Hi folks, this is Dr. Don. I have a problem from Chapter 2 about a frequency distribution. We are given this frequency distribution but we do not have the actual data it was developed from. I have gone over how to create a frequency distribution when given a data set in other videos. Here we are told the distribution is of the heights of 18 students and we are asked to approximate the mean height of the students. Now if we had the original data this would be a trivial exercise. But we don't so we are going to create a facsimile of the data using Excel. I'm going to get the data into my Excel workbook by clicking on the small blue rectangle and copying the data to the clipboard. If you don't already have Excel open you can open in Excel instead. The data should be highlighted in blue but if it isn't use your mouse to select all of it including the titles. If the data is highlighted it should already be copied to the clipboard. But I like to be sure so I use the control plus the C key to copy the data to the clipboard. I navigate to my open workbook and I always paste the data into the first cell on the top left. Now this is just a good habit to get into if you're working with many types of these problems and want to be able to easily reuse your workbooks on new but similar data sets. We start by finding the midpoint of the bends or classes in the frequency distribution. The bend widths are two inches here so the midpoint is obviously 61 in the first bend. If you had more complex bend limits you could find the midpoints using your calculator. I'll label column C midpoints and place them here 61, 64, 67 and 70. We will need the total count of heights in. We were given 18 in this problem but if you weren't use the Excel SUM function to find it. Click in cell B6 and enter an equal sign and begin typing SUM. Select the SUM function by double left clicking and then select the range you want to total. Hit enter and we have our total of 18 heights. Next we need to find the weighted values of each bend using a simple formula in Excel. Click in the first cell, enter equal and left click on the frequency, multiplying it by entering an asterisk and left click on the midpoint, hit enter. Now drag that formula down for the other bends. Find the sum of the weighted values by using the SUM function again. Left click and cell D6, enter equal SUM and select the range. Finally find the approximate mean by dividing that SUM by the count N. Click in the desired cell, enter an equal sign and left click on the weighted SUM. Enter a slash to divide and left click on the N, hit enter. The approximate mean heights of the students in the sample is 65 inches. In my stat lab be sure to enter the exact number of decimal places specified which is zero here for the nearest inch. For your class notebook I like to finish up by using the formula text function to show the formulas I have used. Left click in the cell, enter equal formula and then select formula text. Left click on the cell of interest and hit enter. Here I will drag that formula down to show all the formulas used in this workbook. Whoops there is one more. Left click in the cell beneath the count and use formula text again. You can click in any cell, it doesn't have to be immediately on the left or even adjacent, although you may need to add some notes to tell you which cell you're referring to if it's not obvious. Okay that's it. I hope this helps.


places to figure it out. The event will start soon. Okay. All right. I'm just going to say we are live and let's just record. Okay. Yeah, sure. Let's do it. Cool. All right. Let's kick this off. Where am I? Yes. Welcome to designing your growth as a UX designer. Thank you for joining wherever you are and whenever you are. So let's start with some quick introductions. I will go first. I'm Chris, a product designer that quit his job in 2020 and started a UX education company. I help designers of all levels, whether it's building your portfolio, learning fundamental UX frameworks for any project and how to supercharge your career and manage your first design team. The idea is really to take you from zero to unicorn designer. And today we have Philip. How are you doing, man? Great. Thanks for asking. So yeah, I'm going to introduce myself. So my name is Philip. I'm a design lead at MIMO where I've been working for more than six years now. I'm leading a small design team there, but I also design our daily basis as a product designer in one of our cross functional teams. And in addition to that, I also currently work on one very small project, which is like a site most project of mine, which is the icon set of gritty icons. Gritty icons. I've seen it everywhere. I've even got myself a version. It's awesome, man. If you notice, the event banner has the gritty background. Nice. Yeah, I noticed. Okay, cool. Yeah. So today's topic is, as I said at the beginning, designing your growth, right? And this ask me anything. We're going to introduce some topics and then we are going to answer some of your questions. So I would encourage folks who are listening to drop their questions and comments in the discussion so we can address them towards the end of this. I also want to say that, yeah, just drop in where you're calling in from like a city or a country, just to keep this as interactive as possible. So let's talk about our subjects today. We're talking about really this growth topic, right? So let's go to the first question of Philip. What do you think a growth mindset is or what does it mean to you? Yeah, so for me or from perspective as a design lead in a startup company, it means that someone who is acknowledging the knowledge gaps they have, so they're able to spot the areas where they can improve. They can also identify opportunities and areas with improvements. It also means that they're seeing failure as an opportunity to grow and learn, because as we know, design is an iterative process. You will fail a lot during the process. Unfortunately, a lot of people share only the wins, but there is like a lot of fails in the process. And you need to embrace the failure and you need to see the failure as an opportunity to grow and learn. In addition to that, you also need to actively seek for feedback. And that's something that I can also see from younger designers that they have problem to share their work, because they're a bit afraid of the failure or afraid of some negative feedback they might get. But you need to actually actively seek for feedback and you need to embrace that and you need to learn from that. And also, you need to embrace the challenge, because if you feel like you are too comfortable in your work environment, maybe that could be a red flag that you are not progressing that much, because you need to challenge yourself and it needs to be... I'm not saying it needs to be necessarily hard, but it needs to be challenging. But on the other hand, it also needs to be engaging. But for that, you also need to like what you are doing. You need to be somewhat passionate about the design. So that would probably sum up what I see as a growth mindset as a designer. Yeah, for me, the growth mindset is quite broad. But for me, I like to think about it in terms of someone being a curious individual. So if I was to basically meet someone and say, and actually have to judge if they had a growth mindset, so let's just say outside of work, the best question I would ask is like, what do you do for fun, right? Because I think a growth mindset and also I ask this in like interview questions as well to candidates and stuff. Because often the growth mindset or growth minded individuals have crazy hobbies, right? They learn about super interesting things or even if it's boring, they just get so deep into boring subjects or subjects that I might fall boring, but they do a lot of different things and they experiment and go down these rabbit holes a lot. And for me, that's like one of the number one telltale signs where someone has a weird and wacky hobby. I'm like, well, this person is pretty cool, right? And that to me is a growth minded person. But in terms of what you're saying in terms of being a designer and having that growth mindset, I completely agree with you, especially this feedback component where a lot of our times, the work we do is judged by other folks, right? And for folks to actually seek feedback and actually use it as a learning opportunity, I think that's super, super awesome and super growth minded as well. And then the other one is one that you mentioned, which is like embracing those challenges and kind of getting out of your comfort zone. That one is interesting because sometimes I feel like I'm out of my comfort zone and it's okay, but then other times I'm out of my comfort zone and I don't like it. So I guess the follow up question here, Philip, is what kind of comfort zone do we step out of? Or how do you tell personally, how do you tell if it's the right kind of comfort zone to get out of? Yeah, I think that's really hard to judge. I think unless you feel like what you are trying to gain or learn is way more important than like challenging yourself and stepping out, then you should always step out, right? You just need to know what you want to achieve. And I would basically evaluate based on that. Yeah, that's true. And maybe another thing I would add to what you said is like, is it the discomfort now worth what's going to be on the other side of you doing it, right? Like for example, public speaking, a lot of people, it's kind of their top fears, right? But the other side of doing this event or speaking at a local event, the more times you do it, you're just going to get better at it. And is the payoff worth it? That's a very personal question. But in my mind, yes. I guess all of us can be better public speakers in general, or at least be more comfortable with being ourselves in front of other folks, right? So that's maybe an example that I can think of. But that's exactly it's based on what you want to try to achieve, right? That's why you should always identify areas where you want to improve yourself. Because there are so many different things you can improve, right? Even within the design, like the design is very diverse, like there are so many fields you can go to. But you need to identify what you want to actually do, where you want to progress. And then step outside of the comfort zone so you can achieve the progress where you actually set your goal to, right? I mean, and also for the public speaking, I think this is a great example because I never done live video and never done this, right? And I am now stepping out of my comfort zone. But I know that if I will do it more often, I will get better. This is just how the practice works, right? Right, yeah, exactly. It's about getting those reps in. But that's awesome to hear that it's your first one. And I'm glad that you're here today getting out of your comfort zone. So you are putting your growth-mindedness on display while we're talking about growth mindset. So that's awesome. I want to ask you, why do you think it's so important having this growth mindset? To you, why do you think it's important? I think it's, again, it depends on what you will try to achieve, right? For me, or I think would be super relevant for other designers, maybe for the younger designers or for some junior level designers who are actively seeking for a job. I think it's very important, especially now when the job market is highly competitive, it's really hard to get a job and you need to stand out, right? And you need to understand the companies are hiring designers not only for the skills they currently possess and they have, but also for the ability to learn and grow, right? The companies see they're seeing it as an investment into you, right? And they're kind of expecting that those designers will grow and they will learn over the time, right? So we need to see there's a competitive advantage to basically be able to demonstrate that you are able to learn and grow. So I think that's like very important to have that mindset and to demonstrate that mindset, especially now when the job market is as it is. Yeah, I mean, it's so competitive now that literally everything you hear online is like, there's no jobs, people getting laid off and everybody's applying for the same roles and it's really, really crazy. Even we've heard this from designers we know in the community, right? Someone posted the job and he's like, I'm getting too many messages. This is unwritten, like how am I supposed to go through hundreds of messages to find the right designer? So I guess how do you, as a design lead, you probably are involved in hiring. So are there, are there telltale signs for you in terms of growth mindset? Like, how do you figure that out with candidates? I don't have like a specific structure, but one thing you mentioned that you asked some specific questions about the hobbies and that gives you some, some like idea about the person, how it is, like what their growth mindset is. For me, it's more about not about the answers they give me, it's more about the questions they ask. Because I think this is way more important. You can see if they're like very curious, if they're trying to understand the company, if they're trying to understand the product, if they're trying to understand your users, the decisions you made and where might be like the product in the future and all that, right? So for me, maybe the questions they ask are more important than the answers I get when I ask some, some questions, right? Yeah, I really like that framing where it's not really about, you know, your structure, but it's about the question and how curious that individual is. I'm guessing you've had interviews where a candidate has not asked a question. Is that true? Yeah, sure. And is it just an immediate red flag for you?  I mean, if you have more candidates and you have candidates who ask the questions, they're standing out and they have way higher chance to get hired.  On that note of, hey, asking questions is good and asking questions shows that you're growth minded and curious.   I don't know. I think there might be some stupid questions, like if the question is not relevant to your job or your the product or it's out of the context, but I would still follow on that and I would try to understand why the person asked the question because they might have a good reason, right?  Yeah. Yeah, usually it's, as you said, it's understanding the question behind the question. Exactly. And one of the, I worked with someone who was a CPO and now he runs, is the CEO of a public company and he was my manager at the time. So I was a newbie designer, this guy was super seasoned vet in Silicon Valley and he was my manager, so I would just come to him and be like, dude, I'm having this trouble. And I just said something and he would always assume, he would always be like two layers deep, right? So instead of listening to what I said, he'll be like, okay, so what you've told me is this and do you actually mean this, this and this? And the fact that he could do that on every single conversation we had about work was absolutely amazing, right? Because he tried to understand the intention, the sentiment and what I was actually asking him versus what I was saying. And I felt like that to be such a superpower. And I think, I mean, you know, pro tip, if folks can do that in job interviews to understand why that person is asking you that question. So if it's a, I don't know, a design process related question, they're asking you a technical question about your skills, right? If it's a, if this happened in this situation, what would you do? That's a behavioral question. So they're asking you how you deal in certain situations, they want to know who you are and how you behave in that situation. So I think that's something super underrated. But I might be going on a tangent. Are there anything else you want to touch on when we talk about the, how important the growth mindset is? Yeah, one thing I would also touch is just basically staying irrelevant in the design field, right? Because currently the industry is moving super fast. Like we have new tools, we have new technology all the time, like we have new processes that are, it's constantly changing, right? There are new trends, etc. And just to stay relevant, you need to actively follow the industry. You need to follow the trends. You need to learn about the new technology. You need to try new tools. You need to be really open-minded and embrace that change and embrace that development. Otherwise, you might find yourself not, your skills not being relevant anymore in the future, right? Because this is where we are at the moment. Like we have the rise of AI in the design, right? And I think like everyone just needs to embrace it. Everyone needs to try it. Everyone needs to get ahead of it. Otherwise, someone else will get and will get your into a position or will stand out more in the job interview, right? So just to be irrelevant in our industry, you just need to have that drawn mindset. Otherwise, you will basically get stuck in one point and everyone will be moving forward. Absolutely, man. And we're staying relevant. Yeah, it's like new technology, new tools, and the other is like kind of like new trends or actually new topics that are emerging that people really care about, or that's beneficial in terms of the industry, like accessibility, for example, or inclusiveness. Like that stuff really makes a difference and kind of gives you a new perspective and framing on how you should approach some of these challenges as they're in everyday lives. Quick sidebar, which is what new technologies slash tools do you advise people to get into, or have you yourself been experimenting with? Any sort of insights there? Yeah. I think this also highly depends on what type of designer you are, where you want to go, etc. AI is something you should not miss, definitely. So however you use it, because there are so many different use cases, but I think it has a great use case for the UX design, just for the doing the research for the copywriting, generating ideas, etc. Definitely some if I can, it's really hard to imagine that someone haven't even tried it yet, right? It's like that's something you just you need to do it, right? And from my perspective, what I've been lately, like playing with and kind of learned was Framer. I really liked the tool. I know the tool for years, but it was, I think they started as a prototyping tool. Now they're kind of like focused and it's more about like a no code builder, like you can build a website. And I really liked the tool. It was really fun to learn, really fun to use. And another tool, which I think not a lot of designers know yet, but I think it will be a standard in animation is Rife, at least for flight animation. And I think it's amazing too. Duolingo been using it for years now, they're like closely collaborating with Rife and all the animations you can see in the app are made in Rife. And you can create interactive animations there. It's kind of like lotty, but I think way better than that. The file size is smaller, it's way faster, and you can create those interactions with this mind blowing. So not I'm not saying this is relevant for every product, but for some, it's super relevant. And if they don't know Rife is something they should check definitely. Yeah. And given like, there's kind of like a clash between new technology and tools nowadays with the rise of AI, right? So introduction of like chat GPT within Figma. Figma acquired a company, I think like a year or two ago, that specializes in AI tools, they haven't fully integrated. And I don't know what the deal is, but imagine everyday design tools, having the power of AI, that would be really cool. So instead of it now living in a black box of just, I guess, text to text, or text to images, text to videos, it could actually be in context of the design itself, which is super, super interesting. I've also been experimenting with Figma. So I'm interested to, so Gritty was built with Figma. The landing pages. Yeah, okay, cool, cool, cool. Yeah, that's what I thought. That's great. That's awesome. Okay. That was actually, sorry, but that was actually, I was surprised because I was actually able to build it in two days without having prior knowledge of Framer. So I think that the learning curve is, for me, it was very easy. If you know Figma and if you know all the, like, structure and everything, if you are aware of the auto layout and how it works, you can use the plugin and basically copy paste the designs from Figma to Framer. And there you just need to set it up. And it was mind blowing, but how easy it was for me to set up the website. And that's something I would not be able to do two, three years ago, right? That's what I was saying, that you need to stay relevant because it's changing so fast. The industry is, yeah, it's incredible. So yeah, it's definitely a lot easy on the web flow. I haven't used web flow recently, but I remember a couple of years trying to build my portfolio on it. It took me weeks or, yeah, at least days to learn how it works and the structure and the container and doing all that stuff. But I also launched a website on Framer recently and yeah, within a week, you know, of course, because I want to like mess around with all the other things. But yeah, it was live. And I love also the animations that you could do just real basic things. And over effects and stuff like that. Just like it just adds another layer of polish, but you're so right where, you know, when Framer first was released, it was a prototyping tool that you had to write scripts for, right? Like you had to know how to code. And I was just like, I'm not learning this, I tried it. But it's, yeah, you're right. Like, I think on this kind of tangent of like leveraging or staying relevant, leveraging new tools and new technologies, us as designers, hopefully the folks on the call are some sort of designers or care about this industry, you guys can launch products and services super, super quickly, right? Like, no longer do you need to live in a testing environment where it's like, I'm going to do user interviews. No, you can actually just like launch it on the internet and see what happens and then validate from collecting emails, you know, having a pre-order or anything, like products are now easier than ever to validate.  Like another tool that I would suggest people learn that I've really, really wanted to learn, but I haven't had enough time, which is a bubble. Are you familiar? No, not yet. Yeah. So it's like a drag and drop tool. So imagine Wix for native apps or for web apps. Yeah. So you can connect things on the back end. So like it could be like an air table and you just connect your database in your air table to the front end. So you could, a lot of people are building like chat GPT wrappers. So on top of bubble. So yeah, you could basically like call the API from chat GPT and then display the UI with the result. And yeah, a lot of folks are using it. And I heard it's the learning curve is obviously, I think way more than framework or web flow, but it's still possible to do low code, no code web app development, right? And there are agencies out there doing this stuff right now. So it's pretty damn cool. The world we live in. And if you're not staying relevant, you're kind of missing out on this kind of go to market quickly revolution of what a power of what designers could do and not needing a developer, right? Yeah, exactly. And also, I think there is like seeing the opportunity and being able to spot the opportunity when you see some emerging tool, you can leverage that a lot. Like, we seen the guy who is like selling the notion templates and making a lot of money out of it, right? He just saw the opportunity like notion blew up, everyone started using it. And he started to focus on that. And there are so many opportunities like that, because there are always new tools emerging, right? One of the two I haven't mentioned, but I want to try is spline. I think everyone already like saw some of those crazy 3d animations. And the three days like super trendy at the moment, right? And I really want to try the tool, right? But I think there is opportunity for the designers there, because if you start to focus on that, and you learn the tool, you might be one of few, right? At the beginning. So, yeah. You heard it here first, guys. Stay relevant. What was the other point you had in terms of gross mindset, Philip? Yeah, I think what we... Oh, I think one topic we just touched briefly, but I think we should talk a bit more is actively seeking feedback. And I really like this trend of building in public, because this is basically a showcase how to seek a feedback and how to get a feedback early on, right? And I think this is like a lot of junior designers have problem with. They are a bit scared to get the feedback, because they're maybe like scared of failure and to receive some negative feedback. But this is how you learn the most, right? You need to share your work as much as possible. It doesn't matter what platform you use, but you can use social media like LinkedIn, Twitter, whatever. But also if you are working the company, you can just share it within your team. But it's always beneficial to share early on, not in later stages or not sharing your work at all. You just need to share and you need to get the feedback and then basically iterate on your designs and learn from it, right? Yeah. That's really cool that you said the build in public. I'm a huge fan of folks who build in public. I absolutely love the content. And I think it's something about like reality TV and behind the scenes thing that we've been used to in the media, or at least maybe that's where it came from or where it was popularized, where we want the final product is okay or whatever, but behind the scenes is more interesting. And also you can talk more about it, right? Like showing your portfolio as an example is great. Finish product, you spend weeks, months, however long you've built it, but the process of doing it, you can actually talk more about it, right? You can show why you chose version A of the design version B, how you optimized it. You can talk about your process. There's a lot more to say and hopefully people would be interested in sort of your journey. And you kind of gain a following that way. I know with a lot of these entrepreneurs or even just folks who build on the internet, that kind of content really, really works for them. And I've been following this guy on Twitter and he's building his design agency in public. And I think he got to like 100K within like five or six months. And I'm like, that's crazy. A month, 100K a month. And he shares like his sales tactic, how he talks to client, how he shows work, how he delivers value really quickly. And it's just really interesting, right? And I'm never going to be a customer because we basically do the same thing. But I'm super, I guess, motivated and also inspired by that guy's journey. And I want him to win, right? Like, I want him to do the 200K a year or a million dollars a year or whatever it is, right? So that's really, really interesting. Yeah. And I mean, but it is scary though. So building in public super scary because you know, people can judge you.  So how do you approach that? Any tips on how to approach building public and kind of not being afraid to put your work out? Just do it. Honestly, you just, yeah, you just need to step out of your comfort zone and just share it. It will never be perfect. But you can gain a lot by doing it. Yeah. It might not be comfortable. But I never got some negative feedback or like anything that would, like, I would consider that it would like hurt me or something, you know? It is, it's definitely challenging. But I think you just need to embrace that and do that. What I would also add is that you mentioned like, guys out there sharing their work and sharing their success is inspiring, right? And we are, you are rooting for them and you can like connect to those people. But what I would also like to see way more is sharing a failure. Because when you fail, you learn a lot and we could learn from others, right? Because behind all those wins they share or the successes, there's like way more failures and errors they made, right? And they learned and they iterated and grew and eventually they got to the state where they are able to share the win. But I think we should share our failures way more because I think we could learn and gain from that. Yeah, totally agree because you're right where typically online was this IG approach where you're sharing your perfect lifestyle or every time you go on holiday, you're at the beach, you take a picture. And then so it's kind of turned into this celebration of wins. Like when you go on the internet, it's just everybody's winning. So automatically everybody feels crap, right? Because it's like, I'm not winning. What's going on? But yeah, you're quite right. Reading failures or people when they're vulnerable or they're learnings is often resonates more because it's someone's been there, they could learn from it. And I'll argue that we didn't model that stuff on the internet, which is what you said. But also crystallizing learning is also something you gain from it, right? Because having to write why you failed and dissect it in a third person view is really hard, but super, super valuable because it's easy to say, I made a million bucks. But it's hard to say, here's where I failed at making a million bucks. And here's how I got to make like, that's way harder, right, than just saying, oh, someone made X amount of money or did something crazy, right? Yeah. The reason why I really like it is that it forces you to reflect on what you did, right? And you can gain a lot out of it. Right. Exactly. So let's move on to some of the strategies. I have a few things, or at least like three steps that I've taken from my growth playbook, but I want to start with you if you have any strategies to share, or did you want me to run through how I would do it? Yeah, you can share yours. Cool. Okay, cool. Because we are kind of missing time and I want to get to some questions. So just give me a sec here. Okay, guys. So this is taken from the growth playbook that I and Camilla worked on. And there's a several steps to this, but I'm just going to tell you the three steps at the beginning when you're trying to think about growth. Okay. So the first is what we call career, how might we use, you might recognize this as UX designers. It's really asking the right question to find the meaning in your professional life. And back to what Philip said, it's really reflecting and asking yourself those questions, being curious with yourself, kind of going within. You're asking yourself like, what are my biggest career wins? And why is that? I learned most when I did X. I feel most energize when I did X. Then asking yourself, why is that? So like taking that specific thing and going down the paths of the five Ys. Why did you feel most energize when you gave a presentation? Why was that the answer for that? Why, why, why, why? Then kind of getting to the root of that, you then can define growth statements or you can call it the definition of success. I want to input action so I can input feeling, right? That will help you crystallize a potential path to grow, right? Based on your previous experience. So that's the career, how might we use? Of course, I'm doing this very fast because I can't explain the activity. I don't have a whiteboard behind me. But the second step is what we call the hacking growth framework. It's super simple. After you have defined these things that you want to do, you actually want to brainstorm potential areas of growth, be it education at work outside the nine to five, fitness, whatever it is, what are the areas that you want to grow? And then within those areas, ideas and things that you might want to do based on already reflecting on what you care about, right? Then the the sub step to this part of the framework is the identifying feasibility and also defining your focus by prioritizing it. You can't do it if it's not feasible. If you want to be an astronaut, it could take a lot of years, right? So having priority is always great.   The third, we call the career journey map. It's like the customer journey map that you're used to. So with the career how my ways and the growth statements, you really define, you start at the end, you define the destination first, right? Then you define where you are today, and then you map the steps in between. It's quite simple. You're working backwards even from the destination. That's why it's so critical to define that. And of course, it doesn't have to be the ultimate destination, it could just be on one thing. Let's just say you want to get better at public speaking. So the final destination might be to do a keynote at a UX conference. Okay, cool. Where's your starting point now? My starting point is a LinkedIn live. Okay, what are the steps to get there, right? What do I need to do? Where is the focus? So that's how you could break down of if you wanted to grow in a certain aspect of your career or personal life. That's how you would systematically walk through that. So I want to bring back Philip on. Any questions or anything to add around that framework? No, I think it's really great framework to have actually. And I'm thinking about having something like that for my design thing as well, because I think it would be very efficient. Yeah, there's a lot of ways to plan around goals and stuff. I mean, I also have another technique, but actually everything around goal setting is actually first understanding why and reflecting, right? Then how you get there is, you know, as we are designers, there's always these creative ways to sort of get there. Yeah. Yeah, I think what is also important just to hold yourself accountable, like making sure you are making a progress, right? And tracking that progress. Yeah, that's true. I don't know, do you use goal setting apps or anything? Like how do you track growth progress? I do not, but I do use a mobile app called to do, I guess. Okay. Structured. It's called structured, but it's mostly for tracking my daily habits. Whenever I try to achieve something, I always try to build a habit, right? Because just to make sure I am doing something like on consistent basis, this is probably like the best way how to learn, right? You need to like split the goal into very small, actionable tasks and do it as often as possible and create the routine out of it. This is how you will learn probably anything, right? Whatever you can imagine you can achieve by this. But I don't have structure how I would necessarily try my progress. But for example, we have in my design team, we have like personal OKRs. We are setting for every six months or basically half of the year. And we have every two weeks, we have one-on-ones where we discuss the progress and we try to I try to help and guide my designers to achieve what we set as a goal for the period of the time. And we simply use notion for that. We just like split the goal into a few actionable tasks and they are just checking them. What we find very challenging in the working environment is to find the time to personal growth, right? To find the time to learn and to do something different than your regular tasks. Because that's I think probably a problem in all the companies that you have, you are swapped with this desk. There is a lot of things to do right during the day. And simply finding a time to actually sit and learn and try new things and try new tools and maybe like do some course or watch some videos. It's really difficult and this has been very challenging for us. What we tried now to do is to basically set a blocker in the calendar every week, like every Friday, they have a blocker for two, three hours where they don't need to do any tasks they have for their cross functional teams. But they're able to focus on learning. It doesn't matter what it is, but what I'm expecting is to have some outcome out of it. So essentially, they would probably present something to the team or they will like summarize what they learned. And what I want to see is also to see a progress they are making, right? If it's a book, I want to see like how much they already read, how far they are. If it's a course, how many percent of the course they already done, etc. So we are trying to hold them accountable. But as I said, it's very challenging to find some time, right? That's why we tried now to create those blockers in the calendar. That's cool. Yeah, it reminds me of the Google 20% time where like every Friday they have time to work on a project that's outside of their responsibilities and they can work on anything. But I really like the fact that you guys set a blocker. What do you call this? Do you have a name for it? Or is it just like time to learn? Like is there a name in your company? I think we name it personal growth. Perfect. This is very apt. Okay, great.  I did a version of it, but you can go look at it. I really like the notebook that they give you because it's very structured and like that's great and it breaks it down to like micro and macro. So there's lots of different techniques out there, but bullet journaling is one of them to set goals, build habits, build these atomic habits to succeed. So let's go to some of the questions. I have this question I am stuck in an awesome cultured company with an amazing manager, flexible timing and a dream company environment anybody could love, but the only problem is not having enough work which helps me stay with my skill set. They just love to have me, but they're not utilizing my skill set properly. I don't know how to convince them because I don't want to put them down in spite of the numerous flexibilities they gave to me. How would you approach this problem, Philip? I think there might be two solutions. So one solution might be start your own personal project and try to be busy with something else rather than your day job, right? And that way you might learn something, you might develop some new skills, you might be like very passionate about the project and it might not be like that bad that in your day job you are not challenging yourself because you can challenge yourself somewhere else, right? Second option would be reflecting and actually discussing it with your managers and I think you just need to have like very candid, open conversation with them because I think we as designers we love challenge. We really like to be challenged and if that's not the case, even though you might have great culture, great team, great manager, you might also consider leaving the job. For me, I think I have been in very similar position before. Before Mimo I was working the different startup and all that, the product was cool. All of the people there were super friendly. I really liked the environment. We were basically friends. It was very fun to work on the product. But for me, what I'm looking at when I'm reflecting on my time in the company is I'm learning and I'm growing as a person, as a designer and if the answer is no, I start to evaluate the possibility of leaving and maybe this is also the reason why I'm in Mimo for six years because every time when I ask myself if I'm growing professionally and personally, the answer is yes, right? So I'm not even thinking at the moment to leave the company because for me, there are still a lot of opportunities to grow. But if you don't have those opportunities, even though all other aspects are perfect, I would still consider a change because change might be a better option. Yeah, that's great advice, man. I actually have something similar to you. I think my first design job, I was there for around about two years and it was great. It was a good salary. I was leading a team. Bear in mind, this was my first design job. So I was like default lead, but quite naturally fell into this kind of managerial role. But because it was my first UX role, I didn't really have any other super senior designers around me. I didn't know what I didn't know and it was very engineering orientated, but culture was great. People were great, parties were great, everything was great, but I was very complacent. I ended up turning up to work one hour a day, two hours a day, and it wasn't even a hybrid role. This was before hybrid was a thing, but my manager was just super chill with it and I was like, I get the work done. But eventually you just have to, like you said, have that frank conversation with yourself and say, what is the reason for you to come into work every day? If you really wanted to just sit there, get paid and just watch YouTube all day, that's a great life and I'm not blaming anybody for doing that. That's chill, but is that what you want? Where do you see yourself going as a career? Eventually I decided to leave for less money, less certain situation, but it was like that's the kind of push I needed or growth that I thought I needed and turned out it was one of my best career decisions because joining that new role and then being in the country a year later, still with that new company, my boss asked me to come back and this time the salary tripled. It was the most money that I would ever have made as a designer and I was like, what do I do? And I was going to be the head of the organization, head of design, but I was like, well, I've got like three years experience like this is, and will it be exactly the same? And of course it would have been. So I'm glad I said no at that time and because everything was good, but the conditions for me to thrive and grow in the way that I defied it was just not there. The third thing I would say to this person, so Philip actually had some two great points, which is start your own personal project outside of work. So you're not so focused on this like work thing and you have some other energy to put somewhere else. The second is have a frank discussion with your manager. And I believe the third thing actually you mentioned was like, consider if that's actually the right place for you, which is the sentiment that I expressed just then. But the fourth thing is this, is that you could you could just prove your skill set at work without asking for permission. And I think that's a path that a lot of people just don't take. It's like, why do you need to ask for permission to do work? You're already at work.  Extra user research, more user interviews, additional brainstorming sessions, talking to product managers and talking to like, it's all there. You might as well just figure out how to become useful versus for someone to ask you. And I think that could also like, you know, I'm assuming here of course, but the reason that you're maybe underutilized is because they haven't seen proof that you've done this work, right? You might be saying that, Hey, my skill set is not utilized properly, but what and my question to you, and honestly is what evidence have you shown me that you are useful, that you are good at X, Y and Z, because a lot of people just expect folks to know without showing this value up front, right? So that would be the fourth thing to address there. Yeah. Sorry, just kind of responding to this comment at the same time as talking as well. Okay, so let's go to our next question. Let's see what we have here. Okay, it seems like we don't have that many questions today. Everybody's a bit lazy this morning, but there are some just kind of, I guess, like comments versus questions. Okay, so here's one question. But I don't know if we're, I guess, legitimately able to answer. Okay, here we go. What are the best five questions we should ask a lumen client who does not know how websites work, where chat GPT cannot be useful. So basically a client that is non techie, I guess. I think I would need to get some context, right? Yeah, yeah. The question is if, okay, so yeah, I guess my question to this person was like, why do you need to explain to a client how websites work? Like, surely you should be the one who knows how websites work? And I guess the best advice here is like, think of an analogy, a metaphor that the client understands. If he's from like the agricultural industry, do a farming analogy, right? Like, speak the other person's language versus telling him about HTML and CSS and JavaScript like that.  If they're a client. Okay, so there's another question, quite a long one here. Okay, no, that was someone that says the background was distracting. Okay, here we go. I've been laid off and it's difficult to get a proper job as after spending 10 years in the UI UX industry, now the scenario has completely changed. Where easy to get into a toxic working culture in visualless startups and difficult to find a good job. So what do you suggest I can learn and take like take the next steps towards? I think it's really complicated question. I think that you should first ask yourself where you would like to be, right? As a designer. Because, as we said, like design is very diverse, right? You can focus on one, two and become an expert or you can diversify and do more things. But from my perspective as a design lead and who recently or like a few months ago were actively we were actively hiring. I think now the companies are aiming to efficiency. That's why we like we are seeing so many layoffs, right? And I think it's the time where now instead of being like highly focused designer on one field, which is like a UX or UI or motion or whatever. I think that era is ending at the moment. And now I think it's the rise of product designers who are actually kind of like this 10x designers who are able to do multiple things, right? Because companies are aiming for efficiency. It's for them it's way easier to hire one designer who will cover the whole design process from research to handoff rather than hiring two or three different designers, right? And showcasing that you have those skills and you are versatile and you are able to actually do a lot more than just one thing. I think it's very beneficial. Yeah, I really like what you said in terms of like figuring out what this person wants, right? Like, I think the reason that you might be getting into toxic startup culture, they're everywhere, like there's so many different types of companies. Of course, some are going to be toxic. But I think you need to figure out what I call this the job matching algorithm, right? Like, how does it match to what you want? Really, it's really quite simple. It's using the Moscow framework. So your must-haves, your should-haves, your could-haves and your won't-haves, right? If you can list out in those four categories what your perfect job will be, then you'll look at a job description and you say, oh, they don't have any of my must-haves, okay? And then they have some red flags, which is your won't-haves, like red flags that you won't join. So having those questions in your head or having that kind of thinking, you can approach a job much more strategically. And yeah, exactly. The industry is all like crazy at the moment. So for you, it's, I mean, you're going to have to make trade-offs if you're like a designer that's kind of early in the industry anyway. But if you have 10 years under your belt, I would argue you can pick and choose where you want to go. You don't have to go into a toxic environment, right? And I'm sure they have like a probation period where you can just kind of leave after a month anyway. No harm, no foul, right? So it's, yeah, it's really up to you. I think it's like figuring out your decision framework of how you choose a job. And there's multiple decision frameworks out there, but the Moscow one could just help you. Like we're more familiar with it because we're from the product development world, like that's used for prioritization. So you could use that to look at jobs in the market. One more thing I would mention as well is built meaningful connections. Like that can help you get hired a lot. Like if I would have like 100 candidates and I would personally or somehow know 10 of them, of course, like hiring process should be unbiased, but we are naturally biased. And you, we tend to lean toward the candidates we personally know, right? And also like the companies, they offer some bonuses to people who are able to bring some talent, right? So go there and make some meaningful connections, like go on LinkedIn, try to connect with someone, not just like hit the connect button, but try to really connect on a personal level, have some conversation with the people. If you have some, maybe create the list of 10 companies you would like to work in and try to connect with the people who are already working there and try to learn about the company, try to learn about the culture, try to connect with those people, and you have way higher chance to get the position in those companies than because you are already standing out. Exactly, exactly. I have two growth strategies that I want to share with you, Philip. And these are very interesting. But after each one, I just kind of want to run by you in terms of your thoughts on if you think this is a good growth strategy or not. So I don't know if you know Philip, but Charlie Munger passed away. He was 99 years old, 34 days until he was 100. And he has these things called either Charlieisms or Mungerisms, but he is famous for the invert advice. And so these are growth strategies from him that don't sound like growth strategies. And that's why they're so brilliant. Okay, cool. So let me just go to the first one. And I'll give you some examples as well.  That's what he says. Okay. And here's the example. Person one follows the latest diet, takes different supplements, the latest workout routines, different types of fast or tries a new sport. The one thing this person is really good at is trying new things and hoping it works, but ultimately dropping it if it doesn't and they just move on to something different. Person two eats a balanced diet and exercises every day. This person is really good at consistency. They watch their intake and exercise regularly. Who do we think would be healthier? Person one or person two? Yeah, exactly. Right. Person one is always stressed about like routines, doing it right, the new thing, trying to find shortcuts, right? But person two, they just focus on doing these simple things right. So this goes to avoiding stupidity and you'll outperform everybody, right? Things like if you're framing it around work is like beyond time, follow up appropriately, offering help when people need it, putting extra hours and sticking to your word and the deadline. What do you think about that advice where Charlie Munger says avoiding stupidity is easier than seeking brilliance when it comes to growth? I think it's perfect. I'm a huge fan of Charlie Munger as a person. He was incredible. The advice that he had, you can, of course, like he was mostly talking about investment, but you can apply that to almost everything, right? And I think it's, yeah, it's exactly as you said, like it makes way more sense to just to be good and have some consistency rather than trying to be perfect or like having these like big swings, right? Because yeah, you might hit one, but it's not, it's really hard to keep it consistent. Right, right. So the last one I want to share from Mr. Charlie himself is to get what you want, you have to deserve what you want. He says the easiest way to get what you want is to deserve it, right? So if you want a UX role straight out of school or from a bootcamp, the question I want to ask you is, are you putting extra hours? Are you shipping real products? Are you applying to jobs that you really have a shot at, right? If you want to find a role in a high design maturity organization, are you implementing and experimenting with design ops? Have you sold existing team problems with design thinking this is outside actually building products? Have you had experience getting buy-in from cross-functional stakeholders, right? If you want to speak at a conference, have you spoken regularly at local events? Are you good at public speaking? Do you have original insight that no one else talks about? So to sum up yet again, to get what you want, you have to deserve what you want. So ask yourself, if you want to grow and get to wherever you want to be, do you deserve it? Because the best way is to deserve it. And if we can answer that question, growth would be so much easier, right? The path to it. Yeah, exactly. And I think this is something that you hit the nail because there are, I think, very wrong expectations when people are finishing boot camps. Because oftentimes the boot camps say you will be job ready, but that's very, very inaccurate. This is very wrong expectations to have that you, once you finish the boot camp, you're job ready. Simply, you are not. You need to learn way more. You need to practice. You need to put the hours and you need to stand out. So just finishing the boot camp is not enough. Right. Yeah, exactly. I mean, we could do another whole hour just like kind of smashing boot camps, right? We're just like, don't do it, guys. Oh, God, yeah. But anyway, I think that's probably a great place to finish it. Philip, where could folks find you and your stuff and, yeah, just give us anything you want to plug, product services, whatever. Yeah. So, yeah, I'm mostly active on LinkedIn. So that's where you can find me. Just hit the follow. And, yeah, I'm also building the greedy icons. The icon said you can try for free. And I'm also as a design lead at MIMO. You can try our app if you want to learn to code. I don't think designers necessarily need to be able to code, but I think it's very important to understand the mechanics and to understand the technology because then you can communicate with developers way better. So, yeah, that's all, I guess. That's cool. Yeah. And another conversational topic that we could talk for an hour about should design us code, right? Okay. So quickly from me, you can find everything from me on LinkedIn or uxplaybook.org. I actually want to give folks who are interested in growth 20, oh no, 30% off. If you just use the code live, I'll paste it in the comment section. 30% off everything. You guys just go to uxplaybook.org and check out those products there. But I just want to say again, thank you so much for joining your first LinkedIn live and I appreciate you taking the time and talking about growth with us. Yeah, thanks for having me. It was very fun and I think I will do it again at some point. Oh yeah. Okay, let's do it again. Another couple of our conversations. All right, man. See you. See you. Ciao.


Hey guys, it's Monica. Thank you for joining me. I know I've been missing in action, but I've had a number of things happen. So if you're curious, it's a day tuned. Thank you so much for coming back and joining me on my YouTube channel. And I know some of you are connected with me on Facebook and some of you are connected with me on Instagram and I've received many messages from you and You know asking where I am and those of you are on Facebook, you know, you're sending me message and stuff like that So so I've been sort of struggling with a few health issues that nothing nothing major But enough that it stopped me from being able to video as much as I wanted to Many of you know I'm a real estate professional But what I do in my day-to-day world is I'm the training director of the company I work for so I do all of their Majority of their training not only do I organize schedule I also teach present the classes a lot of them and for the last couple of weeks. I've had a really heavy heavy Class caseload where I was actually presenting Classes and I ended up having a voice strain So I found myself a week ago not being able to talk much above a croak Meaning that my voice would give out I would talk and then it would just be completely gone I have nothing but like Coming out of my throat so that was one thing and I've been feeling an earache coming on and I Have a burst eardrum on one side years ago. They recommended surgery to close it up. I didn't want to do that and Now my my doctor is saying I really need to go see a specialist because it's becoming more of a chronic issue even though I Wear a I put like a I put something in my ear to cover it up when I take a shower I so have an ear cap like a like a plastic ear cap you put on just like you would imagine a shower cap I have an air shower cap. I put that on still though. I'm having issues It's it's and I get out of the shower.  Oh my gosh So I was thinking holy mackerel. I haven't slept. I was feeling really really awful and very very sick. So one of the things that I I've been a proponent of for a long time. I've really advocated CBD. I use CBD is skin care Jay will use a CBD drop So I had an opportunity to check out a couple of CBD products One was sent to me complimentary from Octoly, which I think is an awesome product for anyone And I'm going to talk about that in a moment and another is something that I bought So Jay and I we were at a local bike shop, you know, I love my bike, you know, I love biking and And I just love bikes. I just love that outdoor activity So we were at our local bike shop and there was a CBD shop next door So we decided to walk in and see what they had to offer and we came out with a couple of bottles of CBD so that was pretty cool and I'll tell you if you suffer from sleep issues This particular CBD that Jay and I bought has it's just been really super fantastic for sleep issues It's pricey. I will admit that it is definitely pricey But it it has really done well and what it is is American shaman CBD I'm going to close some photos here so that you can see we bought two bottles of it We bought one that has like a blueberry flavor And the other is just a night version of it and what you do is It's CBD drops you put it in water so it absorbs super quickly into your system and The night version I'm telling you guys I don't sleep well at all and and this may not work for you because it is pricey and I and I bought it because I Don't sleep well and I said if this actually helps me go to sleep better and sleep more fuller than it would be worth the money and So I did I bought it. We actually bought two both of them water soluble So you drink it as opposed to putting it under your tongue tongue in a dropper. It actually works quicker So the night one that I did I am I Put it under my I drank it. I'm sorry.   I'm and I'm out. I'm out like a light So so far I have tried it. They say you have to By the third night it'll really work really well well for me by the first night It worked really well the second night it worked a lot better and the third night it was fantastic So it it works for me and it might be something you guys might want to think about trying Or looking into again, it's an American shaman. I know they sell this all over the place. I've seen it in Many places. I've even seen it in flea markets at certain point in times when I went to a flea market last year and other shops and stuff like that, so I I I'm so glad I bought it as much as it was. I mean, I think Jay and I walked out of there Between the two bottles. It was a discount. I think we paid like 150 for the two bottles But I will definitely Rebuy the night one because it's you working great for me. It's actually working great for Jay as well We both really like it. So That was amazing. So because I like CBD and I know that some people Want to try CBD and they they're you know, they they don't really know what to expect or it's really cost prohibitive It's pretty expensive. I saw the CBD for life product Which was actually promoted on the Octoly network now. I I think the CBD for life and I believe it's it's like 30 ish dollars And I have the 15% off through Octoly and plus if you check out their website, they have other sales as well But what I really liked about this is it's a CBD tincture and it's 300 milligrams It's the flavor of peppermint, although I really can't taste peppermint in it whatsoever but it It's because it's only 300 milligrams, right? It is perfect for someone that just wants to try a CBD product To see how they like it and then they can increase slowly if they want because I obviously take much stronger CBD on a regular basis, but I like this Jay has really liked it. He's used it more than me This again was said to be complimentary from the Octoly network from CBD for life This is a oil you put it under your tongue You hold it for 60 seconds 90 seconds if you want and you swallow it the peppermint They also have unflavored so if you don't even want to risk the flavor go for it But the peppermint I didn't really taste a strong peppermint taste at all and neither did Jay So we both really like this and he says it works really well It it helps with some of your leg pain, especially he's out shuffling today So, you know, once you start to feel that sort of calming effect and all that You'll understand type of thing. So this one complimentary and From CBD for life by the Octoly network highly recommend they have a sale going on I think my link has 15% off But this is a great price point and a great starter Point for anyone that Wants to really start to go into CBD products.  I really liked it The way it sounded and it was affordable. So I'm probably going to pick that up and I'll let you know now Again, most of the CBD products Sometimes have that carrier oil or whatever they would call it and even though it might be a pure CBD isolate, etc It usually has some sort of an MCT oil in it So if you are if you have, you know, any kind of a MCT coconut oil any kind of an issue with that You might want to just read the ingredients carefully But the CBD for life says on this 300 milligram bottle It says take one full a dropper under the tongue and then hold it for 60 90 seconds You can also add it to your coffee your tea in the morning or whatever or a cold drink or something like that And they say you can take it twice daily. So, you know, again one full dropper of the CBD for life It's only 300 milligrams, but it to me, you know, the price point is perfect So that was sent to me complimentary in exchange for a view from CBD for life via the octagonal network and I'm going to just keep trying in different CBD products because I believe in the value of CBD and I I'll tell you the CBD that I'm using for my for the night CBD has been awesome So another thing that I got that was sent to me that I love it I haven't really even talked about is this contraption now this stretches So believe it or not it stretches. It fits me. It fits Jay. It does have a velcro Aductible thing here so you can make it smaller if you're a tiny person but the stretch really gives out good and what what what it is it plugs in and This is from home press Show you this You can get this on Amazon. It has I mean, it's really nice. It's one size fits all You can plug it in. It gives you a Time setting so that it shuts off automatically after two hours. It's a heated wrap a heated You know wrap you can put it on your leg if you want if you have a sore muscle on your back You can really put it anywhere and the cord is long enough They give you a long enough cord that you can actually plug it in So I thought this was really cool and I was surprised at how affordable it was and I was actually surprised at how Comfortable it was to wear it just wrap it around So it fits me and if it's Jay and so when he's got some sore muscles or I have some sore muscles Or I just didn't feel good the last couple of days I actually put that on just for added warmth and I put it on the back of my head my neck You know, I didn't wrap it around my throat But I laid on it like that and it was it worked it really worked and I love the fact that it's got the timer So yeah, this was sent to me in exchange for you highly recommended. I think the price is great I think if you're going to if you have any kind of soreness like that, it's it's definitely worth pursuing So thank you so much for sending me this. I love it.  I've got a wig review. I have to do I have been blessed to have wig sent to me from a number of wig companies And I try to respond, you know to The reviews and do them pretty quick but where I was sick these last two weeks I'm behind on everything So I'm going to try to get that done today and I really haven't Haven't done much. This is the extent Of my holiday decorations. I have no tree up. I have nothing else up I just put this up on my bookshelf with my little Barbie doll sitting there and Said yeah, it makes me feel a little holiday-ish So I think when you're not feeling good and you're in a funk It's kind of hard to get yourself Motivated, you know to be, you know up and to do it and all that at least for me So I did do some amazon christmas shopping. Yes and and I did some I'm buying some accessories for my bike And we have booked some plans for next year So I'm trying to look forward to it. We have postponed our trip to germany I think it's just leaving the country the end of may I think it's just too Up in the air. I think everything is just so up in the air So I don't think we're you know, so we decided I called the airlines and they said that our tickets We could hold them until the december 31st of 2022 So, you know, and if we don't plan a europe trip Next year if it has to be the year after then we're going to have to use those tickets for something else But um We made that decision. So we're going to stay local In all that many of you when you reached out to me you asked about my mom because you haven't seen her in a while Well, we're getting together christmas next week And we're going to get together at my sister.   It's always a shock when it happens, right? But we you're able to prepare when my brother passed away in september There's no Opportunity and I think those of you that have Experienced a sudden death. You understand what I'm talking about.   She looks awesome Uh, uh, my husband jay had gone down there to get an estimate done for something and the my mother was there And she was talking to jay and the person that was doing an estimate And after my mother left the guy said wow, she's she's pretty good and jay said, yeah, she's 93 and the guy said You've got to be kidding me Could not believe she was 93 years old and I'm like, yeah, you know she You wait and see the photos when I put him in next weekend because you'll see some pictures of my mom You wait and see she is just amazing So, um, I'm going to try to get my wig done. I'm going to try to get my wig reviewed I'm going to try to get an empty film today. I just don't know if I'm going to So in the event that I don't have another video up between now and the holidays I just want to wish you all a very very very very Happy and I'm going to say happy holidays. I don't care because happy holidays to me Is a phrase that effect that really impacts everyone, right? However, you are going to celebrate whatever religious Avenue you pursue or or you celebrate Happy holidays covers it all. That's how we've always looked at it. I used to say happy holidays In my christmas cards and all that because it was it was so, you know, generic in that sense, right? To cover it and whatever the holiday was so Yeah, so, you know, I hope you all have a wonderful wonderful blessed holiday season I will try to come back on I don't know if I will But I will be on right after christmas in either case. So if I get my wig video done, I'll get that up But um, you'll see me and my goals for 2022 I'm trying to get back into that schedule. I'm hoping life settles down That's what my goal is life. Please settle down. So anyways, merry merry christmas. Happy holidays I wish you all the best. I will see you all shortly and thank you all for being so wonderful and kind and reaching out And always being there


I would like to invite you all to join me in launching a book, and we actually have a slide of it. The roots of this book go back a very long way, and you will see the reason why we have Professor Crainbrooke speaking tonight as a particularly suitable speaker to launch this book, because Sarah worked with Professor Crainbrooke in India when Professor Crainbrooke was conducting his research on the Zoroastrian traditions in Mumbai, and she has then applied this methodology to the Zoroastrians in Iran. Her work was conducted in the 1990s, 2000s, over a period of about 10 years, with support from the British Academy and various other foundations, and it has now seen the light of the world, and indeed this is only the first of two volumes. It is entitled Voices from Zoroastrian Iran, Oral Texts and Testimonies, and this is the first volume, and it presents the voices from urban centres, and the next volume will be more on the centres in the countryside, but Dr Stuart herself will talk to us and tell us a little bit more about her book, which is now out. Thank you, Almut, for your kind words. I'd like to thank Professor Crainbrooke for his fascinating lecture, a penetrating exploration of what Orality means in the Zoroastrian context, so I'm going to be very short, I don't want to keep you from the reception. But I'd like to say particularly, I'm very grateful to Professor Crainbrooke, as the series editor for her publishes, for his encouragement and support for the book that I'm introducing. It's a great pity that my collaborator, researcher and former student at Zoroast, Mandana Mawavenat, can't be here with us tonight, where it not for her and her family, particularly her father, her husband Bahman Maradian, the project in Iran that led to this publication would never have been possible. I owe a debt of gratitude to all those first and foremost who gave their time to discuss their religion and life in Iran, and also to Ms Shahnaw Shahsadi, who was primarily responsible for conducting the interviews that took place over a period of three or four years. And she put together a team of mainly young people in Yazd, who undertook the translations from Dari to Persian, so I'm grateful to all of them for their work, and also to those who helped with translations from Persian to English, in particular Ms Maryam Mami, the former secretary of the British Institute of Persian Studies. Finally, I'd like to thank the British Academy for supporting the project and, of course, the publisher, Harasiewicz, for the production of the book. Now, throughout the past weeks, culminating on Sunday, marking the anniversary of the end of World War I, our media channels have produced a stream of information about the conflict, focusing especially on the personal accounts of ordinary folk in the form of letters and poems, photographs and memorabilia. What makes these accounts compelling is difficult precisely to pinpoint, but compelling they often are. They allow us to imagine what it might have been like to be there and reflect on aspects we may not have previously considered. Whether or not we agree with the opinions, thoughts and actions of those concerned, their voices are genuine, their accounts first hand. And it's primary material of this kind that's the basis for my book. Over 300 interviews conducted with Zoroastrians in Iran. The aim of collecting this data was to look at what has happened to Zoroastrianism, both in terms of the religion and society since the revolution of 1979. Earlier studies focused on specific locations and thereafter, primarily on Tehran. Whereas this study maps the remaining population where ever there to be found in Iran today. So it's just a map. It's an estimated population based on various statistics last year. So once we've gathered this kind of raw data, the primary source, the question arises how to interpret it in a way as to inform our research without distorting or manipulating what we understand our interviewees to have expressed. Since the main interview was herself Zoroastrian, thus providing an authentic insider or emic account, we listen, we find ourselves listening quite literally to our upon our of what is often a private conversation. So we need to decide what to extract, how to distill and most importantly what account of the religion to use as a benchmark by which to measure what people are saying. Whilst academic studies predominantly in the west have provided us with what is commonly referred to as the classical account of the religion, Iranians Zoroastrianism is informed somewhat differently. And for this reason I've attempted to contextualise our interviews drawing on the translations and interpretations of religious texts by priests and scholars in Iran to explain the various attitudes, beliefs and customs, as Professor Crenbroch has said inductive. A chapter on society that charts the changes in the constitution, the civil and penal codes of the Islamic Republic, as well as the internal governance of Zoroastrians give some insight into interviews, interviewees views on topics such as marriage, conversion, education and emigration outside leaving Iran. Now the previous study that Professor Hintzer referred to, Professor Crenbroch's Living Zoroastrianism in India brings to the fore the many and varied differences between the two communities. So this has been a very good comparator and I have no time to give more than one example which is that both Parsis and Iranians Zoroastrians have moved towards a monotheistic view of the religion. But their prospective trajectories have been markedly different. The Parsis were exposed to predominantly Christian ideas beginning with the missionary zeal of the 19th century in India. Zoroastrianism in Iran, Zoroastrians in Iran have been exposed predominantly and persistently to Islam for over a thousand years. We find in modern Iran Muslim scholars who are deeply committed to their Iranian ethnicity have had to address the issue of how their Zoroastrian religious cultural roots relate to the notion of the inherent superiority of Islam. A common approach to this problem is the belief held by some Muslims and indeed some Zoroastrians alike that the original monotheism of Zarathustra, as they see it, was compromised during the Sasanian era by a powerful and corrupt priesthood supported by the monarchy. So you can see the direction that this has been going in. Zoroastrians helped to shape the new literary milieu that introduced perts and writers who were only several generations away from being Zoroastrian themselves, one assumes way back at the time of the Arab conquests. While we do not know precisely how and when Persian literature came to be a key part of Zoroastrian self definition, it is clear from our interviews that it is indeed a means by which their religion is perceived and understood today in Iran. A legacy of this project derives from the fact that the Zoroastrian Dari dialects are dying out. The Karamani form is spoken by only a handful of people in that city. The Dari of Yazd and its dialectical variations are still spoken in the villages of the Yazdi plain, but these villages are gradually being abandoned for the cities and a new generation is using more Persian words, especially in digital communication. So these interviews provide a rich linguistic archive for future research. You don't need to read this. It's just a website because thanks to the support of the patrons fund, all these interviews are being digitised in the Endangered Languages Archive at the Zoroast Library. And I'm grateful to the head of the archive, Dr. Mandana Sepidini-Paw, for her advice and support for the project and Dr. Sophie Salfner, the digital archivist, as well as Bill Parker and Stephanie Pettit for their work in making the collection available online. All the interviews, or at least all the urban interviews are now available. So I'll end here just with a reflection that sadly it's once again difficult to undertake research in Iran, especially on religious minorities, and of course especially if you have a British passport. But we mustn't give up. With much of the world turning its back on Iran today, Iranian studies is as important now as it ever has been. Thank you.