So, welcome to Content Is Drupal's Business, so make it yours. Hello, everyone. My name is Pamela Barone. You can find me on Twitter at Pamela, which is also my Drupal.org username. I am a client service manager at Previous Next, which is a Drupal shop based in Sydney, Australia. I'm also an experienced site builder. I've got a number of core patches. I'm a module maintainer, and I've been working with Drupal for about four years now. And if you're wondering why I traveled 28 hours to Spain to talk to you guys about content, there's a little bit of a backstory as to kind of what drives my extreme passion. Around all matters, content-related. Before my sort of Drupal career, I spent four years as a content producer for a large media company in the United States. We used exclusively proprietary CMSs, and I say five plus because I don't know whether SharePoint counts because we did use it, but it wasn't really a CMS then, but now they say it is. Maybe five, maybe six, depends on how you count. Most importantly, they spent millions of dollars on these websites. There were high visibility websites, billions of page views, and so much rage. I call it CMS rage. If you've never experienced CMS rage, I think you're probably lacking a really important insight into the lives of the people who use these things. And I spent a lot of my time sort of in this position with my eyes bulging out over those four years. There was absolutely no consideration of content in the design or the development of these sites. The workflows were like it was almost as if they had built it to be as inefficient as possible. We were constantly coming up with workarounds and compromising on what we were actually doing just to get the job done. So instead of enabling us to do our jobs, the technology was actually getting in the way, which resulted in a terrible user experience for the editors, obviously, but also the end users. I mean, the product we were creating was not very good because the design wasn't very good. The tool wasn't very good, and we weren't able to produce very good content. It was a pretty toxic environment as a result of this. We were a big team. There were maybe 20, 25 of us depending on the season, and we were really unhappy. We were really stressed. We felt kind of wronged. We felt like victims, CMS victims, and I left that job, and one of the main reasons that I left the job was that I was just constantly frustrated with the technology that we were being given, and I knew how much money was being spent, and I knew how much time was being spent, and I was so frustrated by the sort of basically the failure to produce something that would have been useful. So after I left that job, I spent a little bit of time exploring the CMS world. I built a WordPress site, and it was hacked within a few weeks, which was totally new experience for me. I was really confused. I downloaded Joomla, and I was just baffled, and that's nothing against Joomla. It just didn't make sense to me. I just really didn't get it. But I discovered Drupal, and I was completely blown away by the potential. So it was really a light bulb moment when I found Drupal because it was totally free from the restrictions of those CMSs that I used that I hated. There were all these assumptions built in. There were all these restrictions built in, and Drupal had none of those. Every problem that I previously had, I could see how I could actually solve it. So where are the old CMSs? We'd say, do you think you could actually check this box by default, rather than having to have us check it every time? And they'd say, oh, no, that's going to be a week of development. And you're like, this is possible. And then Drupal, I could see. If you need to check the box, you just check the box, and it's done. And in a way, you can think of it as you can build the perfect CMS for the use case because you can do anything with it. I didn't necessarily know how I would go about doing it, but I could sort of see that the tools were there, and I found it really exciting. So I started working with a Drupal shop, and I assumed that Drupal projects were smooth sailing with happy people and the content editors were happy. And I mean, that's not to say that, obviously, Drupal's not perfect out of the box, but it's so flexible that it's like, okay, well, we can make it perfect, right? And just throw in a unicorn rainbow, which actually, unicorns farting rainbow is a meme, which I didn't know until I looked that up. So I was completely wrong about that assumption, right? My first Drupal project was a complete disaster for editors and end users, which was sort of a sad story that I had already been a part of. And I was sad to be contributing yet again. The IA was incomprehensible. The content just didn't fit. It didn't fit the CMS. It didn't fit the design. And we spent a lot of time on workarounds and reduced. And we learned a lot of lessons, some of which I'll talk about later. And at that point, what I already knew before I started was that Drupal provides the tools to build great content management systems and great websites. But what I hadn't learned, what I learned after that project was that without the right inputs, those tools are completely useless, right? It doesn't matter what CMS you're using. If you don't have the right information, it's not going to be a good result. So the proprietary systems essentially didn't have the right inputs because they were products that had been built before and you couldn't customize them. And Drupal can be made to do anything, but if you're not making it do the right things, then it's not useful. So I had found this amazing tool that could solve all these problems, but I really hadn't quite yet learned how to use them. And that's what this session is about. It's about why you should care about the content side of things because it will result in better outcomes. And the second part is a little bit about how you can get started implementing these content-focused processes at your organization. So these are actual things that you can start doing now. And then I'll give you a little bit more information about that disaster project and I'll also talk about a quick example of sort of getting it right. So if you're here and you're wondering why is content important, why should I care about this? This is the section for you. So why should I care about content? Well, you're building a content management system. And I think that a lot of times we forget that, you know, we think we're building websites, so we obsess about the design and not just we as vendors, but clients as well. You know, you're building a website, you're worried about the design, you're worried about what it's going to look like, you're worried about the integrations, you're worried about end-to-end testing. You're not really worried about the content, right? But of course we all already know this. So this isn't new information for anybody and I find it a little bit strange that we're still talking about this sort of like, should I care about content? It's like, yes, you definitely should. So I'll talk a little bit about this now, but just a little bit because I really think it's fairly self-evident. So if you think about it as a graph, the value of a CMS is directly correlated to the sort of efficiency and the content consideration. So, you know, you're building them a CMS to publish content and if the value of that then is related to how it performs that action. So if it's beautiful, but no one likes using it, or if it's beautiful but they don't actually have content that will fit into that beautiful design, it's completely meaningless. And if it's hard to use, people won't use it. So if you build a CMS and people aren't making content, obviously that's a huge failure. The value of that project for that business is extremely low. And there's like a kind of maybe a weird analogy, but if you had a business that made custom containers, you'd probably want to know what was going in the container before you built it, right? I mean, I think if you had this business, you wouldn't let your client say, don't worry about what's going into it. We'll figure that out later. Just build it and hand it off and then we'll worry about that. But that makes no sense, but a CMS really is a content container. That's what it's for. It's a place to put content and then publish it wherever you're gonna publish it. So the risks of taking that approach of, we'll worry about that later, are you're probably gonna get it wrong and you may find out that you got it wrong before the budget's gone and then you're gonna spend that money refactoring it, but you might not find out until the budget is gone and then what, there's no more money. So you end up with an expensive system that probably has a lot of workarounds. It's very inefficient. Pretty much everyone involved is unhappy. But the rewards of getting it right are, it's cheaper because you got it right the first time. It's easier, easier to use. The clients are happy, the users are happy. And of course the developers are happy too because developers hate refactoring. And this is just a quick example of a really bad container. So this is a page with sort of like a news feed and I'm sure that this seemed fine in the design, right? You've got a thumbnail, you've got a date, you've got a title, but it's like a telecom authority government agency, right? They don't have really great images for all of their news items. So what they ended up doing a few years down the track is some of them have images, some of them don't. Some of them have a date, some of them don't. It's a really, really awkward page and it's not, this is not a complicated problem. A news listing page is not, it's not a complicated thing to build. All you have to know is what is the information and how should it display? And in this case, probably what they did was they created a display and then just expected the information to exist and it didn't. So in order to get the best result, we need to know the right information. Simply knowing some information is not enough. So in that last example, as I said, I'm sure the client signed off on that design and said, yeah, that's great, but did anybody ever ask, do you guys have images for all of your news articles? I don't know if you can see that well, but the images are like, it's like a book, it's like a stock image of a book and a word up there. So just like, this was not a good idea. It's not a good design and it's not a good result either. So yeah, how do we get the right information? So the best way to get it is to offer it to help them get it, right? We provide services aimed at uncovering those important details and we charge money for those services because it's actually adding value. And the best way to think about it is, in some cases it might be a complete rethink of how you approach these projects, but content comes first and that's the assumption that you start every project with. We don't go anywhere until we know about the content. What is it? What does it look like? Once you know what it is, you can think about how you might structure it, you can talk about designing it and you can talk about developing it, but you have to reverse the conversation from, okay, here's the design, now put the words in later. Find out what the words are and then tell the designer, hey, here's the content that we have, this is the most important stuff. Now you can create a home page.  I mean, if you actually logically think about that, it makes no sense. So if you do think this is worth doing and I strongly recommend it and you wanna get started doing it, the first thing that you need to do is think about how this fits into your team structure. So do you already have someone on your team that has experience with content and can speak to some of these issues? Or do you have someone that's interested in learning about it? It doesn't have to be someone that's a content expert, whatever that means. And sometimes it's enough when you're starting out just to have someone be this sort of designated advocate, meaning this is the person that's putting their hand up and going, wait a minute, we haven't actually answered the content question yet, we should hold off, we shouldn't go any further because we don't actually know enough information to get this started. So like I said, it doesn't have to be a content strategy expert. If you wanna hire a content strategy expert, that's great, you should, but you don't have to be intimidated by that sort of bar. It can be anyone, really. And if you don't have someone, then just hire someone. Depending on the size of your organization, the size of your projects, it could be a part-time contractor. It totally depends on what level of services that you wanna provide. And this person sort of becomes your designated content lead. And then every project you do, you run a content assessment, or you can call it whatever you want, but content assessment is sort of, I think, a little bit non-intimidating and also very vague because the content assessment could be a very wide range of things. But incorporate this into your project definition or your requirements gathering and make sure that your clients understand this is not an optional extra. It's not an activity that you can sort of cross off the list and say, no, we don't actually need that. As a business, we require this assessment in order to proceed with the project. So again, it's not a bonus thing that they can get us to look at their content. We require it. So it's part of the process, part of the project's success. And the amount of effort that you'll need for this will vary greatly. Sometimes you may think it's gonna be small and then you start and you realize that it's actually a big mess and they're gonna need to engage a content strategist to help them or they're gonna need to engage a copywriter to help them. But part of the content advocate's job will be sort of helping you assess this and figuring out how much time you might need to spend. And I even recommend it for really small projects because if this project is really small, the effort to do this is gonna be really small as well, but it could be a huge payoff because sometimes small projects actually sort of get ignored even more because you figure, well, it's only small, it's not gonna be complicated, it'll be fine. I think no matter how small the project, you should at least do like a very initial assessment of, okay, you guys are fine, we can proceed or let's think a little bit more about this. And the content assessment, what the outcomes that you want are, initially it just sets the tone for the project that content is gonna be really important. It's important to us and it's important to the client. And I think in my experience anyway, a lot of clients really don't actually know this. They've maybe never done a web development project before. They don't work very closely with the team that's producing the content so they don't really understand what goes into it. And certainly at my old job, the person who was doing the projects had absolutely no sort of insight or visibility into what we were doing on a daily basis. And so he might have actually been surprised to hear this. So I think it's, again, it seems like it should be obvious but a lot of people don't necessarily know that it's really important. And when I say ensure there's a validated content model, I'll talk a little bit more about content models but ensure means you don't actually have to be the ones to produce it. So like I said, if you come to a project and the content is a mess and you're worried about it and you think they need help, refer them to someone who can help them if you don't wanna help them. But it's just about making sure it's like a gatekeeper thing. If they don't have a content plan, they need to get one. However they're gonna do that. The other thing this really helps to do is just match expectations. A lot of times, especially if it's a person that hasn't done a web development project before, their expectations might be sort of off in the clouds somewhere. And that's not generally the way it goes. So you can use this to match the expectations of, right, this is the content structure and CMS we're actually building for you. And this is the amount of content that you're gonna need to produce to support it. And then once you have that model, you can use that to inform, as I said, get, inform your design and development and sort of take the next steps. So again, the key thing here is that you don't actually have to know everything that you're sort of challenging them with. It's really just about asking them the questions. And again, you can be the ones to provide the answers if that's the service you choose to provide. Or you can just be the one to sort of say, actually, you need more help with that. We can't provide it, but you should seek professional help. So before you start, here are a couple of very simple questions, right? Hey, what's the plan for this content, right? Why are we building this site? What content are you trying to promote? Who's gonna be using it? Who's gonna be updating the content? And what are the workflows? Like how is this gonna go from, probably a Word document to a published item on the homepage? We need to know about that. And oftentimes these are things that the client has absolutely not considered because people say, what do you mean? You're building a website. That's, you know, you're building a website, not us. And I think that kind of disconnect between the website and the CMS is often really, there's a really big disconnect at the start of a project. And so the sooner you can kind of get them on side to understanding that this is a production tool, it's not a sort of a magical content producer. It's a tool, and they need to understand how to use it. If they don't have a plan, stop everything. And talk about it. Discuss it with them. Why don't you have a plan? Did you not know you needed a plan? You do need a plan, so let's sort of explain that we can't design a site for you and we can't build a site for you with no plan. The design, so creating a design is not a content plan. Annotated wireframes are not a content plan. And you have to be really firm about this because I think a lot of times it's sort of like, well, we'll wait till later to do that. That's gonna be later. But this is the slogan for a New South Wales rural fire service, bushfire readiness plan, right? Planning to make a plan is not a plan. So waiting until the site is ready and there's a working CMS and then we'll do the content, that's not a plan and it's not gonna end well, definitely. So you sort of have to, in some cases, protect them from themselves. So you can suggest some tips for coming up with a plan. Here are four, come up with a content plan and four easy steps. Start with evaluate, just ask what is the goal of this project and what is the content that we're gonna need to support that goal? Does some of it already exist? If it does exist, is it still relevant? Is it still accurate? Can we repurpose it? If nothing exists, just make a list. It can be like actually just a list of pages or a list of articles or a list of categories, a list of types of content. It totally depends on the size of the project, but it's actually a really simple exercise in it. Obviously, the sooner that you do this, the better. And then once you have the list, it's really important to prioritize it. So of the content that they're planning to create, what's the most important, what's the most effective at communicating the vision for this project and achieving the project goals? And that's a really, really important step because what that tells you is to focus your design and development effort on the most important content. And the less important content can kind of sink to the bottom and you can worry about that later or you can sort of spend a lot less time on it. And I mean, it's just so important that I can't stress it enough that you have to find the most important content and focus on that. And once you know what it is and once you know what it's gonna look like, you can talk about how to surface it. So once you know what the important stuff is, okay, that's the stuff that we're gonna wanna put on the homepage. Probably you don't need a carousel. You know, once you have that information, you can say you have a list of 10 things that aren't gonna change very much. Why would you want a carousel?  No, let's start from the beginning. Let's start from the content. What is the content? And then we can talk about where it might fit. Do you see how, like, if you say, here's the homepage, now what are you gonna put in it? It already looks like it's completed. They're not thinking of what do I need to do here? They're thinking of something that's already done. They're not thinking of the work that it's gonna take. After you've evaluated and prioritized it, you can do a bit of mapping and you can talk about the structure with them. The detail doesn't need to be too much if they're not very technical. But just, you know, if they already have content, start with the existing fields, what's the structure look like, does it make sense? Are there some improvements we can make? And don't invent fields just for the sake of it. Keep the content map really simple at first and just make sure they understand that the less you build, the more time you'll have to build stuff later. So the best way to be efficient is minimum viable products, which is something I'll talk a little bit about later, but do the bare minimum, get them using it, get them testing it, and then talk about how you might be able to improve that. And this is probably from a planning perspective for them the most important step. Because once you have a list of the content that you're gonna need, you can actually estimate, say, how long does it take to write one article? And we're gonna have 50 articles for lunch. Okay, that's how much time, that's how much actual time we need for the staff to come up with this. Do they have that time? Do you need to hire someone? Do you need to simplify your plan? You can actually do the math, right? And how often do you hear people say, we want our home page to be dynamic, a lot of content, it's gonna be changing all the time.  It's like, oh, well, there's a guy in the marketing department and he might wanna help. It's like, no, if they're envisioning lots of interactive and dynamic content, they need to understand that it's something they will need to be providing. So again, this is more about protecting them from themselves. And I think, as much as you might say, well, the content entry is their problem. If you've ever been part of a project where the content entry was supposed to take two weeks and ended up taking six months, it puts a real damper on things. For us as the vendor, as well as for the client. And if you do have a plan, that's great. Let's talk about it. Let's just go over it. Let's see what the assumptions are that you've made. Are there anything, is there anything in here that implies something functionally that you don't understand? Make sure you clarify that first. Identify any gaps and say, well, you've got this sort of bit of text here, but I don't actually know what that is. Do you know what that is? Is that something you're gonna be updating? Is it something, is it part of another piece of content? And also, ensure that there are examples. So if they say to you, we need a publication content type, okay, well, what's an example of that? And oftentimes we have, you know, we'll say, okay, what's an example of that? And they say, well, we don't have any yet, but it's something we wanna do later. That's totally fine. It's something we'll build later too, though, because there's no point building a sort of a, call it a hypothetical content type. If they don't have an example of it, it doesn't need to be built yet. And then document the workflows that they're envisioning in their heads and talk about this both for Go Live as well as ongoing maintenance. And I'll talk a little bit more about workflows later too. So once you have a content plan, you can come up with a content model. And this detailed content model is not necessarily that important for the client, but it's really important for the designers and the developers. So if you don't know what a content model is, it's really, really simple. It's just sort of a documented site structure. So it can be a list of content types, and then under that, there's a list of fields, and you can sort of identify similarities in places where you can use the same field, places where you can use a shared taxonomy. And it basically takes the guesswork out of site building and design. It tells the developer exactly what they need to build. What's the content type? What are the fields? And the designer as well can say, what information do I have to work with? And that way, you don't end up with these sort of inventions and little bells and whistles that the client doesn't need, and it's a waste of time to build. So it's really like a big picture overview. And honestly, like you said, it doesn't have to be that complicated. A spreadsheet is totally fine. It doesn't need to be this grand diagram with lots of colors, and the simpler the better, really. And I was reading an article in the lead-up to this about content modeling, and one of the headlines was, why is a content model important? And it's just one of those things that you think, because it is, because it's so important. I mean, how do you know what you're building if you don't have a content model? It's the most important thing you can have at the start of a project. And then a little bit of plug for my former self. Content editors are people, and you should talk to them, because it's really important that they get what they need to do their jobs, and the only way you can give them what they need is by actually talking to them. So see if you can set up a workshop. Ask them how the CMS works now. Ask them how they'd like it to work. Are there things in the CMS that they absolutely hate? Are there things in the CMS they absolutely love? And empower them to kind of engage in the process and ask for things. And so you explain that what you're gonna be doing is delivering a version of the CMS, and they can continue to ask for refinements and improvements, and it becomes more of a discussion rather than kind of a throw something over the fence and then throw it back over the fence when it's done. So it's not about saying tell us anything you might want in your wildest dreams. What would your CMS look like? It's not about gold plating. It's not about giving them whatever they want. It's just about including them in the conversation and giving them a voice in the process and making sure that they know where you're coming from and you know where they're coming from, and that engagement really does go a long way. And if you find that your client or whoever you're dealing with on the client side is resisting this communication, it's a major red flag, because there's probably an underlying organizational dysfunction that is going to surface at some point, and if you don't surface it early, it's gonna be too late. So if they say, why do you wanna talk to them? Just say, because we have to, that's how it works. You know, we need their feedback, and we need their feedback often. And finally, workflows matter. So CMS processes should support real workflows, not block them. Find out what the steps are from getting to A to Z. You know, where does the content start? Who's creating the content? Is it a Google doc? Is it a Word doc? Who's actually copying and pasting it? Is somebody actually typing it into the CMS? Is there an approval process? Does that approval process happen offline or online? And real actual workflows, so how they're doing it now, is much, much better than the hypothetical, well, we'd like to implement a process whereby our director publishes the content. You know, does the director really wanna do that? Does he understand what the implications are of that? It's gonna take up a lot of time, I can't even tell you how much money we've, or well, time, how much client money we've used building workflows that two weeks later are thrown out the window because it was just too complicated. And focus the efficiencies on things they're doing often to find out what the tasks are that they do 10 times a day. Focus your effort on making those quicker and maybe less important are the things that they do once a month. It might be okay that that process isn't perfect. Again, back to the sort of workflow thing. A lot of times organizations will use their CMS as sort of like a policeman or a guard against bad behavior. And adding rules and restrictions to the CMS to prevent people from doing something that they shouldn't be doing is kind of a weird idea and probably won't work out that well. I mean, people are really good at finding workarounds for one thing. But for another thing, I think if you treat these people like they can't be trusted and that there needs to be all these fences in place, I think that comes through and I think it's just not the best result. I think educating people and training people in how the CMS works and what to do and what not to do is so much more effective than adding rules and workflows and regulations. It comes down to really trust. I think when we come across an organization that's sort of insistent that the comms person can't publish content, it's like kind of like why is there so much mistrust? That really sounds like a people problem rather than a technology problem. So if they're expecting the CMS to solve their organizational dysfunction, they're gonna be really disappointed. Just a few sort of final thoughts on this. Iterate, iterate, iterate. Minimum viable product is such an important concept in web development but it applies to your content model too. So start really simple. If you have a content type, don't create 20 fields that they might use because someone might be adding something someday. Make it with five, send it over to them, get them using it and find out what they might wanna add. Maybe they find it works fine to their surprise. They didn't need all 20, all they needed was five. But if they do need changes, that's okay. That's the point. You're expecting that there will be changes. You're not necessarily trying to get it right on the first try. But if you don't get it right on the first try and you haven't spent a lot of time on it, then nothing is really lost. So you find out early that there need to be changes when the impact is really low. The second point here is start entering your content as soon as possible. During development of projects, we have a dev site and a staging site and the dev site is where we push things without too much testing. But staging we treat as pre-production from very early on in the process. So we have daily backups running. We send it over to them. We create all the accounts and we actually tell them enter your content now. Like this is the site. So start creating your content. There's no reason to wait until the end. That's just gonna delay things and you're just gonna be delaying that important feedback. And not just add content, but add real content because testing with test content is a complete waste of time. All you're really proving by testing with test blog title is that the text goes where you think it should go. But that's not really what we're trying to test. We're trying to test whether this actually supports their content model. So does it have all the fields you need? Do the fields work correctly? Minor things like should it be a multi-select or a single-select field? You can't get those answers unless they're actually creating real content. So for simple sort of, it's okay to use warmups in my guess, but they need to be testing with real content as soon as is humanly possible. And that means as soon as the content type exists on staging. And that's kind of, I think there's a bit of a mental hurdle there with clients to say, well, the site's not done yet so I can't enter content. But the content type is done, you can enter content. So the whole point of this is to make the project smoother, better, more valuable, more efficient. It's not a money-making scheme or you can make money doing it if you offer it as a service. But more importantly, you can stop yourself losing money if you mess it up. So we really don't treat content services as sort of like a money generator. It's just a really important part of the process that will save time in the end. And I often hear people say, well, my client says they can't afford content assessment. It's not about can I afford it or can I not afford it. It's sort of a cliche, but it's something that they can't afford not to do. So it's not something that's going to make the project blow out. It's something that's gonna keep the project from blowing out. And I'm gonna go back to the example I gave in the beginning, which we got it really, really wrong. This is the setup of the project. And we did have a fair few things working against us. It was a really, really big project. There's a lot of content. They had spent many, many years planning it on various committees.  And that was before they even chose the CMS. And so they had this really big RFQ that again had been decided on by a committee. And as is true in most big organizations, there was a minefield of internal politics. But we were excited still at the beginning. We were optimistic and we were excited for this big challenge because it was a big meaty project and we were really excited to dive in and help these people move from an ancient CMS into the future with Drupal. But one year later, this is really what it looked like. That's me in the corner praying. I ran training at the end, which it wasn't the end, but at the end of the project, I ran training for over a hundred content editors and admins so that they could start the content migration. And it did not go well. I had thought that there probably would be issues. Like I thought that there would be things that they said, oh, you know, we need to just tweak that. That's not quite right, but I had no idea how bad it was gonna be. People were furious. They were frustrated. They were angry.  And I had sat through so many of those sessions myself.  Like I said, I knew how they felt and I understood their anger and I understood their frustration and I knew that they weren't, it wasn't personal, but I had come to them after probably three or four years in this organization, they'd been talking about this great, we're gonna build this awesome new CMS and it's gonna be this huge thing for our organization and here it was, it was sort of like the worst of their, it met their worst expectations. Well, what went wrong? A lot of things went wrong, but tracing it back to the content in particular, they had a content plan, but we didn't know anything about it. And I think that we didn't ask because we didn't really wanna know because we thought it was probably pretty messy and I think we just thought that it was like, well, that's too complicated, they'll sort it out. They gave us these designs that had been done before, we didn't get a chance to talk to the designer, we didn't necessarily know what was implied, they kept sending back annotated wireframes with all these crazy ideas and we took everything at face value, we accepted this sort of piecemeal information, you know like here's the content type and then three weeks later, here's another content type, we didn't really know how they fit together and again, we didn't understand the big picture. Basically, the CMS was just totally unfit for what they needed. And the only good news, there was some good news, was that because we were using Drupal, we did have the opportunity to refactor things and some of it was really hard to refactor, but some of it was quite easy and there were some really small things that we were able to do that, hopefully made it go down a little bit easier. And that training again, like I said, was pretty eye-opening for me, I was pretty taken aback by it, it was really clear that we had failed and it took me kind of a lot of soul searching to figure out what we should do differently and I think the key thing, I talked about before, just don't start if you don't have a plan and the position we were in was, we had a team that was booked and it was ready to go and I think we knew we weren't ready, they knew they weren't ready, but we had this team booked, so I guess we should start, right? And that's just never gonna, it's maybe not never, but it's probably not gonna end well. We should have just said, look, this isn't ready, we don't know enough information in order to proceed. And as a result, I think we took this attitude of, well, it's their fault, we blamed them, it was their requirements, it was their IA, it was their content and they just didn't understand it, obviously. But I mean, we were the ones that were selling it to them, so it really was our responsibility to recognize that they didn't understand and recognize that they were making decisions that were going to come back and haunt them. And certainly I've completely failed to recognize that this was something they didn't really know what they were doing. And that's not to say that in a condescending way, but they were trying their best and they really didn't know what to do. And they just needed guidance. We made some recommendations, but we gave up pretty quickly because we had some sort of early failures where we said maybe you should do this, and they just sort of told us to shut up and do it anyway. But that led to a working relationship that was really tense and we just started doing what they said even though we knew that it was a bad decision. So eventually we just sort of shut down. We stopped providing advice even when it could have been really useful. And we avoided the conversations because they were tough conversations. And I think we ended up adopting just like a sort of a doomsday view of it, like, well, this is gonna be bad. Where if we had just started the beginning from the approach of this is a collaboration, this is a partnership, and we need to know more about it in order for you to succeed. So we should have challenged them a little bit more. We should have kind of identified their mistakes for them and avoided them making them, at least avoided making the same mistakes over again, which we did that too. So there was a lot working against us on that project, but we definitely could have done better. And I'm not a content strategy expert, I'm not a content strategist, but it's hard to be an expert in something, but it's really easy just to try it. And we really didn't try, we didn't try to take the kind of content advocate point of view, we just didn't try it. And so it was a real learning experience for me where I said, right, I'm not gonna let this happen anymore, no matter how big or small the project is, I'm not gonna let this happen anymore. So this is a very quick example of where we did do it, right? We had a large, very large website moving from really old CMS to Drupal. I think it was about 5,000 pages, about 10 content types, and the mapping was pretty straightforward. The old CMS wasn't super structured, but it wasn't a complete mess. And after a long, they had done a long lead up to this to get approvals and they really wanted to move to Drupal ASAP. So there was one problem, which was there was this giant structured content blob of HTML, which was sort of like a landing page, but it wasn't structured. There was no way we could automate this migration. There was no way we could map that title and that teaser to that piece of content somewhere else. And so what we did here was we did a simple measurement, right? The obvious best practice here would have been create a landing page, make it automatically generated, add the teaser and add the image field to the child node and build it dynamically. But we measured and we realized, right, well, there are 600 of these pages. They simply don't have time to do it themselves. It's not gonna happen. It's gonna take months. We don't have time to do this. So even though it was a very, very clear violation of the structured content best practice, we just migrated this into a body field. We just migrated this markup as it was. And it's not a very elegant solution. It's pretty ugly, but it got us, we ended up launching that site within six weeks. We did the automated migration. This way this kind of got thrown into the body field. And we also, at the same time, we created a content type for them and we added a teaser field and we added an image field to the child pages as well so that they could sort of one by one migrate the pages in their own time. And that site went live about a year ago. They still haven't finished, but the site went live a year ago and they might still be working on it now if we hadn't just decided to sort of accept that as a compromise and move forward. So yeah, don't focus on getting it perfect. Find a good place to start and just keep improving from there. If we had insisted that, you know, no, we can't migrate that into the body field because that's a droopble, no, no. It could have taken, like I said, months, maybe even a year to get that site over the line. We just needed to get them started. And once they got started, they took it, they ran with it, they're super happy. We were super happy. It was a sort of the, in many ways, the complete opposite of that first project I talked about. So just a few final points here. There is no single solution. So as I said, we violated a definite best practice, but it was the right decision for that situation. Every project is different, but for me, anyway, that's one of the things I love about this is there's sort of a new challenge every so often. And once you start doing it, you'll start to see similarities. You'll start to see things that looked like something you did where it went well or it didn't go well, and then you can use that previous experience to inform your next round of decisions. You'll start to see patterns. You'll start to kind of approach things in a different way. And most importantly, it'll get easier. The more you do this, the more familiar you get, the more comfortable it will get easier. And the sort of final point is getting it mostly right is way better than getting it mostly wrong. And you just can't get anywhere near the mostly right side of things without talking, without talking about the content, without caring about the content, and without taking some ownership as a vendor of the content side of things. Forget about perfection, you're not gonna get it right. You're not gonna have all the answers, but you have to start somewhere. You have to ask the questions. And that's the only way to get to the mostly right side of the spectrum. That's all. Thank you. Any questions? Yes. So just for the recording, the question was about educating content writers in SEO best practices and kind of enabling them to do it where they don't might not necessarily know how. I think, yeah, content strategists can really help. If nothing else, an SEO expert, which I'm definitely not, can maybe help you come up with ways to improve your CMS. So if you're using Drupal, there might be some obvious things you can do, like make certain fields required, or put some help text in or whatever tweaks you can make to the CMS to make it actually easier for the people that might not be experts in it to do it more often and do it better. And maybe, I mean, I don't know that much about it, but definitely I think a content strategist could help you come up with sort of like an organizational set of guidelines that would be easy to follow. Because SEO is a really complicated thing, and it changes a lot, and I mean, I can understand why people might struggle with. With getting it right. Working is relative, right? Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. The question was about how you can sort of encourage developers to think a little bit more about the content and the experience when they're building content, because it's true. I mean, their job is very technical, and they're not necessarily concerned with the end result from the content at its perspective. But I mean, I think for one thing, getting them both in a meeting at some point, so that they each know that each other is human, I think a lot of times devs sort of, and even a lot of people, can sort of brush aside the content editors as sort of winters or minions or lemmings that just will do what they're told. And I think that meeting the people and talking to them and having at least like a form of communication can help humanize it and can help them understand. And a lot of times what I find is the developers go, well, why do they want that? Why do they want to do that? I was like, it doesn't matter, you don't need to know why they want to do it. I mean, you can explain it, but it's sort of like, it's not an argument, right? It's their CMS, and you might not think it's the best way, but it might be the best way for them. And one of the other things that we do is we have a peer-review process. So every time a developer builds something, they put a pull request on GitHub, they post the steps to test it, and then another developer actually has to manually test it. And I think that has actually helped a lot with, like you said, some of them have never actually tried it.  I should have done it differently. And I actually have seen in our team, I have seen developers send things back to other developers by saying, like, this is crazy. You've done it in a crazy way. We need to fix it. We need to make it a little bit more usable. So, I mean, the best way to get them to understand what it's like to use the CMS is to make them use the CMS. Using the mic, I think. I have a question as well. I'm sort of a front-end developer for Drupal at my job. So I'm between the real developers and the people who write the content. And then developers are real developers, but I know what you mean. Yeah, yeah, I don't write scripts. I just use the views and views and all the other modules, but anyway. My question is about existing websites. We've just gone from a really big website from about 9,000 pages to a new version also in Drupal, 5,000 pages. We were killed off nearly half of the website. So most people said this is going to be disastrous, but we've got 30% more visitors. But how do you get content writers to keep to certain norms? Because we said at one point, you want to have one thing per node that was a totally new insight. One thing per node. Yeah, you stick to a subject. You don't write about something on four different pages because you gotta get a bloated website. But with Drupal, because you can do almost everything, writers will say, oh, you can fix that for me. So how do you manage that? You can fix content bloat, is that what you're saying? Yeah, if you want to do really strange things on your page. Do you work for an internal team, or do you work for an agency? I work at a national library, so we do most of the development. Because for us, the way we educate them is we say, you can pay us our hourly rate to do that for you. Or you can do it yourself, and that's a really easy argument because it doesn't make any sense for them to pay us. But yeah, what's your relationship like with that team? I mean, I would say that it's really about communication and education more than, one of the things I said was just about not sort of, you could implement a character limit on the body field, but I don't know if that's really what you want to go for.  So yeah, I would say it's really just about kind of interaction and maybe show them one day, show them if you want me to do this for you. This is how long it takes and this is what I have to do and kind of propose alternatives. And I really think that's a communication and a person-to-person problem rather than a problem that Drupal can solve for you, I would say. Excellent. Yes. Oh, sorry. Do I ever work with clients that just write properly formatted and grammatically correct content, but content that's just not very good? And the answer is yes, we do it a lot because we work with a lot of government clients and they are really good at that. They're very prolific, but they kind of miss the, they kind of miss the mark a little bit. And it's a tough one because you don't wanna tell someone that the work they're doing is maybe not the best work, but I think you can always sort of suggest that they maybe bring someone in to teach them about content marketing or a content strategy and, you know, that's not something we provide, but we heard about this, our partner agency is offering this workshop that you can go to and learn about. I think it's just about sort of approaching it from a constructive, hey, we found this thing that might help you, not that you need help, but it might help you. You know, versus yikes, that content is crappy. Because yeah, I say that a lot to myself. Sure. Do we ever encourage our content creators to do A.V. testing? Some of them do, it's not, user testing isn't something that we really have gotten into much. We're planning to sort of build up our user experience service side of things, and definitely that would be part of it, but it's not something I'm very familiar with, so I know you can do a bit of it using Google Analytics, and one of our front-end devs is here, and he has some crazy thing that you can add to a block, and it shows one block or another block. And there are certainly a lot of tools now in Drupal that can enable you to do A.V. testing. AcquiaLift is obviously a subscription, but the open source modules that they've released are essentially A.V. testing tools, so you don't get the analytics on the machine learning, but you can build a simple kind of ABC, promote a campaign thing with that, but unfortunately, not something I do a lot of. No more questions? Please evaluate the session, even if it's bad feedback. I do want it, and, oh, that's the credits, and also there's a session tomorrow at 10, 1045, that's about the kind of return on investment, the reward that you get back from investing in content strategy, and that's a replacement session, so it's not in the program, but it's replacing the session, oh, okay, okay, yeah. So it's replacing the content strategy session tomorrow at 1045, and you should all go. Okay, thank you. Thank you.


If you've ever had to write a substantive paper, you've probably had to read a lot of books. Believe it or not, this can be done in ways that are probably much easier than you think. Well, inspectional reading is not all there is to getting through a big pile of books. But it's a start. But before we get into all that, let's first avoid a misunderstanding. Inspectional reading is a way of reading quickly. However, it's not speed reading. Well, inspectional reading is either skimming or it's superficial reading. But let's be clear, neither skimming nor superficial reading is speed reading. Boring and inefficient reading is reading from the first page to the last. Skimming is selective reading. Superficial reading is reading without stopping to determine what you already understand and what you don't. Speed reading is reading from the first page to the last very fast. Well, neither Adler nor I are saying that speed reading is a bad thing. Speed reading might actually be of some use in getting through a big pile of books. However, speed reading doesn't help you comprehend. Adler claims speed reading trains your eye to move quicker and to stop fewer times. Consequently, you're able to take in more words at a time. But it's important to remember that these skills in speed reading are not skills in comprehension. They're only skills in seeing more words. Merely because you're able to take in more words does not necessitate that you understand the words or the sentences or the paragraphs or the book as a whole. Well, speed reading, if you like, that's fine. But it won't help increase your comprehension. And you know, it might be worth to say that if you increase your skills and comprehension, you may not need to learn how to speed read. So as I said, sometimes they need to get through a big pile of books. And sometimes they need to figure out which ones are useful and which ones are not. Which ones you need to read thoroughly or just merely reference or just cite. Skimming will help get you through that big pile of books. Skimming is not speed reading. Skimming is selective reading. You select certain parts of the book trying to answer specific questions. By answering these questions first using skimming, you're able to comprehend more of the book faster. And you're able to prepare yourself to really dive into the book later on. And it's much faster than simple, boring, and inefficient reading. Skimming is also a way of preparing yourself before trying to read the book more thoroughly. Well, think of it this way. Suppose you're going for a hike through a forest. Now, you may be able to find your way through the forest by looking at the sun or landmarks. But if you had a map and a compass, you will find your way more quickly. Through inspection or reading, you construct that map. You construct that compass. You ask questions like, what is the book about? What is the subject of the book? Knowing what the book is about is the map. It gives you the area and location and the conceptual scheme of things. You ask questions like, what is the author trying to do? What has the author think the author has done? And how has the author think the author has accomplished this? Knowing where the author is going with the book is the compass. This will help you understand what the author is doing and what the author thinks he or she is doing. So, where do you look? The title. This gives you an idea of the subject or the map. The publisher's blurb. This can give you an idea of the author's intent. And even some idea about the author thinks the author is going to go about fulfilling that intent. That's the compass. The table of contents. This is more of the compass. Sometimes it even provides the trail. The table of contents can provide a more detailed description of the approach the author takes. The index. Think of this as landmarks. This might help fill out your map. However, these landmarks, these are the landmarks that the author thinks are important. They're important in chapters. And in some works, this is the beginning chapter and the end chapter. Sometimes authors will explicitly write day, here is what I'm going to do chapter for the introduction. The concluding chapter would then be, here is what I have done. This is more compass and more trail. Select paragraphs. This is more of an art, but you can often tell what a paragraph is about by the first sentence or two, especially with practice. By dipping in with a paragraph or two, you can tell a lot about the book. Sometimes books are difficult to understand. But not the entire book. Well, some parts you can understand. And those parts that you can understand can help you understand those parts that you do not understand. The point of superficial reading is to find those parts you already understand without letting the parts you do not understand stop you from reading the book. Adler has basically two rules for superficial reading. The first one he mentions explicitly. Read through the book the first time without stopping. If you find something you don't understand, don't stop. Just keep going. The second rule is more implicit. Read the book more than once. Any book worth reading, especially one which is going to help your mind grow, is something that you're going to read more than once. By reading through the first time and figuring out what you already understand, when you read it through a second time, or a third, or a fourth, that will help you get a better idea of what you don't understand. Moreover, it's probably a good idea to make a note of what you don't understand. Write down a question, a comment, the sentence, and the page number. Reference it for later on. This is your conceptual hit list. You figure out what you need to conquer, and that unconquerable book will be yours. Well, inspection reading gives us some of the mechanics of reading, but this is still not yet all there is to comprehension. The following videos in this series will introduce you to the questions that you need to ask while you are skimming and while you're doing superficial reading. This especially starts in part two of the book and the series, analytical reading. With practice, not inherent genius, not some obscure trick. With practice, these books, getting through these books, is demanding. Is a feat, is something to overcome, and completely within your grasp.


Hi Nate. I was able to get this extra information about the Zelda 35th anniversary. Signed Samus Hunter. Let's go. All right folks, obviously we're talking about some brand new rumors about the Zelda 35th anniversary coming directly from Samus Hunter who messaged me late last night again or I should say early this morning around 2am and of course I told her thanks for the information. I don't know why I was still awake but I will cover it in the morning. She tends to always do this. Send me information in the middle of the night. So let's just read off what she said because it is exciting anytime someone says hey we have some legit stuff about the Zelda 35th anniversary. I want to tell you about it so you can make a video. Let's just get into it. I gotta say though this stuff isn't necessarily major if you're hoping for confirmation for Ocarina of Time HD, Majora's Mask HD, Twilight Princess HD, Wind Waker HD. You're looking for stuff like that probably not gonna get that here but we will talk about some of the prior stuff that Samus Hunter has said and then we'll get into this stuff. So actually let's get into the new first and then we'll get into the old and kind of encapsulate everything that she says we are getting for the 35th anniversary of Zelda. So let me read this off. It says, Hi Nate, I was able to get a little extra information about the Zelda 35th anniversary. I talked in the past about the Animal Crossing New Horizons adding additional content for that, the Tetra slash Pac-Man 99 style potential game we're going to get, events dedicated to the series but these are all titles co-developed by Nintendo so that's obviously all things that has to do with Nintendo. But I can confirm that they are planning some promotions with third party games. For example, Monster Hunter Rise with armor and weapons dedicated to the series with new missions that add new monster variations. So a big update for Rise coming that's not only gonna have Zelda armor and weapons and stuff there's gonna be new variations of monsters and quests themed to the legend of freaking Zelda. That's awesome. Wouldn't it be cool if like in Monster Hunter Rise if you had to take out Valu? You guys remember Valu from the Wind Waker? Stuff like that. Wouldn't that be really cool if you had to take something like that out? Obviously there's other things that could draw a pocket. Do you imagine taking out a Lionel? A Lionel in Monster Hunter Rise would be sick. At least in my opinion. I think that would be really cool especially if it's an extremely difficult enemy shooting lightning at you. Oh my gosh it will be so cool. Alright so that's Monster Hunter Rise and it says another game I heard that will get some Zelda themed items is Sky Children of the Light developed by that game company and it will likely be shown at E3 given the release window. Now I don't know what she means by that. I'm presuming that this means content added in June or July to this Sky Children of the Light game but again she's just expecting E3 because of the release window on that. If you're wondering what else she previously said on the 35th anniversary oh boy let's just jump right into this. So it says before she said you know the updates I've already mentioned could give you some details about Zelda's anniversary plans. Reading on the internet some people were disappointed that Nintendo never mentioned the 35th anniversary of Zelda. Don't worry it's normal until March 31st there was a Mario anniversary and the plans for the promotion will primarily start in June at the E3 period. Skyward Sword is a title that was chosen because it's the beginning of the series. Nintendo wanted to introduce to new fans of the series the origin of some characters. So objects and consequences of the story for this reason it was given priority and not Wind Waker or Twilight Princess although they're already remastered. So we talked about before how that potentially means there's a link between Skyward Sword and Breath of the Wild since they're emphasizing it but that was just some stuff we talked about last week. In addition to the new stuff this is what we talked about before for Zelda 35th. There's going to be a sequel to Breath of the Wild obviously Skyward Sword is DLC for Hyrule Wars of the Angel Calamity, Animal Crossing Furniture and other game events like The Tetris 99, Smash, Amiibo and Merchant Knights obviously we already got one Amiibo maybe we'll get more Amiibo but we got the Skyward Sword HD Amiibo. So all of this is very exciting stuff and Samus Hunter just keeps getting things correct. She got obviously the Amiibo correct. She recently got some stuff correct with, gosh I can't remember where is the Armor set coming to Angel Calamity. She was the only one out there showing off that we were going to get the Ancient Armor set out of the Angel Calamity. So yeah there's just a lot of stuff starting the lineup that Samus Hunter continues to get right. Some people at this point I know Game Over Jesse as an example no longer considers Samus Hunter worthy of calling rumors at this point. He considers her a legit insider and I gotta say she has gotten so many things right I find it hard to argue with that the only reason I'm personally holding back from calling Samus Hunter a legit insider is because she's got some big ticket items I want to see her get correct. So a lot of the stuff she tends to get correct are smaller in nature or more generalized statements that you can argue other people can make however she did has I this part I do know she has gotten very specific things right about Monster Hunter games in the past making me suggest maybe she's got a connection at Capcom or something but here's my thing she's got some big ticket items virtual console yeah that's kind of a a big one there the whole virtual consoling that she posted about back in October of last year that's a big one can't ignore that two Kirby games this year um yeah no one else is talking about two Kirby games this year it wouldn't be surprising to get a Kirby game but two of them okay that's a pretty big deal she also has some exact details about the Hyrule Warriors Age of Calamity DLC that hey we don't actually know for sure yet because despite giving us more information on the DLC we still are lacking information on the DLC now I fully expect the first DLC pack to get blown out at E3 and then we'll know if it lines up with Samus Hunter's claims and with the Robbie and Perra stuff but it's looking likely at least based on the initial stuff talked about with the name of the DLC pack anyways now beyond all of that she's got other big ticket items floating out there as well several people have a Donkey Kong game floating out there including her she was the first person to put out there a Donkey Kong game was coming and then everyone else kind of followed suit so that's a big one that's floating out there right now as well so yeah there's just some bigger ticket items that she has floating out there that we need to see come true before I'll just fully buy in that Samus Hunter is who she appears to be and that is somebody who clearly has a connection to Nintendo I think at this point if this stuff is correct especially that virtual console thing um yeah it doesn't get much more insider information than that so I'm actually interested what you guys want to see happen for the Zelda 35th anniversary it's obviously something we have talked about um consistently over the last month or so uh do you think we're going to get Ocarina Time and Majora's Mask HD uh do you think Breath of the Wild 2 is going to come out this year next year do you think we are going to get like a Zelda 99 Zelda 35 kind of game or what kind of game is it going to be it's going to be like a dungeon runner uh is it going to be like I think you know I don't know like running side scrolling stuff through Zelda 2 I'm very curious what you think that's going to be is it going to be all about Zelda 1 even I have no idea there's going to be like a multiplayer mayhem fest I have no clue this is the fun part is that we don't know everything so we got rumors we got our speculation next up we just got to know what the hell is happening so I am Nathaniel from Nintendo Prime thank you so much for tuning into this special morning edition video uh and we probably got plenty more coming for you as today goes on so I will catch you guys in the next video


So we already saw that these numbers are equal. We were able to convert them from decimal to binary. And we could then convert these binary numbers into octal, say by finding groups of three bets or hexadecimal by looking for groups of four bets. We can also convert directly from decimal to octal or decimal to hexadecimal. And we're going to use the same procedure that we did before. We're just going to be working with a different base. So if I start with my 13.625, and I'm going to break my number into two parts. And I'm going to work with the whole number part. So 13 and octal is 8 plus 5. So that will be 15. Now I'll deal with my fractions separately. So I'm going to use the multiplication method. I'm just going to take my fraction and I'm going to continue multiplying by my base, which will be 8. So 0.625 times 8, 16 plus 4 gives me 20, 48 plus 2 gives me 50. So 0.625 times 8 is 5. So I would write down the 5 here. Since I have nothing else here to multiply by 8, I'm done. I can stop here and if I look, that's exactly what we expected from just converting the binary number directly. I can do the same thing with 6.5625 and I can convert that to hexadecimal. 6 and decimal will turn into a 6 in hexadecimal as well. So I'm just going to keep that. Now I have the 0.5625 and I'm going to multiply this by 16, because that's my destination base. 6 times 5 is 30, 6 times 2 is 12, plus 3 is 15. 6 times 6 is 36, plus 1 is 37. 6 times 5 is 30, plus 3 is 33. And then one times 56.25 is 56.25. So 0.5625 times 16 is 9. So I'll write down my 9. I have nothing left here to multiply by 16, so I'm done. My result is negative 6.9. Almost matches what I've got over here, except that my whole numbers are mismatched on this side. If I change all of these two fives, then that's all consistent and it makes sense.


Narcissists are actually very weak. A lot of people think that narcissists are powerful and strong as though they have a lot of energy and it may appear that way at times but they're actually very weak and I will prove this to you in this video. They're unable to withstand force pressure and wear. They lack moral and intellectual power and they lack confidence and determination. They're easily influenced and worried by other people which is why whenever you're around them you will feel like you have to protect them as though you have to keep them safe from danger or harm like they're this threatened species because they are. They were never meant to make it this far because they're not independent. They depend on their sources of supply they require and demand limitless special treatment limitless admiration, validation and importance which feeds their sense of entitlement and self-centeredness which is why they will deliberately find or create situations where they are the center of attention they will use a false character to manipulate people to bring them into their realm because what they're really seeking is support and assistance they can't manage themselves successfully on their own and once you're involved with them you will find that they're too much to bear they're more than you can handle they're overwhelming they're insupportable they're like their own worst enemy because everything has to be about them it's like you can't entertain anything outside of them even for a moment they need constant attention because they never develop these emotional faculties from within to where they're able to sustain themselves so when the time comes for them to be brave and tough to deal with a difficult or unpleasant situation it's too overwhelming for them it's too much stress it's too taxing for them mentally it's too physically and mentally demanding even though it may well be the only thing they have to deal with in their lives because as we know they don't like too much responsibility but even if they just have a single task to deal with it's like they can't even do it they feel mentally drained and it's not the result of anything external they lack the mental and emotional capacity to deal with things so they end up being burnt out they experience mental collapse caused by stress they then take out on the person closest to them because they can't carry the weight on their own they're too much to bear and even they don't want to deal with themselves they want to pass themselves off to you and let you deal with it and while they hold you to such unrealistic expectations what you're demanding from them is relatively small in comparison and yet they just can't do it because they don't have the means it's like trying to tow something in a small car with a small engine if you're towing something heavy it's going to tax the engine it's going to cause too much stress and it's going to damage it but with narcissists they can't even handle something small they can't handle a simple task on their own they can't even regulate their own emotions which makes them very dangerous people to be around people who are emotionally strong are very safe people to be around but it's weak people who act nice and as though they can handle things who are actually the most dangerous because it's just a recipe for disaster at some point they're going to explode and then you're left to deal with the consequences of their actions you're left to clean up their mess because they can only pretend to be nice they're actually not very pleasant or agreeable at all there's a lot of things going on beneath the surface things which they haven't dealt with or resolved due to a lack of self-reflection and self-awareness they don't even know who they are they haven't even taken the time to get to know themselves because they're too busy using external sources to regulate their emotions and it's like this elephant in the broom this thing that no one talks about because you know that they don't want you to talk about it but it's always there and you know it's there because you feel like you always have to sugarcoat things whatever you're around them and you have to do this to protect them and make them feel safe so you're always walking on eggshells you're extremely cautious about your words and actions because any little thing could set them off so you end up holding yourself to these impossible expectations in the hopes that it will make them feel more comfortable it's like you have to be perfect you have to be in two places at the same time you have to do two things at once you have to be two steps ahead of them you have to be this old CNI you have to be God you have to be the all-knowing and old CN you have to be present everywhere but at some point you learn that's what they want they need you to be with them at all times they need you to check in with them they need you to tell them your plans they need to know what you're doing and who you're with nothing can be unpredictable or unforeseeable where they may be left feeling uncertain or doubtful because their identity and sense of self depends on where you are and what you're doing they see you as an extension of themselves so they need to have full control of you they need to feel like they can pull on the brains when they need to which is why at times they will devalue you they will try to keep you down and if it gets too much for them they will even discard you and this is all coming from their weakness and fragility even after they discard you they will try to find someone else to support them until they realize that person isn't perfect too and then they will hoover you they will try to come back to you until they assume that it's all over for you you can't handle them either and then they will begin this campaign based on lies and falsehood of how you mistreated them or of how you weren't good enough even though you may have given them your entire life you may have given them everything you had but they will go on this campaign and they will build these destructive networks behind your back because what they're really seeking is protection, support and assistance because they lack moral and intellectual power they lack confidence and determination and they're easily influenced and worried by other people it doesn't take much for them to see you as a threat because they're very weak and fragile people but they hold this stance of them being moral and righteous people when in fact they will cheat, lie and steal they will deceive you they will future fake they will deny, project, blame shift and gaslight they will keep a code of silence where they expect you to act like nothing is wrong and see them as perfect and they will do all of this because they are weak all of these behaviors stem from weakness which is why it is only low value people who conduct these behaviors high value people don't need to do that because they can advance by being honest, righteous and moral weak low value people cannot do that they have to cheat, lie and steal they have to deceive because they lack the power to perform they lack the mental and emotional capacity to achieve anything on their own and even if you work your fingers to the bone on their behalf that still isn't good enough for them because they're easily threatened and intimidated they feel inferior to you so then they will start to hate you they will desire to tear you down because they need to domesticate you they need to keep you in this box where they're able to control you but it's not really you that they're trying to control they're trying to regulate their emotions through you because they view you as an extension of themselves they don't see you as a separate person which is why they have to isolate you because your independence would otherwise reveal to them that you are a separate person which would destroy their false reality and then they'd be forced to accept that their thoughts and emotions belong to them which is the last thing they would want to do because they're weak and they can't deal with it on their own so everything they do is designed to protect their fragile sense of self it's why they devalue you, it's why they have to keep you down they eventually discard you and then come back with a hoover it's why they cheat light and steal, it's why they can't leave you alone it's why they smear your name and build networks against you because they're emotionally bankrupt, they're emotionally void there's no place from which they can draw love, kindness or empathy because they're broken damaged people which is why they lack value, usefulness and normal function and if you pay attention you will notice that even their communication appears robotic where they're stiff and unemotional where they're like this machine, something that was programmed by a computer as though they're guided by some external controlled device rather than being something real and authentic so even when you try to talk to them and understand them their communication seems rehearsed as though it's nothing more than a public performance as though they're just stating a list of points that have been made many times before because they have these broken and balanced perspectives these experiences that inflicted damage on their psyches to where they lack steadiness and soundness and judgement because in their childhood they were taught that these things are okay they were taught that it's okay to be weak it's okay to like the force of character to hold their own decisions, beliefs or principles it's okay to like enthusiasm and energy because someone else will take care of it for you someone else will be there to save the day so they've never had to stand up for anything in their entire lives whether it's for someone else or for themselves they've never had to step in because they've always been surrounded by enablers who protected their distorted reality people who told them that they don't have to do anything which resulted in them lacking character, discipline and willpower this firmness of purpose towards something positive and productive which every person should have within but they don't have that instead they have to cheat, lie and steal in order for them to survive they have to build networks that support their narrative because the reality is that these types of people are not even meant to be alive they were never even meant to make it this far and deep down they know it which is why they have to feed off other people because they can't generate anything life-sustaining from within they can't sustain themselves or they can't sustain you instead all they can do is drain you of your life in the energy because they're weak when you are around a strong and powerful person you will feel strong and powerful when you're around someone who feels weak and fragile you will feel the exact same way unless your strength and confidence is great enough to pull them into your reality but with narcissists that's very difficult to do no matter how strong and confident you may feel it's just a matter of time until they pull you down because they are extremely negative and pessimistic deep down they already know that they were never meant to make it this far in life they already know that they are doomed and when you're constantly around that type of energy it's very difficult it will suffocate you it will cause you to feel trapped or oppressed because they've already given up on themselves they gave up a long time ago so instead of trying to manage themselves and become a better person they choose to manage other people when they were never meant to have any source of power to begin with because if you lug them you will see that they're not doing anything productive they're not leading people anywhere good they're not inspiring people and in fact they're just bringing everyone down with them because that's all they can do they can't uplift people because they have no fight left in them they already gave up on themselves a long time ago which is why they're so weak because our power is meant to come from within it's not meant to come from controlling other people that's just an illusion of power it's just something they're taking from another person and claiming it as their own it's not something that they're generating from within which is why they have to isolate you and try to keep you to themselves because annoyingly to you you are the source of their power you're keeping them together you're making them appear normal and sane and this is why they have to keep a code of silence because they're terrified that you will come to this conclusion and then you will recognize that they have no power of their own which means that the illusion will fall apart and then they won't be able to manipulate you after that which is where their power comes from which is why they need you to pretend like nothing is wrong they need you to stay down and keep quiet they need you to see them as perfect which is nothing more than a feeling that they need you to have because a logical explanation would pose that they threat to the illusion and there is nothing outside of the illusion because that's all they've ever worked on they never worked on developing their true character they never built the foundation or structure one day they just decided that this is who they're supposed to be they never did the work they never felt the calling from a higher power or purpose it's all self-serving and it's self-serving because they're weak because they like character which is why they're so envious and jealous of you because they know that you have done the work they recognize in you from the very beginning and then only to them it was your isolation that made you the person that you are today that's why you're strong and they're weak because they're addicted to people they constantly have other sources of supply they never spend any time with themselves so there's no time for them to develop their character and because it's so underdeveloped they wouldn't even know where to start it's too overwhelming for them so instead they target you and try to control you as they take bits and pieces of your identity away from you which they use to construct their false self and they use that to try to make you envious or jealous of them when the reality is that they spend it all this time around you it could only have ever come from you because you are their main source of influence they have nothing more significant outside of you they have no higher purpose their purpose is grounded in the false reality which is why by the end of it it's almost like they become the second great version of you rather than becoming anything of their own and they go on trying to impress other people with your qualities and with the fruits of your labour they're just taking pieces of you with them wherever they go they're not developing anything of their own which is why people in general are so weak and easily influenced these days because no one is stepping in to empower people's individual identity people are telling you to be this or be that instead of telling you to find your own way and do what works for you which is exactly what narcissists do because they want to control you they see you as an extension of themselves so they want you to be just like them instead of you being who you actually are because they understand that your true power comes from within which is why they need to keep you at their source of supply because they know that without you by this point they probably would have gone insane they can't survive without supply because they have no higher purpose or higher calling there's no incentive for them to do what's right because they abandoned themselves a long time ago so they already know they're doomed they chose to be selfish and greedy instead of having empathy for other people and that is what made them weak because what you give out is what you get back which is why they have to build these networks because their entire lives they were selfish they only cared about themselves so now they have to fabricate these stories to build a network where they are protected where they are empowered by other people who assume that they're telling the truth or who may doubt them but choose to go along with it anyway because it's the only way they can make up for in the entire life of only caring about themselves they have to build a false reality where they rob people of their identity where people become agents to a joint purpose and a false reality that doesn't make any sense because that's the only way that the narcissist can harvest their power they can't generate it from within because they lack empathy they don't care about anyone but themselves as within so without the outside world is a reflection of our inner world so if we don't love and respect other people it makes it impossible for us to love or respect ourselves a narcissist have never shown empathy for other people so they wouldn't even know when to begin so they wouldn't even know where to begin they would have to begin by taking accountability for the things they did in the past but they have so many scouters in the closet they wouldn't know where to start and they know that if they came out it would get real and no one would accept them so there's no incentive for them to act right it's like they almost have no choice but to continue on this path because they already know that they shouldn't even be alive they should never have made it this far because they only got this far in life by cheating and deceiving people rather than doing anything on their own. They manipulate and control people these tools or toys which they hold on to, which they see as a source of power. When in actuality they are disempowered because they have to resort to manipulative tactics, instead of being authentic and generating their power from within, but they see these tools as something that will protect their fragile sense of self as something that will protect their weaknesses and insecurities, where they develop these unhealthy COVID and defense mechanisms which resort to them acting like an unruly child who always has to get their way, even though they never did anything to earn it. So they placed you in this parental role, where you are meant to help them to grow and develop, where you are responsible for their mental, emotional, physical, spiritual and social development, where you are left to give direction and pose rules to use discipline, set limits, establish and follow through with consequences, but at the same time they don't want you to have any power, because they need to have the power in order to sustain their false character and the illusion and if you had the power it would completely destroy it, which is why they assign you to these character roles who tried to take your power away from you, because that's what they're using to sustain the false reality, without that the entire thing would fall apart, and then they would just be laying in the rubble dazed and confused, which is why they hold on to it so nearly and dearly, to where it almost becomes like their religion, this pursuit or interest which they follow with great devotion and they give a great deal of their time and energy to it, because deep down I think they know it's the only thing they've got, they have nothing else outside of it, because they never took the time to establish anything real or authentic, so after some time it's like the false character replaces that underdeveloped true self, it becomes who they actually are and that's when it's like they can't even hide it, they become more overt, it's like they don't even have to wear a mask anymore, which is often the result of their network of flying monkeys and enablers, because by that point they can do whatever they want and know they're going to get away with it, because there's nothing to keep them in check, they never built a character which had the intrinsic values or morals, it was purely self-serving and because they're so selfish and greedy there's really nothing they want to do, if they believe they're going to get something out of it, because they're weak they lack discipline and direction, which is why they have to direct control you, as within so without, when people lack control and direction within themselves they feel the need to control and direct other people, if you feel strong and secure within yourself, you feel no need to control anyone and that's what love is, love is freedom, love is about letting go, but these individuals have no love in their hearts, because they lacked empathy from the very beginning, which means that there was never anything for them to develop a work on, by default all they can do is take from other people to sustain their false character and they think that's living, when in reality they're not even alive they don't even feel alive, which is why they have to build networks of flying monkeys and have constant sources of supply, because it's the only way they can feel like they are alive, they can't feel alive on their own, they lack passion and purpose, there's nothing keeping them together, which is why we never get around them it's like they fall apart, because what you have is what they're missing, it's something they can't generate from within, but it's also something they can't receive or experience and yet it's something that they still decide to be a part of and it is for this reason that you have to be their parent, because they lack direction and control within themselves, so they need you to guide and wreck them, but at the same time they have to control you, but whenever you're around them you will feel like you have to baby them, as though you're dealing with a child, but they're like this child that wants to be the parent, so they want to manage and control you, which is why they don't like it when you question or confront them, unless they can use it to get supply, they don't like it when you're looking for answers, because they already know that they have something to hide, they cannot react logically, they cannot give you a reasonable explanation for their behavior, because they already know that we'd expose them, so everything has to be about your feelings or emotions, they have to intimidate you or become passive aggressive and they have to pull you down with them in order to sustain the illusion, because a rational argument would completely destroy it, so they have no choice but to remain emotional whenever they're around you, because that's the only way that they can get their rocks off, they can't do that if it's just two adults having a sensible conversation, they have to resort to feelings, insults and attacks, because although they're heavily dependent on you, they're also seeking independence from you, they're trying to detach but they can't, because they never fully attached to you, they never fully accepted you as the person that you actually are, instead they develop this mental image of you when they first make you, and that is what they will hold on to, and they hold on to it for dear life because they need it, there's nothing inside of them, they have a void and they need you to fill it so that they can feel whole and complete, even if it's just for a moment, so that they can feel like they have a high emotional purpose, but that doesn't mean that you can be their friend, because they deeply hate and envy you, they secretly admire and respect your independence, but it's you and not them so they want to destroy it, because they want to prove to themselves that they are strong and powerful, even though that may never be the case, but they gave up on reality a long time ago, so they will happily settle for a forceful reality where they are the prize, but you will never be able to connect to them, you will never be able to get through to them, even though it may seem like you're getting somewhere, you're actually not, that's still just a part of the game, they will never understand your perspective because they lack empathy and they're more concerned with their own interests and needs, so they will never be able to understand, they may recognize that you are a healthy and productive person, so they will only use closure and validation as a means to further manipulate you and lead you astray, until the time comes when they're ready to destroy you, because that's all that they can do, they're weak, strength is the willingness to accept other people's ideas and perspectives, to accept that other people have a different way of living, which is something that narcissists cannot do, because everything has to be all about them, yet at the same time they have a fragile sense of self and they live in a false reality, so anything else is a threat to them which they have to monitor and control, because deep down they already know that their character and reality is not real and they know it's not real because it doesn't produce anything good, if it produce something good the signs will be there, it will produce success over time, but it doesn't because what they're doing is not right, yet they continue to repeat the same things again and again, because they've lost their minds, creating a false reality is an extreme action to take and that is done out of desperation, desperate people do desperate things, and as Albert Einstein once said the definition of anxiety is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, but that's just where these people are in the minds, they're stuck on a loop because they're weak, only those who possess great strength and willpower are able to break the pattern, but they lack discipline and control, so even if they could do that it would only last for a short period of time and it would only be used to manipulate you, they just haven't got it, they're nothing like us, and deep down they already know it which is why they do what they do and for these reasons you will never be able to connect to them, you cannot connect to a weak person, it takes strength and courage to face things head-on and that's just something they can't do, they're too full of shame and defeat, they already know there's no hope for them which is why you will never be able to love them and they will never be able to love you, because they see love and vulnerability as a weakness, they can't be vulnerable because they see it as though that makes them stupid or foolish and as though they're exposing themselves to danger or harm, which should reveal to you exactly who they are because they're constantly seeking intelligence, they're constantly seeking to understand things that they don't understand, they're constantly trying to protect their fragile sense of self by not letting them love, by not showing empathy to those who may be less fortunate and it results in them becoming very paranoid and hyper-vigilant, where they believe that people are out to get them because they already know they've done people dirty, it's why they build these networks, it's why they're constantly looking for new supply because they're just wondering when is it going to catch up to them, when is their bride going to come to an end, because they know that what goes up must come down, they know that they will eventually experience a fall from grace and they need to have something to fall back on, because they already knew that what they were doing was right all along, they know that nothing good stems from weakness unless you're around someone who is strong, which is why they're constantly in survival mode and they make you their parent or caretaker while they become this unruly rebellious child that you have to protect and take care of, they act out in an attempt to show courage and strength, but it never lasts because they want to take your power from you, so they have to treat you as a child and try to control you when it doesn't make any sense, because although they demanded expect that you take on this parental role and you give them direction and pose rules and use discipline, they don't want you to have any power or responsibility, they don't want you to respond to the best of your ability, because they don't want to change, they want to stay weak, because they're quite comfortable with the way things are, maybe at one point in their lives they wanted to be strong, but they gave up a long time ago, they have no fighting them now, they have the chained elephant syndrome when they remain tied to bad past experiences, which is the result of childhood trauma, they don't try again because they're holding onto negative experiences, which holds them back from the real possibilities of the present that could completely transform their lives and this makes them very dangerous, because although they may have given up on themselves and doing anything with their own lives, they will sacrifice people for the sake of them giving them more power, but it actually results in them having less power because it's self-serving, so it's actually disempowerment, because the power they take is also the power they give away, they're not using it for a meaningful purpose, so it doesn't last a result in anything good, narcissists are weak and that makes them very dangerous people to be around, strong people are not weak because they don't give up, they keep fighting for what they know is right, they spread love instead of hate and animosity, but weak people are quick to throw in the towel, you do one thing wrong and they will devalue you and turn against you, because they have a black and white mentality, so they won't stand for anything, but you need to stand for yourself by realising that you can be better and although you may be down right now it's only because you're around the wrong people, you're surrounded by people whose only intent is to bring you down, if you were in the right environment you would be able to grow and develop and that's where we differ from narcissists, they believe that things cannot change will be better, they may have told you you'll never be anything, they may have told you you'll never be good for anyone after they're gone and that may be true for them, maybe they can't change, maybe they can't be better, but it doesn't have to be true for you, they don't believe in you because they don't believe in themselves and that is why they remain stuck, they stay weak but you can find strength in knowing that we are not the same as narcissists, we can change and grow and become the best versions of ourselves and they're not going to like it because it just reminds them that we are different, it reminds them that we are strong and they are weak thank you for watching, if you found this video helpful please give it a thumbs up, share your thoughts in the comment section, hit the subscribe button to receive the notifications, if you would like to support the channel you could donate at paypal.me.narc-survivor, put a book of one on one with me on my website, it's narc-survivor.uk, thank you for watching and I'll talk to you soon


The Imam immediately stood up, went into Salah, offered two units of prayers to thank Allah And in the last Sajjah, the Imam wept until his holy beard was drenched and soaked by his heads And the Masala, where he was praying on the prayer night, was also soaked So you are our true guide, we're waiting for you to be by your side I'm a jinn, I'm a jinn, I'm a jinn, I'm a jinn, I'm a jinn, I'm a jinn The darkness of lies end to sleep, I spend the days through my heart my heart, Satanic forces of the world have slayed me from the right path. I feel that