Tag: effort

Credo

Everyone should have a credo. Consciously-developed beliefs, understood and articulated so that they can guide individual actions.

So what is my credo?

I believe many things, and, like any credo worth its salt, all of those things have implications for action.

First, I believe we all have equal human value, even as we are unequal in what we can contribute to the collective at any one time. No one is inherently better or worse – or worth more or less – than another because of their specific talents. The value to our community of those talents may ebb and flow, but fundamentally we are all worth the same, and as such we deserve the same basic communal benefits.

I also believe that every dog will have its day.

Meaning that we will eventually need those folks whose talents and skills and experiences are out-of-season today. We don’t know when, but their days will come, and we want them healthy and committed when they do. So we must provide to each other food and shelter and education and basic healthcare, all of those things that ensure survival and growth, regardless of what each of us contributes to our immediate needs.

I believe that people should be rewarded for their efforts and the positive outcomes that result (positive outcomes are those that improve collective utility). Every dog will have its day, but the dog that hunts today rather than tomorrow must get some benefit, lest that dog withhold its talents.

Why would a dog withhold its talents? And why wouldn’t we insist that it make its contribution to our collective benefit?

Because I believe in full agency. In fact, I might believe in full agency as my foundational truth.

Until our decisions and our actions hurt someone else, we must be allowed the widest discretion to choose our own paths. Each of us is uniquely human, a complex stew of ambitions and experiences, influences and knowledge, skills and blind spots, and we exist in a complex and dynamic environment. I cannot know what’s best for anyone else. I’m not sure I can know what’s best for me, given how much everything changes both within and around me. And since I cannot know what’s best for you, I cannot tell you what to do. I can suggest action, I can provide data so I feel like you’re better informed, I can share what choice I would make, but I cannot force you or even manipulate you into a decision. You must be free to choose your way, just as I must be free to choose mine.

I believe people are communal. We form tribes. Even introverts like me relish other people’s company (at least sometimes!). A shared laugh is so much more fulfilling, so much more robust than a solitary chuckle. We find meaning in community. We find purpose in working with others towards common ends. We want to belong with other people.

When someone holds themselves outside our community, it’s possible they’re just an antisocial asshole. But I believe it’s far, far more likely that they just feel rejected by the rest of us. They feel unappreciated or vilified or ignored. They feel like they’ve been treated unfairly. So when we see someone isolated, instead of asking what’s wrong with them, we should ask ourselves whether we’ve made that person feel welcome. Or, looking forward rather than backwards, let’s ask how we might help them feel welcome, so that they will join our community and strengthen it. Regardless, people must freely choose to join community, not have it forced upon them.

(If Gallup Strengthfinders is to be believed, Includer is my greatest strength, and it likely comes from this part of this fledgling credo – helping others feel like they can be part of our team. I see value in others, and I want to bring people together in a way that makes each individual feel valued.)

I believe we all strive to matter. We want to make a difference in the world around us. We want other people to know that we are here. So we strive to achieve. We create. We don’t need other people in order to achieve or to create, but other people add dimension and perspective to our accomplishments. And they allow us to achieve even greater things, more complicated things, more intimidating things when we band together with them. Many hands make light work, after all.

We can accomplish more when we work together. Not only do we have more capacity for work, we also have more creativity, more imagination, and more energy to call on. We have countless examples of individual genius, but we have many more examples of teams that accomplished amazing things because they combined the knowledge, wisdom, skills, experiences, energy, and creativity of many minds and bodies.

So put it together, and my credo is that we make community to accomplish things that benefit us collectively while recognizing the value that each of us contributes, knowing that those contributions will be uneven, always favoring some of us over others. We need to recognize those who contribute more, but we need to care for everyone so that they are ready when their turn comes and we need them. And all of it has to be chosen freely, individually, by each member of our community.

That’s my credo. Or at least the start of it. I’m sure more elements will occur to me as time marches on.

Agency

I believe in Agency.

Letting every person make as many decisions about their life as possible.

I draw the line at full Agency when a choice or decision hurts another person, but until then I want us all to have discretion about what we do with our time and our energies. Let us each create the life we want.

Agency is just a fancier word for choice. I use it a lot, maybe to sound smarter than I am, but it really is the foundational value on which everything else I believe is hung. It’s like freedom, but less static. Freedom to me is lack of controls, whereas Agency implies action. Freedom allows choice but doesn’t demand it. Agency requires action, the act of choosing.

I talk to my children about intention too. Choosing with intention. To me, that’s even more what what Agency is about: choosing consciously and with intent for an outcome. You may not get what you hope, but you increase your chances, and that ups the odds of living a satisfying life.

I’ve not always used my Agency. In fact, I’ve been pretty negligent until recently about taking action to achieve a specific goal. Most of that is because I haven’t set intentions, but it’s also true that I haven’t had the courage to try for the ones I did set. I trusted the universe to take care of me, and that is a sure path to an underwhelming life. The universe is ambivalent to each of us; it’s not malevolent, it doesn’t want to screw us to the floor, but it’s not going to care if we’re unhappy with our lots either. It will march on in step with that taskmaster Time, blissfully ignorant of our frustrations.

No, it’s up to each of us to choose the life we want to live and then work to create it. Not one of us will get everything on which we set our sights – the universe seems petulant that way – but those who work most diligently and with clear eyes on their own prize will reap more of it than those of us who coast. 80-10-10 after all (80% of the time we get what we earn, 10% we get hosed, and 10% we get away with something).

We win at life when we don’t begrudge what we sacrifice for our choices, because instead what we gain with those very same choices fulfills us. We win when we make the benefit worth the cost, including the opportunity cost of foregoing other choices in favor of those that bring us the biggest returns.

My experiment in Agency is still in its nascent stages, and I am overwhelmed with doubts from time to time. But I have also experienced the exhilaration and excitement when I have a small success on the road to my larger intentions. Because I know that I made that little success happen.

I look forward to the rush I’ll get when I achieve one of my big goals.

Brilliance, Unlimited?

I surprised both my friends and myself during an argument over coffee the other day. My very good friend Tom is a fan of iconoclastic businesspeople, people who dream big and dare bigger – people like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. I had an unusually visceral response when he complimented Musk, and I was particularly inarticulate about my thoughts.

I am a free-market guy mostly, but I also believe in vigorous oversight, because far too many businesspeople will push boundaries and take advantage.

It’s a logical outcome of the widely-held view that a businessperson’s main goal is to maximize returns to shareholders. Behaviors like price fixing, price gouging, withholding new products that will cannibalize existing products, adopting rosy economic-growth forecasts when funding benefit-defined retirement programs all reward shareholders at the expense of collective utility, which is – or at least should be – the goal of any economy. In other words, businesspeople will most often choose narrow benefits over broader benefits because their goals, performance assessments, and compensation are aligned with narrow company-specific performance rather than wider economic performance.

And that’s cool. Try to reward a CEO on a broad economic performance metric on which they will have very little impact and you’ll very quickly have an unmotivated CEO. Or need to search for a new one.

But without a vigorous counterpoint (i.e., public regulation) to enforce collective utility, we end up with society as a whole bearing externalities, costs that are created by individual entities but paid for by the collective. Which leads to income disparities (shareholders get all the rewards while non-shareholders get zero rewards but have to cover part of the costs), which further frays our community.

But back to Elon Musk. I have two views of him, and there is some nuance in them.

Musk is brilliant. Tesla will change our world at least as dramatically as Amazon restructured retail shopping – and I’m all in on that change. Moving our transportation economy to sustainable fueling is seismically positive. It will reorder our world, but that huge disruption will leave us in a far better place than we are now.

He is also highly skilled at building companies. Counting PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, and The Boring Company he’s had a significant role in creating four companies that are thriving, which is a great indicator of the appeal their products and services have to people.

But.

His Twitter acquisition shows hubris. He fancies himself an expert in social media and public conversation with no evidence of his expertise. He hasn’t grown up in social media companies, learning the essential issues, understanding the wants or needs of the broader markets, differentiating among the various markets and market segments. He’s extrapolating his personal experience, assuming his experience is the same as everyone else’s, which it certainly isn’t.

People have followed him on Twitter because of his brilliance in engineering and creating companies, not because of his opinions on other topics. Like many other users, he’s using that platform to opine about stuff in which he has little to no expertise. And as long as he’s just one user spouting nonsense, then I have no issue. Free speech and all. But when he uses advantages gained elsewhere to buy influence where he hasn’t earned it, then I do have an issue with it.

The best analogy I can come up with on the fly is Microsoft buying its way into search with Internet Explorer by bundling it with Windows. Windows won its dominant position in the marketplace by its features and its marketing and its sales to personal-computer manufacturers. IE had not earned a market-leading position by its performance. So to force IE into that leadership position by power earned elsewhere undermines collective utility.

Similarly, I think, Musk views himself an expert on speech and social media. He’s transferred the appeal he has because of his engineering and company leadership into social media, but the jury is still out on the latter. He hasn’t earned a leadership position in that area.

To me this whole discussion gets into Ayn Rand territory, where she believed there exists a small number of supermen, disproportionately gifted and superior to everyone else, who need to be allowed to exercise their genius so the rest of the world can benefit from it.

But.

Those people don’t exist. There are geniuses among us, but they have no emotional or moral superiority to the rest of us. They are no less petty and no more aware about our community, its needs, and how we interact than those less blessed with brainpower or technical insights. That their genius manifests in commercial success makes them no better – and no worse – than the rest of us. I don’t begrudge these titans of industry their hard-earned rewards – and to have outsized commercial success you have to work hard – yet many of these self-same titans seem to believe that brilliance in one space equals brilliance everywhere. Musk himself seems to believe that his own brilliance knows no limits.

I respectfully disagree.

Cousin Mike

I don’t have a particularly large family, but then again it isn’t small either. Each of my parents had two siblings, and they gave me six cousins on my mother’s side and four on my father’s. All of my cousins have an appeal, but lately I’ve been thinking a lot about one in particular.

My cousin Mike (on the right, above) is the oldest on my father’s side. My Uncle Edward’s four children showed musical talent, and family gatherings with them always featured guitars and banjos and singing. Everyone enjoyed it, but music to cousin Mike is like oxygen. He simply needs music to live.

He made his living as a salesperson for a big company that makes a lot of different things for buildings and machines, but whenever he had a spare moment he played music or listened to music or thought about music. He can play just about any stringed instrument, and he’s played in hobby bands throughout his life, often with other family members. He’s played for the past several years in a bluegrass band that plays regionally in the midwest, mostly northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin.

To call it a compulsion is probably accurate, but there’s something of a muddy film that coats the word compulsion. Mike really feels compelled to make music, but music brings him great joy and satisfaction. It’s not drudgery, it’s a light in his life. It’s such a part of him, fused to his identity and the goals that give his life its purpose, that he yearns to do it, so there’s no friction at all with his need to do it.

I envy that alignment, and I hope my writing becomes that for me.

I am sometimes reminded of my brother’s bachelor party when I consider questions like this one. We took Shawn to Las Vegas, where we did the expected shows and gambling and adult entertainment and extravagant meals for a long weekend. It was probably 3am on Sunday morning when I found myself with a couple other friends of his sitting in a lounge cut out of the casino. On the tiny stage was a cover band playing pop hits from the 70s and 80s.

My first thought was dismissive, bordering on disdain.

“How pathetic do you have to be to play someone else’s music in front of six people at a casino at 3am? The effort to practice, the expense of the instruments and equipment, the costumes, the opportunity cost of the time and money invested, and this is the best you can do?”

And then a second though occurred to me (not in time to save me from proving myself a judgmental jerk, of course).

“If they are playing this gig, then it’s obviously worth the sacrifices they’re making. They get to do what they love to do, and someone is paying them to do it. They are performing on stage, playing music with their bandmates, because they want to do this exact thing. And that’s such an admirable trait. Chase your dreams and appreciate the journey.”

I chose to believe that they were living the life they wanted to live, not grudgingly punching the clock on a dream with a different destination.

That Vegas trip was a couple decades ago, and I hadn’t considered my cousin Mike at that time. But thinking about him validates for me the second thought I had on that early Sunday morning: some people are lucky enough to love what they must do.

And I hope to be one of them.

My Niece

I saw my niece yesterday.

She’s had a rough go so far. She calls herself the “Queen of Bad Decisions.” Failed by adults during her formative years, she doesn’t feel worthy even now in her early-thirties. She doesn’t deserve to be happy, to find purpose, to be loved. So she punishes herself with drugs and sex and booze and people who steal from her and, recently, beat her. Badly.

After all, she’s not worthy of care, compassion, and love.

And yet, despite all of her self-flagellation, something at her core, an indomitable spirit, won’t let her succumb to desolation, won’t surrender to the voices that tell her she doesn’t deserve happiness. It insists that she matters and that she must persevere, no matter how much pain she feels.

She is extraordinarily brave. She is also often self-centered, regularly manipulative, and less-than-honest at times. I suspect much of that is survival response, but her behavior still raises questions among her family and friends, and she’s been abandoned by more than one of the people she cares about. Mostly because she treats them badly. It’s hard to think of others, to empathize with them when you feel shitty about yourself.

But no matter how much abuse she heaps on herself she always pulls back from the brink of complete self-destruction. She does cut it close sometimes. She’s been hospitalized for alcohol poisoning, and she regularly chooses people who have problems with impulse control and suffer a great deal of pain themselves. I guess those folks are plentiful when you’re living on the margins of society, but everyone needs friends, so like the rest of us you take what the universe provides. They don’t always prove to be reliable.

And she can’t catch a break. She’d worked very hard for about three years to bring herself from homelessness to a sober, employed, independently-functioning member of our community. And four months later a global COVID-19 pandemic closed the retail store where she worked, and without a job she was soon without a place to live again. The pandemic has challenged us all, but it’s one more thing on top of a staggering pile of challenges for those people like my niece.

She’s a hard worker. She likes to do things. She’s got a great sense of humor, and she laughs and jokes with people regardless of how well she knows them. But she has just a high-school diploma, and ADHD makes traditional school hard for her. And her history with adults has left her with a towering distrust of authority figures. So building skills, which requires learning from either books or from people who know how to do things, goes against her talents and life experience.

I don’t know how her story will develop. I worry that the mountain of crap into which she was born that also encouraged her dodgy decision-making will ultimately be too much for her to surmount. But I am heartened by her absolute refusal to take herself beyond salvation. I am hopeful she will find enough people to trust, enough resource to give her the knowledge, skills, and experience that will enable her to function on her own, enable her to find a tribe that values her for who and what she is.

It’s the same hope I have for all the people I love.

Participation

The world is full of actors and analysts.

I am an analyst.

I like to understand things. I think I really need to understand things. Which requires observation. Which I do best when I’m a little detached from what’s going on. So I sit on the sidelines, away from the action. By choice. It’s where I can observe and analyze. And understand.

Actors are in the middle of everything. They make decisions quickly, they relish the interactions, they’re always in motion. They make life fun, and make it frustrating, depending on which actions they take. But they take action.

Analysts are important. We help our communities understand what’s happening and why. Our work informs actions. We are the experts. We study, we learn, we apply our knowledge, and we explain how things work, why things happen, what we can and can’t do about things we want to change. Not everyone listens, of course, but we’re still important.

Actors are also important. We need people who will commit themselves – and ourselves – to action. They move the ball forward. They create the changes we see in our communities. They are the people in the ring. They strive, usually to make things better for us all. We don’t always agree with what they do, but we still need people to do things.

We have another group in our communities as well, however. These people aren’t particularly productive. They don’t add much of anything at all.

Spectators.

They don’t extend themselves to understand. They don’t take action to change their communities. Or themselves. They take what they earn, but they don’t give back to the broader world around them.

We have far too many spectators. People who do their work, come home to watch television, eat with their family, then do the same thing again the next day. They aren’t thinking about why the world is the way it is and how it might be better. And they aren’t committing themselves to action on behalf of others either. They aren’t extending themselves for others beyond their circle of friends and family, and that lack of effort isn’t helping – and when we have a community that is hostile to some of its members, it might actually be hurting – other people.

I’m not saying they are bad people. I do believe that the sum of each of our individual failings is the same. Our individual lots are not the issue here.

I am saying that if they engaged, it would help lighten the load that many of the other members of our community have to carry. Our collective lot is the issue. I believe that if a fellow person is diminished, then we are not optimizing our collective well-being. Is it up to that individual to make the effort to not be diminished? Yes. And it is also up to each of us in our community to make the effort so that no one in our community is diminished.

I believe we are, in part, our brothers’ and sisters’ keeper. We may not have the largest part to play in his or her individual success, but we still have a part in it.

So let’s play that part. Analyst or actor, it doesn’t matter. Just don’t be a spectator.

Cycling

I cycled the Katy Trail – at least part of it – last weekend with a couple of my best friends from college.

It was an interesting trip, and, as usual for these types of unusual experiences, highly informative. I learned so much. About Missouri. About my friends. And mostly about myself.

Central Missouri, at least along the Missouri River, is a beautiful, largely friendly place. For most of the ride we had the river on one side and bluffs on the other. The river is huge, much beefier than anything I’m used to seeing, and the bluffs are either exposed and looming or covered in vegetation and towering. Trailside trees make canopies in spots, tunnels in others. And when the river is away from the trail, fields of corn and soybeans cover the floodplain. The folks in the towns along the trail are welcoming. Very open and very helpful (with the exception of one intimidating general-store owner). And they love their Cardinals if shirts and hats are an accurate indication of such sentiments. . . .

Our ride went from Boonville to St. Charles, about 155 miles, with another 20-ish in side trips to Jefferson City and Hermann, over 4 days. It is the longest ride by far either of my friends have made, and so it tested them. It was easier for one than the other.

My first friend has arthritis and is significantly overweight, though he has been losing weight for a few months, and he did prepare for the ride by going on regular weekend rides in Chicago. He also drew the short straw on the rented bikes, getting the oldest and biggest and heaviest bike among the three of us. He struggled physically, slowing as the day and days went along. His arthritis affected him as he stayed in the same position on the bike for hours, and he spent a lot of the first couple days deep in the pain cave. He never complained, but it seemed to me that he often wondered if he’d be able to finish the ride. On the third day his rear wheel went way out of true, so we passed the bike around – when he was on one of the other bikes, his ride felt a lot better, which lifted his mood, and the fourth day he got a new bike, which made a huge difference in how he felt. It was so gratifying to see him finish the ride and to see in him the pride that comes with completing something that is really hard to do.

My other friend had the opposite experience: he was the nervous one going into the ride, but when we got started he was nearly euphoric with how manageable he found it. He’s been training consistently for nearly a year now, and he dedicated a large part of his training in the weeks leading up to the ride to the bike. That preparation paid off big time. He could easily handle the pace and the distance, and the confidence that bloomed the first day just continued to grow over the rest of the trip. He was very pumped by the end, and so excited that he started talking about other trips we could do.

As for me, I enjoyed the ride, but for different reasons than I expected. I always like spending time with these friends, and being with them for 4 consecutive days was no strain at all. But where I thought the ride itself might be the background for more vivid interactions with my buddies it actually became the centerpiece of the time we spent together. We pedaled probably over 17 hours, and over that time I became first aware and then deeply appreciative of the act of cycling in a way I’ve never felt before. I realized that being outdoors, in nature, moving myself through space, gave me a deep and profound joy that was even more satisfying because it was also unexpected. That I got to share that joy with close friends added to the delight.

I wouldn’t hesitate to reprise the experience, preferably with company and even more preferably with the specific company I had on this ride, but my biggest learning was that I can enjoy such a trip even if I made it alone.  And I like knowing that.

Motivation

Whoever unlocks the secret to motivation will be incredibly rewarded for those insights.

I like to work out. I like to have worked out. But I often struggle to begin a workout. And I don’t have the slightest clue as to why that is. I’ve completed several marathons and half-marathons, Ironman and 70.3 triathlons, century and multi-day bike rides, and I’ve been training – save when I’ve been injured – for nearly 15 years.

And I still choose my bed or my sofa over my workout more often than prudence would dictate.

Meeting someone for a run or a ride is perhaps the best way to get me to the start of my workout. The terror that comes with committing to something I’ve not done before is another effective method. Absent either of those prods I’m just as likely to turn off the alarm or find a seems-like-compelling-at-the-time reason to do something else.

Perhaps it is as simple as genetic coding. We rest because we’re programmed to do so, to conserve our energies. Or maybe I’m just afraid or anxious or worried about falling short. Which is why, you’d think, that I’d be more determined to practice. If we ever needed evidence to show that we’re not a rational species I think our collective behavior around exercise would settle the argument: we know physical activity is critical to our health, and yet we seem to actively avoid it.

No, not always. But consistently.

And I feel tremendously disappointed with my choice when I bail on a workout. If the positive vibe post-workout isn’t enough motivation, you’d think the post-workout-shirking shame would do the trick. But no.

So what can get me to the gym day in and day out?

That is the more-than-one-million-dollar question.

Intelligence

It’s better to be smart than not smart, I suppose. But intelligence is still way overrated.

“He’s so smart.” “She’s very intelligent.”

Observations, perhaps, but meant to explain outperformance and convey expectations. Being smart is supposed to be the ticket to success. In a binary world, a world that demands the simplicity of an A or B choice, being smart is held up as the determinant of success. We all want our children to be smart, even more than we want them to be attractive or funny, kind or curious, even more than we want them to be happy. Not because we’re jerks. Because we think that if they are smart, they will be successful, and that their success will lead to their happiness.

Putting aside that there are many paths to happiness, and putting aside that assessing both intelligence and success are largely subjective exercises, being smart is nothing but one of several factors that affect outcomes. Even if we say success is excellence in a chosen area, intelligence alone is no guarantee that someone can achieve it.

Take me, for example. I am smart. Even very smart.

But I am not excellent in any field. In 30 years spent in the employ of different companies large and small I ascended to middle management. And I wasn’t held in high esteem in my later years, when I reached an age where my future potential was no longer as significant as the possible trajectories of others in my firm. I am an endurance athlete, but I’m not an elite performer. I have thrown pots for a dozen years or more, and I still have yet to create a single work that would be considered sublime. I don’t suck at any of those things. I’m just not excellent.

Being smart is almost certainly better than not being smart. But you need many other attributes to be excellent. Awareness. Determination. Curiosity. Organization. Focus. Commitment. Discipline. Prioritization. There aren’t many people who live at the intersection of all of those characteristics, so there aren’t many people who can be truly excellent. And as Malcolm Gladwell helpfully pointed out in his book Outliers, you also need luck.

Excellence is a complex brew, and we don’t do complexity very well. We want things to be simple. And obvious. And we’ve settled on intelligence as our proxy.

But we’re wrong. Not for the first time, and probably not for the last time either. But we are wrong.

Simplicity

Time is a resource that cannot be replenished. So why do I waste so much of it?

I think I’m not as intentional about using my time as befits its value. And I spend too much of my time maintaining past decisions. So between not paying attention as the minutes and hours and days go by and having to spend minutes and hours and days doing things past choices obligate me to address, I despair.

I don’t have time!

The solution is simple, though not at all easy.

The first part is addressed with discipline. Simply making a plan and sticking to it. Being mindful. Choosing how I spend my time instead of letting one game on TV blend into another, hanging out for an extra hour or two when I meant to go to the gym, napping for ninety minutes when I intended a catnap. I need to do better at time-bounding my activities before I start them, and then honor the deadline. Like many, I struggle with transitions, so perhaps it will help to set expectations with myself that I will move to the next activity when my allotted time ends. And if I feel compelled to continue, then I must do so consciously, with an explicit recognition that I’m sacrificing what I had intended to do with that next block of time.

Easier said than done. I have many times during the day when I stay on Facebook or watch the post-game show when I intended to do something else. My lack of resolve shames me.

The second part is also straightforward: live simply. Everything I add to my life must be maintained. Floors need to be swept, dishes and clothes washed, furniture dusted, computers and phones charged and updated, cars gassed and serviced. I must show up for my engagements on time, presentable, and I have to do my work to expectations. So whenever I add something to my life I should ask many questions. Do I really want this? Can I afford it? How quickly will I tire of it? How much time will I need to devote to this? What will I be sacrificing because of the time I need to spend keeping this up?

We value different things. We value the same things differently. But I think the questions pertain to all of us. Each of us has the same 24 hours in a day to use. And maybe it’s human nature to be satisfied only with something more than we currently have.

I have made strides. I buy only clothes that can be machine-washed. I make meals with five or fewer ingredients. I love fitness though, and I will spend hours every week either working out or reading about it. You may like fashion and be willing to handwash or dry-clean clothes. You may like to cook, and relish preparing intricate dishes. And you may not want to know a thing about exercise. But we all get the same 24 hours. Shouldn’t be strive to spend as much of that time as possible doing what we love most?

If we are diligent and intentional in our decisions, and then disciplined in our behavior, I think we’ll feel that we have enough time to do what we want. I’m not sure we’d still be human at that point though. . . .