WonderTour

We are going to be talking about the Matt Damon Ridley Scott movie, The Martian, which
everybody knows and loves.

And we're going to start right off with a tough question about leadership.

What does The Martian show us about taking the right level of personal responsibility?

This movie really is a good one to talk about if we're talking about what does
responsibility mean?

What does personal responsibility mean?

Because we get this example of Mark, Matt Damon's character, who by all math basically is
left for dead, right?

Like his team doesn't even know he's left on this planet.

If he were to calculate the odds of survival, his odds of survival are like so many zeros
and then a one or whatever.

There's not a lot of an opportunity for him to make it here.

But right from the beginning, we get this statement of responsibility from Mark.

He says, I'm not going to die here.

And that ownership is really, really interesting because obviously he's a space.

Obviously, he's an astronaut.

He's the best of what humanity has to offer potentially.

So.

he's going to be a hard worker.

He's going to be somebody who's determined.

He has to be in order to have made it that far.

So that makes sense.

But there's something more here because it's really challenging for each of us to consider
what the right level of responsibility to take in a situation is.

So Brian, something that comes up to me pretty often, whether it's when I'm mentoring
somebody, I mean, this could come up in a business context.

There's many different ways that this comes up.

This comes up for me personally in my relationships as well.

It's this question of what is the right level of responsibility to take?

Because you can take this on one side and we're going to use a model from Scott Peck here
from the work, the road less traveled classic Scott Peck seminal work, amazing, amazing

book.

Now some of the terminology may have changed and some of the understanding from a
psychology perspective has evolved, but the core concept here is

like what it means to be human.

And I love it so much, but Peck has this spectrum in this book and it's all about neurosis
versus having a character disorder.

And that character disorder is kind of like a general way of describing personality
disorders that tend toward deflection.

So on one side of the spectrum, we have neurosis, which is everything is my fault.

Anytime something happens, I'm the one that's to blame.

I should have done better.

You know, I, and as a result, have very little self-confidence.

Well, and you get paralyzed, right?

Like, you know, it's all on me and I couldn't possibly handle all of it, right?

And so...

Yeah, exactly.

And we see a little bit of an example of this at the beginning with the commander, Jessica
Chastain's character, has the kind of like, she's trying to direct the whole team in that

opening scene, but she's getting a little bit paralyzed and locked up because she's also
trying to put all of the responsibility on herself in the moment because she feels

responsible for Mark, the team member.

It's not a bad thing.

It just kind of results in her getting locked up.

And then the other side is the character disorder and we all...

you know, have tendencies this direction or probably know people who are really far in
this direction, the deflection personality, which is to say nothing is my fault.

And I should just be getting a raise.

I should just be getting a promotion regardless of the actual requirements of what it
would take to do that next job.

It's always somebody else's fault.

It just was a bad year for our business.

So I didn't get a raise.

Sorry, family.

You know, it had nothing to do with my own personal responsibility in driving the business
forward or anything like that.

Right.

So, okay.

So I want to circle back here because this is really good.

So we've got these kind of personality dichotomies of ways to respond to a crisis or ways
to respond to a situation.

We've got the, it's all my fault.

my God, what am I going to do?

And we've got the, it's somebody else's fault.

know, woe is me.

You know, I'm going to wait for, I'm going to.

You know, love, you know, we love analogies on Wonder Tour.

I love this movie because it's both so ridiculous and so relatable, right?

Like I have never personally been trapped alone on an entire planet with, know, where I
was certainly going to start to death or suffocate.

Like, you know, I haven't had that problem, but I think we've all had the like, you know,
this is all on me.

I'm out here by myself.

I've been marooned by my team.

Nobody knows my struggle.

know, nobody knows the trouble I've seen.

Like we've all kind of been in that like Mark.

And so both of these personality disorders, like, you they're both dead ends in one way or
the other.

Right.

You is, the, you know, is the, how am I ever possibly going to solve this problem doesn't
really help you.

And also like it's everybody else's fault.

And I got, you know, this is deeply unfair also doesn't really help you.

And so this, you know, the middle way to coin a phrase, you know, the path down the middle
is what we see Mark Watney doing, right.

Is the, I'm not going to die here.

Is the, I'm not going to die here.

Right?

I, the first, the very first recognizable step is the, I'm not going to accept this
situation, right?

I will do what I can to get out of this situation.

And I don't know all of the steps between me and getting out of here.

Like I have no idea how I'm going to get back to my family on earth.

That's not, I know that that's the long-term goal, but I'm not going to worry too much
about trying to build a Gantt chart between me and there, right?

All I'm trying to do is like, what can I do right now that takes a step in that direction?

So that is, I think that's very relatable.

And that's very much like when you recognize yourself in that situation, when you
recognize yourself on like, feel like I'm alone.

feel like I'm in really put in a bad situation.

I feel like, you know, I'm doomed to like, okay, fine.

Anyway, that's the situation.

Great.

What do you, what resources do you have available to you?

What, know, what, what do you, what can you do next?

Like step one, patch the hole in your space suit, right?

Step one, don't bleed to death.

Right.

Don't stay actively on fire.

What can you do right now to get yourself stabilized?

And then, so once you get out of that like immediate, like I'm, you know, I'm actively in
pain and I'm in crisis stage, like, then what?

Well, I want to take one step back even further than that, because I think we can learn a
lot from Mark Watney.

And also, I think that like, how do you even take responsibility in the first place and
how do you take a healthy amount of responsibility?

I just have to read the opening paragraph from the Road Less Traveled by Peck.

It's so good here because this is the really how Scott Peck lays out the first step to
taking responsibility.

And this is I've gone back to this so many times, the first page of this book.

Life is difficult.

This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths.

It's a great truth because we once...

It's a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it.

Once we truly know that life is difficult, once we truly understand and accept it, then
life is no longer difficult.

Because once it's accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.

Most people do not fully see this truth that life is difficult.

Instead, they moan more or less incessantly, noisily,

or subtly about the enormity of their problems, their burdens, and their difficulties, as
if life were generally easy, as if life should be easy.

And then later on, he says, life is a series of problems.

Do we want to moan about them or solve them?

Do we want to teach our children to solve them?

Discipline is the basic set of tools we require to solve life's problems.

Well, that's almost a quote from the movie, right?

Like that's, that's really cool.

And I think that, I think that's actually, that answers my question really well, right?

Is that there's, you there's a reaction state, like when you get, when you get punched in
the face, when you get, you know, left at the side of the road with a flat tire, right?

You know, your first step is just the sort of patching the, patching the bleeding, right?

You know, just make sure that you're, you know, kind of stable enough to look around and
understand your situation, to take stock of where you are and where you are might be

really dire.

Like then that's when you take stock, then you have the opportunity for despair.

And that's really when the responsibility kicks in, right?

When you're, when you're just reacting, when you're just trying to, you know, just trying
to get your head above water, you know, there's, you, you often don't necessarily have the

time or the perspective to like try to, you know, to, zoom out.

But once things quiet down a little bit.

That's where the responsibility lands is that nobody else is going to do this for you.

Nobody else is going to look at your world and decide actually what's going on and which
parts of it are not meeting your expectation.

And that that's just the deal.

Like that, that's just the deal you've got right now.

You know, weeping and wailing about it, bemoaning it is not going to get you out of there.

Solving one problem at a time, hopefully with your magical science powers, right?

Hopefully with your extraordinary hyper competence and confidence would be great.

Right.

We're not, we're not all going to be Mark Watney, but the solve one problem at a time.

And if you solve enough problems, that is, that's really powerful.

Like the idea that there, there is potentially a chain of solutions that will get you
there.

And that you, if you are willing to face head on what the problem is, you're more likely
to solve the correct problems.

Yeah, that's really good.

Because going back to our question, right?

What is the right level of responsibility to take?

Well, the answer to that question is not.

It's both simple and difficult.

It's first to understand that pain is necessary for growth, that suffering is a part of
the process.

And thus, what is the most pressing problem for me to solve?

Not what is the easiest problem for me to solve.

Right now, what is the most enjoyable problem for me to solve?

But what is the most pressing problem for me to solve?

And we see that right at the beginning.

Obviously, he has to solve this problem, right?

But he has to pull the he has to pull the spike out from him himself.

And then he has to dig in immediately before he like sits down and rests or anything else.

He's like, all right, now I have to like pull the metal out of my body.

Otherwise, all of these other things are going to be pretty meaningless if I'm too weak to
be able to actually go out and explore and.

gather the data and the information that I need, the tools, all of that in order to
survive.

Yeah, yeah, step one, don't get wounded, right?

Stop the bleeding.

Right.

So, so let's, I think we're gonna, we're gonna talk about the step-by-step problem solving
and the persistence that's required to do that in the face of setbacks.

After the intro, why don't we, why don't we hit the top, right?

So, hi, I'm Brian Notwell.

And we are on a journey to lead wisely, to become better leaders by touring fantastic
worlds and inspiring more by going on a wonder tour.

We connect leadership concepts to story context because it sticks to our brains better.

You can find out more at wondertourpodcast.com or on YouTube by searching Lead Wisely all
one word.

So here we are, we're stranded on the desert planet.

We're no longer bleeding.

We have the desire to go home.

We have no idea exactly how we're going to make that happen.

But in order to get there, we are going to have to not only survive, but thrive, right?

We're going to have to look at the resources that we have available around us.

And we are going to have to solve one problem at a time.

And so, you know, in Mark's situation, right?

Okay.

Once you've, once you've got the oxygen problem under control and the next fairly pressing
one is food.

and so we get to a big part, big part of the fun of this movie is sort of watching him be
a botanist and grow potatoes and the frozen excrement from his fellow, astronauts.

and so we get to a big part, big part of the fun of this movie is sort of watching him be
a botanist and grow potatoes and the frozen excrement from his fellow, astronauts.

but again, it's like one little problem at a time.

Okay.

If I'm to grow things and I'm going to need, you know, fertilizer and I'm going to need
water and I'm going to need a place to plant them.

Like all of these things, like it's, you know, the casting around, like what resources do
I have available to me?

Like all of these things, like it's, you know, the casting around, like what resources do
I have available to me?

Like all of these things, like it's, you know, the casting around, like what resources do
I have available to me?

Even if that's not what the

what their original purpose was for, I think is a fun part of this movie, right?

But it's also, it's a pretty good parable.

It's a pretty good analogy for like, yeah, you look for what's available to you and what
can you leverage on that?

And he, I don't think he ever has the impression that it's all on him.

Like he never has the impression that he's going to like build a sailboat and sail back to
earth.

He knows that that's not on the table.

Like he knows that at some point he's going to have to engage a larger community for this
to succeed.

But.

Before that's appropriate, he has to take care of himself.

Like he has to be in a position where he actually is stable on his own, where he's got
some idea, some optionality for the future.

Yeah, he is consistently taking responsibility for the actions that are within his
control, right?

He looks at the problem he needs to solve, not necessarily the problem that is, let's just
say the problem that's most immediate, but that doesn't always mean the problem that is

going to happen immediately.

I know that that seems counterintuitive, right?

But it's, it's the problem that's most immediate.

So at some point, the problem that's most immediate is the one that where there is a
misalignment between the number of souls that he is going to have left in terms of food

and the number of souls he's going to need to solve that problem.

That's the most immediate problem, even though obviously what's going to be most important
today is taking care of the food and making sure it doesn't die because that's going to be

a huge issue long term.

And isn't that one of the most interesting things about the botany aspect?

Like you said, there's a lot of kind of fantastical parts of this story that are enjoyable
because it's a sci-fi movie, but the botany brings it really back down to earth in a way

because it's something you can't cheat.

It's the natural growth of something in the universe.

And he doesn't come up with some magical way to make the food grow faster or to make it
yield more or something like that.

He just has to level with that growth curve and he has to work within the constraints that
he has.

And so that's what he does.

And he fights that battle first.

And then he, you know, cares for these plants while he's working on other things.

And where some of the other things where you're like, somehow we've jumped from

cameras that can look at each other to, now we patched it into the rover and now we're
like I am-ing back and forth and stuff.

That's a little bit more of a shortcut.

Yeah, well, that's yes.

But, okay, so you're here.

But, okay, so you're here.

So you've taken responsibility.

You're taking advantage of your resources.

You're doing the hard things and you're diligent about it every single day, right?

So everything's gonna go fine, right?

That's what happens in this movie is everything goes smoothly from then on, Yeah, but.

trust the process.

so much, right?

So then, right, what happens?

The airlock blows up, his face mask shatters, and once he finishes stanching the bleeding
again, in that situation, he's discovered that all of his potato plants are dead, and now

he doesn't have nearly as much sustainability as he thought he did.

So I want to talk about his reaction to that, because I think this is actually a key
moment for us in this episode, is sort of how he responds to...

yet another setback in this already fairly bleak and challenging situation.

All right, so this is gonna be one of our micro moments here, our mountaintop moment where
we can see things clearly is gonna be something that many viewers may have forgotten if

All right, so this is gonna be one of our micro moments here, our mountaintop moment where
we can see things clearly is gonna be something that many viewers may have forgotten if

they haven't even watched The Martian in a long time.

Brian, we could have gone with a much bigger scene like the airlock blowing up, but
instead we wanted to go with the scene right afterwards.

So he's taped up this, he's replaced where the airlock was before with this tarp and duct
tape.

as he continuously has to do with all things on Mars.

And then he has it becomes night and he has the realization that he needs to see reality
clearly and that he needs to go in and really take inventory of how much food he has left.

So he's counting the potatoes that he has drawer by drawer at this point.

And once again, this is the only other time in the movie that we see this storm like
conditions, it seems like after the first time in the movie.

And once again, this is the only other time in the movie that we see this storm like
conditions, it seems like after the first time in the movie.

Right.

where we hear the wind beating against the housing that he's in.

And now, because there's that tarp over one of the entrances, the wind is like, it's
almost terrifying.

It's like when you know when you're in a storm and the storm is so loud and you can just
feel the wind beating against your house and it just feels like everything's gonna shake.

It's almost like an earthquake is happening.

He has that kind of a moment.

it's a very primal thing, right?

It's like, I just need to take shelter.

Like the world is trying to kill me, right?

And literally like it's dark and the wind is flapping the thing, you know, against the,
against the outside of the airlock.

And he's just sitting there and he's just counting potatoes.

He's like, all right, well, I, you know, one, one thing at a time.

All right, I'm to start doing the math again in a different way.

I've got a different problem to solve now, but how many of these things do I have and how
long is that going to last?

Right.

And then it's, you know, it's clearly

You know, he's not happy.

Like he's not like, yay, I'm going to succeed again.

Right.

He's not hyper confident in this moment, but he's just like, I'm to do the thing that I
know how to do.

Like, all right, fine.

Start to taking stock of the new situation.

What's my new set of facts?

What's my new set of resources?

And I love that moment as sort of that moment of, of persistence, even when you've kind of
done everything improbably right.

And also you're still in a terrible situation.

Yeah, it's these micro moments where he's, you can tell, mean, like that's the moment
where I potentially felt the most emotion in the whole movie because you're sitting there

and you're thinking, my goodness, if I'm Watney, you know, I just went through so much.

And instead of just resting and giving up until tomorrow, whatever, and just saying like,
I'm so screwed here.

He's just putting one foot in front of the other, solving the first problem in front of
him.

And he's like,

almost shaking in the scene as the wind is blowing against that tarp opening.

And yet he just keeps refocusing himself, forcing himself back down to the potatoes.

Just focus on this one small thing that I can do.

And he does the same thing with the food, right?

He's when he's in that vlog and he's thinking or he's like, NASA told me I have to eat
much less food now.

So this sucks and I'm out of ketchup, but he just keeps doing the small things that are
required.

And it's the small things that lead up to the big things, right?

That's the moment is not.

when he's like, am Iron Man.

That's not it.

And then I think we talked about the same thing, funny enough, in Iron Man.

It's like that you're building up to be able to have that moment when to be Iron Man, you
have to do it, make the decisions, put forth the effort, pursue the mission in the small

things before you ever have that big win, that breakthrough moment, like when he cuts his
hand and uses it as the Iron Man thruster.

things before you ever have that big win, that breakthrough moment, like when he cuts his
hand and uses it as the Iron Man thruster.

Right, right.

No, absolutely.

think that's a good way to look at it, right?

Is that the taking responsibility is, you know, he does have, as we like to talk about, he
aligns himself with a mission.

Like he's got a really big picture.

Like, I don't want to die here.

He's intrinsically motivated.

Nobody has to talk him into this.

Like he's got good reasons to work really hard.

But also he has to do the hard things every single day over and over and over again, even
when they're the boring small things like, know, fling furrows and planting little tiny

potatoes or hauling carts of dirt inside of an airlock.

he's got, he just does the things over and over again, right?

And that's the invisible work behind success that he models really well, I think, in this.

that's the flavor of taking responsibility is like,

Yeah, he's not gonna, he's not gonna sail back to earth.

Like he needs somebody to come rescue him.

He needs a whole team of people to do a whole bunch of impossible things on their end for
him to survive.

And that's what we'll talk about in the next episode is like, what does that look like?

But in order to be able to meet them in order to be ready for them, in order to be able to
do his part for it, like he's got to take that step of personal responsibility.

And if you're in that, like, you know, I'm all alone and by myself and I'm going to need
some help out of the situation.

Like,

Yes, you need to reach out.

Yes, you need to engage and figure out how to, you know, how to find a team that you can
join, look for the people who are who rescue for a living.

Right.

But also you need to be together enough with yourself that you're taking steps towards
them and not just putting up the shields and not just waiting to die and not just

complaining about how it's somebody else's fault.

Right.

But like, anyway, okay.

Solve one problem at a time.

Yeah.

And so I think that's a perfect spot to take us to our practical application.

How do we use this?

Because I've been thinking about this as you've been talking and we talked about this on a
previous episode of wonder tour, but this idea that when we look at people who, again,

whatever you, your definition, everybody has a different definition of success.

But when we look at people who are successful by our definition of success, you know, for
wonder tour, we look at people who are serving others, who are making an impact in the

world, who are

who are helping others to achieve limit breaks, right?

That's what we talk about on Wonder Tour.

people effectively in a direction, If you're being willingly followed, that's a good sign.

Yeah, we look at those people.

You often see the successes or you see the moments, but you don't see everything else that
happens.

And so I remember listening to John Mark Comer talk on a podcast about that exact thing.

He's like, people are always like, how are you so successful?

Like, how are you doing these things?

And he's like, well, the thing is it's just a bunch of little things every single day.

Like you don't see them because I don't tell you about them.

But the big things are just like the buildup of all of these tiny moving the granules of
sand.

every single day.

And that's exactly what we see here with Watney as well.

like we have to move the granules of sand.

You have to be focused on this one granule right here, this one potato that I need to
grow.

Otherwise, there is no moment where you're able to achieve breakthrough and have the Iron
Man moment, achieve the rescue, get the rocket off the ground, whatever it is, the big

moments that, you know, all of us remember from watching.

Yeah, the muscle memory of discipline and practice and the small decisions about doing the
things that support the big mission and not the other things, right?

Not the easy things, but facing the hard things.

Yeah, so that's really good.

I think that's a, that's a really good practical application.

My, my number one practical application takeaway from this episode was that you should
always have duct tape near at hand.

My, my number one practical application takeaway from this episode was that you should
always have duct tape near at hand.

Turns out to be a critical factor more than once in this movie.

Right, right.

But also on the flip side, the, you know, from, from what you just said about the taking
personal responsibility, right?

If you're, if you're in the leadership role, if you are leading the team, if you are in
the role of potentially being the rescuer, right?

What you're looking for are those people that are doing that, right?

The people that are already taking responsibility, the people that are already solving
problems at the ground level, the people that are facing the challenges and.

putting themselves in a position to be helped are incredibly powerful, right?

Those are the people who are ready to be helped.

Those are the people who, if you reach out to them, you actually have a really good chance
of getting them through their limit break, of getting them to a new level, of getting them

out of whatever situation they're in, right?

And so you can recognize that, you can look for that, you can challenge people, you can
encourage them, you can point out what are the disciplines they might need to develop,

but...

when we see what happens on the other half of this movie, right?

All of these organizations, all of these people, over the countries, all over the planet,
like sort of doing extraordinary things to help mark out, right?

It's because it's a compelling story, like we've got to go save this guy on Mars, but it's
also because they can see him doing extraordinary things, right?

They can see that he's doing literally everything in his power, and that's inspirational.

Right?

Like, won't, I, you know, I, couldn't let that person down.

couldn't, I couldn't not put in full effort myself.

If I see that that's what's happening on my team.

If that's, if I see that this, you know, that this person's, you know, is despite their
suffering is working that hard.

And I don't think those people are hard to find.

Like if you look around, you'll find people that are in bad situations who are neurotic
and people who are in bad situations who are deflecting, but you will see people who,

know, who despite difficulties because of difficulties.

are really thriving or are at least, you know, coming to work every day and just getting
it done.

And that's really powerful.

Like that can be inspirational.

So you can, you can drive behavior change.

can drive extraordinary organizational change that way as well.

Hmm.

Yeah, that's a good point that I didn't really think about.

How do you, it's kind of, leveraging the ownership, that responsibility that people have
to, to take personal action.

How do you, it's kind of, leveraging the ownership, that responsibility that people have
to, to take personal action.

And what happens then also, I want to talk about kind of going back to our Scott Peck
quote from the beginning about pain.

It's like, well,

you kind of got to lean into the pain.

That's the last practical application for me here.

And for us individually, you know, that might be a little bit different than having to
like, you know, farm and excrement and stuff like that, or, you know, pull us.

hope that my personal path doesn't lead me to the farming and excrement on the desert
planet phase of survival.

Yeah, but for all of us there is that pain and the natural thing to do kind of going back
to that mountaintop that we talked about with the counting the potatoes after the airlock

blows.

The natural thing to do is not to want to go back into that pain after you have that
traumatic event where the airlock blows up.

In fact, he's like thrown through the air and obviously I don't know about what the
gravity situation is, if it's lesser of a fall or something.

But either way, he literally goes through like

physical pain, emotional and obviously mental pain given his survival situation.

And he has to go right back into it.

That's the thing.

That same night after he fixes the airlock or at least closes off the airlock, now he's
got to go back into the pain and he's got to go face reality of how much food he actually

has left.

And this is the thing that most humans, especially today, do not want to do.

I don't want to do it.

I have to force myself to do it.

I don't want to after I make the mistake in the meeting, after I say something that I wish
I didn't say to my wife or like say it in a tone that I really know I shouldn't have said

it in and I have told myself a million times I'm gonna stop doing that.

The easy thing to do is just to go off and say, okay, well, I'm gonna go out and get a
drink.

I'm gonna go and play video games.

I'm just gonna watch a movie.

I'm just gonna go, yeah.

The hard thing to do is to sit and think on it, to meditate on.

you know, what actually happened, what was the true reality of the situation?

And then to work quickly to make that situation right, to go back into the pain and say,
okay, if I need to apologize, I'm going to apologize.

If we need to have a frank discussion, we're going to have a frank discussion.

But what we can't do is have that, that moment where everybody can kind of, or that moment
where you feel the pain and then you run away from it instead of quickly coming back.

towards it.

Because that builds up and I mean, there's a lot of science behind this that we understand
now that when we don't do that, that builds up trauma, that builds up this kind of

emotional polarization of memories in our head and stuff, which when we go to sleep, it's
natural that we're trying to process those memories and those memories kind of the best

way that I've heard it talked about is they get locked up.

It's really hard for your brain to like put those memories to rest.

which is why they continue to define us over and over and over until we're willing to go
back into it and face the pain.

Right.

And they're a lot scarier when you avoid them, right?

Like it's just easier.

It's a much less of a big deal if you just right away like, whoops, that was terrible.

I'm really sorry about that.

Where are we right now?

Like that's a lot easier than three weeks later when you've been avoiding the conversation
or avoiding the problem and then like finally getting around.

Yeah, and there's like simple ones.

I'll give you a really small one that I saw recently.

Funny example, but on Sundays we have Red Zone, right?

It's been going for 16 years, led by a guy named Scott Hansen.

It's just all the football games, all the pro football games, all jammed into one stream.

And they're just showing you the highlights of all the plays basically.

But the live highlights, it's not like you're at sports center.

You're watching it after the fact, live plays.

And the whole tagline has always been seven hours of commercial free football.

But.

Last week, Scott Hanson, who is again, been doing this for 16 years, let off with the and
here we go with seven hours of commercial free football.

And then it wasn't.

And then there were there have been ads added into it and the show has changed and stuff
like that.

And again, it's a small thing, but Scott Hanson is in my experience, a really stand up
guy.

He's somebody who has high levels of integrity, perhaps a magnanimous leader.

As we look at here on Wonder Tour again, even though he's doing this funny red zone show
that we love.

But the thing is he

took it on himself to post a one minute video afterwards and apologize for it and say, you
know what, I can't say that anymore.

I'm still trying to give you the best product, but I've always hung my hat on that seven
hours of commercial free football and that wasn't what it was.

So I'm going to come out.

And again, like you said, it was like the day afterwards, I'm going to say this because I
want to get out in front of this because I don't feel right sleeping at night with just

this little bit of friction, this little bit of pain.

I violated some expectations and so just going to go jump right on that.

Like, okay, yep.

Yeah.

Not that I'm not afraid of it.

I'm not resenting it.

It's not somebody else's fault, right?

Like, you know, not like, these are the six reasons we have to do this thing.

Just like, anyway, no, this is where we are right now.

And I need to be.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I just need to.

Yeah, no, that's really cool.

That's cool.

Like just, just jump right on it.

Like, okay, anyway.

Yeah, I'm sorry.

You're right.

This is where we are.

And so yeah, goes, Mark, you know, stumbles back into his Rover and he screams and punches
the ceiling a couple of times.

Then he starts typing emails like, yeah, so all my potato plants are dead.

She's like, you know, she's like, all right, what are we going to do now?

Yeah, so all right, so we can aspire to be Mark Watney-esque in our trusting of the
process of like solving one problem at a time and taking responsibility for solving all of

the personal problems that we are encountering to the extent that we can with the
resources we have available to us, while recognizing that that still doesn't get us back

to Earth.

So.

Despite all that, despite our best practices, despite our effort and our discipline, we
will also need to engage our community.

And that is more of a leadership challenge, which is what we'd like to talk about here.

But I think that's what we're gonna talk about on the next episode.

Good deal.

So, all right.

Well, thanks so much.

This was a lot of fun.

We hope you all enjoyed joining us for this conversation.

Until next time, just remember as always, character is destiny.