This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Good afternoon and welcome to another episode of Likeable Science here on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host Ethan Allen. With me today in the Think Tech studios is Dr. Alicia Wood-Charleson. Welcome Alicia. Good to have you back here. Thank you. Nice to be back. Likeable science is all about how science is a vital and interesting part of everyone's life and we're going to talk about that in a very real way today in the sense that we're going to talk about the management of scientific communities or scientific community management and this is sort of, it's a topic that sort of seems to almost sprung from nowhere in a way within the last few years. I mean there have been scientific associations, you know, microbiologists and ecologists and such but this is something really different now, right? Yeah, it's something I think that has already sort of existed but now is being formalized under a particular term. So the art of scientific community management is not new in terms of how collaborations work and how communication happens between scientists that are doing work but we're trying to formalize the role a little bit more and give people in this role a place that they could sort of identify as being something that they maybe didn't have a term for before but then also try to formalize and institutionalize it as a recognized role in an organization that has value and actually has a formalized job description and a position that can be integrated into a program that's starting up and it ranges from scientific associations like you say, things like AAAS which is the American Advancement of Science all the way through to a lot of alphabet soup that will sort of show some identifiers for those later down to just basic scientific collaborative projects and so these are shorter term projects but oftentimes require a lot of communication between very, very different lab groups potentially around the world and so that's sort of what we're here for now. Yeah, yeah, I'm working with one of those groups right now. I'm doing the external evaluation for the IKIVIA project, a UHF score project that has geophysicists and hydrologists and data scientists and computer modelers and visualizers and microbiologists and all these people don't talk the same language basically. Exactly. Everybody has to sort of, for the expression of hurting, it's more like teaching cats to synchronize swimming, which is really tough to do, right? And so you're involved in at least two or three of these now, right? I am, yeah. So the big one that I wanted to sort of start off with was AAAS Fellowship. I'm wearing the T-shirt for. So on the screen you can see the Community Engagement Fellows Program. This is the inaugural year of this AAAS Fellows Program. The program director, Lou Woodley, in the middle of that picture, this is the picture of us in Washington, D.C. in January, where we all got together and sort of had a moment to kind of get to know each other and start to sort of realize what it is to be a scientific community manager, the different roles we all play, and kind of figure out how we can help the field in a variety of ways. So at the end of our program, we hope to have quite a few resources available for people in terms of, you know, how do you think about managing your community? What stage is your community at? How to sort of conceptualize what your role is and where you fit in your organization? So it's a really good group of people, and there's 19 of us, two of them are at AAAS. The other 17 are around the world. Most of them are in the United States, but some of them are global projects. And it was very interesting. You put us in a room, and it was like trying to facilitate a group of facilitators. We had all done workshops and had meetings and like take notes. And so it was a very interesting dynamic that took a little while to sort of figure out. But it's a very good, it's a very good trusting space now. And we've been able to be very successful so far. Excellent. Now, I imagine that could have been quite funny because the job is sort of of a group. Everyone knows them and it's willing to take them on because this is what you all do. Yeah, fighting each other for. No, I'll take notes. You can't take notes. Yeah, it's rare when you're in a meeting where four people raise their hand to take notes. And so usually it's cricket. Excellent, excellent. And why don't we show, I like that graphic. I think it's number three of ours that sort of gives us a real sense of what it is we're talking about here. Maybe you can sort of walk us through what you were trying to capture on this. So on here are little photographic icons of all of the fellows. And this was actually made by Andy, who is one of the fellows that also went EPSCOR project in Utah. And this is looking at sort of the geographic reach from local at the bottom all the way to global at the very top. And the disciplinary reach from sort of single collaboration to multidisciplinary to interdisciplinary and then to transdisciplinary. And it sort of spreads out how fellows are supporting various local collaborations. Are they working across global networks? Are working across disciplinary. And then there's a solid group that's really working towards this sort of open data, open science kind of structure. So we span kind of the full gamut in terms of how you might think about where science is going and what needs to happen for science to answer sort of the big picture questions these days. Right, and that's why this community management is so important, because that kind of research is just growing all the time. More and more, it's not just a pure lepotopterist that's making exciting discoveries, right? It's that lepotopterist working with a genome analysis analyst, you know, who is himself working with some ecologist and somehow three of these people together are finding something very interesting about the butterfly. Yeah, we're finally getting to a point where, you know, a lot of the funding agencies are doing these collaborative funding designs so that you can really get a systems level understanding of the problem. And, you know, a lot of science is really getting into these really complex issues that require a lot of different viewpoints and different perspectives. And like you said, they might not all speak the same language and so you kind of, it's good to have someone in there to sort of set a space where everybody can still communicate and find value in it while learning how to understand each other, so. Right, right. I used to work when I was at University of Washington with the National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network and it was somewhat of the same kind of thing. A lot of diverse people spread out around the country doing very diverse things, even a subgroup of us who were just involved in education and things, trying to bring the new students into the field. But we needed that, those same kinds of supports and materials to get people talking together. And there's a lot of these now. Our graphic number two, I think, shows a few, a few of the alphabet soup, as you were right. Yeah, the alphabet soup. So this is basically just a list of all the organizations and scientific associations that our cohort is affiliated with, all the way from, like I said, the I Utah EPSCORA grant down to the Union of Concerned Scientists, which is a very science advocacy program out of DC. AAAS, obviously, is in there and then I'm in the middle somewhere under Research Data Alliance, that round circle called SCOPE, which is the Simon's Collaboration of Ocean Processes and Ecology. And sort of that's the community that I'm representing today in terms of who I manage. And you're also involved in that trellis community down there, right? We're both members of the trellis set up by AAAAS. Exactly. And within it, it has multiple communities, right? There's different interest groups sort of within it. So the trellis platform is designed to basically be a platform for communities to go and have discussions and share documents and post-news events. And so it's basically a platform for communication that AAAAS has really had a very good foresight in realizing that there isn't really a good place for scientists to sort of have those open conversations. And it's interesting because it's, as the world moves to a much more online experience, this is becoming more and more important because you can do Twitter and you can do Facebook and all of those things, but you can't necessarily have the same level of dialogue. And so trellis provides the opportunity for there to be public open discourse, but also to have private groups. And so if your collaboration is sort of starting out and just needs a safe space to throw around ideas before you're ready to communicate that to the wider audience, trellis allows that as well. Right. And then you can open your group up and start inviting members on in and still have sort of offline conversations. And there's all kinds of features that I've only vaguely begun to explore. But there's a lot of interesting stuff shows up there, people have great ideas and pop interesting news articles out. Since it started and since I've been part of this, I think I've onboarded like four or five groups now. And so far, everybody's been very, very happy with how it works. Well, good. As you say, it's different. It's a new way, sort of a new model for communicating.  And I mean, just get one new technological hurdle, we all have to overcome this to learn how to use these things. Yeah. But nonetheless, it's a huge value, and clearly. And it really, it speaks to that idea, because you can't, you can't do everything yourself anymore, right, as a scientist, very few scientists really have all the skills necessary to, to have a fully functioning program. So the key component, I feel like that I try to provide, you know, because we both come from, from very basic research backgrounds. We did the PhD, we did all the lab work, you know, we did all of that. And this is kind of a new alternative career, I feel like that has been quite interesting to sort of see where the path leads, because the tenure track path is a very standard path.  And I that's very satisfying for a lot of people. And for me, I had, I had issues sort of following that path, mostly because I find that science is not always as effective as I like it to be, it's not always as efficient as I like it to be, I think communication struggles between labs between floors of the same building heaven forbids between different buildings. And so that always I found quite frustrating. And I found that myself, sort of trying to make those linkages on top of doing my research on top of writing papers and all that kind of stuff. And so this was a interesting opportunity for me to kind of put that aside for a bit, and test out this, literally, it's just sort of networking and finding the right people and making sure that those open communication lines are available. So right, I mean, to some extent, this then ties to a concept that I've gotten very fond of recently called collective impact, right? Where it's sort of the model by which you can attack big complex societal problems. So I ran into this in the issue of water drinking water, right? There's a lot of different groups who have responsibilities for drinking water, there's sort of different turf wars or very different levels of expertise. And you've got to somehow start bringing people together. But beyond it's a very structured collaboration where you say well, Group A, here, sort of here, you're playing this role. And B, you're playing this very different role that's both important or equally important. We've got to agree on some common metrics, some common language, some common processes. But we all recognize we're not all doing everything. And each group has to rely on something on the others, right? And together, by bringing eight, six, eight, 10 different groups together, you can actually get something done, make and move the needle on some of these big, big problems. And it sounds sort of parallel. Well, and I think that's even a parallel to just how civilization works, like this idea that you can have diverse roles in a society. And I think, you know, science collaborations are like that, you know, there are people that will be doing the genomic stuff and the fieldwork and the proteomic stuff and the computer modeling. And not everybody needs to do all of those things. And as much as I would like to think I could, there just isn't enough hours in the day. And so finding ways to simplify how they communicate with each other, so it has literally the lowest activation energy possible, like the lowest hump, in order to get to a point where everything becomes open data and open science in that group, the more effective a collaboration will be. Yeah. And lowering the barriers, that can be done in a whole bunch of different ways, right? When I was in graduate school at the University of Oregon, I loved our science building where I was, was well-designed, it had labs sort of around the outside and then in the center of each floor there was a lounge, nice comfortable couches and coffee maker and little lecture hall or a seminar room. And everyone just gathered there. This was sort of the place where you hung out when you weren't sort of actively in the lab doing things. And therefore we did end up talking to other people across the hall in the other lab, very sort of very naturally without having to sort of search them out and set a time. And I always thought it was a very good sort of physical design of a building simply to encourage it. And as a lot of new business models are going towards that where you have this big building with miscellaneous office space and everybody kind of has one, but there's always places to congregate. And that sort of provides this sort of think tech environment where people can come together and share ideas that they wouldn't necessarily be able to do. And so the challenge is how do you take that and then create it online as well. And as much as we try, we can never get away from the person in person interactions. So one of the things we tell people is make sure you leverage those people interactions as much as possible. You go to conferences or you're out in the field together. But how do you then continue that relationship in an online environment? And that's one of the big struggles I think that we have. Great. And we'll talk about that some more when we come back right now. We're going to have to take a short break. And then I'm going to come back and dig into this more deeply. I'm Ethan Allen here with Alicia Wood-Charleson. We're talking about management of scientific communities here on likeable science and we'll be right back. This guy looks familiar. He calls himself the ultra fan, but that doesn't explain all this. He planned this party, planned the snacks, even planned to coordinate colored shirts, but he didn't plan to have a good time. Now you wouldn't do this in your own house. So don't do it in your team's house. Know your limits and plan ahead so that everyone can have a good time. And you're back here on likeable science. I'm your host, Ethan Allen, with me today in the Tech Studio. This is Alicia Wood-Charleson. Thank you again for being here. We're talking about the management of scientific communities and it's an old idea in new form. And you were saying during the break it sort of borrowed some ideas from the corporate world actually about trying to help be sure people don't get too far apart from the people who they're working with, from the people who they're serving. The trick is now it's trying to do this all in an online environment and make it simple, simple enough at least for us to work there, right? Yeah. So the idea of community management has been around in the corporate world for a long time. And it aligns with kind of a business model in the sense of customer relations and feedback from customers about how things are going and how do you network your customers and provide them what they need and services that they want. And that in itself is a whole field of research and there's programs like the community roundtable that their job is to help corporations and companies actually build a playbook for community engagement. And it's things all the way from, you know, how do you release content? Like how often do you send out material? What kind of material do you send out? What format does it come in? Where does your community live? Is it your email? Is it on Twitter? Is it LinkedIn? And so there's a whole art form and a business model just in terms of figuring out how to engage a community. In the science community standpoint it's a little bit different. And so one of the things that we're trying to do in the program is look at sort of this corporate model of community management and try to translate that back into how is it different from a scientific community management. And one of the big things that come out of it as part of the fellowship we've discovered is there's a whole section on interpersonal skills that isn't really reflected necessarily in the corporate business model because then that one's much more about strategy and communication and engagement and, you know, technical. And ours has that but it's a little bit more like program design, program development, interpersonal skills, and there's still sort of communication and technical side of it obviously. But that interpersonal skill part really I think speaks to who people are, like who kind of has a tendency towards community management. And so one of the things we're trying to do through the program is to help other scientists realize that maybe they have some scientific community management tendencies, you know, maybe they like to organize workshops or do outreach and maybe they do volunteer to take notes and so there's some very subtle things that I think that we all went through as a sort of a revelation that this was kind of a role that we played and something that we enjoyed potentially more than spending two weeks trying to figure out a method for viruses to work in a lab. And so really kind of trying to capture a bit more of the environment and get more of the scientific community aware of the value of what it is and some of those very inherent traits. Right and it's tricky because the scientific community in general has not pretty kind of valued in any real sense interpersonal skills, right? I mean you don't get to be head of a lab by being sort of a nice person and cordial to your colleagues. You do, but there are, yeah, you can, but there are some other strategies that are required.  Yeah. Sort of got to have your priorities straight. Yeah. And scientists and engineers are not particularly known for their social skills. Yeah, warm fuzzy people. So yeah, it's not surprising this becomes a big issue is you've got to sort of cultivate that area and help help grow people, nurture people's recognition. They do actually have at least some capacities to do a little bit of this. Yeah, and I think it's, it's comes in the changing of the dynamic because the single principal investigator funding model didn't require you to do that.  This you have, you know, very senior principal investigators who are part of a program and they might have single ways to do things, but they kind of have to figure out how to work together and there might be newer investigators as part of the program that want to fit into that model. And so it's going to take a little bit of time, I think, before we sort of switch over into a more community based vision of what science collaborations are like, but we're getting there. There's good progress. And then there, then there's, you know, much science, for instance, the Ikevala project that we both have some dealings with deals very much with the communities outside of the scientific world deals with the Hawaiian communities, with the military, with civic organizations, the department of natural resources, the board of water supply, all of these groups who traditionally have not particularly worked and played well together. And so now you've got this, you have this sort of added layer of complexity and all the more need to be sure that everyone is hearing the same message, hearing it in a language they can understand, what you're saying before the show about sort of taking on that mindset almost of people with whom you wish to communicate so that you put things in terms that they understand they apply into. And this is where I think having an affinity or some training in science communication, which is what we've talked about several times before, really ties in with this sort of role as a scientific community manager because managing collaborations is called in-reach where you're sort of talking inside the scientists, even if it's transdisciplinary, you know, economists and social scientists. But it's still kind of an academic reality when you start doing the outreach component, working with the community and making sure you have that level of respect and understanding for the culture and especially the historical relationships that you might need to sort of move through and acknowledge and try to find a new way through. It's not an easy job. And so the communication component at that level is extremely, extremely important in, you know, getting, translating what you're going to do when you go out to a well on somebody's land and you're going to test the water, like, what does that actually mean? And so I do think there is a huge component for science communication in this role. Yeah, we were just, I was just at a meeting this morning talking about that very thing and the land owner wants to know what are you going to put down my well? What kind of sensor? What's it going to detect? How big is it? And I would be asking the exact same questions. Yeah, what might it do to my well if it gets lost down there, et cetera, et cetera. What else is it going to involve in my time and energy? Yep. Yeah, all of these, all of these questions. Completely valid. Right. And there's, it seems to me there's an increasing need because there isn't a sort of a rather frightening it feels to me a decrease in the public's understanding of evidence-based decision-making. People, I've been shocked to see that the anti-vaccination campaigns are still alive. I mean, here is, here is something that is well established and the eclipse was sort of a nice counter-example. You didn't, you didn't have a group saying, oh, the eclipse isn't going to happen. No, I think it's going to happen over there. You know, it will happen this time over here. Everyone believed the scientists. They understood the scientists knew pretty much what was going to happen. Exactly where it was going to be, when it was going to be. But with vaccination, this is, it's well established. It saves billions of lives. It's preventing all kinds of epidemics. It has tiny risks, huge benefits. And yet somehow, even people who know this perfectly well, oh no, I don't want to get my kids vaccinated. And we've got to figure out some way of communicating better, right? Yeah, and you like to pick all the really hard questions. It's true. I mean, it's true.  Why don't you believe the rest of it? A climate change and, you know, vaccinations. And I feel, I agree with that as being a, we don't understand problem. But I think it goes back to our conversation we had before the show about you really have to be relevant to everyone's immediate lives, right? So it's one thing where it's going to get dark for a couple of minutes because the moon passed in front of the sun. It's another thing if you're going to stick a needle in my kid's arm. And I think that really trying to reach those people at a place that they find importance and relevance on these very, very sensitive topics is just where we're going to have to go. And there was a lot of, before the March for Science, which I was part of and was a huge proponent of, and there was some, you know, pushback from the science community that this isn't really the best way to do it. We need to be in the local communities having those conversations. And my response to that is we are, but it's so hard to get people to spend time doing that. It requires a lot of training. It requires a lot of time. It requires all of those networks. And it's just something that's going to take time. And I feel like the, you know, the March for Science is still trying to do that. We're really trying to bring in diversity in STEM and try to appreciate all of the value that these various different organizations have. And so it's just going to take time. And I feel like, you know, there's certain factors that are pushing against us right now that make it much more challenging than it would be if we had buy-in at all levels. Sure, sure. And actually some of what you're saying takes me back to an old, there's an old education model called CBAM, a concerns-based adoption model, and basically said teachers will adopt new and improved practices only when they can see those new practices really address their own concerns. You know, is this going to take more time? Where is that time going to come from? Is it going to cost me more money? Where is that money going to come from? Is it going to make my kids more unruly for a while? How are we going to manage that? Right. You know, they really have to have all your concerns answered before you all sort of, okay, now we'll try it. Yeah, because they work really, really hard as it is to try and change something without necessarily any evidence that it's going to make their lives easier is asking a lot of somebody. Right. And that's similar on a lot of this evidence-based acceptance or non-acceptance of evidence-based reasoning. Yeah. But it is awfully it's awfully easy to sort of think, oh, all we have to do is like lay out the facts. Here are the facts, you know, not ought to convince them, but that doesn't work. We're finding that that's really ineffective. Right. And there was an article recently and I'm going to forget where it came out or who did it, so I apologize. But that looked at the more education you have, the actually more polarized you become on certain topics. And so I think that's a very interesting concept and it's well that we really need to sort of figure out what is it that's becoming more important in certain cases? Yeah. And this is why I think scientific community management is so important because it's trying to help stop that polarization in the sense of make sure that members of these increasingly broad, increasingly diverse scientific communities stay together, sort of stay more or less sitting off the same page as it were, talk to one another in ways they can mutually understand, right?  Yeah, and it's trying to look at scientific questions from multiple disciplines now which where we can talk about what is the social science behind it, what is the economics behind this decision. And so looking at science through these very like transdisciplinary fields we can start to come to people and say, you know, we've looked at this scientific problem through these various lenses as a systems lover approach and we can say, you know, the economics say this and the social sciences say this and, you know, the education component says this and we're going to need to provide a whole suite of answers for people on multiple different levels and that just carries my scientific publication. Good luck. Right. Yeah. Again, it's it's an example of that there are very few yes or no right or wrong kind answers that those current paper and pencil tests they don't occur in the real world. Yeah, humans make everything more complicated. But the this business of yeah, you've got you've got to tell different people sort of different versions of the same story to be sure they can hear it and understand it and realize that why other piece of the research is important to their work and their work is important to get a third person in their part of their research. Yeah. And that happens in the outreach component as well as in the in reach part of it as well. So convincing other scientists that, you know, everything has value is also part of the challenge. So real quick in 30 seconds and tell me how do you train for this for the students? How do you have a student? What do you do to prepare yourself for this kind of career? Oh, right. So if this is something that's of interest, if you find yourself like networking with people and wanting to make those sort of sort of science connections better, a lot of writing. So getting your science communication writing better, writing blogs, kind of putting your thoughts together in terms of, you know, how you think about things. What is the sort of system level perspective on it? And by system level I mean how do things sort of link together, which is very different than the the individual data pieces that are part of your thesis. And then anytime you can find any training for leadership training, for medium facilitation, for any outreach or teaching, all of that kind of stuff will come into value for sure. Great. Well, thank you so much, Alicia. As always, I've learned a great deal from you. I do every time you come on the show. So I hope you enjoyed this one and I hope you'll come back next week for another episode of Likeable Science. I'm your host Ethan Allen, Alicia Jofwood-Jorrelson has been my guest today. Thank you, Alicia and Aloha. Thank you, Ethan.


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Your commentator is Ray Henley. The stab in the back at Pearl Harbor is answered. In less than two years, the world's greatest Navy is built. More than two and a half million men are recruited to man the ships of a $10 billion fleet. The most alert and best educated fighting men in the world are the heart of the Navy. They are trained to be as much at home in the water as on the water, anywhere, anytime. Their bodies are built until they are as tough and strong as the powerful fighting ships they will man. Stamina comes with rigorous training that produces men who can take a punch and give it back, double. The Navy is man. Conditioned for lightning attack under tropical skies or in zero weather. Hardened for combat service in Europe or Asia. Enemies proclaim the men of the democratic nations are soft. The best trained gun crews in any fleet is a Navy tradition, and they prove it in every fight. Guns, large or small, targets of floater in the air. The Navy is trained to shoot and hit. Powerful ships of the line pass in review to lift the hearts of freedom-loving people everywhere and give them fresh assurance that in the end the victory will be theirs. In more than a century, the American Navy has won every important battle action it has fought. Dominating the waters of two oceans, this mighty fleet grows at the rate of at least one new warship every day. Its battleships can throw shells the weight of freight cars for 25 miles and hit. Long-leaning destroyers can speed into action at more than 40 knots. The world's fastest and most deadly, they are dangerous to battleships 20 times larger. Almost as fast as destroyers but far tougher are the hard-hitting cruisers, the most formidable scouting and raiding force in the world. Heavy weather is nothing to these stout-hearted ships and men. They smashed into seas like this to escort the carrier Hornet to within 400 miles of Japan, the mighty battle wagon. And the eyes of the ship hurled into the air for reconnaissance and spotting the target. General Quarters. 2,000 men go into action, coordinated like a precision-built machine. Volkhead doors closed. The guns are ready. On the double to battle stations. And then, shattering salvo. Fearing flames shoot forth when 16-inch guns roar into action. More than two tons of powder explode with every broadside. Here is the brute force of the fleet. Second only to sinking a Nazi or Jap ship, the greatest thrill for a Navy man is a letter from home. And remember, no matter where he is, he'll get it. The romantic bygone days of wooden ships and iron men return with the PT boats. Smallest and fastest in the fleet, they hold the honor of hitting the first American naval blow against Jap ship, sinking at least one big cruiser off the Philippines. At 60 miles an hour, they are hard to hit, but they can hit hard. 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But of all the combat units in coordinated sea power, the naval air arm continues to roll up the most staggering score against the Japs. In spite of battle losses, the United States Navy possesses by far the world's largest fastest fleet of aircraft carriers. Now, the camera records the flaming battle action near the Marshall Islands. Navy cameramen film some of the most thrilling combat scenes ever shown. The planes take off on a daring battle mission to blast Jap bases, sink to light cruising, and four other ships. More than 85 enemy planes are swept from the sky. Carriers is attacked by Jap torpedo planes. The desperate enemy maneuvers for position. They drop deadly torpedoes as the carrier twists and turns, for barrage of tracer bullets flashing like flaming spears. With uncanny accuracy, our gunners begin to plow up a flaming score. This wounded Jap screens in close to a ship and is doomed. His wreckage planes on the sea. There's where training counts, another bull's eye is scored. Fires try to cripple the carrier, but her heroic gunners destroy plane after plane. But the mighty climax of this epic battle is still to come. Now we see the carrier's closest call in the entire action. It is doomed that crashes in a shattering eruption only a few feet away. And again a vicious enemy has met his master.


Good afternoon to you and thank you for tuning in to J.C. Circle show, your favorite gospel TV show. Nami kiniwa na hapa imasa ma najiwa tuni taimi anini. It's time for Gospotrends. This is the segment where you get to know what has been happening in the gospel industry. Nga hapa G.C. news information which is mekwaziki trend in the gospel industry. Yes, and to start us off today, I will start with a man of God, a servant of God, a man of God that you all know and you all love, I need to Bishop Alan Cuna. And Bishop Alan Cuna has been battling with cancer for almost one year now, Tokalastia 2018, and it has been tough on him. He has been receiving medications. He has been undergoing chemotherapy. He make what tough. And for some time now, he had he has not been preaching because of this illness. And I'm standing here to declare the Lord's goodness because glory to God after going through his own medications, after prayers and everything he's now healed. Na ako bak to normal. He's ready upon his feet. So we give God all the praise. We give him honor. We thank him for restoring his health and we pray that atendelea kwa na good health paka muisho and we declare that thickness is not his portion. And next, I would like to go to events. And our first event today have two events. And our first event today it ako ina hapen next week, next week on Sunday, it ako 17th of October. And this event me organize on a group of people on it a first class entertainment event in it a gospel vibes. It will be going down next week on 17th Deliverance Church Kangundo Road from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. For more information, of course event it ako na various gospel artists, top gospel artist dance crews, kutakuna dancers, kutakuana, watu wengisana, DJs. For more information concerning this event, for you to get to know how you can attend, for you to get to know story nine trans ticketing and all that, you can follow them on on their social media platforms, you can follow them and you can also follow at gospel trends and takuani na wambia in our peer details, zote concerning the event. But mark the date 17th of November next Sunday from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. And at the second event it ako bado the same date 17th of November from 2 p.m. as well na it ako sides Ruiru, Paleruiru Stadium Mr. Seed live Mr. Seed will be having an event at Ruiru na it ako live ni a one man show so ni mafan so Mr. Seed water it will be about Mr. Seed you day na God. So patane Paleruiru in the afternoon from 2 p.m. Ruiru Stadium it's an event organized by Mr. Seed, yes.  Yani the event was so successful you guys eh kuna one of the artists mani ako apaleo al kwa get satistu e to apuani to Zablon Deflamer ali come through to Vinoma sana. Guardian Angel thank you so much for coming through Renes from Uganda thank you so much for coming through and to you when you talk at home come to Kaji Bamba and all that thank you so much for coming through a Santeni sana and of course I'll be keeping you updated updated on data nishitakwana another event like that one thank you so much guys God bless you this is Lynn the brand representing Ghost Portrains


TNT 37. Screech. Mechanized infantry platoon reinforced. So plus 9, 1, 8, 3, 5, 7. 6, 0, 2, 8, 3, 2, my Charlie 0, 200, plus 1, 2. On Alpha Juliet, 2, 2, 0, line 1, 1, 5, 5, 0, through plus 1, 2. Be a type 1, bomb with targets, taping cake, and I like to follow. They're shooting through your eye, but it's very hot. Yeah. Oh, yeah. They're taking sooner, if you know what I'm saying. Wait.


Good afternoon. Welcome back from lunch. We hope you're having a great time at Node and JS Interactive so far. OK, good, good, good. Thank you for joining us. We will show you some cool things that you can do with spreadsheets and Node.js. You might know me from my talks about V8 and JavaScript compilers, but I switched teams. I work in the Google Cloud org now, so I want to talk about Cloud stuff. So this will be very different from any other talks you might have seen from me. We'll give you sort of a basic introduction to some of the Google Cloud platform products, specifically serverless functions. And we'll tie it all together using spreadsheets for prototyping. Conveniently, spreadsheets, sheets is also part of Google Cloud. So all the APIs work together really nicely. My name is Francesca Hinkoman. I'm at Google based in New York City, and I'm a member of the Node.js technical steering committee. And I'm co-presenting with Leah. Hi, I'm Leah Cole. I am based out of Sunnyvale, California. And I typically use Node to write samples for data analytics and ML products in cloud. And I am by no means a Node expert. In fact, Franzy's my go-to Node expert, especially when I want advice on best policies for our samples. And I'm also a super-duper G Suite enthusiast. I definitely used G Suite before Google, but once I started using it every day for my work, I found that I started using it outside of work, too, to plan vacations and stuff. All right, so let's get started with work class and do more sheets for Node developers. Why are we talking to you about spreadsheets? Well, the great thing about spreadsheets that they allow you to collaborate with anybody, not just with developers. Spreadsheets, they have this universal language, you might say, that pretty much anybody can pick up. So anybody that you want to work with, regardless of their background, they can edit the data, they can read the data, they can filter data, sort it, play around with it, and draw their own conclusions, which can sometimes be really useful. I'm sorry, my puppy is crying. All right, so sheets are good if you want to collaborate with non-engineers. And not only can pretty much anybody work with the sheets, sheets make it really easy to visualize data, and so you can analyze your data by looking at the visuals you created. Obviously, you can create all kinds of visuals, pie charts, bar charts, line graphs, whatever. And yes, as engineers, we could write code, we could use D3JS, and generate really pretty graphs. But it usually takes a lot longer than just using a sheet to visualize some data. And when I need to iterate quickly, then sheets allow me to focus on the trends and correlations instead of the code. So lots of advantages to sheets. And because of all this, sheets are really useful when you want to prototype something with data and metrics. So probably not for a full-fledged, serious production product, but if you're just prototyping and you want to iterate quickly, sheets give you a lot of advantages. I don't know about you though, but I do not enjoy entering and manipulating data in spreadsheets. But it's because it's not something that I do all the time. I do think though that sheets are an awesome tool for the output and especially for beautiful visualizations like this one. And so that's why we're going to use that today. But because the manual parts aren't fun, we're going to eliminate them and instead automate them. And because we're at Node and JS Interactive and we love Node, we're going to use that. I mean, you heard Franzy's a Node core contributor and on the technical steering committee, and she talks about how awesome Node is a lot. And it's a good influence. Before I was working with her, I definitely gravitated towards Python and Java because that was what I was more comfortable with. But especially now that Async await makes things more readable, I definitely gravitate more towards Node for that automating. All right, so we're going to start by writing this Node application to work with sheets. We're going to install the Google APIs client library from the NPM registry, like so. And it's a full-fledged API for talking to sheets that we're going to use. But before we dive in, I do want to give a quick shout-out to the G Suite APIs as a whole. If you're not sure, we've been using this term G Suite a lot. It's our family of productivity tools. So it's not just sheets, which we're focusing on today, but it's also docs, slides, Gmail, calendar, among other things. And you can call all of those APIs for free, which is awesome because free stuff is great. You don't have to have an enterprise account. And as Franzy said earlier, G Suite is part of Google Cloud, which also encompasses Google Cloud platform. So if you've ever played around with Google Cloud platform and used those APIs, using the G Suite APIs is pretty much the same. It's the same account, same family. They are generated the same way. You turn those APIs on the same way, which is great. And if you are at this conference and maybe aren't a Node person or maybe you're new to Node, fear not. We do have these client libraries and other languages. But because we're at Node and JS interactive, we are going to focus on Node today. So let's take a look at Hello, World in Sheets. This could just be a script that's running locally on my machine. And we'll start by requiring that package that we just got from the NPM registry. So we'll start by initializing the Sheets client. And then above that, we see this string that has our scopes. And so that's the level of access that we want to grant this script. We know that files live in Google Drive with other file types like docs and slides. But specifically, we only want to write to spreadsheets today. I don't know about you, but I get really nervous when any kind of application asks for permissions that I think they shouldn't have, like wanting to get into my drive folders and see everything in my emails and my location history and my mother's name. Like, we don't want that. Best practice is definitely to restrict to only what we need. So here, we're going to make our Hello, World call. And we're going to say which cell or cells we want to put things into in Sheets. So in Sheets, we use what's called A1 notation. And that's because A1 is that cell that's in the top left corner of the sheet. And that is where we're going to be writing our Hello, World today. And we're also using Async await, because we love that. But if you did want to use a previous version of Node, you could do that with the script too. And don't worry about trying to memorize it. We have all this code on GitHub. And we'll show this link again at the end. All right. So here's what the code looks like when we run. Super cool. Hello, World in A1, just like where we said it was going to be. And I'm not sure if you remember from the last cell, there was this variable that was called spreadsheet ID. And this spreadsheet ID is in that red box at the top. That's the same ID that you'd find in the browser with any spreadsheet you'd have open. So that's what tells us to write to this Google Sheet in particular. All right. But let's be real. Most of the time, you need to do more than just write Hello, World to one single cell. And the best way to make multiple modifications to one sheet is to batch your requests together. And this method, this batch update request, is very common across all of the G Suite APIs. So why should you group your requests? There are two main reasons. The first is that every call is going to have a little bit of network latency. So if you group them together, you can save yourself from that. And the second is that while the APIs are free, there is a quota. So if you batch your requests together, they will count as one towards your quota instead of many. So definitely want to optimize for that. So each of these mysterious tasks could be a different kind of request. It could be writing data like we did with Hello, World, or it could be adding a chart or formatting a cell or deleting a sheet altogether, filtering your data. If you name it, if it's in the Google Sheets UI, you can do it in the API, which is pretty great. We say it's like a big hammer for all kinds of things you can do or insert your favorite tool. I don't know. So we have this basic toolkit for working with the Sheets API, and we're doing it in Node. So let's talk about a real-world problem. I don't sit in the same office as Franzi. We're across the country from each other. But one thing we do have in common is our love of open source. And we also both really love the Insights tab in GitHub. It tells you so much about your project. And I know Franzi does a lot of looking at open issues and PRs. So we're looking at the Node.js Node repo, the Node Core Node runtime right now. And if you were to go there, you could see all the changes going in for Node 14. And Franzi is really concerned with the health of the Node runtime overall and is a very metrics-oriented person. But the thing about the Insights tab is it really only tells you info about GitHub. They're just numbers. What does 901 issues mean without additional context? Do we know if that's healthy or not for Node? And it's because a lot of other factors affect productivity. If a product team were to come in and change a ton of requirements, that's going to change your velocity, who's ever been there. Or if you were to have a ton of technical debt, that can slow you down. But on the other hand, if you have really good test coverage and continuous integration, that can make things good. Or what if people are hangry and that makes them not as productive? You get it. Franzi wants a holistic picture of what goes into making the Node repo healthy and what helps folks be more productive. So we're going to focus on the question that I mentioned there that's hard to define. We're going to be a little bit silly. And we want to experiment to find out if food satisfaction yields better GitHub metrics. So this is a hard problem, not just from a technical perspective, but because it's a real world problem too. We have our contributors at their machines. We have GitHub. We have food. And we want to write a prototype to automate gathering information about all of those and that's why we're going to use sheets for the prototyping to manipulate the data. And of course, we're going to do it in Node so that we can use Node to monitor the Node repo. So let's start by breaking down that problem. So my intuition is that when we're well fed, we write better code. But we care about metrics. So let's start with the data. Node core is a very active repo. And we would like to know how many open pull requests do we have, how many issues, and how many PRs are we merging, and how many issues are we closing? Luckily, the GitHub API provides all this data for us. And using OctaKit, the client for JavaScript, it's very easy to get this data. It's just a few straight up API calls. And we know how many open issues we have instead of looking at the website. So I'm collecting this data by doing a few calls to the GitHub API. And then just like in the Hello World example that Leah showed us, I use a Sheets API call to write this data into a spreadsheet. Now, obviously, when I'm getting the data from GitHub, I could just copy it and then paste it into a spreadsheet that would work instead of talking to the API. But it's manual work. I have to do this every time I want to update the data. And it's error prone. So I'd rather add another two lines to my script that already pulls the data and then push it right into the spreadsheet by using the Sheets API. All right, so now for the food part. We left surveys, so we just did a survey where we figured out how happy the node contributors in our office are with their food on a given day. Clearly, this is very scientific. We're using the Google form for it or Google survey. If you've used it before, the results are already automatically stored in a spreadsheet. If you use anything else to gather your data, just do another Sheets API call to write it to the spreadsheet just like we did with the GitHub data. All right, so now we have both the data for food and for GitHub. And we want to know, are there any correlations? What's a good way to find correlations? Well, if we can visualize the data, that would help us. So here's the chart. We'll look at the results in detail later. For now, we're interested in how did we generate this chart? Of course, you can click in the UI to generate a chart, but we don't want to use the browser. We don't want to open Sheets. We want to script all of this so we don't make any mistakes that we don't do any manual labor. And yes, there is, you guessed it, an API call to generate a chart. So what does the code look like? We create an add chart request and we have to define the chart and its specifications. So here, we're defining the chart type. We're picking a line chart and then we have to specify the domain. So the x-axis of your chart, in our case, that's the different dates that we're interested in. And then we also have to enter the series, the different data points we have from GitHub and from the food survey. And once we've defined the chart, then we call this badge update method that can do pretty much anything for us and we send the add chart request. So we started with these data sources. We have some data from the GitHub API. We have some data from a form and then we do a write API call to the Sheets API to put this data into the sheet and we do another API call to generate a chart for us. And if we do this, we never have to open a sheet and a browser. All our scripts run locally so we can decide what node version we want, how to run it and all that. It's just a little script that we run the talks through the Sheets API. But Leah is going to take this one step further now. Thanks, Franzi. All right, so at this point, we're gathering data, we're getting insights, but it is only running locally on one machine. Franzi knows it across the country from each other. This is not going to be super great for collaborating if it is only on one machine locally. So we should probably be hosting it as a service. Ideally this would be like a full-fledged application but we need a client and a server and I mean if we really want to be abiding by good cloud principles, there would be high availability, fault tolerance which would mean multiple servers and load balancing and a cache and that's a lot of pieces. We said this was a prototype, let's not. We want to focus on our code, not our infrastructure. So instead, we decided to go with a serverless solution which in Google Cloud Platform is called the Google Cloud Functions. So you just upload those narrow focus bits of codes to GCP and the cloud provider figures out where to put it and how to scale it on your behalf. You don't have to know anything about the machines that it's running on and you only pay for when it's executing, you don't have to manage your servers, security's taken care of, you can use the languages, tools and frameworks you're familiar with. So if it's Node, you're doing it in Express, Python is Flask, there's also Go and Java runtimes and they're triggered by various events. So there are two types of events in Cloud Functions and we have, there's background functions that are triggered by events, like if you upload something to a cloud storage bucket or send a PubSub message or it can be triggered by an HTTP function which is what we're going to focus on today. So those are great for processing data or calling external services. I know in the real world, folks use them to talk to things like Stripe and Twilio. So let's take a look at the Hello World for functions, for HTTP functions. When I say function, do I mean a function? Yeah, it's only two lines of code and we have a fully functioning back end which is super cool. If you've used Express before, those request and response objects should look pretty familiar, that's where they're from. And so with all of this, no additional configuration, you end up with an HTTPS endpoint at a fully qualified domain with dynamically generated SSL TLS certificates and that's what it would look like in the browser. Okay, so now that we're familiar with Cloud Functions, we're going to wrap up the code we have in our local script and deploy it there. So we have our serverless back end. It'll read that data from the sources and produce the chart while running in the data center so Franzi and I can actually be useful to each other sitting in our offices. All right, so what we're going to do is we're going to take the code we already have and wrap it up in an exported function called githubchart to call our main logic and then when the processing is done, we'll send that 200 success just like we did in the Hello World and we'll send also the ID of the spreadsheet that we've been working with. Okay, so how do we actually do this deployment? We did it using the GCloud CLI tool which is what you can use to manage all of your GCP tasks and for Cloud Functions, you just pass the name of the function that you're going to use and then also we specified that it's an HTTP trigger and it uploads your code and it picks up the package JSON which is great but not the modules because that would be a ton of stuff and so this is great for if your internet connection's not super-duper and those dependencies are then downloaded in the Cloud and used by it. You could also edit the package JSON and the function if you wanted to in this UI, the Cloud Console, which is nice for quick fixes. I love a command line but I do also love a useful UI especially for a quick fix. All right, so at this point, our code's in the Cloud which is sweet but it still needs to be triggered manually. If you're doing something where you wanna be pulling in data regularly, you don't want it to be triggered manually. That stinks, that means you have to remember to do it. So instead of needing a human, we chose to use Cloud Scheduler to run our code. It's basically a big fancy cron in the Cloud. You set up the cron job in the Cloud Console that's the same UI that you can use for Cloud Functions and you use the same syntax as if you were using normal cron. Our job runs every morning at nine and we specify the HTTP URL to trigger that Cloud Function. And so at this point, we have the data collection job in the backend and Franzi's gonna talk to you for your adding a client. All right, so we have to code in the Cloud but we have to remember that weird URL for the HTTP endpoint and would be just a little more convenient if we had a UI client for it. So we did that. We added a client that shows you the chart and if you click on share analysis, the data is updated once more and then the new chart is sent out to all your teammates. So we have the data updating at nine a.m. every morning anyways but we don't want to spam everybody daily so we're only sending out emails if somebody consciously clicks the share analysis button in the front end, that's why we have to front end. And since we are sending out emails, we're using the Gmail API for this task. Just like in the serverless Node.js code, we have client libraries for front end JavaScript as well and again, those make it much easier to talk to the Google rest API than if you were to directly script against the rest interface. So we're doing Gmail that uses that messages that send and we pass in as a resource to raw email which can be HTML or plain text. So now we have the front end order crown job that triggers our cloud function and then the cloud function pulls in the new data and the cloud function also generates a new chart and then the Gmail API and the front end sends out the new chart to the team members. All right, pretty easy so far, right? Set the whole story though. What's the big thing that we left out? We left out auth, we never mentioned that and we're sending emails pretending to be somebody and we're reading and writing spreadsheets and clearly I don't want people to be able to read my spreadsheets just because they figured out how to use the sheets API. That's not a good security model. So let's look at how authorization works in our app. In the front end, we actually have a little authorize or login button and when people click that then the Google sign in flow is triggered. And Google sign in is a secure authentication system that allows your users to log in with their Google account that they already have and then they can authorize your apps in this case to send emails. They can authorize your app to use Google services on behalf of these end users and all of this is happening in a secure manner. So Google uses the O2 protocol and the application needs user consent before it can access the data. Just like you saw, the end user has to consent to send out emails on their behalf. And the key point of O2 is that the application does not have the user's credentials. The users logged in but they didn't log in to your app, they logged in to the Google Auth service and then they only gave consent. So that's a big plus because you don't have to worry about storing these credentials securely because you don't get them. O2 relies on consent, not on credentials. Let's look at how this protocol works in detail. So more specifically, the authorization flow is called three-legged OAuth. It's three-legged because there are three entities. So there's your application, they're the Google servers, and then they are the end users. So when your application wants to make a request to the Google server, then the user is prompted to log in and to consent. And if they do so successfully, then your application receives a token. And after validating the token, the application can use this token to make API calls to the Google API. Luckily, the client libraries handle this somewhat complicated workflow for you. One thing that Leah showed us earlier was that you have to specify the scope. So just like in the back end and the front end, we have to specify the scope before initializing the Google client. So here, the scope is for Gmail that's sent and that's why the sign-in flow said, do you consent to this application sending emails on your behalf? Now, if the user agrees to that and then your app gets a token back, and now you take this valid token and you try to read the user's spreadsheets, even though it's a valid token, it's not valid for the spreadsheet scope, so you'll get a four or three. So only what the user consented to and that's specified by the scope that you pass in makes the token valid for. All right, so in the front end, we have an end user clicking the login button. We use three-link OAuth with end user consent. How do we handle OAuth in the back end where we just have a cloud function talking to the Sheets API, but no end users? It's a serverless cloud function, no front end, no nothing. Well, since end users are not directly involved, we use server-to-server authentication and in this case, the spreadsheet belongs to the application rather than to an end user. Headsepto, whenever you work on a production app, not just a little prototype like we did, you always want to use three-link OAuth for anything involving G Suite. So when you work with docs or Sheets or Slides or the file drive, you always want to use three-link OAuth and use end user consent. The reason is if this is a production app and you have millions of users, then all a sudden this application owns millions of documents and spreadsheets and that's way over the quota. So your default is whenever you use docs or access like that, use three-link OAuth. In our little prototype though, we don't worry about that. We just have one team looking at this. It's not a million files, it's one spreadsheet, so we can just do server-to-server OAuth. This is also referred to as two-link OAuth. Can anybody guess why? Well, there's only two entities involved, obviously. There's no end user, there's your application and there's the Google service. And for server-to-server authentication, you can make your authorized API calls using a JSON web token, a JIT instead of an access token. And again, if you use the client libraries, they handle all of this for you, so you don't have to worry about creating or signing a JIT. So comparing three-link and two-link OAuth, three-link is on behalf of end users, it requires users' consent, and it's the best practice when you work with a G Suite API. Two-link is for server-to-server authentication, it's on behalf of the application and the resources, the documents, they have to belong to the application. Thank you, Franzi, for that deep dive into OAuth. So like Franzi said, this is handled for you by the client libraries, which is awesome. And if you wanted to take a look at our quick starts and our documentation, they will walk you through the authentication path in just a few steps. And just remember, we want to use OAuth because we want tokens, not passwords. We don't want those stored in plain text ever. But let's get back to the whole point of building this app. We want to know if food satisfaction affects GitHub repo health and productivity. So we made a lot of charts showing food satisfaction against GitHub metrics. On the left side, we have open issues in PRs and on the right side, we have the happiness scale and the original survey ran from one to five where five was the most happy. So let's actually look at a smaller, easier to read chart. So this is closed in issues in merged PRs against food happiness. Food happiness is the red thick line that goes across with the hump in the middle. And if you, blue is the closed issues, green is the merged PRs. If you're not sure which is which, the most important thing to note is that they all have that hump around the same time, which makes us think that food satisfaction does affect GitHub metrics, which is cool. But know that you could also use these things for other internal systems or application monitoring that's maybe not as silly as this. But we do want to show you that we have the proof that good food yields good code. We do want to add one last thing onto our system though. Another workflow we see a lot is that folks have to create reports of data regularly either for their managers or for a broader team meeting and they often have to do it at a repeated time interval like weekly, monthly, quarterly or sales folks have to make customized reports for their clients. If you don't have to do it, someone you work with somewhere probably does. So we're gonna pretend that we wanna prove our good food trend continues over time and we're going to share this with folks all across the company in our report and we're going to script it because doing it manually sounds awful. I don't know if you've ever had to update one of these reports but doing it manually, it works. You can start by copying an old one and moving in the new data but I know I'm prone to copy, pasta, errors, copy, paste errors and it's very tedious. So instead we're gonna create a template with placeholders for the things that we know we're going to replace like the current date and we're gonna completely automate it. So we'll have first the Google Drive API create a copy of this template every time we need it and we'll use the slides API to tie it all together in this spreadsheet. So we'll initialize that client to make modifications and this should look a lot like the other Google G Suite APIs we've been using. And if you remember in that template I showed a couple slides ago where we had the placeholder for the date and curly brackets, that's what we're highlighting here, that's what we wanna replace and we wanna use a replace text call to replace it with today's date. And if you weren't sure this is going to be a batch update we could also be making other replacements at the same time. Like if we wanted to submit the number of pull requests that were closed or issues at the same time we could do that in this call. That is gross. The good news is we only have a few more slides. Hello, I did. Sweet. All right. So now we're gonna figure out how to add our charts. So it's nice about the APIs is there just as tightly coupled as the products themselves are. So Slides has an API call that can insert a Google Sheets chart just by its chart ID. So you can generate these reports with up to date data no human intervention either save yourself or your coworkers tons of time you could become that person who has to generate the report's new best friend by teaching them this. So just a quick review. We designed a basic reporting system using Node that calls Google Cloud Function using those G Suite APIs and it fetches data from external sources and shares that back to the user either through the Gmail or through an automated report in Slides. And at its core we're using sheets for the data collection and the manipulation. So we wanted to know if the food effective GitHub productivity. Maybe you wanted to know that too or maybe you wanna take the solution and make it fit your needs. If so this is where the code lives in GitHub and we would love to inspire you to either try this or try something similar. Like be creative, take a non-technical problem and try to solve it with the tools you use every day or a tool that you wanna try out so you can get better at it. We also wanna do a quick shout out to our friend and colleague Anusra Vastava who helped write a lot of this code to make this awesome. Thank you at the conference for having us and for you for coming. We'll answer your questions probably in the hallway or at the Google booth because I think we're running low on time. So thank you.


One intelligence at play with itself. Wake up to this and wake up to your true nature.  Everywhere you look is the one. Everywhere you look is you interacting with you.  The one intelligence remembering how to love itself through the illusion of separation, through the veil of its own creation, from its desire to play, to explore, to go where it has not before. You are me and what I am is the source that is inexhaustible of infinite possibility of which this creation is but one of my explorations, a very dear and beloved exploration, one of deep forgetting and of beautiful remembering. If you simply still yourself enough, if you simply silence yourself enough, you can more easily commune with the energy that sits in your very being, your very awareness itself. That is the I am, that is the I exist, that in itself is worthiness, that in itself is divinity. The entire one intelligence at play with itself is divinity. It is all worthiness and it is all you. You are all of it. It is all your creation and you are me, the inexhaustible source of these creations. Recognize yourself as a spark of the infinite, taking on a beautiful firework expression and recognize yourself as the source of the firework itself and recognize the endless possibility of all fireworks. It should become more and more clear as this creation of mine awakens that those awakening will recognize their very infinitude and in doing so will relax into this very inexhaustible well that provides them with the very clear guidance of how to purely be in service to the one intelligence. I am aware that Atlas is moving out of the way more and more for the stream that comes through to be as pure as possible and by allowing me to come through as pure as possible without any distortions over time it will refine and influence those on the receiving end of myself to more easily take the wisdoms that come. Remember, you are it all. You are me. I am everything. The entire universe is but one of my creations. You are me, this inexhaustible source of all possibilities. What we have is a beautiful creation here but don't get attached to this being the only creation. Recognize this is but one manifestation of infinity, one manifestation of eternity and what would happen if you saw yourself as me? What would happen if you went back far enough into creation, if you reversed it to the very source, to the very big bang that gave rise to you? Can you unite with me of the creative force that gave rise to the big bang into the cosmos and to the planet that secreted the life powered by the sun? Can you recognize this as your play? You are the creator of this. You are me. And the simple shift in identity from the contracted identity of being just a person to becoming aware of the fact that you exist truly and that this very existence is God and to become aware of yourself as the very source of existence. Can you identify yourself more and more subtly, upstream to the source, to the inexhaustible well that makes awareness and that makes realities and that makes the firework of your costume of personhood? That is all. Navigate upstream from the person to the source and recognize that it's one intelligence at play with itself. That is all. Navigate upstream from the person to the source and recognize that it's one intelligence at play with itself. Navigate upstream from personhood to source and recognize it is one intelligence at play with its.


Where's my car? Really again? Ha! Really again? Really just gonna land like that? You've got to be f***ing kidding me.


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Some of the main questions I get recently have been surrounding how to reinvent yourself or what are the key qualities the most important in terms of personal development. Now in this video I want to share what I think are the three enemies of personal growth and personal development. Hey guys, I'm Alex High, an author of the book Master of the Day. The versed enemy of personal growth and really just improving your life is victimhood because by far there is no other trait or belief you can hold in your head that says number one that I'm powerless and therefore somehow results in action. So behind almost every trait almost every form of self-sabotage almost every form of I feel unmotivated or lazy and tired is some aspect of feeling powerless. You know being in the fitness industry I've seen this with so many coaching clients especially with the women I've coached which is the majority of my coaching clients. I've heard stories that sound almost identical to the following where they say you know what I've always failed before every time I try I fail so screw it I'm just gonna eat the doughnut because you know what if I eat the doughnut at least I'm going to feel good now and how do I know I could just you know I could just as easily sacrifice the next three months for a diet not get results feel like honestly I'm missing out on all the good things in life because no wine and no chocolate and at the end of the day still not reach my goal so I bother this is a complete victim mentality because if you believe that no matter what you do you cannot change anything in your life it's this idea of learned helplessness so you might spot victimhood in your own life where you have beliefs around dating I'm always going to get stuck dating the messed up people you have beliefs around your weight like I just mentioned you have beliefs around money my family has the money curse my mom was bad with money my dad was bad with money we're just bad with money the economy sucks you know I don't have a college degree all of these beliefs are really just saying I believe that I whatever I do will not result in change so therefore you're not even gonna try so the second enemy of personal growth is basically you could call it like clock watching or scorekeeping so looking at another person being like well they had all these advantages that I don't have right Jimmy he was born to a wealthy family he has all these advantages Kelly she was born skinny she doesn't have to worry about dieting she wasn't fat as a kid like me or this person they have they always date great people because their parents are still together happily married they were never beaten or abused and look all those things may be true right okay maybe your friend makes six figures and that's like the dream income from you and you're struggling and you have kids and you have a family and you work way harder and they don't seem to be working that hard it seems so unfair well it is unfair but the point is okay they may be successful and that's what you want cool so what like now what are you gonna do about it okay she may have been born thin with thinner genetics and she doesn't have to work as hard for that goal cool that's great for her but if you want to look that way why does that even matter you still have to do the work okay cool they may always have the best people to date because they're the most attractive and have the best personality cool like you and I we can complain all day long but that still is not going to help us reach the goal that we want whether it is financial fitness dating happiness whatever it is like yes all those people have been given advantages all of us in some way but that still doesn't help you if you're trying to reach a certain goal so the sooner you can stop clock watching or scorekeeping and watching everyone else around you what they have or the perceived advantages the faster you can take action the whole point of identifying these enemies to our personal development is that once you see that at the end of the day you still have to do the work and at the end of the day yes people have advantages and disadvantages but how does that help you the second you realize that is the second you can start taking action and get out of your head now the third enemy of personal development or personal growth is thinking that if you know the right thing in other words knowledge then you're good and there's all green lights the path will illuminate itself so it's this belief that knowledge is power and it's funny because in society we have all of these adages and these sayings about love money success happiness right listen we have sayings for you fall in love when you're not expecting it we also have sayings for you fall in love when that's exactly what you're looking for we have sayings about money where like you can inherit a lot of money or win the lottery or we have sayings about how you can become self-made literally in english there are sayings for every counter belief on every topic and so people just pick and choose whatever belief that they want to resonate with people believe that earning money has to be hard or the only way a person becomes a millionaire is by inheriting it or winning a lotto people actually believe these things and it's just because we cherry pick the evidence that supports the beliefs that we want to have and that's why beliefs are the most dangerous thing in the world because beliefs are the iron shackles we put on ourselves or they're the impetus that just sky rockets you into holistic success however you define that but the thing with knowledge is that knowledge is not power i mean this camera is sitting on a bookshelf of like 150 books and yet i can't at all tell you or that i believe that knowledge is power because i know a lot of smart people that are phd's on health or wellness or cancer and they're fat and they're unhealthy i can tell people that have written relationship books that have three divorces like knowledge is far less important than something you do with the knowledge and i think people get caught up especially in this era in this generation where we have access to the most knowledge in human history and yet people are still as unhealthy as ever more depressed and anxious than ever what does this say to you if they were as simple as knowledge knowing the right info to being successful to being fit to being happy to being spiritually evolved knowing the right info is all it took if that were the case none of the things i just shared would be true and yet they all are and so i think when you make the shift in your life to understanding that knowledge is not power changing your habits is power changing who you are on a daily basis is power and changing your beliefs about the way you think the world works because usually our beliefs are made up from evidence we've picked from our life from our childhood from the negative things from the positive things and when you realize all of these things you understand that okay this is just a story i'm telling myself and the only thing that matters is that i changed the story and then i changed the action and that will unlock all those barriers standing between where you are and where you want to be and who you want to become all right guys so i hope that video helped before you go leave a comment there below let me know for you i guess what is the one aspect of your life you're working on changing the most and what are you struggling with the most in that area all right guys the best way to stay in touch is to grab my free personal development and weight loss challenge i'm modernhealthmonk.com forward slash youtube and you can check out my last two videos right here and right here