Smash The System

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Welcome back to The smashes system podcast, I’m Nino Prodan. This week, we talked a lot about working from home, and how to develop working from home as an opportunity to breaking yourself free, free from the daily commute. free from all that time that you spend, that’s committed to work, but isn’t about working, and how to get the most out of your time to develop new skills and systems to create more time for yourself. And then I talked about how I use that opportunity to also break myself free from my job and create a business for myself. Something that aligned with who I am and helped me help other people. And then yesterday I talked about focusing on what you can do and to go along with that if you’re listening to this during the time of the corona virus. Look at this time as a way to develop your emotions. To be able to face fear to be able to face panic and remain calm and collected and focused on what you want. Use it as a way to develop the systems to disconnect yourself from the panic that’s being fed to you all the time. Stop watching the news. Stop letting mass hysteria be fed to you all day long. So you remain in a panicked and fear state. Because when you’re there, you can’t access the creativity, can’t access the resourcefulness that you need to develop yourself to develop systems to break yourself free. So start using this as an opportunity for developing your resilience. So you can foster that creativity that leads to problem solving and creating abundance in your life. So you no longer fear taking command of your emotions. is a decision. It’s a decision to own it yourself and not let somebody else tell you what to think and how to think and how to react. It’s a decision not to give into that feeling that you’re missing out that you’re going to be uninformed and vulnerable because of it. It’s understanding that what you’re really missing is a trick being played on you. It’s a trick being played on you. So you continue to tune in and pay attention to something that is just created to manipulate you to continue to pay attention, so they can get advertising dollars. start finding ways to access information when you want and how you want without the emotion involved, access the data access to information, but separate it from the hype. So you can remain in control of your decisions and your emotions and the state that you’re in because the state that you’re in dictates how you feel and how you react. And if you can command that, you can then dictate your life to create the results that you want. So don’t look at the current situation as something that panic about something put there, put in your life right now. So you can redesign your life, to look the way that you want. take precautions, take care of yourself, and your family and loved ones and make the decisions that you need to make to create the life that you want. You have the chance now, so take it. I will talk to you next week.

Transcript:

Hey, welcome back to the Smash The System podcast, I’m Nino Prodan. This week, I’ve been talking about taking advantage of working from home, creating a system to take advantage of it. And I told you the story about how I started working from home and progressed from there creating my own freedom by opening up my time. And then using that time to develop something. Time is really important, because it’s the most limited thing that we have. But we don’t always have to trade that time for money. And one of the most powerful ways to take control of our time and not trade time for money is to create systems systems to free you from making that trade, but also increasing your productivity, increasing your dependability, and your deliverability see if you have the right systems in place, not only do you spend less time working But you also get more done. And the other thing is to make sure that the systems that you do have in place now are serving you the best that they can. Because there are a lot of systems that have been created, that don’t get updated, they become obsolete. So it’s always good to see if you’re putting time into something that isn’t worth your time. Start looking for inefficiencies in your day. And if you’re working from home right now, it’s a great opportunity to start evaluating these things because you have more time on your hands, that you can invest in creating more time for yourself in the long term. Because right now, I’m guessing that if you’re working from home, you don’t have constant interruptions from your colleagues. Now, if you have kids at home, that might not be the case. But if you have the opportunity to create more Time for yourself, start to take it. Think of it as an investment into yourself investment into your time and investment into your life. And then you can use that time to build skills or grow a business or just take time to spend with your loved ones. This can be a trying time, but you have a choice right now you can focus on the negatives and the scary things. Or you can focus on the things that you can do the things that are in your hands to make a change and for the future. Yes, deal with the right now and take care of yourself. But look at the positives and focus on the changes that you can make and what’s in your control. Take care of yourself and I will talk to you tomorrow.

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Welcome back to the Smash system podcast. I’m Nino Prodan. Yesterday, I kind of left you off on a cliffhanger. And that was something crazy that I did while I was working from home. And what happened is I started outsourcing my job, I actually hired a personal assistant, I created a whole bunch of macros and systematized my whole job. So it was very easy, pretty much fail proof. And I created a process where I was really only involved and working maybe half an hour a day, responding to emails and initiating the system, which involves removing sensitive information. So that way, I could get all my work done by someone else doing it without violating any company policies or anything like that. So at that point, I essentially outsource my job, but I was still getting paid to do it. I hired a personal assistant in Sri Lanka to do the parts of my job that she was able to do. And so I told you before that I was playing tennis and taking care of myself, developing myself. But I want to tell you what came of that. I started to discover what I really wanted. I had the freedom to start exploring what my passions were in life, what would fulfill me what would help me attain a higher purpose that I thought important to me. You know, once I wasn’t running on the hamster wheel of what I thought I had to do, I was free to do what I wanted and needed to do. So at this point, most of my life, I had a nine to five job most of the time, but I also had a side hustle a business that I would work on on the side just to make extra money, but I never followed my passion in that side hustle. It was always just the means to make more money to make easier money. And it was usually temporary because of that I saw a need for something and I feel that need and then after a while It became obsolete, or I didn’t grow the business because it wasn’t my passion. But now I had the time and the income coming in to start exploring what my passion was, it was no longer a hustle. My time became my time. And my perspective, certainty change because I was no longer scurrying about my life, trying to get things done while I had the time. I had the time now, and I got to explore what would make me happy, what would fulfill me, I always knew that I wanted to help people. And I started coaching. And the great thing was, when my personal assistant wasn’t helping me with my nine to five job if there was something that I needed to attend to, she could help me research and help me create my business free me up so I can develop more skills so I can grow the business more. See, the great thing that happened here was that I was able to create more time in my day in my life, to where I was clear headed enough, relaxed enough, not worried about having the money to start following my dreams. To start doing something that was really important to me, I was able to start creating a business that represented who I am and what I love to do, rather than just worrying about having to pay the bills. And I did it all without the stress without the risk of not having a job, because I did, but I had somebody else doing it, because I had the systems in place to make it possible. So if you’re working from home over the next month, look at it as an opportunity, an opportunity to free up some time to own your time and possibly use it as a stepping stone to start creating the life that you want, start creating the systems today while you have the opportunity, start creating the trust, start training the communication and begin owning your own time. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.

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Welcome back to the Smash assistant podcast. I’m Nino Prodan. Yesterday, we left off talking about how I started working from home. And like I said, At first, it was great, I didn’t have to commute anymore. I didn’t have to get dressed up all fancy to go into the office. But my job started bleeding in to my whole day, taking over my life. And finally, at one point, I said, Enough is enough. I need to fix this. Or I need to find another job. And most of the time people think, Oh, you know what, I’ll just go find another job. But the grass is greener over there. And at the beginning it is. But then you just start seeing the same thing happen again. And I realized that getting another job wasn’t going to fix the problems that I was having. Especially finding something that could allow me to work remotely because I was kind of addicted to it. Tell you the truth. I hadn’t liked not having the commute. It was wonderful. So I thought to myself, alright, if there’s expecting me to kind of be at their beck and call? How can I stop that from happening? And I thought, well, I train my dog to come to me when I called him. I trained him to sit down. And it was all with just consistency and repeated behavior. So I thought, maybe I could train them to expect something different from me. And so when they sent me emails, or called me, a must, I was talking to them at that moment. I wouldn’t answer I want to answer right away. I would wait maybe 10 minutes, maybe 20 minutes. You know, I kind of built it up over time, over a period of a few weeks, and then I just would only answer at certain times of the day that way they knew when they sent me a message, or called me that I wouldn’t get back to them until a certain time. And it took weeks to do this. It wasn’t something that happened overnight. But as I put in the repeated behavior, repeated feedback to them. They started to just understand what they were going to get. No, I started to own my own time. I also had to prove my dependability. But as I proved my dependability, when they give me status checks asked me, oh, how long? How far along? Are you? Can I see what you’re doing? Or can I see what you’re working on? I would ask them, instead of saying, No, you can’t, or here it is right away. I would say, do you need this earlier? Is the deadline moved up? Or do you still need it on Friday? And a lot of the time they would backpedal and say, Oh, no, no, no, I just, I just want to see where we’re at. And I would say, yeah, it’ll be done on Friday. And once you need it earlier, let me know. And at first, they were apprehensive about it. But as I delivered it every Friday or delivered everything on time, they started to understand that they didn’t need to Badger me to get Things Done. Things happened on time. And they had nothing to worry about. But to get your I also had to get past my own stories, I had to tell myself that I was also trained. Initially, I was trained to think that I had to deliver everything right away or respond to everything right away. It was a story that I was telling myself. And as I told myself that I told them, that’s what they should expect from me. So if you think this is impossible, what story are you telling yourself about this? Why are you telling yourself that this is impossible? Is it because you think you’ll lose your job? Or do you think you won’t deliver on things that need to get done? And if that’s the case, how can you make sure that you get things done? Because I’ll tell you, it was worth it. No, I started running on my schedule. I didn’t have to come to the beck and call of others all the time. They knew when they could get ahold of me I held them to it. So my day opened up, I could live my day, my life. It was great. I started taking care of myself, my health improved, I lost weight, I got fit. I started

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Welcome back to the Smash assistant podcast. I’m your host, Nino Prodan. This week, I want to talk about something you may be going through right now. And that’s working from home a little over 10 years ago, I was kind of in the same shoes as you. But for me, I was working at my nine to five at the time, and they wanted me to do data analysis and do data cleanup on a whole bunch of research that we were doing. We had a whole team of people putting together data from a whole bunch of county website documents, and this is like 100, hundreds of thousands of documents. So this is a huge project that took years to do. And when I first started doing it, I was trying to clean up the numbers, clean up the data, run the analysis on it during the day, but I wouldn’t get the results from our team until the end of the day. So I really didn’t have enough time to do all this. So I stopped started doing it at night while I was at home. And I will give the reports every morning. And the people I was working with actually like this. They thought this is working really well. Let’s just keep rolling with it. It worked for me really well, because I’d liked being a night owl. So I work all night, give the report in the morning. And then I get to go to sleep and kind of be a vampire for most of my life at the time. But what I didn’t understand at the time, was the blessing that I had, that I no longer had to get dressed for work. I no longer had to commute, which is like my least favorite thing to do in the world. Especially when I lived in California. You know, I started to be able to enjoy my mornings. I was able to start my day off the way I wanted my day To start off, not rushing around trying to get everything done before I had to commute to work. Instead I could actually relax Take it slowly do the things that I wanted to do for myself. But I also started butting up against one big problem. And that was that work, instead of being left at the office started bleeding into the rest of my life, and instead of work being just limited between nine to five, while I was at the office, not only did I work all night, but I’d also have to answer emails during the day, take calls during the day, and it was like I was working 24 hours a day, rather than just limiting myself to eight hours a day. At first, I didn’t mind it because my days were running at my pace at my time. My schedule was kind of flexible, so I could do things when I felt like it. As long as I got those reports done in the morning, I could do the work whenever I felt like it. But the problem was, people always wanted to talk and ask questions. And when they call, they wanted me to answer the phone. And when they sent an email, they wanted to response immediately. And of course, I felt obligated to live up to that expectation. I thought, wow, you know, I have this opportunity to work from home, there’s no way that I can leave them hanging when I don’t have to be at the office. So although I was free of the commute, free of always needing to look presentable, so I didn’t do video calls. My whole day became dedicated to working my nine to five, which now became a nine to 5am, not a nine to 5pm it was like everything but six hours of my day was work. And instead of creating more freedom for myself, I shackled myself even more firmly to my job, and as I started realizing this, I realized that I needed to do something, because this wasn’t the way that I wanted to live. And I’ll share with you more about that tomorrow.

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Welcome back to the semester system podcast. I’m Nino Prodan. And in this episode, I want to continue on the topic of outsourcing. But I want to talk about what it would allow you to do, what will allowing things that you don’t need to do go out of your hands create for you. Quite often, we think that if we have control of everything, we can make everything go right, we can make everything work the way that we want it to. But the problem is, you’re not always the best person to do things. But that’s not where I want to go. today. I want to talk about the unknown. I want to talk about what could happen a lot of the time, we’re so set on making something happen, but not letting go of things to make it possible. About a year and a half ago. We made the decision to downsize our lives, to get rid of all our stuff. Pretty much All our worldly possessions all the way down to two bags. And I have to say it was kind of scary. It was kind of weird not to have all that stuff, not to have something readily available right at that moment when you need it. But it starts to show me something about myself. It started to show me how resourceful I could be, start to show me that there is abundance in the world. And that getting rid of stuff getting opening up my schedule, allow more time for me to create something more trade something else. It helped me develop skills that I wanted to develop to grow my business even further. See before I was always stuck, only doing so much because I didn’t have all the skills that I really required to grow my business the way I wanted to develop myself into the person I want it to be and that way I could serve people the way I want it to serve them. Without that room, I wouldn’t be able to do this podcast right now, which is both a service project and a growth project. But the key thing is, is letting go of things. So you can make room for new things, especially if it’s something that’s draining you if it’s something that you don’t like to do, or something that drains all your energy that you can have somebody else do for you, why not let it go? Yes, there’s some things that you need to do yourself. But you need to make sure that it is something that you need to do yourself. And you need to understand the why why do you need to do it yourself? Is it a valid reason? Or is it just a story that you’re telling yourself? If you think it’s just to get it right, start to examine that again. If it’s because it’s your magic sweet spot, then think about how you can get more of it. What would it look like if the thing that You hate it to do was something that you gave out to somebody else to do that they loved. It was their magic sweet spot. What happens then? What if they bring their magic to the spot where you were drained by something? What if everybody’s working in their magic sweet spot where their talents and their passions all line up, they’re all energized. That’s what you need to aim at. That’s why you need to let go of things. So everybody can work in the area where they’re aligned and energized, where they’re challenged, but not overwhelmed. Or the they can be creative and problem solve. When you can work in a state of flow. And time goes by but you don’t notice that’s where you want to be. That’s when the magic happens. So it’s not about getting rid of something just to get rid of it. It’s about getting rid of something to open up an opportunity for the best to come out. You have anybody else that’s working with you to open yourself up to more opportunity. It’s been a great week, I’m Nino Prodan. And I will talk to you next week.

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Welcome back to The smashed system podcast. I’m your host, Nino Prodan. And in this episode I want to talk about what should you outsource? And when should you outsource? The first thing you want to look at is, what the core function of your business is. And what takes you away from that. See anything that isn’t part of your core business is something that is possibly a candidate to be outsourced. So the first thing is to get a handle on what your core businesses What does it revolve around, because that’s the thing that you want to focus on that thing that you want to put through most time into. And if you have a lot of work to be done in this area, start looking at what’s taking away the most time and also look at how much of your time do you need to open up because you don’t have to outsource everything all at once if you don’t have enough clients to fill your whole schedule throughout the day or if you don’t have enough work. In your core offering, and start looking at what you do enjoy and what you don’t enjoy, start looking at which parts of your business that you don’t have proficiency in. If you know nothing about marketing, then maybe start there. If you don’t like bookkeeping or don’t understand bookkeeping, then there’s a place to start. If it’s payroll, and you can look at that, also start looking at which areas can also help your business grow, which ones can extend your reach, so you can bring on more customers and clients. Much of this depends on the size of your business on the amount of staff that you currently have, and also the needs of your staff. But the majority of your current staff should be focused on the function of your core business, not running the business. Because that’s what you offer to your clients and customers. That’s where you need to excel and be better than everybody else is in your core business. So if you’re not focusing most of your hiring and personnel to that, then really start reexamining outsourcing as a solution. And some of the places you can look is in accounting, you may be a financial expert, but most business owners aren’t. So this is definitely one place you could look at for outsourcing. Having somebody that keeps you compliant and keeps your books in order. bookkeeping is definitely one of the first places to start, and also one of the easiest places to start. How much of your time are you spending on administrative tasks. This is especially big for solopreneurs or beginning entrepreneurs. If you’re spending a lot of time doing small little tasks throughout the day that are easy enough for somebody else to do, then it might be time to hire a virtual assistant. There’s a lot of options out there. So start looking at those small little tests that take a lot of your time and how many of them can be done by somebody else? Make a list and see if any of it needs your personal decision making to make it happen, or is it something that you just need to educate somebody very briefly on that somebody else can do. Another thing is customer service. A lot of businesses bring on someone to do customer service that could really be done by a call center. And that way you have someplace that’s open 24 seven that’s available to take calls for you all the time. Because most of the time, customer service isn’t an all day job, at least with smaller companies. So instead of bringing someone on full time, possibly work at a call, with a call center to at least handle and field, the first level calls, and then if it’s something that needs to be passed on to someone escalated to someone then that service ticket could be forwarded to your business. You can outsource research. So there someone can research with products and industries for you, you can outsource marketing, which is actually what I do one of my core offerings, I don’t d

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Welcome back to the match system podcast. I’m Nino Prodan. If I didn’t convince you to outsource yesterday, I’m going to continue to do it today. Now imagine working in your business and doing everything that you like about your business and someone else, doing all the things that you don’t like to do. How would you feel at the end of the day? How fast would your day go? How much into the zone would you get into? And how would you feel once you got home after you were done working? Or when you were done working? How would you feel with the people around you, your loved ones, your family? How much energy would you have to spend with them? The other thing is, how much more productive would you be in your business if you can focus on the things that you’d like and also focus on growing your business, doing the things that you’re good at? See, it’s not a cop out to focus your efforts on the things that you’re good at, because you’re getting more bang for your buck. You’re getting More for the time that you’re putting in. If you outsource or hire somebody to do the stuff that you don’t like to do the stuff that doesn’t energize you, you’re not wasting your money. Because you’re not wasting your time doing things that you don’t like doing things that you’re not good at. Instead, you’re optimizing you’re optimizing your time for the efforts that benefit you the most. I want to ask you do you mow your lawn every week? If you live in a snowy area? Do you shovel your driveway all the time? If you do, is that work gratifying for you? Is it worth your time? Or could you pay somebody to do it for you? Who has better equipment who’s more specialized to do that? And put your time and make more money into your business? Or could you free yourself of it and spend more time with people that you want to spend time with? See it’s not being lazy to get somebody to do the chores of your life nor the chores of your business? There’s Certain things that we just don’t like to do, and why should we spend time doing them, if we can have somebody else do it, somebody that specialized in doing it, stop robbing yourself of your life. Stop robbing yourself by doing things that you don’t like to do, doing things that you might not even be good at, why not let somebody else do it. This way of thinking freed me when I pretty much automated and outsource my job that freed me to spend my time doing what I wanted to start growing my coaching business and playing tennis all your time doesn’t have to be dedicated to growing your business, you have to take care of yourself. Because if you’re not in the right space, mentally, emotionally and physically, you only have so much time that you can give to your business. You have only so much energy and if you don’t take care of yourself, you’re gonna have less. So find ways to make more time so you can prioritize yourself so you can get more out of your time more out of yourself. When you do dedicate yourself to work, and if you think you have to take somebody on as the only way to get help in your business, need to start thinking outside of the box, you can start hiring personal assistants. If there’s not too much to do, you don’t have to bring somebody on full time. You can hire somebody part time. You can hire somebody part time virtually. You can hire a service to do bookkeeping, start to look outside of the box. start buying your time and your life back. I’m Nino Prodan, and I will talk to you tomorrow.

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Welcome, everyone to the smashes system podcast. I’m Nino Prodan. And in this episode, I want to dig further into hard work and the quote of if you want something done right, do it yourself. This is one of the biggest lies that people tell themselves that keep them locked into their business. So they can’t actually work on their business to working in their business. And this too, is a lie. If you want something done, right, you don’t have to do it yourself. You have to figure out a way to teach someone how to do it the way you want it. And sometimes when you actually get somebody else to do it for you, they do a better you do a better job of it, they do it more efficiently, because they’re not locked into one particular way of doing it. So I like to say, if you want something done right, then find someone else that can do it better. You don’t have to do everything yourself. You don’t have to do it yourself to get it right. You have to either find somebody that knows how to do it, or create a system that will help somebody do it correctly and teach them how to do it. There’s no reason that you can’t find a way to replace yourself in your business. And if you think you’re replaceable, then you need to start digging into why is it your ego? Is it because you want to feel important? Because it’s an idea, a story that you’re telling yourself. There’s a lot of intelligent, brilliant people in this world, very creative, very driven people. And if you’ve tried to put this out and hire people and it’s not being successful, then you have to ask yourself, you have to stop and ask yourself, why am I not attracting the right people? How are you treating people? What kind of quality people are you looking for? Are you just looking for a body to fill a seat or you’re looking for somebody who’s tired You can use, how are you going about finding somebody? Are you just looking for the cheapest price that you can get? Or have you put together criteria to find somebody, when you start up a business, you need to start arranging for it. To have an exit strategy. You need to find a way to make it work without you so you can sell it, or you can still hold on to it. But you can’t be the focal point of it. Because if you are, there’s something wrong with you, it goes down. You can’t have a business hinge on one person because life happens. Yes, if you’re early in business, this isn’t the case. But once you’re up and running, you need to make sure that your business isn’t hinging on one person. If it is, then you need to find a way to remedy that. Because anything can happen your health can fail you can get hit by a car, whatever. If it doesn’t run without you, then how can you go on vacation? How can you enjoy your time start to create some systems so that your business isn’t your job. And your business isn’t just you, I’m Nino Prodan and I will talk to you tomorrow.

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This is the smashes system podcasts. Welcome back. I’m your host, Nino Prodan. And in this episode, I want to talk about the one thing that everybody tells you is gonna bring you success. And that’s hard work. And right now, I want to tell you straight out that if you think hard work, is your key to success. You’re believing a lie. I know way too many people that have put their heart and soul into work, have come to the brink of killing themselves because of the hard work that they’ve put in. ruin their health, destroyed the relationships. And at the end of the day, the best they can have is a paycheck that’s maybe just a little bigger than anybody else’s. But I’ll tell you one thing, they’re not rich and half of them are scrambling right now because they’re getting close to retirement. And they don’t have enough put away. They’re saying, I don’t know How I’m going to retire with what I have. So I think I’m gonna have to work until 70. I’m going to tell you one thing at the rate you’re going at the rate you’ve been going by the time you hit 70 you’ve got maybe one more year to live. That’s the sad truth. This whole hard work will give you success mentality kind of reminds me of when I first started playing tennis, I started playing tennis. When I was 35 years old, pretty late. I was a late bloomer with tennis. And it was because I was overweight and I wanted to do something fun to lose weight. So I chose tennis. So I started about halfway through summer. And at about two months of playing. I joined a tennis club getting ready for the winter. So I joined that and about September, and this tennis club had a weekly competition. And I decided, hey, why not join this competition. It’ll give me something to do on Tuesday nights, you know, help me kind of gauge where my games at. So I joined and I was at the bottom of the ladder. Everybody that played had been playing for years and years, some people for 20 years and more. The guys at the bottom of the ladder, they were like, you know, 810 years of playing. And after probably about two months of playing, I started moving up in the ladder, and one guy started to get jealous started to get mad at me, because I was advancing so quickly started to tell everybody Oh, I don’t know how the hell this guy’s moving up so fast. He just started playing some kind of BS He must be getting lessons from some professional must be putting a lot of money into this just so he can get better really fast, but I wasn’t. In fact, I wasn’t getting any lessons from anybody. I was teaching myself but along the same lines, I was Doing it strategically, just like you would with a professional. Yes, I was putting in work, I was putting in a lot of work. I was practicing with intention. I had specific goals in mind. I worked on specific things. And when I did it, I used YouTube to find slow motion video of the pros. And what I tried to do is mimic them as exactly as I could. And at first, it was a total shit show because trying to hit a ball like a professional when you have no skill at all is really tough. But I had a long term strategy. I was trying to program my mind trying to program my body to move in a certain way and not any other way. And so at first it was terrible. But as my body start to understand what to do as my brain understood how the ball was going to balance and where I needed to be, I started progressing really fast. This guy was jealous about how quickly I progressed, because he put in so much hard work. But he put in hard work. That was undirected, that was half assed at best. And so I want to tell you, if you think it’s hard work that’s gonna get you success, you’re wrong. You need to aim at something, you need to have a target in sight. You need to have a strategy, and then put in hard work that’s direct