I have to say I'm a little surprised. I was like, if I have 10 people in the room, I will be happy because this is the last session of the last day. Everybody excited about what they learned this weekend?  Awesome. Well, today we're going to talk about content.  I'm super overwhelmed and I don't know what to do. I don't know where to start.  So many of us, myself included, we've been there. We've done that. So we're going to talk today about content. We've had a lot of great content talks already this weekend. I know there was one specifically about video. There was one specifically about podcasting. Hopefully this is going to help bring everything together for you and tie it up in a nice bow before you go. So content doesn't have to be scary. It doesn't have to be intimidating. It doesn't have to make you like, you're looking at that new post blinker going, what am I going to talk about? And then you go and get a cup of coffee because you don't want to deal with it. I think there is fundamentally a problem with the way that we look at content. We so many times look at content like, okay, what am I going to say? What am I going to put out there? And I think we really need to change the way that we look at it. You have information to share, information, product services. You have something to give to the world. Your customer has a problem. As long as you keep that information to yourself, your customer's life is going to continue to suck. Think about it that way. Like if you don't put out into the world what you have and what you have to offer, your customer's life is going to still be miserable and they're still going to have this problem and they're not going to know how to solve it. You can help them solve it. If you look at it that way, you're not going to be thinking about, oh, I'm bothering them. I'm bugging them. I'm nagging them. You're thinking about it in terms of, I'm going to help them solve a problem. So, I'm not used to talking this much at once. See, I'll forgive me. So, the first question you have to ask yourself is who are you talking to? And I hear so many people say, oh, like as an example, I sell pillows. Everybody needs a pillow. So I'm talking to everybody. No, you're not. Because if you're talking to everyone, you are talking to no one. I think it's really important to remember that. And that goes for, if I say who are you talking to and your answer is moms, that's not a good answer. If I say who are you talking to and your answer is entrepreneurs, that's not a good answer. You need to narrow it down. Because if you're trying to talk to everybody who fits in that, you're not really talking to anybody. It's like having, you need to look at your content in terms of it being a personal conversation. So, when you think about your customer, you need to know everything that you possibly can about them. So you can talk to them in the best way possible. Your content should be a conversation, not a lecture. I'm gonna say that again. Your content should be a conversation. It should not be a lecture. You're not talking at your audience. You want to invoke engagement and ask questions and say, hey, have you been feeling like this? I have too. I know where you've been. And this is how I got past that. So it's a conversation. It's an engagement with your audience. When you start thinking about not just who are they, but what do they like? Where do they hang out? The problems that they're struggling with. It's gonna give you topics for your content, but it's also gonna give you places to go find them. Because those interests are gonna translate into Facebook groups, where you can find your audience in different interests-related Facebook groups or associations. It's gonna lead to not only how you talk to them, but where you're gonna find them. So, so many people are like, well, I know where my customers are. I know what they're doing, all that kind of stuff. I'm gonna challenge you to actually put it on paper. So I love this format. It's from Digital Marketer. And if you go to their website and look for their customer avatar sheet, you can download it there. And I'll post my slides with resources and everything after I'll put it on social media. What was that? This is from Digital Marketer. DigitalMarketer.com. So this goes into detail, and I know you can't read it all, but when you download it, you'll be able to read it. Great. It even talks about what are their goals? What kind of books do they read? What kind of magazines? What blogs or websites do they go to? That sort of thing. Really hone in on who they are. Like get to know them as if they are your best friend. Told somebody the other day, like you need to be thinking about this avatar so much that like your spouse thinks you're having an affair type of thing. Like you need to know who this person is, like really understand them, get to know them. They are your best friend. Think about what you know about your best friend. You need to know at least that much about your customer and who you're going after, okay? So the next question I usually get is how am I supposed to get this information? Like really? And the thing is you have to talk to people. Talk to who your potential customers are. Go where they are and ask them questions. In Facebook groups, in fact, I saved this one last night because I'm in a Facebook group that's for female entrepreneurs, women who are starting businesses. Somebody posted last night, I'm a professional home organizer. I'm looking for some input. I'm working on some content creation, surprise, surprise. I would love some feedback. What is your biggest organizing challenge?  What result would you like to see? Drop your answers below or if you're interested in a quick call with me to talk about these, I would love to have that conversation. That's how you get this. You go where they're hanging out and you say, hey, I would love to just know, not trying to sell you anything, I just wanna know. What are you struggling with? What is the problem that you're trying to fix?  So the other thing is, you can have multiple personas that you're talking to, but I'm gonna really challenge you to know more than three. Think about it, even if you were at the after party last night. You're having conversations with people. If I'm standing here having a conversation with you guys, if I can have a personal, meaningful conversation with two or three people in real life. If I start talking to 10 or 12 people, it's no longer a personal connection. You're more broadcasting.  I want you to limit those to know more than two or three. And here's a couple of examples that I found. If you're familiar with HubSpot, it's a marketing website and they divide theirs by like company size and the person's role within the organization and all that kind of stuff. I love this one. This is a coffee shop. So you've got, and give them names. So you've got Chad who's the busy professional and he's willing to spend his money on quality food and drinks. Then you've got Sally who's the busy mom and Heston, I don't know where that name came from. Who is the coffee guru? Like he's the one who probably roasts his own beans at home or something like that. So limit it to three and you can very easily have three very different personas.  When you're sitting there going, all right, today I'm talking to Heston and Heston has a problem with finding the perfect bean because he's very particular about the way his beans are roasted. Suddenly that changes what your content becomes. It changes the way you talk. It changes the way that you approach your content. No longer are you sitting there at this flashing cursor that it's like what in the world am I gonna say? You have a person in your mind and you can imagine yourself sitting there having this conversation with Heston and telling him how you're gonna fix his problem of finding the perfect bean, all right? All right, so we've talked about our customer, identifying who our customers are. I think it's really important to talk about their story and think about their story. So I love this quote. In every line of copy we write we're either serving the customer's story or we're descending into confusion. Now I'm from Nashville so this next part is the most important for me. You're either making music or you're making noise. If you think about all the things that are hitting our customers today, all the information that's coming at them from every angle it's a lot of noise. And so the question is how do you cut through that noise? You cut through that noise with story. We are hardwired to connect with stories. And so when you start thinking about your customer's story and how you can intertwine yourself into your customer's story, it makes a huge difference. You're no longer noise, you become music. You're the saxophone player in the Marta Station where everybody's running to and fro and the people stop to listen to that music, all right? So think of it that way. I love Donald Miller. If you're not familiar with him, highly recommend. I'm not associated with his organization. I'm not associated with him or anything. I am like the biggest super fan. He's got a book called Building a Storybrand or a podcast. If you don't wanna do the book and you rather, if you download the podcast, start at the beginning.  I'm gonna show you a very basic framework here in just a second on the next slide. But if you start with episode one, he's gonna walk you through very detailed. And this will change your content life. Let me tell you, okay? Has anybody in here heard of Red Storybrand, familiar with it at all? Am I, did I tell him the truth? Yeah. All right, I was talking to somebody yesterday that he was like, we just completely read at our website once we found out about Storybrand. So, I mean, literally you're gonna read this and you're gonna be like, I am doing it all wrong. So here's the Storybrand framework in a nutshell, again, not associated with the company. So Donald, if you're watching this video later, love ya, don't sue me please. So this is the framework in a nutshell.  This one's simple, I can understand it. That's the important part, okay? So, the way this works is every story, oh, here's the other thing, spoiler alert, this is gonna ruin every movie you're ever gonna see and story that you read ever again, okay? Because they're all the same. Star Wars to Tommy Boy, it's all the same framework. All right, all right. So, your story has a hero and that hero is deeply flawed and has a problem that they're trying to overcome or that they're trying to fix. And the hero meets a guide. The guide's been there, has the empathy, the authority, it's been there and has come through and knows what they're dealing with. And that guide gives our hero a plan. And he calls that hero to action. And if that hero follows the plan and takes action, then he or she is gonna either find success wild success and win the day or they're gonna find ultimate failure, okay? And usually in the story what happens is they get really, really, really close to failure and then something happens and they're yanked out and they're super successful, okay? So the best stories, they end in success. So, the way you look at this, your customer is the hero and that's where so many people go wrong. They think they are the hero.  And that's not the case.   Remember that part, you are Yoda.  But the thing is, you gotta think about you are the guide. You are not the hero, all right? That's the biggest mistake people make in that framework. The other thing is to focus on the transformation because people buy to become somebody better than who they are today. They want to become something that is not where they are in this moment. They're struggling with something, they see other people who seem to have it all together and that's what they wanna be and that's what you're selling.  Okay, so that aspirational identity. So focus on the transformation. I've gotten off my notes and I'm trying to go back to where am I? All right, so your job is to show them how your product, your service, your business will help them become a better person. All right, so this is all great stuff before you start creating content. You know who your customer is, you know their story. Does it feel like, okay, I can actually have a conversation with this person. I can create some content that appeals to their story and who they are and what they're looking for and all that kind of stuff. And people get so bogged down in, well, how many times should I post? What should I post? What about social media? Like how many times should I be on Facebook or Pinterest or wherever? And then we start getting super overwhelmed. Here's what I want you to do. I want you to focus on Spock. I know we went from Star Wars to Star Trek. I don't know that story super well either. I'm talking about one significant piece of content. All right? We're not talking about everything. I'm talking about focus on one significant piece of content. And when I say significant, I'm talking about something that it takes a little while to put together.  It's something that has some thought to it. It provides value to your customer, okay? One significant piece of content. Now that could be a blog post. It could be a video. It could be a podcast. I can't tell you what that is. I can't tell a room full of people because again, if you're talking to everybody, you're talking to nobody. I can't tell everybody like, okay, you need to go and write a 1500 word blog post once a week for your customers. It's gonna depend on your audience. If you're talking to a busy mom, she may not have time to sit down and read a blog post but she has time to listen to a podcast in her car as she's driving the kids around town.  So when you're talking to them and you're doing that survey or posting on Facebook group or whatever, one of the things that you can ask is, so what's the best way that you get your information? Like do you prefer video or audio or reading it? I mean, ask those kinds of questions because that's gonna help you figure out what your significant piece of content is. You can also ask them like, how often do you get around to your favorite websites?  Do you go to them once a week? The busier they are, the less often they get to those blog posts, that can guarantee you that. So find that stuff out while you're creating your personas and then build your schedule around that, okay? So yeah, there's people like Seth Godin who posts on their blog every single day. I don't advise that because life gets in the way. If you think that you can post or you want to post every day, I'm gonna encourage you to start once a week. Start slow. Don't start off with these grand plans of I'm gonna post every other day, I'm gonna post every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, whatever that is, build up to that because I want you to have those wins when you start posting your content and you start sharing it and people start engaging with it, all right? I don't want you to set yourself up for failure. I want you to start slow and ease into it, all right? There are some people, believe it or not, I was listening to podcasts the other day and this lady, she posts once a month on her blog. And of course the host is like, so what happens the rest of the month? And that's where we get into sawdust. This lady posts, and I wish I could remember her name, she posts once a month. The rest of the month is all what we call sawdust. It's the stuff that kind of falls off your significant piece of content, all right?  That's what you're gonna post on social media. I kind of skipped over this on the last one. Social media is not the place for your significant piece of content because Mark Zuckerberg and his team changes their mind every week about what they're gonna allow us to do. Next week they're gonna tell us that we can't post any pictures that have the color blue because suddenly blue is offensive to somebody.  So don't put your most important content there.  And I think you said this yesterday when you were talking about video. Then go embed it on your website. You're still gonna get the views. It's still gonna count on YouTube.  But make sure that in the comments, you have a link back to your website. You always wanna take people back to your website. Yeah, it's gonna help you with SEO. Yeah, it's gonna help you with everything else. But it's gonna train people where to find that content in the future when the social media channels screw it up again, okay? Always point back to your owned media. And by owned, I mean something you control 100%, okay? So yeah, social media, and I just realized that was a very low quality picture. Social media is considered sawdust. It's not considered your significant content. So what do you post to social media? It's quotes from your blog, your video, whatever your podcast, whatever it is.  It's even like, say you post, and I'm gonna use a blog post as an example, I think that's what most people use as their significant piece of content.  That sawdust, that's something that falls off. It drives people to go read the article first and then come and ask their questions, okay? And if you get into a regular rhythm of that, your customers start to expect it, and they're like, okay, this is great. This is how I engage with Heather on the content that she's created and stuff like that. So you've got, you can pull quotes from your videos. If you do video, you can use shorter video clips. If you don't like to go live on Facebook, you can do that and then use your video clips as live, even on Instagram. You can go live now. You can do transcripts from your videos or your podcasts. You can even translate those into shorter blog posts.   It's like a sermon. You've got three points. So you take point number one, make it a smaller blog post and you can actually spread that out into three blog posts from a significant video that you've invested a lot of time and effort into. There's all kinds of ways that you can create sawdust. So when you're writing your significant piece of content or creating your significant piece of content, be thinking, how can I use this in other places and how can I use little pieces of it here and there and drive back to that significant piece of content over and over again. That's the hub and spoke model where that piece of content is the hub. Your website is the hub. Everything else points back to it. All roads lead back to your website. All right? Yeah? You're doing the Facebook live thing. I'm not familiar with that. Are people actually talking to you at that moment via somewhere and you say I'm gonna be live? They can be posting comments and questions as you're talking live. So you're doing live video and they can submit questions in the chat or be able to ask questions. And so you can say, hey guys, today we're talking about the first part of Monday's blog post. We're talking about, I was trying to come up with a really good example. Like, let's say you're talking to moms of girls who play basketball. And so you wrote this really cool blog post about how to build a DIY basketball goal because moms do DIY stuff. I'm just making that up. And so today we're gonna talk about step one and two of how to create that basketball goal. And so, you know, you're putting it together and they're asking questions and you're pointing things out and stuff like that. So that's just something that you can do. You must let them know in advance that you're gonna be live like at two or five. You don't have to. So that's the cool thing about Facebook live is that people who follow you on Facebook, it'll send them a notification that you're live. So you can schedule it ahead of time and they'll get something saying that Heather's gonna go live at two p.m. or whatever. Or when you just, hey, I can pull my phone up right now and go, hey guys, we're live, everybody say hi. And it'll send all my followers a notification. So it is pretty cool. So although next week they're gonna decide that we can't do that either. I'm a little bitter against Facebook right now. All right, so yeah, everything points back to your significant piece of content. One example, a client that I have is a fashion blogger. She does a lot of photo shoots, all that kind of stuff. So she's posting all over Instagram and Pinterest, these beautiful photos of these beautiful clothes that I cannot afford. And everything though, whether it's Instagram, Pinterest, or Twitter or whatever, it all points back to a blog post where she brings all those images together and then that's where she outlines like where you can buy it and how much it is and who's got it on sale and the things going on in her life and all that kind of stuff. So even in that world, she's everywhere.  Now, the really cool thing, and this is what starts to make your content more simple and that you don't stress about it, if you watch that sawdust and you look at the engagement and the questions that people are asking in that Facebook Live or in response to your Twitter post or whatever, that's gonna give you more ideas for new Spock, new significant pieces of content. So if you see that they're asking about this one certain part of your blog post, your video, whatever, expand on that and make it its own thing. It's literally like wash, rinse, and repeat. Like you can make this into a cycle where you're posting your significant content, you're throwing out your sawdust and from that sawdust, from the ashes, rise as a new significant piece of content, okay? So always be looking for what people are most interested in, what they engage with the most from your sawdust, because that's gonna lead you to your next significant piece of content. And you'll find it's related, you know?  Because you've got all this- It's like interest driven. Yes, absolutely. You're serving your audience. She said it's interest driven and it absolutely is, because you see what they're interested in, you see what they respond to, and then you continue to build on that and you're solving their problems. So you may actually post something that, like an example I was thinking about earlier is like a coffee shop. So let's say a coffee shop, they specialize in these handcrafted, amazing cups of coffee and they're marketing to the busy mom because they've got a drive through window, for example. Well they may find that the moms are like, hey, the coffee is amazing, but I really love that they have healthy snacks for my kids who are in the car with me. And you may go, huh, I never thought about that. And so then you can start going that direction about like the healthy snacks that you offer and how, you know, don't take your kids through the McDonald's line, you can get your caffeine and you can get a healthy snack for your kid at the same time. So you may find from your feedback and your engagement with people something completely different that you didn't think of another problem that you can solve. Yes, sir. I know, I know a lot of content is an urban planner. He ended up committing to posting every day for a year and what happened was certain topics just exploded, he ended up writing a book. And then other things that he thought people really understood just to sell it out. Absolutely. He ended up writing a book and then he created the audience for the book from all these discussions that he realized, oh, we really need to flesh this out.  And this is something I'd really be interested in.   And you're gonna find like it's like shared like crazy. It's like the next viral content, you know? I mean, you'll be shocked, but that's why I always say, talk to your audience, talk to your ideal customer, talk to that person that you probably know some people. Like you probably have a product or a solution that you're solving because you have the problem and because people around you have the problem. So talk to those people that you know have that problem and say, hey, is this, it's just like creating a new product. Is this a product you would be interested in? Ask them the same thing like, well, how would you like to learn about this product? Where would you go to find this product? Where would you go to find information about this product? And if you're having trouble to the other thing, go to Google, you know, Google's your friend when you start typing in, you know, let's say you're selling pillows, for example, you know, when you start typing in, it gives you the suggestions. Pay attention to those. Start, you know, go incognito and search, start searching for your product or a problem related to your product. And you may find that Google already has some other things that you can talk about, that you can address. You wanna talk about helping your SEO, you know, if people are searching for it and Google it's gonna show up in those suggestions. Next thing you know, you've got content that's gonna answer people's questions that they're already searching for, all right? So here's just an example. And I kept it limited to these because if I added more, it was gonna make the text smaller and smaller and I knew it was gonna be hard to read already.  So, you know, little video snippets, the transcript, the shorter blog article, we've already talked about these Facebook Live Q&A, pull quotes from the transcript that you post with pictures on Instagram or something like that. Pull the audio from your video to post as a podcast. It's not ideal, I realize that, all the podcasters in the room go, oh, but it's not ideal, but it's another form of content that you can get out there. Create an infographic. And I know a lot of people are like, how in the world am I gonna do that? Canva has a bunch of templates for infographics. There's free templates for infographics that you can create in PowerPoint. If you wanna go to Fiverr and find a graphic designer, create you an infographic or something like that, there's that option too. The other thing is creating lead magnets. So take your content and create a worksheet from it. Let's say you've got a video or you've got a podcast or whatever, and a ton of podcasters are doing this now. In their content, they say, hey, I've got a worksheet that goes along with this podcast or with this content, go download it at my website, what podcast number, whatever. And when you go to download it, you put in your email to get it. So it uses a lead magnet so they capture your email address to get the worksheet that goes along with the podcast. See how this all kind of connects together, loops together? There's so many different things. If you go to Google and search for types of content, you're gonna find all kinds of things like 45 types of content, 101 types of content, all that kind of stuff. You're gonna find all kinds of ideas. And all you do is time back to your significant piece of content. The original, the original Spock versus the new Spock. Whether you like them or not. So tie it all back to your original content. So in summary, make sure you're identifying your customer as detailed as possible. The more detailed, the better. Give that person a name. Think about them as your best friend. Think about them every time you sit down to write content. You're having a conversation with Sally or Heston, whatever his name is. Map out their story. It helps you understand where they are and it helps you show them where they can go with you. All right. Create your significant piece of content and then maximize the sawdust from it. And then what you're gonna do is just rent and repeat. Keep using the feedback from that sawdust to create new significant pieces of content. All right. So, there's my information. I believe in the story brand framework so much and I just decided this like 20 minutes ago. Shoot me an email at heatherandthedogs at gmail.com and just put word camp or story brand or whatever in the subject line. And when I get home tonight, I'll have my husband pick one of the emails and I'll send you the book for free. So, I was like, I didn't have it built into my slides. I'm like, how can I do this? Shoot me an email, heatherandthedogs at gmail.com. And I'll have my husband pick somebody tonight when I get back to Nashville and I'll send you an email. All right. Can you add us to your email list just from that? I can, yep. Yeah, I'll probably respond and ask you if you wanna be added. Cause like most people, I'm revising my website at the moment. So, if you want, I'll respond or you can just put it in the email that you wanna be added when I start, when I get that back going with content and everything. So. You can do a drawing here. Huh? You can do a drawing. Yeah, I'll have my husband do it. Yeah, I'll have him pick cause he doesn't know anybody from here. So. Just put word camp or story brand or content or whatever, whatever. I just, I just went to inbox zero this morning. So, it's all good. Yes ma'am. Yes. I will post a link in all hashtag work, WCATL, word camp Atlanta. So just look at that hashtag and I'll post them this evening. So, yeah. Where are you gonna post them? I'll post them, I'll post it on Twitter. So, you can either follow me. Twitter doesn't like how long my name is so it's Heather the dogs instead of Heather and the dogs. So, you can follow me and I'll post it tonight. I'll also use the hashtag WCATL, the hashtag for the event. So, if you're following the hashtag you'll see it that way too. Yes ma'am. Okay, I have a question about creating your avatar. Mm-hmm. When you were starting to do debuts, that's what I spell the most with, honestly. Mm-hmm. Do you recommend like starting with the thing or like, there's clients that you're currently hoping and you didn't find that or do you recommend starting to do what I'm really feeling right now? Your ideal, yeah. I don't know because. So, I think the answer to that is are you currently serving your ideal customer? And if you don't feel that you are, I would say look at who your customers are right now and what's the difference between them and your ideal customer. You wanna base it on your ideal customer because, I mean, frankly, like if the customers that you have right now, as much as you value them, they're not the ideal customer. You want to get to your ideal customer. That avatar needs to be who you want to work with. It needs to be who you want to go after. Because if. Do I just choose or do I go find or do I just evaluate them? I always say talk to real people. Talking to real people is gonna give you more feedback and it's gonna, because anybody can say anything online, but when you talk to real people, they give you real answers, okay? The thing is, so what I was gonna say too, if you're not happy with the customers that you have right now, if you continue to fish in that pond, you're gonna get the same fish. So if you want different customers, you gotta go to different places to get them, all right? So that's why I would say define, if you love the customer base you have right now, you want to stick with them, that's great. Create your avatar based on those people. But if you want a different type of customer, you need to create a new avatar. Yes ma'am. When you were talking about identifying their story, sort of went through the story framework, is it really the problem part of their story that you're focusing on? Or is there more than just that? It's not just the problem, it's how you're gonna guide them through that problem, okay? And when you start digging in the story brand whether it's the book of the podcast or whatever, it really breaks down the problem into three types.  People do not buy based on their external problem. They buy because of the internal problem. Because what happens to the external problem is something that's happening to them, it's something that they're struggling with outside in the world and everything. So like the company that I work for, we do a lot with financial stuff. So the problem that people are facing externally is that they're living paycheck to paycheck. The internal problem is how they feel about the problem they're facing. So they feel lost, they feel hopeless, they feel overwhelmed. That's why they're buying our products is because they want to feel better about themselves and they want to be something different. So yeah, they're struggling with living paycheck to paycheck but they really wanna feel differently. And then the philosophical problem is like the whole good versus evil in the world. So for us, you shouldn't have to feel stressed about your money all the time. So it's that, like in Star Wars, Luke's, the philosophical problem, what it comes down to is the good versus evil. Yes, ma'am. Is it a good source for an editorial content or editorial content calendar? Content calendar, I love co-schedule. Co-schedule, it's all one word, CO-schedule. There's a bunch of people who have like different tools and templates and stuff like that.  You can find a ton of them out there. I love co-schedule, so co-schedule has a plugin for WordPress. So it'll actually give you your content calendar in WordPress. They have a paid version, but last time I checked, that plugin was free that you could use. And it actually creates a calendar and you can start your posts in the calendar. It shows your posts in that calendar. And when you wanna start sharing it with other people and having team members and all that kind of stuff, I think there's a fee for it. But I think that calendar within WordPress, that plugin is for free. So, but co-schedule is my favorite. Are you similar to Ops calendar at all? Ops calendar? No, I haven't seen that. Yeah, Ops calendar is another one. Ops calendar. Is that a plugin? Yes, it's the same thing as co-schedule. It's like, can it help you schedule like your content? Yeah. There's a lot of different options there. What I'm gonna say is I may like co-schedule, but it might not work for you in terms of like the way you work. And that's what I'm gonna say is don't ever try to make a tool fit you. Find another tool. Because if you have to put a lot of effort into using it, you're not gonna use it. That comes from somebody who like downloads every tool available. Cause there's so many options out there. Really, I don't really think there's anything that like corners the market and there's not other options available. So, yes ma'am. That slide. Okay. Yep. I've never seen one before. This one? That one, thank you. Yeah. And I mean y'all, this list could go on and on and on and on. Again, I was trying to think how small the text was gonna be. Cause I know it's hard for me to read from the back room too, so. Any other questions? So I don't know if the happiness bars is still open. I'm gonna stick around. If you have any questions that you wanna come talk about, I'm happy to talk with you. Feel free to shoot me an email. Connect with me on social media. We can chat there as well. I'm always happy to help other people overcome their fear of content. So. All right, thanks y'all.


Amen. Alright, so we're finishing up our Seasons of Life series this morning. We're talking about the main topic this morning is raising older children.  What is, what does success to you look like? You know, you have to define success. If you want to have a goal, you have to define it so you can shoot for it, right? And we want to have saved children, we want to have children of character, children that walk in the ways of the Lord, walk in the ways of the Bible. You know, when you look at the men in the Bible, great men in the Bible, you will see that it is no guarantee that because they were a great man and did great things for the Lord that they raised godly children. Some of them raised just outright wicked children. You know, you think about last week we talked about Eli. His sons turned out to be reprobates that God actually killed. It wasn't enough that God rejected them, God actually killed them. And that was Eli. You know, he was a great man of God. Think about David, you know, one of the greatest men in the Bible. Think about some of the children that David raised. You know, it's no guarantee. We look here in 1 Samuel chapter 8, and we see this man Samuel. Samuel was a judge. We look at Samuel, I mean, just think of it. Just think of Samuel's life. So he rebuked prophets. He anointed a king. He anointed the first king of Israel. He hewed a king to pieces personally with his own hand. Samuel was a great and powerful man of God, yet he raised corrupt children with no character. I mean, this should be a warning shot for us. This should be a warning shot for us.  So what do we need to do? You know, this should humble us, these stories in the Bible, when we see, and I understand that I believe that's one of the reasons that God gives us this detail about Samuel's sons. You know, the Bible doesn't say that Samuel's sons were reprobates, but they were corrupt men that actually got the people of the nation to revolt against the judges, saying, you know, we want a king now. We want to be like the other nations, and we know how that turned out. Samuel warned them, and he said, we still want a king.  That's how bad it was. You have to also understand the state of the nation of Israel at that point, not that that's really relevant, but you know, we're at the end of the judges, you know, the Bible says at the end of Judges 19, there at the end of the book, judges that, you know, every man just did what was right in his own eyes. That's how you end up with messed up stories like Judges 19. Everyone was just doing what they thought was right. But these sons were so bad that people wanted a king, okay?  You know, spanking and disciplining small children, that's just the first step. That's just the first step of the foundation.  I want to talk about what builds on top of that foundation today. Okay, and the first thing I want to talk about is from, you know, from the spanking of the small child to the word of God is the first thing that we need to understand today. It's absolutely vital that by the time spanking for your children ends, that your children are saved in gaining a firm understanding of the word of God. Because they're going to literally go from your rod to the rod of God is what's going to happen. And they had better be ready for that. So they had better, you know, be saved. Your time with them is short. Turn to Hebrews chapter 12. They need to know that they're going from your supervision to the supervision of the Lord. Turn to Hebrews chapter 12. And this, of course, is a famous passage about, you know, the chastisement of the believer. But there's a couple points that I want to make here. And if we look at Hebrews chapter 12 in verse number six, the Bible reads, For whom the Lord loveth, he chaseneth, and scourges every son whom he receiveeth. If he endure chasening, God dealeth with you as sons. For what son is he whom the father chaseneth not?  Referring to the fact that God will chastise people that are saved and not those that are unsaved. Furthermore, we have had fathers of our flesh which corrected us. This is what we talked about last week and we'll talk about today as well. And we gave them reverence. Shall we not much rather be in subjection unto the father of spirits and live? For they verily for a few days, they being the fathers of our flesh, your dad, for they verily for a few days, chastendust after their own pleasure, but he for our profit. We might be partakers of his holiness. There's two points here. The first point I want to make is that the days with your children are short. They're short. I don't know how my son got to be 18. I can't even, it happens so fast. The days with your children are short. And the second point is this. They chastendust, our dads chastendust after their own pleasure. What does that mean? It means that people raising undisciplined children are miserable is what that means. I mean this is why people today can't imagine having more than one or two kids. If you talk to people in the world, they're just like, ugh.  And they go for the holidays or Thanksgiving and they come back and be like, I'm never having kids. Because they have one or two kids and it's just a nightmare. They're just the braddiest kids. There's no discipline. It's this new way of raising children. And everybody's miserable, including the children, by the way. So it says that for a few days, you have a few days. You don't have long. You better get this right.  It will bring peace. It yields peace. And after salvation for your children, when they get saved from the time that they're six, seven, eight, nine, 10 years old, whatever that may be, maybe older, God's chastisement comes into effect and they need to understand that. That's why I was talking to you last week about disciplining your children when they're two to five years old to get them sitting in church and hearing the word of God. This is where that begins. Turn to Deuteronomy 11. By the time that they get older, they basically need to know what they believe and why they believe it. You see, the simple commands no longer apply. We start with the simple commands. Don't touch that. You don't have to explain it when they're two. Don't touch that or you get a spanking, period. Why? Because I said so. You don't have to, don't reason with a two or a three-year-old. Because I said so, but when they get older, they need to start understanding the word of God. They need to start forming these beliefs themselves, especially after they're saved. This is, by the way, how they will come to you and start asking you questions about salvation when they hear the word of God. They're gonna start asking you these questions when they go out soul-winning with you and hear the word of God preached to other people. We talked about that last week. Deuteronomy 11, look at verse number 18. The Bible says, therefore, that lay up these words, these my words in your heart and in your soul, and bind them again upon your hand that they may be as frontlets between your eyes. And ye shall teach them your children, speaking of them when thou sittest in thine house and when thou walkest by the way, when thou liest down and when thou risest up. Do you do this? Do you talk about the Bible at home with your children? You know, when your children get to be, you know, close to teenagers or even younger, they will be very interesting, little conversationalists when you are having, when you're talking about the Bible in your home. And by the time they get above 10, you might be surprised at some of the things that they say and some of the things that you maybe didn't know they had full grasp of that they understand. So do you talk about the Bible in your home? Do you have Bible studies at home? Is the Bible a conversation that comes up in your home? The Bible says it should be. You should be talking about it all the time. But here's the thing, you should wanna talk about it. This isn't something that's forced. You should wanna talk about it. You should be reading the Bible in personal time, everyone in your family that can read. And then things come up and hey, what do you guys think about this? What do you guys think about this first? What do you guys think about this story? And just spark conversations. That's what Deuteronomy 11 is talking about.  It should be a culture in your home. So by the time that they're older, they need to have God's words in their heart and their soul is the point I'm trying to make here. So you've taught them the word of God. They've gotten started with the word of God. But I wanted to tell you tonight or this morning, I'm sorry, that it takes more than spirituality to raise older children. It takes more than spirituality. Turn to Proverbs chapter one. Proverbs chapter one and look at verse number eight. Proverbs chapter one and verse number eight. The Bible reads, my son, hear the instruction of thy father and forsake not the law of thy mother, for they shall be an ornament of grace unto thy head and chains about thy neck. Look, it takes, if you are going to be a father and you're going to instruct children, it takes time is the first thing I wanna say. The first thing you need to do is you need to start learning to spend time to instruct your children. You can't just give commands. That's not good leadership. Sometimes you have to get down in the weeds and you have to help your children with the commands that you've given them. I mean, homework's a simple example. You know, you give your children commands, do this assignment, they can't figure it out. Sometimes you just gotta get down in the weeds and spend some time to make sure that they succeed is the main thing. To instruct properly takes time for mom and dad. So if you're not spending time with your children, especially as they grow up, it's not going to work well. The main thing I wanna talk about this morning is that your children will learn character from you. They will learn their character from you. Now, here's the thing. Being saved is no guarantee of any kind of character because it's not of works, right? That's right. I mean, it's what you believe. To be saved, it's what you believe. It has nothing to do with what you do or even after you're saved, how you live your life. I mean, lots of people are living under the chastisement of God on a daily basis. So being saved is no guarantee of character.  That's a main goal. That's a big milestone in a child's life is to actually get saved. But after that, they will learn their character from you. They will learn some sort of character from you. And it's up to you, really, what defines what type of character that is. Turn to 1 John 2. And here's what I'm getting at this morning. Turn to 1 John 2. It takes having a walk according to the Bible yourself is what it takes to instill character in your children. 1 John 2 and verse 4 says, He that saith I know him and keepeth not his commandments is a liar and the truth is not in him.  If you don't have a walk. James 1 verse 26, I'll just read for you, says this, If any man among you seem to be religious and bridal is not his tongue, but deceiveth his own heart, this man's religion is in vain. If you're living something different than what you are trying to teach your children, they will see right through it. At a young age, before they're even 10, they will see right through it and it won't work. Successful leadership is by example, folks, it's by example.  That's the bottom line. You know, it takes time and a personal walk. You know, you have to, you're not Jesus. People aren't just gonna trust in you and just do whatever you say.  So how do you teach this? Now character itself is just like a whole sermon series. So I'll just give a few examples of character that needs to be instilled in children as they grow older. But you see character and teaching character is more complicated. It's a more complicated task. You know, you're thinking about the task of don't do this. You've set up these boundaries and this structure and then these boundaries inside this structure for these small children. Teaching character is a complex task that builds on top of that, okay? So it begins with you. How do you instill it? Let me give you a couple examples. Turn to Ephesians chapter six. But I just wanted to say, as far as your walk goes, if you are not walking according to the Bible, just stop here. Just stop here. Because nothing I'm about to say will have any effect. It won't work, okay? Look at Ephesians chapter six and look at verse number one. Children, obey your parents and the Lord for this is right. Honor thy father and mother, which is the first commandment with promise that it may be well with thee and thou mayest live long on earth. The first thing that you need, the first major character installation in your children needs to be respecting authority in their life. And this started last week, by the way. When I brought up these major items that we just, whenever they popped up with small children, we just crushed them immediately. Respecting authority in their life is a huge point of character that needs to be taught. You know, it starts with the temper tantrums. It starts with the eye rolling. This is what we talked about last week. You must destroy that immediately. You must come down on that hard. So then you can teach this. You can teach how to respect authority in your life. You have to respect authority of your parents. You have to respect the authority of eventually, you know, when you're not in our house, you have to respect the authority of God, who is gonna be your main authority in your life, you know, as you become an adult, as you leave the authority of your parents and you get married. So if moms, when I'm trying to get you to understand, if according to your, how do you do this according to your walk?  Because they're gonna, you're teaching them to not respect the authority in their life.  And that will get you. That will come around, you know, you will sow the wind and you will reap the whirlwind on that. When you have an 18, 19, 20 year old who is not respecting your authority. Because now it's out of your hands. Now you're Eli and you can't do anything. There's nothing you can do. And at that point, God's gonna take care of it. So respecting the authority in your life and teaching your kids that they need to respect the authority in their life is a huge deal. It will define their life in many ways. It will define their marriages.  It could destroy her marriage. Think about it. Maybe you have some puppy man that you're married to that will just allow it.   How's he gonna support his family? I mean, these are big deals, folks. The next big chunk of character that you're building, block of character that you need to install in your children as they get older is hard work. Hard work. I'm not gonna preach a sermon on hard work. But you need to instill this in your children. Look, if you are lazy, let's talk about your walk. If you are lazy, you have no chance. None of raising hard working kids, none. Because what you do matters more than what you say. I've said it before. Look, you work hard and then when your kids get older, they work hard with you. That's how it goes. That's how you should train them to work hard.  You know what I mean? Because you're already training them to be lazy. It's already started. The next one is this and it's kind of tied together. Turn to Proverbs 26, 13. These are sermons in themselves. I'm just trying to give you some main points of character that you need to instill in your children. The next one, turn to Proverbs 26, 13. The next one that you need to instill in your children was also talked about last week and that is honesty. Your children need to learn to be honest. Turn to Proverbs 26, 13. The Bible says in Proverbs 26, 13, the sloth will man sayeth, there's a lion in the way. A lion is in the streets. Now here's the point I'm trying to make with Proverbs 26, 13. You will often find that people that lack honesty also are lazy because lazy people a lot of times are liars. Why is that? Because what's this guy in Proverbs 26, 13 doing?  So they go together. You need to teach your children to be honest because if they're lazy and it'll turn them into liars. Basically, that's another thing I brought up last week.  You better stop that in its tracks big time.  Especially if you didn't realize it when they were four. And we've all seen this too.  Especially you young guys. Here's the thing about excuses. Don't ever do it, ever. Because here's the thing. Nobody cares why you failed. So when you go to work, you didn't get something done. Nobody cares why you failed.  All they hear, all the boss hears, is that it's not done. Doesn't hear anything else. And then you become that guy.  And number two can't be relied on. That's it. Don't ever make excuses. Just make it a rule in your life. And guess what? That's good character. Because you know what? If I don't get something done or I fail at something, I'm sorry, I will do it better next time. That will not happen again. Done. That's what you do. Something's messed up, I'm sorry. It won't happen again. I've identified the failure, I've fixed it. It won't happen again. That's character. That's good character. And people will recognize that. You need to have this walk yourself because you're training your kids to be this way. And they will recognize these things. If you're constantly making excuses to people, you're teaching your kids to do the same thing. Turn to 2 Timothy chapter one. Here's the last one that I had to stop somewhere. So here's the last one I wanna give you on character traits that you need to install on your children. Turn to 2 Timothy chapter one. Here's a character trait that you need to install on your children. Even after they're saved. Faith. Faith. We talked about it on Thursday night. You need to instill in your children a strength of faith. A loyalty to God. Is what you need to instill in your children. Because you can perfect your faith. You need to teach your children that they can perfect their faith. And that they should be working on that throughout their life. Look at 2 Timothy chapter one, verse number five. Talking about Timothy. When I call to remembrance the unfaigned faith that is in thee. Which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois and in thy mother Eunice. And I am persuaded that in thee also. So moms, you spend the most time with these kids. How do your children see your faith? How do your children see your faith? Because you know what? You can see it. You can see it because faith is rots with your works. Your children will be able to see your faith moms. Especially since you spend all day with it. Every day. If you never talk about the Bible. There's never Bible time. There's never anything spiritual coming out of your mouth. Not that you should just be this person that just speaks in spiritual nothingness. But I'm talking about if you don't care about the word of God. Your kids will notice it. And they will learn that faith from you. Or lack of faith from you. That's a huge one for the moms. You see here that Timothy's grandmother and his mother had this strong faith that was just, that Timothy just, he learned it from them. The Bible says. It's hugely powerful. So on top of character, we could talk and talk and talk about different details of character. But the point I want to just leave you with is that your kids are watching you. And they are learning their character from you. So if you have poor character and you have a poor walk with the Lord, that's what your kids are gonna learn from you.  If these kids are watching you. Third tonight. I don't know why I keep saying tonight. Third this morning. You need to turn to Exodus 31. You need to prepare your kids. Now we're talking about when your kids are in their, you know, they're in their teens. You need to prepare these kids to succeed. You need to prepare these kids to succeed. Turn to Exodus 31. Your kids need to have actual skills in life. I mean, it was important in the Bible. You know, this is the one that I was talking about a few weeks ago. You know, where this is the one where everyone just seems to stop listening. But the Bible talks about this. Everyone just stops listening at this point. I don't know if it's TV, if it's video games, the phone generation, or what it is. But I am seeing an entire generation of children that know how to do, they don't know how to do anything. They know nothing. Everyone thinks we're so smart because we have all these smartphones and all this. But I'm telling you, we have never been dumber. In the history of our country, we have never been stupider than we are today. It's crazy. Nobody knows how to do anything anymore. But look, I'm seeing college graduates that don't know how to do anything. They're not functional people. That's how bad it is. Imagine getting out of college after you spend $100,000 or more and not only can you not do anything, you're just unable to function. It's an epidemic today. And God forbid that it should happen to us. What God needed skilled men, look at Exodus 31. Exodus 31 in verse number one. And the Lord spoke unto Moses saying, See, I have called by name Bezaliel, the son of your eye, the son of her, of the tribe of Judah, and I have filled him with the spirit of God in wisdom and in understanding and in knowledge and in all manner of workmanship to devise cunning works. That means he could build awesome things to paraphrase, to work in gold and in silver and brass and cuttings of stones and to set them in carving of timber to work in all manner of workmanship. This guy knew how to do everything. And behold, I have given with him a Holiab, the son of a Haishimech, of the tribe of Dan and the hearts that are all of the wisehearted I have put wisdom that they may make all that I have commanded thee. If you want your children to succeed in this life and especially to be able to support a family, they need to have some skills to succeed. Turn to 2nd Chronicles chapter two. Let me read you Proverbs 22 verse 29. See, thou a man diligent in his business, he shall stand before kings. He shall not stand before mean men. If you're extremely skilled and you're diligent in that business of whatever your skill is, you will stand before important people is what the Bible is saying here.  So what it means by you won't stand before mean men. Let's look at 2nd Chronicles chapter two in verse number 12. I just love these verses in the Bible right here. This is Solomon. He's writing to the king of Tyre who was David, his father's friend. And Solomon is getting ready to build the temple. And in verse number 12, Hiram says, said, Wherever blessed be the Lord God of Israel that made heaven and earth who hath given to David the king a wise son and dude with prudence and understanding that might build a house for the Lord and a house for his kingdom. And now I have sent a cunning man and dude with understanding of Hiram, my father's. And right away after he talks about this cunning man, he describes who this cunning man's parents are. Please don't miss this. The son of a woman of the daughters of Dan and his father was a man of Tyre skillful to work in gold and in silver and brass and iron and stone and timber and purple and blue and fine linen and in crimson also to grave any manner of graving and to find out every device. You can just figure out how everything worked. I love this guy. Find out every device which shall be put to him with thy cunning men and with the cunning men of my Lord David thy father. So the first thing mom and dads you need to do is you need to, you see how he said he's describing this guy that he's sending and how he describes this guy is how awesome this guy's father is. Because it's assumed that he'll know everything and more that his dad knew. So the first thing is moms and dads you need to teach your children what you know.  Make sure you, and guess what? That takes time. That takes time. And if I'm gonna work on something and I'm gonna teach my son what every tool in the toolbox is it's gonna take me a little bit longer to do that than if I would just go and just hammer it out myself. You gotta take the time. You gotta take the time to teach them what you know. You say well I don't know anything. Well, it's not gonna work out. I don't know what to tell you.  Well, good luck to your kids. Point number two, when your children get into their teens you need to help them map some actual goals for their life.  You need to start talking to your teenagers about this. You see, worldly parents don't have to do this. Worldly parents, they don't have to have a plan for their kids because the plan is on autopilot. Because the plan is this. Daycare, public school, college, life crushing debt. That's the plan. It's the analogy I was thinking of was the Tesla automated driving car. They're on autopilot. By the way, I know two guys with Teslas and they have both crashed them on autopilot. So all of these people are gonna crash. But don't replace the automated Tesla car with no driver at all, please. A couple of years ago or a year and a half ago I preached this sermon called why I won't send my kids to college. And I won't send my kids to college. But one of the fears that I had about that sermon was that people would just take that as an excuse to just not put anyone in the driver's seat. To just get the kids through school. You know, okay, they're saved and they're not in prison and done. No, you have more responsibility than that. You have to get in the driver's seat. But you see, the problem with that is this. When you go down this road of staying home to raise your kids and figuring out how to homeschool your kids, which is hard. And then actually doing a good job homeschooling your kids. And then after that, not sending them to college but coming up with some different plan for them where they can still succeed, that's difficult. Total freedom equals total responsibility. If you grab the wheel, better know how to drive. And you can still crash. So please help them plan to succeed. And I'm just gonna give you some examples. You know, education, first of all, the biggest fear of that sermon that people would think that education is not important. Education is so important. Kids need to be, that's one of the beauties of homeschooling, by the way, is that kids will become self-starters in their own education. They will start learning things. Look, Garrett takes college classes from home. He will be going to Sacramento for two weeks a year to take training for this apprenticeship that he's in. But he's gonna be in an area that has a good church where he can keep going to church. You see, that's a plan, it's a plan. Learning a skill set is still important. Education is still important. Jacob last night was, and my kids have heard me say this maybe a billion times, reputation is good, by the way. I don't care if they think, oh, dad said that again. I don't care, I'm gonna keep saying it. Jacob sitting in the corner last night, reading a book. And I just told him, I was like, hey, that's great. Because those that read are smart and those that don't are dumb, period.  Because they won't read the Bible either. Those that read are smart and those that don't are dumb. You can quote me on that. Education is super important. I want educated kids coming out of my house. So don't just throw your kids to the wolves because being able to support a family, by the way, is still an important part of the Bible. Turn to 1 Timothy 5-8. Yes, we're going there again. 1 Timothy 5-8. But if any provide not for his own, especially those of his own house, he has denied the faith and is worse than an infidel. You could raise a saved child that goes to church three times a week and is worse than an infidel if he doesn't support his family. First of all, he'll probably never get married. I mean, I can't tell you how many young ladies my wife and I know that they're not married because they can't find someone that can do this. I'm serious. It's this one reason. It's the number one reason that we know so many single ladies. Because they can't find someone that can support them. It takes more than spirituality. And here's the thing. I wanna get really detailed here because look, there's a huge golden opportunity for your kids. If your kids are 12, 13, 14, 15 years old, there is a huge golden window after high school.  He's just getting in all kinds of debt. And he's ruining his life before he even gets started. But look, if these kids today can get out of high school, you know, ASAP, find something that they could form a business out of, that they could turn into their own business. This is an ideal goal for me. It doesn't have to be your goal. Get into the program, start working while they're under their parents' roof. They could save a ton of money. They could be going the opposite way. Everybody's going in debt. They could be going this way. There's this, it's a unique window that's once in your life. They could start training. They can start working. They can start saving money.  I mean, it's the opposite. Instead, they're heading into this world and they're getting more and more responsibility. They're learning these advanced skills like financial responsibility. While under the authority, it's great. Take advantage of it. Help them formulate a plan where they can learn these advanced skills under your authority. Take advantage of it, the window's small. I mean, we're talking maybe three, four, five years here. They can start learning these financial things. They can start learning to give, to save a large percentage of their money that they make. They can learn to give 10% to church like the Bible says. They can learn all these advanced things. By the way, I never had to tell my son to tithe. He just saw us do it. I mean, we're driving, we're driving Friday night. We went to look at Christmas lights or something. This is just, I don't even know if this has anything to do with the sermon. But we saw this kid, this little girl. She was Ashley's age or younger. And she's walking down the sidewalk, smoking a cigarette.  And she's smoking a cigarette. And I'm just like, I need my daughter not to smoke. So I had a lecture in the car and I was like, Ashley, listen here, don't smoke. I mean, we're all laughing. It's a huge joke. You know, Ashley, no drinking. It's a huge joke. Because they just, they see the example.  They see the example of not only, you know, their family, but they see the example of people like that. I always said that, you know, standing out in front of Verity Baptist Church with that methadone clinic right next door, that's the best opportunity for kids to never do drugs ever.   Hey, let's go get some cocaine or heroin or whatever it is. No, I mean, anyway, life skills, life skills under authority.  But it's just the beauty that you don't have, when you live an example of life and you teach your kids the word of God, that's the main one, because, you know, she doesn't have a perfect dad, Ashley.  You don't have to teach those things. Learning life skills under authority. Huge opportunity. Look, these kids, if they're just hanging out at home after high school being a bum when they're done with high school, you know, it's just a huge wasted opportunity. Learning to work in the world, I was just talking with one of you guys yesterday about this, learning to work in the world is a skill. If you're saved and you have to go out in the workforce amongst unsaved people, handling that situation in a proper Christian way is a skill and it must be learned and it's best learned under authority. Turn to 1 Corinthians 5. I wanna show you guys something, we just got done with the boot series talking about 1 Corinthians 5, 11. Men will have to work in the world. It's a learned skill. You need to know how to handle it. My daughter doesn't know how to handle it because she's never gonna be sent out in the world to work. So you say, I don't wanna work with worldly people but the problem with that philosophy is this, the Bible, okay? Look at 1 Corinthians 5, verse 9, two verses before verse number 11. And I wrote unto you in an epistle, not to accompany with fornicators, yet not altogether with fornicators of this world or with the covetous or extortioners or with idolaters for then must ye needs go out of the world? And then he goes into this, what I meant is if any man be called a brother and we define that in that boot series that if somebody's in this church and they become a member of this church and we get to know them and they be called a brother and then they're into these sins, that's time to exercise church discipline at that point, start that process going. But what it's saying is in verse number 10, look, if it meant just people in the world, you would never be able to even, you just have to go out of the world. You wouldn't even be able to exist in the world. So you will have to be in the world. You have to help your children know how to deal with that. That's why I would just interrogate Garrett after every job that he got.  How old are they? Are they married? How do they talk? Do they swear? In the interviews. Did anyone swear in the interview? I'm just trying to get a feel for what kind of situation he's walking into because there's situations where I wouldn't want them there. If it's just this vulgar, perverted environment, get out because it'll vex you.  Most people aren't reprobates out there, you know? So you have to teach them how to work in those environments while holding that character that you've already taught them. Five, six, seven, eight years ago. You see how this all builds on itself? It all builds, every building block builds on the next. And if you miss a block, the whole thing comes down.  Well hey, it's, you know, it's training. It's training. Training's complicated. Each step builds on the next. We talked about when they're young, the structure and the boundaries, right? You build the structure, you create the boundaries in that structure and then you enforce them. It's the first building block. If you miss it, you can't continue. Respecting authority, building character, learning skills, and then having a plan to execute those skills. Each step fails if the previous one was not taught. I mean, it's complicated. It should make you a little nervous. If you're like, wow, this raising kids thing doesn't seem so simple. It's good. You should feel that way. You know, I used to go up in these, we had this guy at one of these plants that he was the designated guy to go up in the crazy high places, like 600 feet in the air on an open grading deck and things like that. God just didn't, he didn't care about heights. And he would always say when he brought people up to those heights, he would say, you know, it's the people that get up here and they're not afraid.  And he's like, it's the people that aren't worried that I worry about is what he would always say.  It's the same thing with kids. It should make you nervous, these things. It should make you nervous enough to sit down with your spouse and formulate a plan. How are we gonna do this? How are we gonna discipline our kids? What's that structure gonna look like? What are those boundaries gonna look like? You know, man, you're to lead this. Lead this discussion. And then, hey, how do we need to act in this home? You know, how are we gonna study the Bible as a family in this home?  Hey, I was reading this last night. What do you guys think about this verse? I mean, lead the conversations in those directions. It's easy to do. It doesn't have to be formal or anything. It's a culture. Now, let me talk about, I talked a lot about things that apply to boys this morning. I wanna talk a little bit about girls. And I want you to understand, and this is something that's its own sermon by itself. But here's another thing that's very important to me, and I don't have time to get into the Bible on it, but there's a lot of this in the Bible as far as favoritism in raising children. Everything that we provide for one of our kids, we will provide for the other. And you need to understand that. So my daughter is not going to be in a situation where when she's 16, 17, 18 years old, she's going to be able to just go to work and save all this money. So we've already made a plan where we're putting things away for her. And she will have that same goal, that same amount that we want her to have when she goes off and gets married. See, we're gonna treat them all the same. Because favoritism can destroy a lot of things, folks. It's its own sermon. I don't have time. I want you to understand that it's very important to our family. When you see favoritism of people in the Bible, it causes a lot of problems in families, in the Bible. One thing that we do for another, if we do for one, we will do for the other, okay? And you need to keep that in mind as well. And guess what? When we put away money for our daughter, guess who provides that money? Me, because it's my responsibility to provide for her, until her husband takes over that responsibility for her. You see? And you better believe that when she's 35 and starts dating, that I will make sure that whoever is looking to court my daughter can provide for her, or he will not say a word to her. You think I'm so serious about that? It's heart attack stuff. I already talk to her about it all the time. I talk to my daughter all the time. Is anyone messing with you at church? Because I'll kill him. Is everyone nice to you here? I mean, we just had a conversation this morning about this. How are you doing?  It's not just about the boys, all right? All right, conclusion. Let's look at the verse of the week. Turn to Ephesians 6 and verse number four. Because this is something, this is a verse that maybe people, if they don't have older children, won't really understand. And I wanna wrap up this sermon with this verse. Ephesians 6 and verse number four. And this is something that I'm trying to do the best that I can at. And I think I'm getting better at it. You can maybe ask Garrett, don't ask Garrett. But it's something that you have to get right. In Ephesians 6 and verse four, the Bible says, and ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath, but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. And what does that mean? Provoke not your children to wrath. Here's what it means. As your children get older and start maturing and getting more responsible and getting character, you need to treat them as such. You need to not treat your 18-year-old like a five-year-old. That's not gonna go well. Because one thing that you'll see when your kids start taking on more and more responsibility, they change. Like, they turn into like adults, it's weird. And you need to not treat them like a five-year-old. I don't treat my 12-year-old like a five-year-old. My 13-year-old like a five-year-old. It would not go well. It would provoke them to wrath. Now make no mistake, I'm still in charge. Okay? And as a matter of fact, I got Garrett's permission to tell this story, but Garrett just turned 18. And I just had a conversation with him about turning 18, you know, two weeks ago. And here's the thing about turning 18. You know what, turning 18, it's a big deal, right? You're 18 now, you can vote, you can get drafted. You're an adult in the United States when you turn 18. But you know what turning 18 has to do with the Bible? Nothing, I'm still in charge. You are still under my authority. But I don't treat him like he's five, right? But he's still under the authority of his parents. And I think he wants to be, I think. You know, but we're helping him in these more complex areas now. Because the tracks are laid, he's on the tracks. And now we're helping him in the more complicated areas still under our authorities. And here's another thing. When your kids get older and they start learning the Bible and they start learning the proper ways to do things, because here's the thing about me, I am not a perfect parent. So when I make a mistake as a parent to whether it be my older son or daughter or whatever, you know, I apologize. I apologize. I say, I'm sorry that I handled things that way. I should not have handled things that way. When I've made a mistake, I own it, period. Because your kids will know what the Bible says if you've done your job right. And if you're going against something that the Bible says and you've got, whether you get in the flesh and you do something or whatever, you know, just own it. I'm not a perfect parent. I'll never claim to be, but just own your mistakes. No excuses, remember? No excuses. It's character training and they're gonna learn it from you. And here's the last thing. They not only need discipline and training and skills and character, but they need encouragement. Especially as they get older. You know, I don't have to encourage a two-year-old for doing the right thing. But when my kids get older and they start learning these things, you know, this is just good leadership. You need to encourage your children. Don't be this tyrant that is just constantly just catching them doing things wrong and it's all about what you did wrong and you didn't do enough things right. No, give them encouragement. Encourage them when they get it right. There's two sides to this. Encourage them. Look, folks, it's a handoff. You know what I'm saying? It's a handoff here.   He gets up and he has to run. No, it's a handoff. It's a handoff.  And God takes over the authority in, you know, in your children's life when they leave your home or they leave your authority. Look, you're still to respect your parents. Don't misunderstand what I'm saying. But it's a handoff. You're trying to get them up to speed. It's your responsibility to get them up to speed. And, you know, if you do it correctly, they can go straight from your home into the married life sermon. They can skip the single life. They can skip that whole thing with your kids. It's super important, folks. It's just biblical building blocks and you have to recognize these things. These things that I brought up today, it's not a complete list. You gotta sit down, you gotta have a plan. You gotta plan your work and work your plan and then you'll succeed. Your kids will succeed. Let's bow our heads and have a word of prayer. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for today. We thank you for the Bible. And Lord, we thank you for our children. You know, this gift that you've given us for such a short time, Lord. I ask that you just give us all wisdom in raising these children and help us just to heed the words in the Bible that we would know, Lord, how to handle situations that we could just help these kids, Lord. We could just, we could provide them with a structured life, teach them to teach them boundaries, how to respect those boundaries, Lord, teach them character and then teach them these complex life skills or that'll help them succeed. Not only be saved, Lord, but have successful marriages and raise, raise godly children themselves. Lord, we love you. We ask all these things in Jesus' name. Amen.


My name is Ethan Gaveon. I'm the executive director at Keep Playing Baseball. Our goal is to make the path to college baseball accessible and affordable for all high school baseball players. So, youth baseball has gotten more and more expensive. It's one of the most expensive youth sports to play. There's a large number of student athletes who are getting priced out of the ability to play at the college. So, what we do through our website, KeepPlayingBaseball.org, and our educational program is as we help those kids and those families through the recruiting process and through the college surge process, free of charge. And this is our first time participating in Big Give Giving. We're pretty excited about it. A lot of people think of it as just a fundraiser, but the capacity building aspect has been particularly helpful for us throughout the year, and we're really just trying to get our name out there and raise as much money as we can.


Next up, it's Petro Balcha Correa. That's right. His title is Protecting a Web Privacy with Free Software and the description. Web tracking is a common practice used to monitor the behavior of a particular user on a website. This kind of data is frequently unauthorizedly collected all over the web by big corporations and used or sold for targeted advertising, which is a huge privacy concern. In this short talk, we are going to briefly cover the most common fingerprinting methods used for tracking purposes. Subsequently, we are going to explain how to fight them by enhancing your web browser with several free software solutions. Petro, we look forward to hearing you. Thank you. So as she said, I'm going to talk about how to protect your web privacy with free softwares. First of all, let's explain what free software is. It is not necessarily free of charges. So a free software might be paid or not. But what it's actually about is allowing users to have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change, and improve the software. So this is the freedom that we're talking about here. And in order to accomplish all of those points here, we need free software to be open source. So every free software is also open source, which means that anyone can go to its code and understand what's going on there. So when we're talking about privacy, this is vital, because if a free software is said to be privacy-friendly, it means that the community around it, the programmers, can read its code and guarantee that it's actually privacy-friendly. So on the other hand, we have closed source, which are those pieces of software that do not allow you to access its code. So no programmer can read it and guarantee that nothing shady is going on behind the scenes. You cannot know for sure what closed source is doing with users' data. So true privacy cannot be reached with closed source software. And OK, with that explained, let's address one of the big problems that I want to talk here, which is target advertising. So target advertising is the kind of ad that tries to reach as many people as possible by choosing those that are more likely to have interest in a specific product. So pregnant women, for example, are more likely to buy maternity pants, so they are more likely of receiving this kind of ad as well. And well, I suppose that most people here have gone through a similar situation in which you get an ad that seems to perfectly fit you in your current situation, with perfect timing. And to me, that's kind of annoying because sometimes I don't really know how advertisers knew that that ad would catch my interest so well. And well, one of the reasons for that is because of these guys here, so data brokers. Data brokers collect information about individuals from different sources. So maybe from public sources like public recordings or maybe from private sources like social media and web pages that the person visits and the apps that this person uses. So what data brokers do is they get all of the pieces of information from different places. They put them together to make a profile about you, about this person. And this profile it might contain, for example, this person's age, purchasing power, religious beliefs and political affiliations, for example. And the fact is that every piece of information is valuable to them because this is what tells them what kind of product or service you might be interested in. And I don't know, often I hear people saying, well, I don't really care about targeted advertising because I prefer to get an ad that might be interesting to me than getting an ad of a random product. So I don't really care about giving them my information, I don't care what they'll do with it. And I don't know, I think that this kind of thought is a little bit dangerous because, well, I'll show my point with an example. So let's take, for example, this company, let's call it A. And let's say that A sells alcoholic drinks, okay? And then company A wants to target advertise its product. So what it is going to do, it is going to hire an advertising company to do that for it. So keep that in mind. And now, let's suppose that we have this, this pretty guy here. Let's call him B. And let's say that B has an alcohol abuse problem. And maybe he's trying to quit it, so he searches online how to stop drinking. And then now data brokers know that B has an alcohol abuse problem and we're going to talk how they know it later. But, so now they know it and they'll sell it, they'll sell this information to advertising companies. Or another thing that might happen is that this data broker company might be the same advertising company. So many times they're the same. But what matters here is that now this advertising company knows that B drinks a lot and what it is going to do, it is going to try to show B. It's going to try to show to be A's product. So products like this, so it's basically trying to sell alcohol to a person that has an alcohol abuse problem. And I don't know, I think that this is questionable. And this is only one of the possible scenarios because data brokers here, they could sell this information from B to his healthcare insurance company. And then this healthcare insurance company now knows that B might develop some kind of cirrhosis or something like that. So what it is going to do, it's going to make B's healthcare plan more expensive. And this might sound like some kind of conspiracy but this is the kind of thing that is happening. In Brazil, this has been happening a lot. And also I've read about this happening a lot in the United States as well. But let's now talk about how data brokers know about this information from B. How they know that B searched how to stop drinking. So what they use are these things called web trackers which they basically put it everywhere in the internet. So a lot of web pages contain web trackers and they're hidden. The user has no idea that it is there. And according to a study that was published last month, web trackers are present on more than 94% of web pages around, at least those that they have studied. And I don't want to get too technical here but I'm going to explain some of the techniques that they use. And one of the most common ones is tracking pixels. So tracking pixels are present on web pages and emails and they're usually invisible pixels, one by one pixels that the data brokers send to you this image request and in the moment that you accept this request, you send back your IP address. So they know that you're there. A similar approach is done with cookies. So briefly explaining cookies are small text files that are placed on your system when you visit a website and they store your preferences. So if you go to a web store, for example, and you put an item on your cart and then you close that web page and you open it another day and your item is still there, that's because of cookies. So cookies are nice. But the problem comes when third parties use cookies because they don't use it to store your preferences. They use it to track you. So it works more or less like this. A web page cannot see cookies from another web page. So if you visit a web page and then a third party puts a cookie on your system through this web page and then you visit another web page and then the same third party puts another cookie on your system through this other web page, then this third party can see this two cookies because it belongs to them. And so it has information about you from these two websites and it can use to make target advertising to you. And I'd like to show, because I don't know if it's clear, it's too clear to be speaking like this so I'm going to show. This is Curitiba City Hall web page and I have here this extension which is called U-Matrix which basically shows me all the requests that I get on a web page. And according to this extension, these guys here that are in this strong red, they are either ads or trackers or analytics. And analytics are used by web developers to further understand their website. So if I wanted to know if this button here is being effective, I can use analytics to see how many clicks it has and maybe if it's not being effective, I can put it here and then check if people are clicking more there. So, okay, so analytics are cool so you can improve your website. But again, the problem comes when you use closed-source analytics because you can't know for sure what they're doing with users' data. You can't know if they're storing it, if they're sending it back to the analytics provider. And, well, there is another website here that I really want to show to you guys. This is Brazilian Government web page and remember, strong red are ads, analytics are trackers. So take a look at this. It doesn't end. Okay, so we have many of those here and I wasn't expecting to find those because, well, it's from Brazilian Government but let's take a closer look of what's happening here. We have images, so all of these images here are probably either ads or pixel trackers. And we also have a lot of cookies. So these cookies might be tracking cookies as well. And, well, what can a regular user do to prevent it? How can I block all of these trackers? So first of all, I recommend using Firefox because it is free software and because it has been releasing a lot of privacy-oriented features lately. So I recommend using Firefox and going here to preferences, privacy and security. And the first thing that we want to change is accept third-party cookies, never.  So what's happening here, I'm basically blocking all third parties so I won't get web trackers, cookie web trackers and I'm blocking known trackers that Firefox know that might stalk you. And, okay, in the future just for the record, this is going to change tracking protection will be called browser content, so for those in the future. And one thing that Firefox said is that in a few months, so right now tracking protection is only used by default if you're in private windows. But Firefox, Mozilla said that in the future, it's going to be always for everyone as default, which is awesome. And another thing that I recommend is going here to add-ons, extensions and download, downloading this guy here, you block origin. So this one is an ad blocker, it blocks ads and trackers and analytics and you don't really have to do anything. It is free software as well and you just have to leave it there and it will do all the job for you. And for those that have never used an ad blocker before, the internet is going to seem like something really totally new because you won't see ads everywhere displayed in your screen and you won't get those annoying ads in the middle of your video when you're listening to music and so on. So, okay, so these three changes, I recommend doing that. And, okay, another thing. Here at you block origin, I recommend coming here, open the dashboard, filter lists and coming here to privacy and adding another cool list which is thumb boys enhanced tracking list. This is really nice and then apply the changes. Okay, so moving on. There is another third technique which I haven't mentioned yet which is done by using Javascript. So if you pay attention here, there's a lot of JavaScript injection here and this might be for web tracking. So, is it, okay. So fingerprinting is when you use Javascript to retrieve the user's information about its hardware and browser and operating system so you can get a lot of information about that guy's computer. And then if you combine all of those and this combination is unique, it means that your fingerprint is unique as well.  So it's a signature of your computer basically and your browser. And five minutes, okay. So if we have five minutes, I'd like to show this really quickly. We have this website from Electronic Frontier Foundation which allows you to see if your browser is safe against tracking. So I'm going to run it here in the Firefox which we made the changes. And then in a new Firefox, brand new Firefox and then on tar browser, which I haven't explained but briefly explaining it's used to anonymize you. People use it to browse in the deep web but you can use it for regular browsing too. So okay, the tests are running. And for this one, wait, this is the regular one. So we get that your browser has a nearly unique fingerprint. And if we go here, we have that only one in 98,000 browsers have the same fingerprint as yours. So it basically means that I'm not disguised. What I want is for this number to be low because I want to be disguised. I want to have a fingerprint that is similar to many people so the web trackers don't know if that's me or him or him or him. So this is a high number. This is for a brand new Firefox profile. If we go to the one that we made the changes, we get no results probably because they cannot load the trackers, okay? And finally for a browser, for a tar browser, do you have any idea of what this number is going to be, one in any guess at all? Well it's 98,000. For a tar browser we go to 75. So we're really disguised. So if you want to make a really private search online, you can go for tar but doing these changes is good enough as well. So what happens is sometimes these changes that I said about you block origin and et cetera, well they use a list of non-trackers to block them but sometimes a tracker might not be present on that list so the tracker will be able to send the JavaScript request and the only work around would be to turn off JavaScript which I do not recommend for almost anyone because it will break most sites. But the thing is I am a crazy person and I do not use JavaScript on my browser and I want to share something really interesting that happened. I was going to register for depthconf and I got this. This registration form uses JavaScript. Without it you'll have to navigate the validation dragons without any help. So I turned on JavaScript because I have no suspicions I have no suspicions about that conf but the fact is and I would like to talk a little bit with developers here because I'm a developer too but as a user it is frustrating that I have to do all these work arounds and turn off JavaScript to try to protect my privacy. This is an absurd because regular users will never do that. So the thing is our privacy it should be ours by default and I don't know if we have to struggle to have it back it means that it was taken from us and the cold truth is that if it was taken from us it is because us developers let it happen because everyday web pages and apps and tools that use closed search that are shady are being released and everyday millions and millions and millions of people are using these tools without realizing that every time that they do it they are killing their privacy again and again and again. So this is I don't know I don't know all I'm asking here is for us developers to stop a little bit and think about our responsibility in this process because when we're developing we're kind of used to quickly look for the solution and sometimes we forget to think about the consequences of that solution to the user. So it is common for a developer to use the to go strictly to the obvious solution in the market which might be closed searched and it might not respect the user. So I think that instead of doing that we should create a habit of going after alternatives looking for alternatives that are free software and that are privacy friendly because after all users' privacy is in our hands. It is up to us to protect it. Thank you. Oh there's one? Okay sorry. Is it working? Okay first of all thank you for your presentation. It was really really interesting and at the beginning we're just saying the convenience sometimes it has for the advertising the content of the advertising that sometimes feels convenient for you. You want to see exactly the things you want and do you see any in this spectrum of just have total privacy and you have such things as advertising convenience. Do you see any like middle between in this spectrum that would work? Well actually that's something that nowadays it's hard to have a balance of that because every time that you look for more and more privacy you left convenience aside. And not only that because the thing is that to have privacy you also have to, you need the knowledge and sometimes money for example if you want to really protect yourself you might go after a VPN and things like that. So this is the kind of thing that regular users don't have access to usually. So that's why I think that the biggest change needs to come from the developers because after all we're giving them the product and we should guarantee that it concerns their privacy but yeah this is always the trickiest part to balance these two guys. Actually like this question comes mostly for the regular user right? The ones that are not really aware of this kind of situation we're leaving and how to manage with that. I can imagine some more privacy and more transparency but most of all I think that developers may be an answer to make easy for the user to understand and be able to also get advertising because like maybe a second question for you but we usually relate data with advertising but would that be maybe the answer to have no relation between data and advertising at all? Like the main reason for like the thing is would you say that like there should be no relation between data and advertising at all? Maybe like what I'm suggesting is maybe other ways. Consider like I'm trying to be as most neutral as possible okay considering that not only the convenience but the techniques for the advertising to understand the user. Would there be maybe other paths and maybe it's the same question I just bring to you. Well, can we have a personal conversation? Of course. Can we take this to the break? Let's discuss it. Thank you. And then in the interest of time could we also take your question to IRC please? Thank you. Thank you so much Pedro. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all too.