We want to thank everyone for being here today. Weather turned out great, we got a great crowd. It's been a long process to get this project completed. It took a lot of help from a lot of people, but I think most people agree that it's certainly enhanced the arrival of this corner of Jervay Street and Lincoln. And we're looking for it to serve as a hub for customer service to all our visitors as well as our residents that need information on restaurants, attractions, tours, and any information they may need about our city and about our region. It wouldn't have happened without the help of a lot of people. Certainly the support of Mayor Benjamin and a great city staff. Missy Gentry, when I went to Missy about four years ago with this idea, she's been very supportive every since and seen it through its completion. Jeff Palin, Krista Hampton, a number of people. Robert Anderson, Gregory Tucker with his expertise in the experience and construction, walked the project through to completion. Couldn't have done it without him. Dana Higgins, so many people. Hal Stephenson shared my vision four years ago about what this could be on the corner. Meredith into the whole Vista Guild. Fred Dell, everyone in the area is so supportive and it would not have happened without the support of so many people. And I know I've left individuals out that helped make this happen. But thank you all. And at this time, I'm going to turn it over to the mayor. But before we do that, when you have your friends and your family come visit, send them down and we'll take good care of them. And with that, Mayor Stephen Benjamin. Do you guys feel this energy? Do you feel it? Look around you. I mean, look around you at this incredible gathering of citizens in Columbia, South Carolina. This is a big day for a relatively small in terms of area endeavor. But it's representative of what so many of you have been working on for so long. Some of you new to the city? Some of you have been here for decades working to build Columbia and then what we know it can be. To help the city live up its promise. That's construction, baby. That's a good thing. That's a good thing. But to be able to make small strategic investments that recognize the historic value of places like Columbia's Vista, as Kirkman Finley would call it. In the pepper with new buildings and strategic public sector investments and watch private sector investment grow. We together are doing something special in this city across this region. The work that Bill, his entire team has been doing at Experience Columbia, with I think I'd say, I think Mr. Duvall would agree, a banner year last year, taking an incredible natural event like the eclipse. And turning it into something special, singularly special for Columbia, South Carolina is representative of what we can do when we work together. I do want to thank Bill and his team. Thank Teresa Wilson, the fantastic team at the City of Columbia. Fred Delt and his leadership at the Columbia Development Corporation helping Shepherd, this entire area and our fantastic partners in the business community, Carl Blackstone and his team. We're doing some great things together, y'all. And we're going to continue doing great things together. The Vista is vibrant. The Vista Guild is leading here together. We're going to turn this city into the place we all know it can be. We will not only retain our fantastic millennials, but we're going to make sure we retain our perennials and everyone else who wants perennials of those of us. I'm not over 50 yet, but I'll be there sometime soon. Those are over 50 as well. This is the city for all people. And this is representative of a gateway into the city. It says, welcome to Columbia. Let's experience everything the Midlands has to offer. So thank you. Excited to be here with y'all. Thank y'all for coming out, making us a rather day.


TEFL Portland, Oregon The city of Portland is an exciting place to take your TEFL Tezal course There are lots of interesting sights and attractions you should not miss Some of the most popular attractions in Portland include the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry Pittock Mansion Washington Park Oregon Zoo and the Pioneer Courthouse Square Providence Park is the best destination for sport fans who want to watch soccer or baseball games Oregon is rich in natural beauty with many beaches, mountain ranges and forests It is also a great destination for surfing, whale-watching, hiking and biking You will not get bored when taking your TEFL Tezal course in Portland, but will make many memorable experiences


Throughout history, courageous and inspiring women have stood up. Despite the hate, they resisted. They fought for equality for what they believed was right, and their victories became ours. Today, courageous women continue at the forefront of social change, fighting for a world where all human beings are treated with dignity, where women's rights are fully respected and societies thrive. On the 8th of March, let's celebrate the millions of women who've transformed our lives. Stand with them by sharing their stories, by amplifying their voices, by questioning harmful stereotypes in your community. Help them build societies where we're all equal in dignity and rights.


In today's video, if I pull a foil, I get a chance to open a rare vintage pack. What's up guys? We are back with another epic video. In this one, I will be opening 24 packs of First Edition Darkwing Blast. If I pull anything above a super, we get a chance to pull a pack from the Super Special Rewards box. Inside the Super Special Rewards box are 24 random packs including things like First Edition Legend of Blue Eyes, Turbo Pack 6, Retro Pack 2, and then there's some ones you don't want to pull. It's possible we could hit some duds or we could hit some amazing Old School First Edition packs. So before we get into the video, I have a giveaway. I'll be giving away this forbidden legacy Pop-Tart pack. It has not been opened. This will contain either Dark Magician, Blue Eyes, or Caribo in secret rare. You guys have seen me open this many times. Go check out some of my forbidden legacy videos. If you haven't, it's cool. You want it. All you have to do is like the video, be subscribed, turn on notifications, let me know down below. How many times will we get to visit the Super Special Rewards box and will we get anything huge? All right. Let's start off with Dark Winged Blast. Here we go. I'm pretty excited for this. Super Special Rewards box. Very beautiful. I did not. I mean, that's definitely not handmade or anything. That's like printed, beautiful mystery box that I showed you guys. I put a ton of time into making that box. It's incredible. It's amazing. So you should appreciate it. Y'all see, we have the Silver Sword showdown. I'll ruck some special. Okay, Branded Beasts, just a super. Those do not count. And by the way, this is from our Dark Winged Blast case. I figured we'd knock out two birds with one stone. The first bird is getting that Starlight Black Wing. Second bird is potentially pulling something crazy in the Super Special Rewards box. It's very hard to say. I should have given it a different name. All right. Super Special Rewards box. It is though. We've already branded it. Here we go. Next pack. Bay Rock Dragon. We have Camellia. The Great Noodle Inversion. Shadow Squall. We have Decisive Battle. Scareclaw. Hanchi. Amazonas War Chief. And an Ultra Rare Maison. The Battle Ninja starting it off with, guess what, guys? A foil. And you know what that means. Super Special Rewards box. And yes, this thing is way too big to put on the desk. So I'm going to do it like this. Gotta be careful because there are nice packs in here. We're going to go in. Okay, I'm just going to pick one. The first one I touch because there are different size packs in here. So I don't want to ruin it by feeling it. I'm just going to pick one. Here's the first one I'm going for. What will it be? Okay. We have a Maximum Crisis. We're starting off with Ash Blossom Potential. So I would say this is on the lower end. It's not like one that you don't want to get, but it's also not like a huge vintage one. But so it's kind of in the middle. It's probably an appropriate way to start. Nothing too disappointing. Nothing too crazy. I'm going to do three. I think actually it's the weird pack trick. That's going to be an Ash Blossom. Watch this. Mild Turkey. Watch out. It's not Thanksgiving yet. Dynamist howling. We have Cobalt Sparrow. We have Ghost. True Draco. The Prologue of Destruction Swordsman. The Preda Plants. And Supreme King Gate Infinite. Okay, so I didn't do it right. That is not what we're looking for. All right. Back to Darkwing Blast. We have pulled from the Super Special Mystery Box though. So we can consider that a W. But next time we might get something better. The more foils we pull, the more chances we have at getting stuff like TurboPak, LOB, you know, just crazy stuff. So obviously we want to keep pulling those. We have a Laughing Puffin. Can we get that? Blackwing Dragon. We have searched a long time for this card. So that would be a win in and of itself if we get that. We have Keido. We have Silver Sword, Tribor Gain, and Blackwing Chimbal, the Sandstorm. That's not even a foil. Much less a Starlight. I mean, it's a foil technically, but it doesn't count as a new foil because it's super hard guaranteed. It needs to be another word for that. Like the only way to say it's like a hot, I guess you could say high rarity, but like that's two words.  Is that a high rarity? Not really. Art tool. We have Twin Saw. Back in the day it was. We have Scream, Tilting and Trainments, and Donner, Draggor for a dagger for hire. There we go. All right. I got that. That would be a different card if that was the real name. Here we go. Darkwing Blast. I believe in you. Come on. 24 packs, basically a booster box, but blisters. So random ratios, hoping for better than normal ratio. So we get to pull from the super special rewards box again. We have Yoshiro, Dancing Leaves, Tilting and Trainment, Heartbeat. We have the Nijitsu Art tool, and oh, a secret rare, Ignis Phoenix, the Draco Slayer. Check that out. That is a beautiful, beautiful card. That looks great. Secret rare. You know what that means. Super special rewards box. All right, guys, round two. Check out that beautiful, beautiful writing on there. Here we go. Next pack. It is, oh, oh, what is this? Oh, a dualist alliance. That is a pretty nice pack. We're talking 2014 right here. So second pack's a pretty good one, I would say. I'd say that's like in the, definitely in the top third of the packs we have in there. Maybe top half, something like that. Unlimited, but there's Ghost Share and Ultimate Rare Potential. You can't really beat that in a Yu-Gi-Oh pack. Here we go. Three, and then I think you just leave it like that. I think. No, it's a weird one. No, it's a weird one because we actually pulled something. It's like this. It's like this. I'm pretty sure. Despa 001. Here we go. Hymn of Light. Can we get that Saphira Ultimate Rare? It's in here. Agent of Entropy, Metaphas Arm Dragon, Artifact Lancy, a great card. Perform a bow, hip, hip-ho. We've got Break of the Dark Magical Warrior. Was I right? Let's find if we got a foil. Okay. We'll never know if I was right. The rare was in the right spot for me to have been right, but we don't really know. Okay, so far it's been fun. It's been epic, but guess what? Haven't got anything crazy yet. We've got some nice packs, but we didn't pull anything. One, two, three, four. Can we get a Starlight? Here we go. Kyro, Bayrock Dragon, Frecky, Infernal Queen Sam, and we have Spiritualist, Amazon's War Chief. Kyra Spirit, we have the Silver Sword Master, and a Sprite Double Cross. Super rare. Oh man, okay. Okay, the good thing is out of our super special rewards box, we have not pulled any duds yet, so that's good. No duds. We really don't want to pull duds, but there are a few duds in there that we hopefully don't hit. It's like Minesweeper, this thing. We have Celestia, we have Pendulum, Bayrock. If you guys know what Minesweeper is, you're old like me, we have Showdown, and Jitsu Art of Dancing. We have the Cucumber Horse, best card we've opened so far, very nice. Cast your ogre, and a Blackwing, the Soul Dragon, and a cover card. Another high rarity foil card. That's what we're looking for. And it's time for the super special rewards box. Visiting it for the third time. Been pretty in the middle so far. Will we have a great pack? Will we have a terrible pack? I'm going right for the middle here. Did I get something? Here we go. Shining victories. All right, staying in the middle. We're going to even keel on this one. Nothing too exciting, nothing too devastating. Can we get that blue-eyed spirit dragon? It's what I want to get out of here. We recently pulled a, what was it, crystal dragon? What's it called? The Synchro Crystal Dragon or something? I can't remember what it's called. Crap, maybe we'll pull it again. It's like, got a ghost rare. What was it called? The Clearwing Synchro Dragon? No, it's a different one. Protective with eyes of blue. It was something like that. Gear of the change. We have the digital bugs. Too many with the same name. Cuban. I love him. He's Rubik's Cube. Performapal, Shell Shell Crab. Rise to full height. We have the Illuna Light Leo Dancer. Super. That's not guaranteed. Wait, no, it is guaranteed in this, isn't it? And then Performapal Odd Eyes Light Phoenix. So you needed to do four from the back on that one. Super rare Leo Dancer. Yeah, that's guaranteed. It's shining victories. So nothing crazy. Super special rewards box. You've been good for us. You've been good. You've been good. But can you be great? Don't give us something crappy. That's all I'm telling you right now. Don't do it. Yoshiro of the Aqua. Okay, come on. Scareclaw. We have the Infernal Queen Salmon. Nice. Frecky. Xeep? How do you even say that? IZ? I don't know. We have the Catalyzer. Turbo Tange it. And the shade of the Goaty. Goaty. That's how you say it, right, guys? Right, Chad? By Chad, I mean people not live. I mean people watching right now that are infuriated that I just called it that. I'll make up for it though. I'll make up for the mispronunciation with Starlight Rare. Here we go. Celestial, Underworld, Tilting Entrainment, Castier or Ogre, Decisive Battle. We have the Naturia Mole Cricket. Ooh, and a Tier Limits Rukla. It feels like every other pack we're pulling something at this point. Very nice. Not Ultra Secret Rare. Actually, very high rarity. Two secrets already. This used to be a big card. It's only a few bucks now, but it gives us access to, you know what? The Super Special Rewards Box. All right, guys, no peeking. What's it going to be? We're the right there, I think. Let's see what that is. Oh, no. No. The fist of the gadgets. The first dud has been hit. Why? Oh, I didn't think. I thought this was a ghost from the past pack when I first picked it up. Oh, no. There are ghosts from the past in there. I guess I just told you that. There's a few of those. There's also a few duds in here, including this pack. There are a couple of cards that are not terrible in here, so let's hope we get them. Not many, though. Goliath. There we go. David's taking them down. We got Sorcerer, Code Talker, Dynamite Knight, the true Draco fighter. There we go. That's a rhyming one.  Looks cool. It's from Figa, so it's probably not. All right, I feel like we're not even halfway, and we've pulled from the Super Special Rewards box four times already. So we're on a good pace in that regard. Silent Wolf, Granule Inversion, Black Shadow Squall, Tessia, Showdown, Dancing Leaves. We have Two Gumberhors, Best Pull yet. I mean, besides the other one. Keshare Ogre and Abyssal Sarenir. Very good card. Not as expensive as it once was, as you guys saw in my video the other day when I completely failed and forgot to sell these and open these up first. Yeah, that's how it goes, guys. Darkling Blast. I do want to get more of those Bistules though, so if you want to hand those over Darkling Blast, I would be down. Even though we wouldn't get to pull another card or pack, that'd be sad. Salmon, Mole Cricket, we have Showdown, Twin Saw, Pet Liger King. Oh, and the Bistule Abel.  Was that, yeah, that was every other pack, wasn't it? Wow. Okay, we're just on fire right now. The more we pull, the more chances we have to get good packs from the Super Special Rewards Box. And here we go. I'm going to go to the back corner. Let's try this. Back corner action. Goes from the past. Wow, it just won't give us any crazy ones. Dual Slice was pretty good. That was up there, but it goes from the past. I mean, this is a good pack, but it's not one of the crazy ones. Definitely not a disappointing one though, so I'm okay with that. We have Metapholes Silver. Don't we have the Sunseed Shadow? You're going to need Draft. Hierotic Dragon of Tefnuets. And a Red Supernova Dragon. Not a bad card. I will take it. And we're back to Darkwing Blast, which has been very good for us. It's doing its best to get us an LOB First Edition pack today. It may or may not happen because there are 24. So, I mean, technically, if we pulled a Hierarity card in every single pack, then we could have opened every pack, but it was unlikely that that happened. You know, blessing we have Tainan Hotrod, Spiritualist, War Chief, Haikyaito Spirit, okay, and the Wallo. Okay, so the next one is guaranteed to be a foil, basically, with how we've been opening. I think we've done, like, this will be like our 12th pack. Is that right? One, two, three, four. No, it's our 13th pack. So it's not quite every other, but it's been essentially every other. We've done five and 12. If we get one here, it'd be six and 13, which is almost every other. Pet Liger King, Soul Scissors, Full Bloom, Preparations. Oh, it is every other pack. Vera, the Venuslip Goddess, another Ultra Rare, which means another chance at the Super Special Rewards Box. Here it is. I know you guys are loving this thing. You guys love this gimmick, don't you? Here we go. Next pack, it is... Oh, no. I think you guys can tell. Five God Strikes again, and get, there are not 12 Faiga packs in there. I promise. There were four. There were four packs, so we've pulled half of them already. The good side is that means there's only two left. Two left. I gotta find someone to open these, right? I mean, I can't just, you know, eventually I gotta open them, right? I gotta find somewhere to do it. Okay. We have the boot up order. We have the Starring Benefusion. Used to be money. Now it's under a dollar set. It's up to our final battle. We've done it my night. Yeah, that used to be one of the only good cards in the set. Now that one's even under a dollar. And the Archfiend's Awakening. I remember, I always think this one looks cool. I'm like, ooh, maybe it's worth something because, you know, Summon Skull, it's not. Okay. We've had great luck, but we haven't been able to pull anything crazy from the Super Special Rewards box. We've opened six different packs so far. A couple of duds though. Faiga has not been good for us. We have Yoshua of the Aqua, Tobari, Frecky, Prediction Princess. We have Go to Cosmos. We have the Full Bloom, Cucumber Horse. That's a play set. We have Tilting and Trainment and a brand of regain. Here it comes. The guaranteed one's coming up right now. The back, the every other, it's going to continue right now. Will we get something big? One, two, three, four. We have Pagodo. Bay Rock. Give us that Starlight. Come on, Frecky. Sammon. I'd love to be shocked by that. War Chief. We have the Omen. We have Heartbeats. Caster Bird. Wow. Two in a row without the high priority card. This is crazy. All right. Maybe now it's going to, maybe we'll get a third one and they get back to back or something to make up for it. Every other is just crazy. If we can continue that, it'd be pretty sweet. We have the Silent Wolf, Rover, Grief, Cagodo, Caster Ogre. Decides a battle of Golgonda, Mole Cricket, Secret Arts. Peanut Slip. That's three in a row. Oh no. The Super Secret Rewards box. Super special. It's also secret as well. Super Special Secret Rewards box. Super, super, super special Secret Rewards mystery box. That could be a super tongue twister. I can barely say it. Kagura. We have the Twin Shadow, Puffin, Pendulum, Zonda, Mole Cricket, Cody Cosmos, War Chief. Prediction Princess. Uh-oh. We hit the Duds at the end. What is going on here? We need one more chance. We've got to pull something crazy from the Super Special Secret Rewards mystery box. Come on, guys. Maybe it should be mystery rewards. You know, that would make sense. Okay. We have a Blackwing Twin Shadow, Puffin, Pendulum. Come on. Give us that Blackwing. That would be huge. You can get the Blackwing and get it a bonus pack. Oh, huge win-win. Cucumber Horse. That's the fourth one. And a Freight for hire. Okay. We still have six packs left, so we don't need a Freight yet. We pulled six foils, which is like normal for 24 packs, so hopefully we get at least one more out of these six. I don't think we're going to go over like our last 10. That'd be really sad. Rover. Grief. Augusta. Zonda. Soul Scissors. Spiritualist. We have the cashier preparations and the Blackfeather whirlwind. We are really slowing down here to end it. Really slowing down. It started off insanely hot, and we can end insanely hot because we've got some big packs that we have not opened yet. Here we go. One, two, three, four. We have Laughing Puffin, Prediction Princess, Bibliomuse, Sky Ninja, Milky Way, Scissors, Spiritualist, Preparations, Godicosmos, and Blazing Garticia. Secret Rare, our third secret of the video, which is better than Box Ratio, guys. This is why blisters are fun. They are more expensive though, so keep that in mind. Is it worth the extra ratio? Maybe not, but it is exciting for the video either way. Oh, and did you guys realize what just happened there? The Super Special Rewards Box is back. Here we go. Big pack. Come on, big pack. Here we go. Right here. Oh, I just threw a retro pack, two pack. Oh, no. I didn't mean to damage you. Don't have blue eyes shining.  I just chucked the pack. I thought it was a fight pack, to be honest, based on the colors. It kind of looks like one. Okay. I thought it was a fight guy. I was about to be mad. Okay, which we're back to. We got to get in the zone, guys. Big pack, very expensive, a couple hundred bucks. This is what we've been waiting for. The Super Special Secret Rewards Mystery Box. Here we go. One pack, nine tradeable cards. Here we go. One, two, three, four. Will there be a foil in the back? Secret rare, please. Emergency provisions. Let's do this in this video. Super Special Secret Rewards Mystery Box. Do it for us. Bottomless trap hole. Nobleman of Crossout. These are good comments. Some of these are worth a couple bucks. Reckless Greed. That's a good card. A legendary ocean. Gravekeeper's spy. We are on to the Light Force Sword. Okay. That is now the seventh card. We have one more. Curse of the Masked Beast. And here we go. This could be a huge card right here. Secret rare. Blue-eyed Shining Dragons, what we're really hoping for. Here we go. Oh, it is a foil. It's an insect queen. Super rare. Sorry for throwing you insect queen. Weevil. My insect queen has been pulled on Ruxen's channel. All right, insect queen. That is super sick. I had to do the Weevil for you guys. But I think the scariest part about the Weevil is the face I have to make when I do it. It's pretty scary. All right. That was a pretty good one. That was a pretty good one. Four packs left. Let's go. Retro pack two has been opened. We got a foil too. That's pretty nice. That's pretty nice stuff right there. Darkwing Blast. You know what can top that? A Starlight Rare. We have Aqua, Sky Ninja, Runefangs. Come on. We have Bibliomuse, Secret Arts, Golgonda, Zonda. Zonda, Golgonda. We have Daughter of the Dragon Friar. That could be the new Miserizame, Yame, Donda, Yolgont. What did I say? I don't even remember. I give it up. Three packs left. Let's do this. One, two, three, four. We have Underworld Ritual, Celestial, Golden Whip, Nishiriya Blessing, Cucumber Horse. Very nice. Zalamander Catalyzer. We have Venuslip and Full Bloom. Omen of Full Godi, of the Full Godi, of the Godi. And oh, another Blackwing Assault Dragon cover card. That's two of those. There we go. Super Special Rewards Box. Let's go. One more chance. I mean, maybe more after this, but here we go. Going to this corner this time. Haven't been over here. Okay, what is this? I'm not going to throw it this time. Okay, Ghost from the Past. I did kind of throw it, but I was closer to that time. It wasn't as aggressive. Also, these five packs, you can throw around a little bit more because there's not as much weight to them. Ghost from the Past. Here we go. Give us something good. Dark Magician right now, and then we'll get the Starlight in the same video. Let's go. We have Photon Thrasher. Metapholes. Metapholes combination. And you're going to like it. That is a few dollars. So we will two packs left of this video. If you guys have enjoyed this video, don't forget to subscribe to the channel for more content like this. If you want to see more of the super special rewards mystery box, then make sure to let me know in the comments. Let me know if you want to change it up.  Something crazy like that. Let's just let me know what you want to see. Noodle inversion. We have Squall, Scream, Twin Saw, Entrainment, Heartbeat, another Ultra, Master Pegasus, the Draco Slayer. It's really trying to get something crazy today. Another Ultra has been pulled. Super special rewards. Box is bad. Here we go. We got something. What is it? Okay. Okay. You had to. We had hope. Another dud. Code of the Duelist. Hey, it's first edition. Firewall Dragon, Unurata first dead. Anybody? That's what we're looking for. Here we go. One, two, three. I think you probably do the weird pack trick like this. We have FA Hang-On Mock. We have, man, this is not the most exciting pack. Hackworm, Jane, Launcher Commander, World Legacy's Heart, Supreme King. I don't, I think I did this wrong. Oh, a secret rare. Lumina, Twilight Sword, Shaman. Not Sorceress. I think this is under a dollar, but it's a secret rare. We'll take it. One final pack. Will we have one more chance at the super special rewards? Mystery box, secretness. Okay. Here we go. We've got one great pack today. We've got a few duds. Let's see if we can give ourselves one more chance for the Starlight Rare right now. One, two, three, four. I should have made like the Starlight Rare worth two draws or something out of the box. Pendulum, we have Shadow Squall. Scareclaw to Klein. We have Bamboo. We have Showdown, Dancing Leaves, Cucumber Horse. Very nice. Cast your ogre and, oh, Magnemot. So, hey, it's not a, like a high rarity card, but this is one of the better ones you can pull. So, I'm not going to complain. If you guys enjoyed it, don't forget to subscribe and let me know in the comments what you thought about this video. Shout out to Tomahawk Show, Daxer, Tomato Juice, Puffets of Doom, Ernesto D'Annet, America Deuster, Supreme Sage 21, CJ, Liu, Gwine62, Yu-Gi-Oh, Unboxed, and Anatai Show, Ian Moosa, Junior Barty, Robert F. Thomas, Belklane, and Changa Lange. Thank you guys for supporting the channel, and I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.


I wanted to introduce Jen Greenway who's going to be talking today about mentoring and open source. Jen works on our diversity committee at scale and her day job is a teacher. So please give me a warm welcome and wish for Jen. Thank you Hannah. Can you guys hear me okay? I can hear myself loud and clear so I think we're good. Thank you for coming. People in the back feel free to move closer to the front unless you're a back sitter. I have to sit in the back myself so no pressure I don't mean to single you out. We're here to put a dent in the universe. I wondered if it was a good idea to start a presentation at an open source conference with a Steve Jobs quote. I felt like it could go either way but I thought maybe if the quote's good enough and I think this one is and it's very relevant to what I'm talking about. This is what Steve Jobs said. Hopefully everyone in this room can agree that helping other people is a good thing. If you don't agree with that you probably shouldn't be in this particular trap and there's still time for you to get to another talk. One of the ways I have found in my life to be helped and help others is through mentoring. So I'm excited to talk about the subject with you guys. I presume if you're here today you either have a little bit of interest in the subject as well or you're related to me in some way or being paid by me. I'm going to start off by sharing a story about mentoring that's also about teaching because I make my living as a teacher and that's where I come from. So this past semester through the mentoring program that I work with I had the opportunity to mentor a woman who had previously worked in the classroom of a friend of mine and she came to me to be mentored and shared a story from that classroom that I thought was relevant to mentoring. So during that time in the classroom she had observed a student who had very significant challenges, social, emotional challenges, behavioral challenges. It was his first time meeting his parents and going to preschool. He was a second language learner. He was four years old but developmentally he was about two. So he just had a lot going on. So due to his behaviors a series of meetings was held. Meetings with his parents, meetings with the administration, teachers, basically everyone. And the big question was how can we keep this boy in our program. At age four he was already at risk of being kicked out. So the woman that I mentored recalled speaking to the teacher about this. She was there in the classroom doing observations and saw what was going on and she spoke to the teacher and said what do you think is going to happen and what are you going to do? Are you advocating for him to be removed? And the teacher said, no, absolutely not. And the woman was surprised by that answer because she saw firsthand how this child was in the classroom. And so she asked the teacher, why would you not want him to be removed? It would make your day so much easier. And the teacher said, what if I'm all that he has? What if I'm the only consistency that he has? What if this is his only safe place in the world? She likely was the only consistency he had. And spoiler alert, she made a big difference for him and he graduated and went to kindergarten. But here's where this teacher, my friend, really dented the universe. The woman who was in her classroom doing those observations came to my classroom and she shared that story with me. And I saw it reflected in all of her interactions with the children in my program.  She went on to get hired by our school district and now she has her own classroom so she's sharing out all those things that she learned.  Humor me for a second. I have a group activity. Take a moment to think about something that you know a lot about. Something that you're not necessarily an expert in but something that you really care about. That you love doing, that you can't stop talking about. Do you have it in your head? Maybe. If you're sitting next to someone else, turn to that person and tell them what you're thinking about. Excellent. If you were able to think of something that you know a lot about, love, care about, or something that you can't stop talking about, something that maybe you're really curious about, you could wear one of two hats by the time you leave today. Being a mentor or being mentored by someone else. So these are a few of the hats that I wear to make my dent in the universe. In my day job, I'm an early care teacher for the Kanao Valley Unified School District here in Southern California. I work with infants and toddlers age six weeks to two years. I'm excited that we have a very young child in the audience because I feel much more at home. I'm a scale volunteer. As Hannah mentioned, this year I became part of the Scale Diversity Committee, which I'm really excited to be a part of. It's the best committee at scale. I'm an avid reader, so that's my default when I want to learn more about something as I get actual books and find out what's going on with it. I'm a student all the time learning new things. I'm just looking at beginning a master's program in human development, which is both really exciting and incredibly daunting, depending on the day. And I'm a mentor. So I'm going to talk to you about my experiences being mentored and being a mentor. When I look at the open-source community, I see a lot of groundwork that's been made for successful mentoring. But I also see a lot of holes and a lot of chances that are maybe being missed by misunderstandings. So I'm just going to share some ideas with you today that you can take with you, do with them what you wish. This is a photo of me as a college student working in the classroom of my mentor teacher who obviously was instrumental in my life and development. My time in the classroom with her helped me to learn how to be a teacher in the real world. So things that I learned from my mentor weren't things that I learned in the classroom as a student learning about teaching. For my mentor teacher, I learned it's really important to have a plan and a backup plan and be ready to get rid of that plan any second. I also learned to not listen to the little voice in my head that was always like, maybe this isn't the right job for me, maybe I'm not in the right field. She gave me confidence in myself. So like a lot of people who have been purposefully mentored, I wanted to mentor others. So now I'm a member of the Mentor Teacher Program in the state of California, which is a fairly structured program, which is one of the things I'm going to talk to you about today. I mentor a college and university students who are training to be early educators in the future. My role is to guide them towards increased competence and confidence in the classroom, and my relationship with each one of them is unique and different depending on where they're at and their development and what they need from me. Among the people that I have mentored have been a future pediatrician and occupational therapist, an elementary school teacher, a special education teacher, and even an exotic dancer who wanted to become an educator. Some of the things I taught them were specific skills that were relevant to our jobs, but most of them needed something more general, less quantifiable. This less quantifiable something is what mentoring is really all about. Mentoring is entirely relationship-based. So just like open source is all community-based, which kind of makes it sound like open source might be relationship-based as well, although this can be difficult for some people to embrace. This makes the open source community ideal for building mentoring programs and partnerships because it's just about constant growth and improvement, tweaking things until they work just right, making things better. It's all about transparency and honesty. So in my mind, when I think about these things, I think the correlation between mentoring and open source is very clear. And hopefully by the time you leave here today you will feel the same way. Mentoring is how open source will succeed. So let's talk a little bit about what mentoring looks like. We'll start by talking about what mentoring is not. A mentor is not a coach, although they may coach you sometimes. A mentor is not a role model, although they could be looked at as a role model to others. A mentor is not your boss. Although they may have been a mentor to you in the past or they could be in the future, a mentor is not necessarily an expert. A mentor is not a sponsor. And a mentor is not your best friend. Although your friendship may involve as your relationship goes on. People often confuse the concepts of mentoring and coaching. And trying to untangle the differences between the two things sounds like semantics until you really think about it. So coaching is performance driven. Mentoring is development driven. Coaching is very task oriented, very specific, while mentoring is relationship oriented. And people can have or develop relationships with a coach. And people confuse the two things and overlap the two things all the time. And it's probably not a huge deal. But the point is your mentor could coach you, but they won't always coach you. Mentoring is not about tasks. A coach would make you better at really specific things. But a mentor supports you at being better in general. This is me with a mentor and a role model. So my role model is the woman on the right here. She wrote a lot of textbooks that I read in school. She was an idol to me. I've admired her for years. I studied her, memorized her theories, taught her theories to other people. She was totally on a pedestal to me. And I had the opportunity to meet her this year at a conference that we were both speaking at. And we talked really briefly about her work. And I tried not to be too much of a geek and shower her with my adoration. And then we talked really extensively about our cats, which I thought was a pretty good balance. So I left our encounter thinking more of her as an actual human being in person, but she's still definitely a role model to me because she's up on a pedestal. My mentor, who's pictured on the left, is someone that I interact with at least once a month. She's in charge of the mentor program that I work with, as well as being a professor in my field. And she's a real person with real strengths and flaws that I know and a phone number that's programmed into my phone. A mentor is a person who's always reachable to you, not just a person that you observe from a distance. So it's possible that you have a warm and wonderful boss who feels like a mentor. I've had those bosses before, and they can be very beneficial to your development within a specific organization and as a person, but it's really important if you're serious about being mentored that your mentor is not currently your direct supervisor or manager, because that's not what's best for you or for the organization that you work for. Conflicts can develop there really easily. It makes the relationships just a bit stickier in general. A mentor does not need to be an expert in their field, but they need to be more of an expert than you are. To be effective, they need to have been where you are now, at least roughly. They need to have experience that's relevant to your goals. And their experience should be relatively recent so that it's applicable to what's happening right now in the community or organization. Most of all, they need to be willing to honestly and openly share with you about those experiences, the mistakes that they made, the successes they had, what they would do differently. If you keep up with what's hot in women business circles, which I'm sure that all of you do, you've probably heard about the subject of sponsorship, which is a pretty hot subject right now. There was even a study done on the subject by a woman named Sylvia Hewlett. She's the president and CEO of the think tank center for talent innovation. And a book was written about her study that's called Forget a Mentor, Find a Sponsor. Has anybody heard about that? One person? So when it comes to sponsors like with coaches, it can be difficult to untangle the web of which is which and does it even matter? It matters to me because I think that mentoring is really important and that sponsorship is different and I think that mentoring has a real value. Cheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO and author of Lean In, has famously said that being asked to be a mentor is a total mood killer. She says that of women, if you stop telling them, get a mentor and you will excel. Instead we need to tell them, excel and you will get a mentor. And I think that's a fantastic sound bite. But I can't see how it's useful advice for people who feel like they need or want a mentor. The way that Hewlett, who conducted that study on sponsorship, talks about sponsorship, reminds me of that quote from Sandberg. And she says, a relationship has much more stake for both parties. It's an investment that must be earned and that's where she kind of lost me on sponsorship because that's where you turn back to mentoring. Relationships that really matter don't have to be earned. You're worthy of it right now as you are with all your nerves and insecurities and everything that you have yet to learn. So that being said, sponsors could be fabulous for you and your career. I think of sponsors as a person who kind of markets your brand. They can talk about you. They may not talk extensively with you, but they could be important. Finally, your mentor is not your best friend. I'm sure your best friend is a wonderful person and there are many wonderful things to you, but when it comes to mentoring you need to have someone in your life who might be a bit more objective about you. So let's talk a little bit about what mentoring actually is. Mentoring is generally a formalized partnership, but there is also informal mentoring relationships that form. So for purposes of this talk, what I mean by formal is that it's an agreement between two parties with specific expectations. And sometimes informal mentoring shifts just happen between two people and they may not even realize that oftentimes I'll talk to people and ask them about mentors that they've had for a minute and they say, you know I had this person years ago who helped me so much with this one thing and they were really kind of a mentor to me and they didn't necessarily have a formalized partnership, but that can be a benefit. Mentoring is centered on guidance. A mentor is defined as a guide and a guide who will help you towards the goal that you have decided on. Mentoring is generally long term, relatively long term, meaning that it will last for longer than a few weeks. Sometimes it could last for years. Mentoring is supportive and it's mutually beneficial. Mentors get as much from the partnership if not more than their protégés. There's been extensive studies done on how mentoring is a value to corporations because when people perform as mentors they're more invested in the work that they're doing. And I can speak to that from my own experience when I joined the Mentor Teacher Program it really made me step up my game and think about everything that I was doing and kind of reaffirmed that I love my job and I want to help other people be able to enjoy the same thing. It's also important to note I think that mentoring is not gender specific. So men can mentor a woman and women can mentor a man. Younger people can mentor older people and vice versa. It's just about finding the right match for you. This is Rita Pearson who was an educator who gave a fantastic TED talk and she was a really outspoken advocate for education and she said this which I believe can be applied to mentoring. I would change it to every person deserves a champion someone who won't give up on them who understands the power of connection and insists they become the best they can possibly be. A mentor is the person who believes that you can reach the next level and knows how they can guide you there and they believe in the power of connection because they understand that relationships are the foundation of success. The first meeting that I ever had with my mentor the one that was pictured a few minutes ago she kind of laid out what my life could be for the next five to ten years and she was so confident about it that I was completely convinced that I could do everything that she thought I could do and I have done many of the things that she said that I could do which I wouldn't have thought of doing if I hadn't had that conversation with her. So even though the conversation made me want to go home and immediately go to bed it was a really good thing. This is where I'm going to put on my child development hat for a little bit and talk about a theory that was developed by Lev Vygotsky. So in child development and education circles we often talk about his theory as scaffolding which is what mentoring is all about. You can see in these little circles over here in the purple section it says current understanding can work unassisted. In the teal section it says the zone of proximal development that's where you learn through scaffolding and the green area is what is out of reach to you right now. So the zone of proximal development that teal area there has been defined as the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers. Vygotsky viewed interactions with peers as an effective way of developing skills and strategies. What children can do with the assistance of others may in some sense be even more indicative of their mental development than what they can do alone. This seems very relevant to what we're doing with mentors. Our work with our mentors is indicative of our mental development. We need other people to reach our full potential. When I describe ZPD to early childhood people I use the example of doing a puzzle.  They know where it's supposed to go but maybe they don't know that they need to turn it a little bit and keep trying.  So I haven't done that much coding in my life but I've done a little bit and for me it seems that that very easily applies to working on code. Years ago there was a Seidenfeld episode that included a bit about mentoring. Has anybody seen it? So the character of George had a protege and George also had a topic, risk management that he needed to learn about for his job. So when his protege said that she was not familiar with the topic he handed her this giant textbook he said you read about it and then teach it to me. To be clear this was just George being lazy. Mentoring is not exactly about being lazy but every mentor has their own style. So it's important that their style match yours in some way. Some people learn very well in this way. Some people would need a more hands-on mentor but ideally you would have some combination of both. A combination of trying and failing and flying. One of the biggest mistakes I made early on as a mentor was doing too much of the work that was needed by my protege. I had one student who really took advantage of me knowing that I would be willing to do the work rather than see her fail. So with that particular student I could have really helped her with time management and responsibility but I was not a very good mentor to her because I basically took over where she left off and we were not a good match. So that's just to highlight the point that each mentoring relationship is unique and it's a learning process on both sides. So some people have the idea that because they learn things the hard way and on their own say they first joined a community and they got flamed and then they learned that's probably not the best way to start an email. It was good enough for them so that's the best way to learn things. It'll be good enough for you too. It's a strong survive and open source. Survival of the fittest. And they think that this is how we can create the best code and build the best communities because if you can't handle it you should just leave. When I was putting together some pieces for this presentation I came across a blog post that was written by a developer in the open source community. Can the post address the topic of whether or not he would mentor someone because apparently people ask him all the time and Chris it wasn't you. So he wrote this blog post where he gave the short answer no and also the long answer which was all about how he had had to learn things for himself. He had to get involved on his own. He had to read the documentation himself make all those mistakes so everyone else should have to do that too. And I believe he also walked uphill in the snow both ways to and from school without shoes. So this attitude goes against what mentoring is all about because mentoring is the idea that your experience is both positive and negative can be shared and passed on so that our collective wisdom grows and we can become better as we go. Communities become better and stronger this way rather than increasingly divisive. Even when someone is being mentored they're going to go through hard things and they're going to have to learn things for themselves. It's also worth noting that everyone learns in different ways and what one person found to be motivating another person may find to be completely discouraging. And that's not to say that proteges should be coddled. Mentoring is about guiding or scaffolding not about explicitly teaching specific skills and it's about relationships that benefit all parties. Open-source communities have a long history of valuing self-reliance because do-it-yourself is the Linux way. But let's all note that truly effective mentoring is a way of fostering self-reliance. So my advice to open-source mentors is to warn your protégé if they're about to do something that's going to get them flamed because that's not an effective way to learn. But maybe let them see for themselves that there's a bug in their code because that is an effective way to learn. This is from the Fedora IRC Helpers Code of Conduct. The Fedora IRC channel has assigned helpers who work specific shifts to welcome newbies to their community. One of the things they tell them is to practice the same method used by a surgeon. Do no harm and advise the user on a course of action that makes minimal changes to effective fix. This is a great example of the kind of groundwork that's being made for mentoring in open-source. It sets the right tone. Less of the read-the-manual tone and more of the hey, we're glad you're here tone. Google Summer of Code may be one of the best-known examples of mentoring in open-source. This is a link to their manual which is so comprehensive and beneficial that everyone should just read it for themselves. As fantastic as their overall program is, the documentation of their program may be even more admirable just based on how specific and extensive it is. It's an awesome comprehensive resource for anyone who's wanting to be a mentor or develop a mentoring program. If you don't know about Google Summer of Code, it's a global program that's open to college and university students where they're paired with a mentor, a coding mentor from a participating open-source project, and they're paid a stipend to write code for that project. From their website, I found that since its inception in 2005, the program has brought together over 8,500 successful student participants from 101 countries and over 8,300 mentors from over 109 countries worldwide to produce over 50 million lines of code. Both mentors and protégés enter the relationship with expectations. It can be a really good thing to have the expectations agreed upon and even signed on or at least reviewed by both parties together. If you're going to be a mentor, you need to take a moment to think about these things and whether or not you can give them to your protégé. These are some examples that I came up with. Things like full and undivided attention during meeting times, which can be surprisingly difficult to accomplish. You may need to close your laptop and set aside your phone. An openness and willingness to try new things, to give and receive feedback, and to actively work together on agreed upon goals. To do what you say you will do. To ask questions and gather information. To be patient. To allow for the opportunity to make choices. So like I said, these are just examples and you could expand upon them if you decided to have a contract. So I mentioned earlier that there's formal and informal mentoring and then there's the kind that kind of falls somewhere in the middle. But a lot of times formal mentoring will come when someone who's volunteered to mentor is assigned a protégé. So you might join a program and they say here's a person who needs a mentor. There you go. And usually in those cases the two parties have already agreed to certain guidelines or rules as part of the project. And that might be enough. But you might want to think about some of these things moving forward. Just simple things like when and where were you going to meet, for how long, scheduling the meetings, what is the aim of your partnership and what's the best way to contact one another. If you're the kind of person who doesn't like to get calls after a certain time that would be a good thing to share with each other going in. Goals and objectives. So let's apply this to open source. One of the common examples of mentoring in open source is when a new person joins a project and they want to commit some code. They actually assign a mentor to a newbie. And the mentor will work with them on their code before it gets submitted. And this is a benefit to both sides. It's an opportunity to learn about communication as much as it is an opportunity to learn about code. Ideally it gives the person being mentored the opportunity to understand how that unique community works and how they can best fit in there. So let's say the goal in this case would be submitting a piece of code or fixing a bug or adding a feature. The objectives to that goal might look like figuring out exactly what part of the code you're going to work on, and the mentor may break that down even further for you. You might agree to have certain pieces done by a certain date to submit to your mentor who will then check them for bugs and report back to you. And after that the objectives would be to further debug it, test it again, and finally submit it following the steps to find a mentor. I have some advice for you.  So remember that a mentor is a person who's further along than you on the same journey. Think about your expectations and what you want a mentor to be to you. Before you go looking for them you should know exactly what you're looking for. Maybe you know what project you want to work on, what you want to work for, or what job in general you would like to have. Who are those people who are already there? You want to network with some of those people. So conferences like this are a great opportunity for that. Some of you may be here for that very reason. And in that case you have to be willing to go up and actually talk to people. You can ask someone else to introduce you which might make that conversation a little bit easier. The in-person aspect can be really helpful and that's a wonderful way to network. But something to watch out for in those cases is the post-conference leg.  So it can be really helpful if you meet someone at a conference with the goal of networking with that person that when you take their business card you commit to a follow-up. Or it's just to yourself. Make a little note like on Tuesday I'm going to follow up with this person at noon. If you don't have the opportunity to attend a conference like this or you don't find a mentor at a conference like this there's a lot of other ways that you can go about it. You can look at working at school through friends online business associations nonprofit organizations maybe even within your family someone knows someone who has a shared interest community groups business chambers of commerce and Lugs can be a great resource and I'm going to talk more specifically about them in a minute. So how do you ask someone to be your mentor? It can be kind of an awkward conversation. So you want to engage with them a little bit first so you can get to know each other a little bit better. You want to be sure that it's the right fit so you want to learn some things about them before you commit to having them be your mentor. So you're going to want to be really specific. You don't want to think things like I need to advance my career you need to think specifically like I would like to know more about public speaking or I need help in conquering imposter syndrome or I want to be able to confidently join this project because I want to develop this new feature. Why are you asking this specific person to be your mentor? It really doesn't hurt to give them an example of how they have already helped or influenced you and what prompted you to choose them in the first place. You have an equal responsibility as a protégé in the mentoring relationship and maybe you've heard about the benefits of mentoring and you think yes I want to mentor but there's a lot more to it than that. In order to reap the benefits of the partnership to be that person who's five times more likely to be promoted you need to be a person who's open and engaged in the process. You need to do the work. I have some tips from Diane Schumacher Craig who's the global head of research economics and strategy at Wells Fargo. These are some of the things that she says help you to be someone who's great to mentor. So be great at what you do. At least be excited about what you do. Ask for more responsibility.  Build your support network and most of all help to promote the success of others because you're joining a network of people. Sometimes the person that you ask to mentor you is going to say no. Short answer, no. If that happens it's probably not about you and it's going to be okay because there's a lot of other people out there who are going to say yes. So you could ask them if they know anyone else who might be willing to take on that role or you can move on yourself to the next candidate. If you don't have another candidate you can revisit the list of places where you could find one. Here's the list of ideas where you might encounter your next mentor. So Linux user groups can be a good place to find a mentor. And I say this with some caveat because the climate of the user group is going to be dependent upon that particular population. Here's how I found out about Linux user groups. I met my husband in 1998 and the year before he had founded the Simi Kanaeho Linux user group in Simi Valley, California with his friend Dan. So I learned about Linux user groups through him because sometimes he would ask me to go to the lug with him. And I actually loved going to the lug because it was such a fascinating population of people to think about. It was a very diverse population. Women have obviously always been a minority there but I was surprised at the enormous range of ages and interests and people came from such diverse backgrounds. So that group that he founded was one of the groups that led to the beginning of scale. And I remember being at one of these meetings long ago and meeting a high school student named Elon. Does anyone know Elon? He's Scales Conference chair now. So Elon started attending the meetings and participating in the events that were called Lugfest. And it's safe to say that he was the lucky recipient of some pretty solid, informal mentoring in those years. I have observed a lot of mentoring via the lugs and my experience has been that they can be a pretty welcoming place although each group will have their own flavor. So these are some resources that you can use in this immediate area but the groups are all across the country. Last night at the Bad Voltage Show they asked the audience about how new users are coming into Linux. And John O'Bacon mentioned that he was introduced to Linux via a Lug group. So if you're someone who's active in the open-source community you might want to think about how you're introducing Linux to new users. I'm going to share some links of the projects I found that seem to have pretty well established, well documented and robust mentoring programs. Most of these programs are geared at coding specifically but not all of them. So here's a few to start with. The Apache Software Foundation Adora Project Google Summer of Code Ubuntu Women OpenStack actually includes a list of available mentors and their timelines on their website. So what that means is how much time they can devote each week to mentoring, what time zone they're in, what their area of expertise is and what their IRC handle is. Railgirls does their own Summer of Code program and Drupal actually holds an IRC. You can follow Drupal mentoring on Twitter for reminders of the hours and other mentoring events that they'll be offering. The Open Hatch group is based in Boston and it's a really friendly way for people to get involved in open-source. Their goals as an organization are lowering the entry barriers and increasing diversity. They have training missions and outreach events. If you're someone looking for mentoring to look into and get in touch with, one of the things I really like about the Open Hatch group is that it's not just about code. So while it's wonderful to see so many projects or seeing the benefit of adding mentoring to contributing code, there are many more areas in the open-source community where mentoring could be a great match.  Yoda demonstrates as the mentor to mentor is how to give support to a promising individual, how to offer challenges that will permit one to learn and grow and how to provide vision so that your prodigy will gain confidence and eventually independence. The thing about mentoring is that not everyone can do it because not everyone wants to do it. Not everyone has the right temperament for it. If you're someone who thinks you might want to be a mentor, chances are pretty good that if you're thinking that you could be someone who's going to become a great mentor. The seed's already been planted. In my experience you don't always start off as a great mentor. Years from now you're going to want to go back to some of those people and apologize to them for the things that you said or did or more likely did not do. But that's all part of the process. So one of the things that I read that inspired me to put together this presentation was an article that Rich Bowen of Apache and Red Hat wrote for open-source.com about the life and open-source and the mentors who led the way. If you're at all interested in mentoring I recommend that you take a look at it because Rich talks a little bit about the mentors that he identifies he's had along the way and he talks about easy ways that you can incorporate mentoring into your life and why you would want to do that. Like leaving a legacy that actually matters. Every moment that you invest in another person will extend your impact a little further past your own direct influence. And one of the things that he also talked about is how to find the people that you would like to mentor. This is interesting because a lot of mentoring and open-source as structured by projects happens at random. If you want to be a mentor you tell the project that that's something that you would like to do and then when someone comes along who needs mentoring that's the person who will be assigned to you. But what if you took it a step further on your own and just kept an eye out for the specific individual that you could mentor on a higher level. Just keep your antenna tuned. Talk to people. Talk to people about what lights them up. Talk to them about their goals. You'll pretty quickly find a way that you can dent the universe. So if there's one thing I want you to leave with today. It's the knowledge that you can be a mentor. You can do it. You can make a difference. It feels really good to do that. But you also really need to think about it. Think about what it will require of you. Get yourself prepared. It's a relationship that you're committing to and you're not necessarily going to be able to do it in a big way in every phase of your life. Josh Birkis did an interview in 2009 with IT World and he said being a good mentor requires a lot of time. Frequently more time than it would take you to do the development yourself. For this reason most open source software developers are not temperamentally suited to be mentors. These are some universal qualities that mentors ought to have like patience. A good mentor is going to be patient with you. They're going to be easy to talk to because they're going to want to talk to you. And they'll be the kind of person who honors their commitments. They'll be effective communicators. I once read a mentor must believe in their mentee both personally and professionally. Mentors help fill your knowledge gaps and seek opportunities to help you grow and excel.  You want a mentor who knows people, people that you might want to know too. For example, my mentor introduced me to my role model. I didn't know that she knew her but I knew that she knew a lot more super smart and creative people in our field than I do because she's a lot more outgoing and a lot older and she's been in the field a lot longer. So she's the kind of person who's just really good at making connections and that's the kind of mentor that you want to have. Let's talk a little bit about communication in mentoring relationships. Communication is everything but what is the best way to do it? I recently read Sherry Turkel's reclaiming conversation and I read about Ben Weber who's a graduate of the MIT Media Lab and he developed this tool called the Physiometric Badge. What the badge does is it tracks employees' movements through an office and it measures and analyzes a whole range of things in their conversations who they were talking to, how long they talked, what the pace of their speech was, their tone and on. Using that information Weber was able to quantify that face-to-face conversation leads to higher productivity. For example, software teams produce less when they talk more. Face-to-face. Weber's study indicates that the same is not true of online encounters. So that's something to keep in mind when you're in a mentoring relationship. There are a lot of collaboration tools that we all know and love that make it possible for mentoring relationships to develop over distance but there's still something to be said for face-to-face relationships. That's just something to keep in the back of your head. The best approach may be the hybrid approach of things for different purposes. For quick exchanges or status updates you might use texting or Twitter. You may use Slack. For a long explanation of something email might be the best because both parties will have the time to read it and reflect upon it before responding. Video chat can work for a regular check-in if you can't make it happen face-to-face and IRC could be a good solution if you're stuck on something. The point is to make sure that you're communicating often. If you're going to be a mentor you're going to get a lot of experience giving and receiving feedback. The learning curve on this can be really steep so I wanted to talk a little bit about feedback and some common approaches. Does anybody know what the sandwich approach to feedback is? The sandwich approach is to start with something positive before going into something negative and then coming back to something positive. An example would be Jen, your presentation today ran smoothly. I didn't agree with most of what you said but I really like the pictures. Some people have objected to the sandwich approach as being disingenuous and undermining your negative feedback. This assumes that the main point you would want remembered from your feedback is the negative part. Namely, you didn't want to talk about my pictures. You wanted to talk about how you didn't agree with what I said. So as a teacher my opinion is that if the point you want carried off in the end is negative you probably shouldn't be mentoring. The point of giving feedback is not to come from a negative place. It's to say, good news, I pinpointed our next objective. I watched what you did there and I saw you really understood this, this, and this. Now we know that what we should focus on next is this. So if you're not able to go into a feedback session with a growth mindset you're probably not going to be super successful as a mentor. It doesn't mean that when your protégé does something wrong, you shouldn't tell them that it was wrong. It means that you can let them know they should do something differently without making them feel like a horrible human being. So some of the people who object to the sandwich approach as being disingenuous with their point being that people know going in that you're just trying to tell them something negative in a nice way. They prefer to use the transparent approach. So the transparent approach works like this. Jen, I wanted to let you know that I didn't really care for your talk. I want to tell you what I didn't like so you can think about it next time. You had told me you were going to talk about open source but all I remember you saying is something about sandwiches. The value in the transparent approach is that right from the start the receiver knows that they're going to hear something honest and maybe uncomfortable. You need to hear these things sometimes but I want to emphasize that it's probably more productive to give feedback that encourages people towards reachable goals. Nine times out of ten they already know something that went wrong. They have a mentor in the first place to help them understand how it could be fixed and how it could go right and how they could do better. So if you believe that it can be fixed too you're automatically going to come at them with a gross mindset to be able to make it a learning session. So raise your hand if you've given any thought to what mentoring means in your life. Pretty good. Do you remember what you said to the person beside you at the beginning about what you were passionate about? Maybe you're ready to follow up on that. January is National Mentoring Month. The initiative was initially developed to encourage adults to mentor youths but hopefully what you've heard today will help you fully understand how mentoring can support anyone regardless of their age. If you need or want a mentor I hope you'll be more capable of finding the right one. And if you want to be a mentor I hope you'll know where to get started. So I would love to hear about the mentoring process in your life. This is how you can contact me and I spelled out my name there because people often forget to email if you'd like to. And if you'd like links to the resources that I mentioned you can email me and I'll send them out to you. I believe we have some time for questions. Anybody? Hold on. Thank you. Thank you. Anybody else? Awesome. Okay. For the video recording I want to repeat that she was plugging and she said I'm going to turn off my audio now. Sorry, Hannah. Hannah asked what advice do you have for winding down a mentoring relationship? Do you mean if you're a mentor or a protege or either one? Both. Probably at that point both people are becoming aware that they're not as much in mutual understanding that they're not as much in mutual need of one another. Some signs of that would be that you're finding it longer between your meetings or you don't feel excited about going to meetings you don't feel excited when you hear from them. That would be a really good conversation to have with them. Sometimes that means that it's time for you to develop some new goals and sometimes that means moving on to a new person sometimes it means revisiting what you've already done and you're going to have to have a conversation where you say I think we've done some great things here I don't want to schedule another meeting that kind of thing I know that you could think of some incredibly nice ways to say that. Thank you.


Cats love boxes, perhaps more than they love humans. Boxes provide hiding places for cats to feel safe and warm. Here are 10 reasons cats love boxes more than you. At our house, we can't compete with the magic of the simple cardboard box. Every box is amazing and incredible for our cats. We even have a cat mandated box protocol put into place. When a box is delivered, we immediately must place it on the dining room table so that it can be thoroughly inspected. This inspection entails lots of sniffing, a modicum of clawing, and some top of box sitting. The next step requires some skill on our part. We must open the box, taking out any harmful packing materials, while one or more of our cats simultaneously tries to get into the box. It's a test of will as we battle for domination. Not one of our cats has the patience to wait for even one second to get into the box. Once the box is opened and quality tested, it's moved around to various locations, customized, and then after about a week, put in the recycling bin, but only after all the cats have signed off on it. Cats love their boxes so much that it's obvious that if they had to choose between their human and a box, they'd choose the box every time. That's why we put together the 10 reasons why cats love boxes more than humans. Cats think inside the box. Time inside a box is never wasted. It may appear as if your cat is sitting in the box not doing anything, but looks can be deceiving. Boxes are a great place for a cat to tackle the big questions of life such as, should I have dry food, wet food, or both for second breakfast? Life isn't a box of chocolates, it's just a box. The box is warmer than anywhere else. Cats feel cold more acutely than you might think, so, they seek warmth where they can find it. Boxes are a surprisingly good source of heat and cardboard is a fantastic insulator. I'm not saying to ditch your parka for a cardboard box, but don't underestimate its ability to keep your kitty warm. Boxes have a chill vibe. If your cat jumps five feet in the air when the doorbell rings or a stranger comes into the house, they probably have some anxiety. A box allows your cat to take a time out and relax without having to worry about getting interrupted or attacked. Cats can manage their stress in a box. For a cat, the enclosed space of a box makes them feel safe and secure. They can de-stress, decompress, and take some breaths between cleaning. There are no deadly cucumbers, cats number one enemy, in a box, and by hiding in a box, a cat believes that they're invisible to vacuum monsters. Hello. This video is sponsored by Beemix Pets. Are you looking for high quality cat collars at an affordable cost? Check out, BeemixPets.com. Use coupon code KittenLife, to get 20% off. Cats adore a good place to hide. In a recent study, researchers found that cats who were provided a hiding box were able to adapt faster than those cats who weren't. This probably goes along with the warmth of the box and how comforting it is for a cat to have a box of their own, even when they're sharing it. Cats love the ego boost of fitting where they're sitting. Boxes are one size fits all even when they're not. Squeezing into a box that nobody thought you could fit in feels like a win and proves that you've still got it. It doesn't matter if a cat's body is spilling over the sides of the box, they've earned squatters' rights. Box seats, indeed. Every day is Boxing Day. When you're a cat, getting a new box in the house is a celebration. If your owner has lots of things delivered, you might get to play with three or four boxes at a time. Who wouldn't enjoy a playground of boxes that will stimulate the hunt. Boxes also have treats inside. We buy expensive cat toys for our cats all the time. They have a whole toy box, but still, they'll choose a box to play in over a cat nip ball or squeaky toy every time. However, if you want to take your cat's fun to the next level, put a toy inside the box. It's a simple hack, but it takes the level of fun to attend. Boxes are the best camouflage. Boxes allow your cat to stalk and hunt while remaining safe. You may think it would be hard not to notice a box in the middle of your living room, but boxes are good camouflage when your cat is hunting for the big game. They can groom in their own private box. Boxes can help your cat look their very best. A cat can take a bath in a box, trim their nails by scratching on the inside of the box, popular activity around my house, or whiten their teeth by chewing on the cardboard. A box is like having their own personal spa day without having to go anywhere in the car. Cats have big box love and no matter how much we humans try, we just can't compete with the simple cardboard box. If you enjoyed this video, kindly press the like button. Also don't forget to subscribe with notifications on, so that you don't miss out on videos like this. Thank you for watching.


Question is from Dressfit. What are some good compound exercises for adductors and abductors? I like this question because- Because you picked it? Yeah. That's right, mainly. That's actually the only reason why I have no idea how to answer this. No, because I think we've talked about this on the show when people have asked us, you know, funny questions like, you know, what's the least effective machine in the entire gym? In fact, I remember way back in the day when we used to hang out with Craig when he was here in California still. I used to razz him about using that machine. And the reason being is- You're with the adductor machine? Yeah. And to me, this is where you can do some cool things with like step-ups to stabilization and doing movements that have got carryover and you get some of the benefits of working the adductors and adductors. So, yeah, those don't target them directly like an isolation exercise like the good girl, bad girl machines. But the benefits that a client gets from a step-up by itself and then teaching them how to pay attention and focus. Because the typical person that doesn't understand mechanics at all and just steps up, it's very natural for people to- their knee to cave in or- and their foot to kind of pronate. So teaching them to have a good base with their feet, to keep their knee open and step up to a balance. You get a lot of good stabilization there. You do. Yeah. The adductors are muscles on the inside of the thighs. They bring the legs together. The adductors are muscles on the outside of the thighs, right? They bring the legs apart. So the machine that Adam's referring to that, you know, that's commonly referred to- Good girl, bad girls. Yeah. Yeah. Yes, no machine or whatever.  But you can do compound movements where you're using more weight in your- and those tend to be very effective at developing these muscles. One of my favorites for the inner thigh, the adductors, is a good old-fashioned, you know, sumo type exercises. Exercises with a wide stance where you're squatting up and these muscles are really having to stabilize really hard to maintain that position. So like a sumo squat would be a good example. The funny thing too is your intention can change a sumo squat from an adductor to an abductor exercise. So I just love everything in the frontal plane. So if I want to take, you know, side lunges are great for that as well or caustic squats.  So to make that more of a, you know, full body inclusive workout, that would be great. And there's really cool ways to do a standard conventional squat with tools. So, you know, you could, this is where, and I have a video I think I'm doing real soon here for the YouTube channel, like using hip circles. And this is where you see a lot of people using them. So you use the hip circle. And as you're, as you're dropping down this in a great squat, which we all know is a great compound lift, you're pushing and forcing your knees out, you can also do the opposite of that by putting like a basketball between your legs and squeezing the basketball as you go into a squat. So those are two ways that you can use a tool to accomplish targeting an area that you want to put emphasis on. Which is also a great, you know, way like a teachable way to help somebody with compensation.  Yes, I'm glad you said that because when you're working on compensations, I've actually seen this more too many times. That's why I want to clarify a compensation when you're trying to work on a compensation, you want to strengthen the opposing movement, okay, not prevent the movement from happening. There's a difference there. Like I would have, I've seen this way too many times, a trainer will put, you know, a medicine ball or something between someone's knees when they do a squat to squeeze it. And then I would ask them, why are you doing that? Oh, they're knees cave in. Yeah, that's the worst idea. Knees cave in, so it prevents the knees from caving in. I'm like, all you're doing is making them squeeze their legs. Enforcing the problem. Yeah. So when that person, if the knees cave in, you put something around the legs that they push out, something in between the legs is if their knees go out when they squat. And really, this is what you really want to pay attention to when it comes to the adductors and abductors. They're small muscles like really isolating them or developing isn't really a big deal unless you see an imbalance in your movement, which case, here's where the imbalances come from with the adductors and abductors. Avoidance of lateral exercise. Really, this is what it boils down to. Are you doing exercises that make you step out to the side or walk to the side? I love the sled for this.  And you're going to get great. You can either make it work the abductors of the leg that's pushing out or the adductor of the leg that's pulling you forward as you walk across. In my opinion, that is one of the best things you could possibly do for those two muscles. Sideways walking with different variations. It's also great. This is where we talked about pre exhausting these areas. So yes, there's compound movements that you can do that help target or put emphasis on these two muscles. But a lot of times what I would do is going back to Justin's point is if I have a client with their knees are caving in, then I'm going to do lateral two blocks first, and then I'm going to squat. And when I'm squatting, I'm queuing. Don't let your knees cave in, push your knees out at the bottom of the squat. And they're going to be better engaged with that muscle because I just had them do an isolation exercise with it first. So understanding why you're doing it, I think a lot of people try and target these muscles because they think it's going to make their thighs look shapely or they're like, Oh, I want to I want to work on my inner thighs, you know, because I don't like my inner thighs. And so they think like doing a machine like this or doing exercises like this is going to really benefit that. And that's where I'm not a fan of those machines. There's other movements that you can incorporate those muscles. Here's one if you are going to do machine I like men and you've heard me talk about this on the show is single leg press I'll never do a leg press with both feet just to me it's for me it's a waste of time it's not that beneficial in my opinion for for both legs to be planted on there it's already you're already very stable anyways and throwing one leg out there does force you to really engage both of these muscles to keep the knee from stable because that's what they're responsible for they're going to keep that knee stable and so you got to think about that.


In this video, I'm going to talk about a penny stock that's just got into the NFT industry I do believe this is breaking news and big for this penny stock. Okay, and we'll go into it in this video I've also got to say don't worry about the market conditions at the moment It's a time to buy those penny stocks and buy those growth stocks and normal stocks That you believe in that you believe has got value for the future and to get those at cheap prices You know if you believe in these stocks then get them at cheap prices because you're not investing for today We're not worried about today. We're not investing for dirt today The whole point is to invest for the future and where you think it's going to go towards the future So remember that always bear that in mind for anyone who needs by any market conditions We've seen this time and time again You know the best investors are ones that do take these conditions as an opportunity To find the stocks that they like so hope for that's a word of comfort there for you But let's go through this penny stock that's just got into the NFT industry now I've just finished work So I've just finished teaching and I've just gone straight into making a video So I've finished work and I'm straight to making videos if you appreciate that dedication Then do hit the like button. It really does help out the channel. Okay. Thank you for all the support I've also got to say I'm not a financial advisor. I'm a business teacher But I'm by no means an expert on the stock market But what I am good at doing is finding Finding companies that I believe have got good growth potential The companies that I believe are in high growth industries We've talked about driveshack when it was around two dollars It did actually reach over three dollars at one point. Okay, and even further Okay, we've talked about light in the box that we talked about at two dollars It's now it was at like four or five dollars But then obviously with the correction it's come down to about three dollars We covered that in the very very low two dollar range So we've covered stocks that have done quite well in the past Not always every penny stock we cover is does well But good a good chunk of them do quite well And I do believe this is another one that is really good So this is a penny stock that's got into the NFT industry Okay now to before we get into that what is the NFT? So it's a non-fundable token for anybody who's not aware of what an NFT is So this is a unit of data or a of a digital ledger called a blockchain Where each NFT can represent a unique digital item And thus they are not interchangeable NFTs can represent a digital file such as art art Audio video and items in video games So an NFT this is a growing industry and this is an industry I do believe is here to stare I think if you look towards the future and where we're going with virtual reality or augmented reality Where we are going in towards the future with innovation I do believe that NFTs do have a place within this innovation And I do teach one of my topics that I did teach in the past is innovation And you know we are moving just think think of how much innovation change we've had in society in these past 10 years It's been unbelievable amount of change and innovation And this is a hyper growth industry that you want to get in at the ground level And I've got a penny stock that is getting into this industry. Okay Now this is clickstream We've talked about it before for other reasons because they have some other apps and some other information as well That they're going through and we'll get back into that and some updates But the recent news that's come out is clickstream. Okay, it's a quiet rebel blockchain Okay, and this is the developers of nifter, which is a music NFT marketplace Music NFT marketplace. This is a hyper growth area. Okay, so it announced today a quiet rebel blockchain And what they can be is of course Nifter is a marketplace that allows for the creation Buying and selling of these music NFTs Okay, so this is a marketplace for particularly music based NFTs in nifter And I do believe this is going to be a common trend because you do have these NFT Marketplaces where they are basically a collection of all types of NFTs But I think naturally as marketplaces evolve I do think we are going to get niche Not necessarily niche but marketplaces that are specific to a type of area of NFTs So you're going to have marketplace for audio Related NFTs or music related Then maybe a website that's dedicated to our NFTs and they can be the expert in that area I do think just naturally as we have businesses that are specialized in certain areas We are going to get have websites where you can purchase and sell and buy NFTs in specialized areas Alongside the the ones which have a collection of all different industries. So I do think there's there's there's an area for this kind of Focus on say for example a music NFT site with only music and audio related NFTs I do see this as a potential and this is nifter.io Okay, this is going to have a lot of catalysts that I'll get into And what do we like to say catalysts that are likely to happen? We can talk about catalysts till we're blue in the face But the only good catalysts are the ones that are the catalysts that come to life and actually happen. Okay Moving into this nifter. So should look on to their website So they create sell and discover unique music and sounds on NFTs So you can actually go on the site to browse NFTs That's you know, obviously being developed And you can also sell your own NFTs One of the catalysts that could happen is if They find some and it's very possible and they're probably working on it I imagine If the smart they'll be working on this and that is building up partnerships with potential known artists to sell their NFTs Exclusively on nifter And I think that that could be a catalyst a big catalyst that sends this stock price Going up in that sense Also, you've got the revenues that could be generated obviously off the back of NFTs This is a high revenue growth area lots of money being spent will go into that But you know, this is an interesting marketplace. It's an interesting development for this penny stock.  What have they said about this latest development? So they've said It has long been our intention For clickstream to get involved in blockchain technology Development We have a unique opportunity to establish ourselves as an authority in the non fungible token space by creating a marketplace for artists songwriters and fans to create and exchange NFTs And I do believe like I say with the rate of innovation With the change in society I do see there is a place for NFTs And I think it's a big place And I think one of the areas of NFTs that could see it thriving. I mean at the minute it's art, but I do see potentially artists And music NFTs being a big area that does also grow And this penny stock a penny stock ladies and gentlemen is at the forefront of that Moving into this. Okay. You've also got the NFTs Just as an example, right? You've got artists that are selling Artists a digital musician that sold sold a collection of their NFTs for a total of $17 million. This isn't pocket change. We're talking about serious sums of money here that has been In terms of revenue generation from NFTs. Okay There's also got this ultraviolet album Which has held the record for the most paid for one one singular NFT and that was 3.6 million dollars So when you think about the revenues This has got high growth potential Okay, and if this penny stock can capitalise on the you know the the songwriter and audio artist NFT marketplace We could see a catalyst of massive revenue gains and the industry shows that because of how much the industry is growing Okay It's a way to monetise your fan base that's never been possible. So it is it's a new way It's an innovative way completely new way to for artists to make money And I do believe there is more and more artists that are going to be Building in towards this idea of creating their own NFTs. I think it's just a matter of time We want to get on this at the ground level. So when this continues to hype it's hype up Justifiably remember because this is an industry that's going to be around Um, I do think getting on the ground level has got a lot of potential Also within the nifter platform. It's also combining the power of blockchain And so if you hear my stomach rumble there, I've gone straight from like a certain teaching into making a video I haven't had any any food yet for for um for the evening. So I will after this though Combining the power of blockchain with the magic of music. Okay, that's what nifters trying to do here Allow musicians and song artists to connect with their fans in a new way through NFTs Anyone can create though. So it's not just you you know, you're well known artists But also you're smaller artists that do need to obviously fund their journey Can create their own very creative innovative innovative NFTs and actually sell them on the marketplace. Okay They'll got fixed price and auctions as well. So you can buy NFTs for fixed prices or you can get involved in auctions There's a sort of like ebay style version of bidding for NFTs. It's on the ethereum blockchain, of course It's delivered within seconds and nft got verifiable ownership. So you can get the verification that for example If an artist creates one NFT and up and come out an up and coming artist Maybe not as well known but up and coming and you think that that artist is going to be You know the next big artist And they create one NFT or one version. There's only one version of that audio NFT Right and you think that they're going to be big You can have verifiable ownership that you earn that NFT And you're the only person in the world that earns that NFT that they created So obviously it's built on scarcity of how many versions of that NFT there is and how many people can buy it So there's there's a lot of interesting stuff going on here, but you can have verifiable ownership And also it's got face class support as well Another interesting thing to mention is this penny stock is not just NFT based they do have other apps. They're involved in the blockchain industry now Lots of catalysts in relation to that But they've also got the hey pal social language learning app So this is a language exchange which allows users from around the world to learn a new language through interactive chat and social posts This has actually had a soft launch in some countries and what we're seeing is In the hundreds of thousands now messages being exchanged within this language learning app So they're getting high levels of engagement with this app and getting good levels of downloads So this is an innovative app that we could see do really well into the future And again, the more downloads the more engagement they get could be and is a potential catalyst They're already doing this. They're already getting lots of downloads, but as they reach their milestones for Messages sent or downloads downloads, which they are climbing towards It's likely to happen the catalyst is likely to happen as that happens We could see a good movement in the share price as well Also, they've got another app called win quick, which is a Quiz-based app which you can win money So they're developing apps as well that they're looking to build apps and the owner of the One of the developers of this one of the people that's prominent within it has said that they see this app hey pal as the language learning of facebook so In terms of you can communicate with people from around the world And learn different languages and they've got little different language features on the app that have kind of embedded into this And you can look at a german feed or you can look at You know an italian feed or whatever it is and you can kind of connect with other people around the world In and learn different languages and it's got different features on there Now the current price for clickstream It's at 0.24 52 week. I was at 0.60 So I first covered this stock at 0.16 It did move up significantly to around 0.50 to 0.60 it then came down with a market correction And it sort of moved down And now it's getting to a really interesting buy zone to either either either buy in or increase positions if possible Okay, and this ticker symbol is clis and it's at 0.24 And I do see this one as we go to the future market cap of 20 million Market cap of 20 million lower market cap I do see this one moving up to a dollar In the future it may be Within the next sort of six to 80 months that will take to move up to a dollar But I do think that they've got that many projects that are on the go now in terms of the blockchain And the aft space they've got a language learning app that's doing really well and getting downloads Then they've got a win quick app quiz based app And then they're also looking at developing other apps and getting involved into different industries So I do I just see this one as this this company seems a company for the future because they're thinking about the future They're thinking that traveling is going to continue to grow and the learning of languages is going to be increasingly more important I happen to agree NFT it's going to be growth industry. This is a company thinking about the future And uh, that's why I like this company. It is risky as always. It's a penny stock It penny stocks are risky But I do see this company doing really really well into what's the future side. I do Like this one. I I bought into this And uh, you know, I might increase my position favor as well when I get the chance to do so So thanks for watching this video Do smash the like button if you found this video very interesting and if you appreciate the dedication of making this video straight after work And if you do appreciate, you know the support I do I appreciate the support on the channel But if you do appreciate the videos then do and do like them I do appreciate that subscribe to the channel if you knew we cover the latest penny stocks ones with catalysts That are realistically could happen right not ones with catalysts Which could which which have a small chance of happening. We don't want that We want ones which are likely to happen because that creates a safer benchmark for the penny stock to move up Okay, so thanks for watching the video. I will see everybody in the next one remember to like comment subscribe And turn on the notification bell. See everybody later