the beginning, and write the things down that they need to practice before they come the next week. We, you and I are so like-minded because that was the whole idea of why I wrote my first book, and then why I've done the journals is because I keep having the same conversation you're having with kids. You've got five hours left in your day and you can't jump rope for three minutes. How badly do you wanna be a better volleyball player? How better how badly do you want to jump higher? So for me, my purpose with recruiting athleticism, being a great kid, it all comes down to executive function skills. And I want kids to learn, and that's what the journals do, is I'm gonna set three goals this week. Three goals. Not that I'm gonna win the lottery, not that I'm gonna do, I'm gonna run 50 miles, right? But can I get up every day and make my bed? Can I have my homework done before eight o'clock? Have it in my backpack, have it by the door so I'm not worrying about it when I go to sleep. And then can I find that three minutes to jump rope? Can I find that three minutes to do 20 pushups and 20 crunches and make my body stronger? And then we add the recruiting component to that. Can you send one email and follow it up with a phone call to one coach? You're interested. You've done the research. You're telling 'em why you want their school. Now we're talking about three or four goals that took you 15 minutes, right? In a day to do. How much better are you? Then your competition because you took that 15 minutes. 'Cause there's plenty of people riding them. That's right. So for me I want kids to understand this doesn't have to be your life. It doesn't have to be a job, but you do have to be the CEO of it. You're, it's your business. Yeah. This is your life. You're, as much as you want them to recruit you, you're also recruiting them. You're trying to figure out where do I wanna spend these four years of my life, which are probably gonna be the most impactful four years. Of your young life. Yes. So you and I are so like-minded. I love the way you coach and I love the way you teach, and I love the way your mind works. And coach, if there's anything I can ever do for your little ones or your program I hope you don't even hesitate. You just call me and say, Matt, I need your help. If I can send you books, if I, if you want me to do classes, I will do it. Just, I love what you're doing and thank you for doing this. Today, I asked for an hour and you gave me almost two hours today. Oh, no. But I have one thing that Yes, is really important. I want you to sell, talk about everything you're doing where they can find you too. A lot of times parent will talk about club and their club coach. Yes. Or their school coach. Yes. And I said this is very important. You put a sheet of paper, a post-it, you know whether you've got a dry board. I want you to take, let your athlete take 10 minutes. And I said, and maybe you should take 10 minutes on your own board and I want you to put up. Everything up there that you wanna complain about. You got 10 minutes. I love it. I want you to put 'em up there. You can complain, love it. You can call it whatever kind of session you want, but you put it up there. I said, now I want you, then you're done. No more complaining. But I want you to look at that list and I said about 90% of that list you don't even control. So my question is, why are you complaining about something that you can't control and this is what. This age group is, I'm gonna send my mom to the principal because the coach is not playing me, and the coach should be fired. This isn't the way you do it. You put it on the board and you recognize what things you can do. Now you may change something about your attitude because rolling eyes and not showing up and doing this and looking in the stand, that's not teamwork. So my question is, can you change that? If you don't change it, do you think that doesn't affect some other people? Now, if I'm talking to the rest of the team, I'm saying you shouldn't let it, but that's one of your complaints. So you take the complaint off 'cause you can control that. You don't listen. So to me, everybody needs a board to love it. Bang, 10 minutes. That's it. You're done for the day. It's. It's everything and I'm finding myself. I write a blog every week and I'm finding, I write. About that as much as I write about anything else. Of all the things that we try and control that we really don't even need to put our energy into, how do I get better if I'm not looking in the mirror and going, what can I do to make my relationship with my coach better? What can I do to make my abilities better mentally, physically so I can help my team in different ways? If we're not starting there and I think we wait too long. We wait too long to get to 17, 18, 19, where we try to start instilling that message. I think when you're doing it at four and five and six and you're getting 'em to think, I can't control that, but I can control this, I can get better, I can make mom and dad happier 'cause my room is clean. Yeah, I could make my teachers happier, but just remember this. Just because I work hard doesn't mean that I'm gonna get on the court. So just understand no matter what I do in recruiting. It doesn't matter if I email every single week. I send a great highlight every single week. It doesn't mean they're going to recruit you. Yeah. 'cause it isn't about turning. Most important thing is that Tom Lander Jr. Learned from me. He says, Ruth, I don't understand how you can continue raising money trying to get sponsors. When everybody says no, I said, sooner or later someone will say. Yes. Yeah. And it isn't easy to hear. No, because of course he'd never heard no before. You're your coach Landen, everything's, life is different. But in a, I can only imagine. You wanna hear no instead of nothing. If you say no, then you move on. But you don't take them off the radar because some things change. Their dynamics of their team, or maybe the coach also is learning at the same time because there isn't anything that every single one of those coaches aren't learning. They are learning. They may not be admitting it, but listen, they are learning. You'll love this. 'cause I tell my kids, I tell my, the kids I work with, I say, you've got three goals when you're reaching out to a coach, you and all three of these are victories for you. Number one is they give you any kind of feedback, right? You get a college coach to tell you what they think of your ability and maybe give you some advice on what to work on, right? Number two, they like you and they wanna follow you. They wanna start recruiting you and get to know you better. Yeah. And number three is they tell you they're not gonna recruit you, right? Or they don't have a spot for you, right? That doesn't mean they won't have a spot for you in a year, things can change, but it allows you, that's a victory to say, okay, I learned something there. Maybe I can put them on the shelf for a little bit. I can put my energy into other schools and other, they did me a favor. I say it's like dating. If you ask somebody to go to the movies with you and they say, no, I don't wanna go to the movies. That doesn't mean there's not somebody better out there that wants to go to the movies with you. But now your energy, it doesn't mean that they don't change either. That's right. They might change, but they might come after you in a year. Now, last thing on recruiting. I would say this. If a parent in a situation's not happy with what? A club coach or a recreational coach, or any coach? I think the most important thing is that to really teach that kid, 'cause if a kid comes to me and says, oh coach, you don't can believe what my coach, I said, don't complain. Ask me how I would approach your coach if I needed more information. And that is that every situation, every club, every recruiting phone call. You should learn at least one thing, maybe more about yourself or maybe about the process or maybe about them. Correct. Jim Coleman used to go to clinics, everybody's clinics. He's there writing things down. He said, you can't learn one thing, then you're not listening. That's right. That's right, coach. Thank you so much. If I, if no one would ever ask me if somebody came to me and said We wanna rebuild youth sports in the United States, I'd say Let's get Ruth Nelson in a room. Let's start there. So thank you for doing this. I You're very welcome. Been joy. Yeah, you're very welcome and thanks again. What a gift it is to learn from Ruth Nelson. She's not only coached, legends and built winning programs, but she's also given families and athletes the kind of perspective that makes recruiting clear, more purposeful, and more attainable. Ruth reminds us that recruiting is about finding the right fit, creating the right opportunities, and not letting money or influence affect the ultimate goal of getting a great education while playing the game You love. Her BYOP and Go. Kids programs show that development starts early and her decades of college coaching. Prove that the habits you build now carry into every opportunity you'll ever have. If you're a recruit or a parent, I hope you take Ruth's wisdom to heart. Be proactive, be prepared, and remember the right college fit is about so much more than just a roster spot. For more tools, resources, and guidance on your recruiting journey, visit coach matt rogers.com. Until next time, stay focused, stay humble, and keep chasing significance. Okay.