Can

you dive into that, a little more, I mean, that, what I'm thinking about here is that we're all born with parents, we didn't choose them, some of them are exceptional, some of them are average, and some of them are terrible. And that's not to place anybody in any of those buckets. But this is what you grow up and you get this environment. And you, you get these habits, you you assume these habits from your parents and that's the patterns that you learn as children, and then at some point you take over your life and you get to choose your habits and patterns whether you recognize it or not, You can take control, you can pick your own personal board of directors, you can pick your mentors and we can choose to have the best mentors from history. What's the approach to pick the right ones?

First, in my own case, I had to start choosing early. I think my initial choosing was to get away the to to not have to depend on something like an undependable father. I mean, no one in my family gave me guidance about where or what I should do or how I should think about things. So So, I think this question of sort of self-direction and self choice and she'll self molding. For me started - I was 13 or something. Probably when it was really conscious that it really began and there were some pivotal moments in that for me, where I just like, I'm just going to do, this is what I'm going to do. But then when I, when I entered my 20s, when I think about kind of choosing mentors and creating a father, I did I did three things. The first was I just made a simple goal. I'm going to read a hundred biographies and I figured that by reading a hundred biographies, I would get a hundred lives and those lives would teach me something is beautiful beauty of biographies as you get entire Arc of people's lives, right? And so you don't just see Matt moments or incident and I sat down and one of the ones that shape me a lot was was Churchill's Memoirs of the Second world war 4990, six pages, six volumes, it completely shaped. The way that I think about how you guide through tumultuous her rundas times. And, and I tried to take the best of, you know, Winston Churchill as a guide. And then that sort of led to the second part of the personal board of directors. And I remember, very vividly I was, I was driving down Alma Street in Palo Alto, and I was listening to an audio book called plain. And plain speaking was basically transcripts and consolidations of interviews that a guy named I think, Merle Miller had done with Harry Truman and Truman had this one line in there, which was only thing I know for certain is, if you don't know the difference between right and wrong, by the time you're 30, you never will. And I like, literally made a right turn pulled off the side of the road and sat there. And thought to myself, I was in somewhere in my early to mid-20s. I got like five years to figure this out. I mean it was a cruel eclipse from owners like a. How am I going to do that? Right? Because I really didn't want to get. I really wanted that. And so that's when this idea of, I'm going to create a personal board of directors and I'm going to put people on that board who I admire for their character, right? They're the sorts of people, I wouldn't want to let down and so I drew a little diagram of a, like a board table and put seven seats around it. And of course, Joe We had one Bill had one. Bill was my first sort of non Joanne Choice, and then I filled out the rest. I put that, that piece of paper above my desk and whenever I'd be in situations, I'd look up to that piece of paper and there would be those seven seats. I mean, literally, like their names were there and it was like this guidance mechanism and it didn't look to it for, you know, how to be successful. That wasn't what the personal board was about. It was this, like, moral Compass and this sense of what's a richer values-based life based on these people. So then that was the second part. So biographies then the personal board of directors and then the third was really, really growing from mentor moments if I had a wonderful Mentor moment. It might have only been a day or an hour, or it might be like with Bill where it was day after day, after day, after day for. Years but those Mentor moments, they were like sapphires. They're just pure drops of gold and I wanted to have those be like the seeds, these kernels that would would affect me for the rest of my life. And, and I have sought mentors. It's evolved and I, and so, I have the person board directors. And then, as I got older, Most of my personal board members are now deceased including Bill and and so I started thinking now that I'm in my 60s, how do I begin to also have that same mechanism and I I've evolved it's no longer a personal board of directors, have them at different stages of life. I have my personal Band of Brothers, some of them are are are women but it's sort of this Band of Brothers idea. And there's of these people in my life that again, I wouldn't want to let down Over younger than me quite a bit younger. Some of them are about my age and and I what I text them, you know, it's brother, Tom, Brother, Kyle, right? My personal Band of Brothers, the people who would hold me to account the people, I would not want to let down their

powerful approach.