Hey everyone, Chris here from IELTS Advantage and in this lesson, what I'm going to do is talk about task 2 introductions. Recently we worked with a student who jumped from a band 6 to a band 8 and what she did was not really add anything new to her introductions but remove all of the bad things. So we're going to talk about 7 things that you never ever want to put in your introduction but before that, what I'm going to do is show you the high important introductions actually are by taking you up here. So welcome to my home time, I'd like to introduce you to it. So not a great introduction, is it? Do some rocks and some bushes, not a great introduction but if we slowly pan around then we can see that this is a very different introduction. So 2 things that are exactly the same, my home time, can have very different introductions and that creates a very different impression and they say first impressions last. So you could have an amazing thing, your essay could be amazing but if you're including some of these 7 things in your introduction, you are going to be lowering your score.  Okay, so let's start off with the question. It's really, really important that we fully understand the question before we can write our introduction and this is one of the key mistakes that we see students making all the time and it's related to the things you want to avoid in your introduction. So let's have a look at it and fully understand it. Many argue that schools are no longer necessary because children can learn so much from the internet and be educated at home. Do you agree or disagree? So pause the video if you like and just have a read of that again to make sure that you fully understand this.  What I'm going to show you is 2 introductions. Introduction A and Introduction B. Both of these introductions were produced by the same student. One of them when they first started working with us and on their previous attempt they got a band 6 and one of them after they had finished working with us and we removed all of these common mistakes and we showed them how to write an effective introduction and they actually moved from a band 6 to a band 8. So I'm not going to tell you which one it is. I want you in the comments to tell me do you think the band 8 student is or the band 8 introduction is A or B? Okay, so let's start off with A. Teaching children at home is a hotly debated topic nowadays. A plethora of people believe that children can study better online. This essay will discuss why it is better to teach adolescents in educational institutions before coming to a reasoned conclusion. So I would like you to just read that, have a think about it and do you think this is a band 6 essay or a band 8 essay? So remember one of them the student was getting a band 6 and the other the student was getting a band 8. So let's have a look at the second introduction, Introduction B. Many people believe that homeschooling is preferable to traditional education because learning can be done online. I do not agree with this because students require face-to-face guidance and many way web-based schools are not reliable. So do you think A is better or do you think B is better? In the comments just let me know, put A or B and maybe if you want to say why you think this is so. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to take Introduction A and I'm going to break it down into its constituent parts. So we're going to look at each part of this essay introduction and tell you exactly what the student is doing to give you an insight into how the examiner is thinking about this. So let's start. So this bit here is what an examiner would consider a hook. A hook is something that you'll often see in essays where the person writing the essay is trying to make the reader interested in what they are trying to say. They're trying to hook the reader in and get them to read the rest of the essay. This is a terrible idea for IELTS writing class two for a couple of reasons. Number one, the examiner is being paid to check your essay. You don't need to hook them in at all. The money that they're getting paid is hooking them in. So you don't need to do that. Number two, there are no extra marks for it being interesting or it being exciting or anything like that. You're not being judged on how interesting or exciting your essay is. So if you are trying to do something that doesn't get you any marks, you've just wasted your time completely. So you're doing something that is not necessary and you are wasting your time completely. So the first thing that we do not want to see is a hook.  Okay, so the next thing that you do not want to put in your introduction is something like this. Hotly debated topic nowadays. Now you'll see this in the vast majority of essays and you'll often also see teachers teaching this and this is a cliche. So let's have a look at what a cliche is. Cliche, a phrase or opinion that is overused and most importantly, betrays a lack of original thought. So it is an overused phrase. And the reason why people use these phrases is they don't have original thoughts. They don't want to think for themselves. So examiner is looking at this and number one, they're looking at it and go, Oh, another hotly debated topic. Alright, I've seen this hundreds of times this week. And the examiners are human beings. And if you they say the same thing over and over and over again, they're you're not putting them in a great mood to be honest.  There is no originality in here. And you want to at all times, avoid things that the examiner is looking at that and thinking this person is just memorized something because the IELTS test is not a memorization test. It is not a repeat a memorization test. It is a test where they're testing your ability to clearly communicate in English. When have you ever heard someone a native English speaker say, Oh, this is a hotly debated topic.  So it is completely unnatural to put this into your essay shows that you're not really thinking and shows that you believe that the test is just a memorization test. So don't include cliches. Okay, the third thing a plethora of people an educational institution spelled incorrectly and the spelling is not the actual problem here. This problem here is memorizing impressive vocabulary or high level vocabulary or band nine vocabulary. The examiner see this over and over and over and over again, especially words like plethora. Why does plethora come up? Because someone on YouTube made a video called use these five words and you will get a high score. So what happens is millions of people have seen that video though included and some of those words in their introduction, I've even seen introductions with all five words put in there. And what again that indicates to the examiner is that you believe this is a memorization test and also that you are not focusing on actually answering the question and you are also not focusing on using the English language effectively to convey meaning. Why do people write anything in any language? It is to clearly convey meaning to tell people what you think.  People would never use a plethora of people that is just an inappropriate way to use it. So often when people memorize these big words, they will use them inappropriately and incorrectly. The collocations will be wrong. It's not suitable to use that in a sentence. The grammar could be wrong. Or like here, the spelling is wrong. There you do not get any extra marks for using big words incorrectly or inappropriately. Educational institution, it would be better just to put school. All right, so you might be repeating the word school, but which is better to repeat a simple word that actually is effective and accurate and appropriate or try and put in a big word that is actually inaccurate because you spelled it wrong or the collocation is wrong or the grammar is wrong. Or here, you would just never use that word. Why not just say many people or a lot of people? Again, much simpler, but actually correct. So the fourth thing that you do not want to include is a background statement. So I've highlighted both of these. Teaching children at home is a hotly debated topic nowadays. And a plethora of people believe that children can study better online. This person has watched a few too many YouTube channels. And some of them say you need to include a hook. Some of them say that you need to include a background statement. And some of them say just paraphrase the question. And what this causes is huge confusion in the student's mind. So they're like, well, this YouTube channel says hook, this says background statement. And they get totally confused about the difference between a hook, a background statement, and simply paraphrasing the question. And some teachers also get confused about that. Not all most teachers are great. But there are some teachers, especially online and on YouTube, that get confused because how they produce their lessons is they actually go and look at other YouTube channels. And if you are looking at other YouTube channels that don't know what they're doing, you're not going to know what you're doing either. So this is going to cause a huge amount of confusion. And this is what has happened to this student. So forget about hooks, forget about background statements, and just simply paraphrase the question instead. Your first sentence, just look at the question statement, paraphrase that stated in your own words, and that's you done for your first sentence, you're not going to be confused. And most importantly, the examiner is not going to be confused because they're like, Well, is this a paraphrase? What are they doing here? I don't really understand. The examiner has a headache already before they've even got to the end of the introduction. So forget about background statements. Okay, so the next thing we're going to talk about is this. This essay will discuss why it is better to teach adolescents in educational institution before coming to a reason conclusion. So this is a very poor thesis statement for two different reasons. And there's two different things that you do not want to include in your introduction. And the key here is adolescents. So did the question talk about adolescents? So adolescents are a specific subset of children. Adolescents are teenagers. There are people who are in high school. The question was not about high school. It was not about teenagers. It was not about adolescents. It was actually about children in general and school in general. So by misunderstanding the question and putting things in there that are not actually accurate or not related to the question, you're indicating to the examiner that you haven't understood the question. And also what the student was doing was trying to again add in big words. So they didn't think that children or school children or boys and girls or whatever was fancy enough or impressive enough because their former teacher had told them that you need to use big impressive band nine words. So they've tried to put that in there. And this is not accurate. It's not what the question is about.  So be very, very careful about understanding the question and just putting things in the introduction that relate to you answering the question because at the end of the day, the most important thing is that you actually answer the question. The second reason why this thesis statement is not appropriate is because it has a lot of memorized language in it. You will see a huge number of introductions that say this essay will and then they talk about the topic before coming to a reason conclusion. So it is very, very obviously memorized by the student. And again, this comes from the internet, especially YouTube, where you will get certain videos that have millions and millions of views on them. Obviously, students are watching them. They trust the person talking to them. They think that they're an expert. So they copy what they say. And then after a few months, examiners start to see the same thing over and over and over and over and over again. And that is not a good thing for your band level. Your band score is going to suffer because again, you are basically telling the examiner, I do not know how to think for myself and I do not know how to write in English without memorizing things. It is not a memorization test. It is an English writing test. You will not be able to go into the real world and use these fixed phrases.  And the last thing that you want to avoid, the thing that you never want to do is to use a memorized formula to treat writing in the same way that someone would treat a mathematical equation. It is very, very tempting and it is very attractive to think that all you have to do is just memorize a formula and then use it. I know that you're very stressed out and I know that you want to get a high score, but this is the last thing that you want to do to memorize a formula and then place it on any different type of question. That is bad for a few reasons. This is what a lot of these memorized formulas look like. X, take the topic, is a hotly debated topic nowadays. Wow, you are really impressing people with those cliches. Insert general background statements. Take the background of the topic and then put that in, even though you've already really talked about it in the hook there. This essay will discuss Y and Z. Well, the examiner really isn't interested in you telling them what the essay is going to discuss. You better discuss that. That is what they've just asked you to do. It's like walking into a store and saying, I am going to open the door now. I am going to walk to the counter. You're supposed to. Why are you telling people about that? Then before coming to a reason conclusion, just another memorized, fixed phrase. Another major problem with this is that people tell you that you can take this formula, take this format and apply it to any question type. It doesn't matter if it is advantages and disadvantages, problem, solution, a double question, a discussion question, an opinion question. You can just memorize this and do that. You can't. Each of those questions is asking you to do a very different thing. Therefore, you need to have a different approach for each different introduction and each different question. I know that's going to require a little bit of extra work. But if you want to go to our website, ialtavantage.com, we cover a lot of that on there for free. So go and check that out if at the end of this video, of course, if you want to. So let's look at the seven things not to put in your introduction. Do not put a hook. Do not put cliches. Do not put memorized high-level vocabulary. Don't put a background statement, especially if you don't understand the difference between a hook, a background statement, and paraphrasing. This essay will discuss and then put something in there that is not related to the question. Or this essay will discuss plus all those memorized phrases. And finally, don't make every introduction exactly the same or apply the same format or the same strategy to every single introduction. The good news is that once we took all of those things out from our students introduction, they were able to massively improve their essay. And I say essay, not introduction, because let's look at what a good introduction can do for your entire essay. So let's have a break it down again. So many people believe that homeschooling is preferable to traditional education because learning can be done online. So what they've done is they've just taken the question and they have paraphrased it. So they've taken the words and they have stated it in their own words so that it means the same, but with different words. So this introduces the topic. It tells the examiner this person understands the question. And they know how to paraphrase. So their vocabulary is good, their grammar is good. So you are making the examiner very, very happy because they know you know what you're doing. And just from the very first sentence, they know that this essay is going to be easy to read. Now let's have a look at the rest of it. I do not agree with this. So the reason why this is a good way to start your second sentence is it clearly demonstrates that you have a position that you have an opinion on this question. In other words, you have just answered the question. All right. So it's going to be different from question type to question type. But this question type basically said, Do you agree or disagree? I do not agree. Okay, so they're saying I disagree. So they could say I disagree or do not agree. But they have clearly stated what they think immediately. So again, the examiner has already understood what you think about the question. Let's continue because, okay, here's the reasons. Students require face to face guidance, clear main idea, and many web based schools are not reliable, clear second idea. So instead of this essay, we'll discuss why homeschooling is preferable to not schools, the plus reason that doesn't you're just wasting your time and state your position and your two main ideas. Now, how is this going to help the student write the rest of their essay? Because what is going to be their first main body paragraph, they're going to talk about students require face to face guidance. They're going to explain why that is that they're going to put examples in there. And then their second main body paragraph, many web based schools are not reliable. They're going to put that in their second main body paragraph, they're going to explain why that is they're going to use examples. And the examiner will know exactly what is going on. What this also does is it provides like a mini plan for the rest of the essay. The examiner will also be looking at your main body paragraphs, they'll be looking at your conclusion and seeing if all this matches up. Is it cohesive? Is it coherent? So this introduction does many, many things. But the two things that it does really, really well is it makes it easy for the student. And most importantly, it makes it easy for the examiner to understand that they are actually a band age student, and they are going to get a good score because they are helping the reader with their job. If you do that, you're going to do very, very well.  Hopefully, this was helpful, guys. And if you need any more help, go to aislesadvantage.com.  Head over there and feel free to get in touch with us if you need any help. Thanks very much, guys. And I look forward to reading your comments as well, and give it a like if you liked it. If you didn't like it, feel free not to do that. Thanks very much, and see you in another video. Bye-bye.


It's not a chop factor. Stocks are just literally in the middle of the ranges, so now we're kind of forced to look at other areas. And there was some pretty good areas in the market today for some strength. Again, a lot of things. Welcome to Access to Trader, the number one community for those who are committed to taking control of their trading in order to achieve success, profitability, and longevity. Thank you for joining us. Here's Dan Shapiro to help you find your edge, master your process, and own your future. Hey guys, good evening everybody. Welcome to another edition of the Access to Trader.com nightly wrap up show. Hope everybody is doing well. What a difference a day makes. Let me tell you guys a quick story. So yesterday, if you watched the video, I was completely off. I was just literally missing every bounce spot on Tesla, just really frustrating day. And the big thing for me going into today's session was, as we talked about in the video last night, any dips, literally any dips, I thought they were gonna be bought, I thought any dip is gonna get bought, especially in the morning. And there's a high probability it's gonna go right to green. And 5.30 in this morning, I have a poodle, I have a pretty damn big poodle. She's about 75 pounds, big, big girl. And she jumped off the bed around 5.30 in the morning, literally 5.30 in the morning. And so I woke up, I woke up 5.30 in the morning, not to be x-rayed or anything, but I went to pee, right?  Well, how much does Tesla, 30, 40? So I look and Tesla's down six. So I go, oh my God, this thing's gonna go right to green. Definitely is gonna go right to green. So I run into my office, I turn on the computer and I just wait. And you can see what time this was. At 5.46 in the morning, I go guys, watch red to green for experienced traders, 12, oh, excuse me, a big number. Obviously we're gonna watch that 12, 10 area, which was last night's high. And not only did it go red to green twice for eight to 10 points, but every dip today, literally in the morning on the rising 60 minute support got bought and it went green again. And then eventually they stalled it off and then there was another bounce off the 1140s area. So which basically comes to my point, which we talked about last night in the video.   And this is kind of an important part of kind of, Tyra Ribbon about yesterday's conversation, but you're gonna have days that you're off, right? And instead of trying to squeeze and be depressed and be angry about it, just let it go, right? Just let it go. The market is always going to make you whole, right? As long as you don't do anything really silly and prostitute your money and burn mental capital on days that you just can't get going, we're just kind of missing the ball on everything. It's okay, right? It's okay, like we talked about yesterday and today the value came ridiculous balances today in Tesla, red to green twice in Tesla. And not only that, we saw an incredibly, an absolute incredible liquidation on a lot of technology names. And what was crazy about today's market and we talked about in the webinar, I haven't seen something like this in a very, very long time. Five years ago, forget about going back to 23 years. Five years ago, if a stock, right? Or a market, or in this case an ETF, just like the Q's, reclaim the five-day moving average, that is the most bullish thing you could possibly have. It's very, very rare, okay? It's very, very rare that the next day you're gonna have this crazy tremendous liquidation. And if you told me last night that, hey, by the way, in the last night we talked about some names that I definitely liked on the downside, names like Moderna, names like AMC, right? Names like AMC, and we'll get to the pivots in a second.  It very rarely happens, but hey, guess what? This is the new market, right? This is the new market, there's new technology, there's different rules. And what we saw today was incredibly aggressive, and it felt like to me that some fund had to liquidate today. And the reason why I say that, if you look at a lot of names, especially your favorite stocks, I don't care what your favorite stocks are, but if you look at your favorite stocks in the technology space, they have one common denominator over and over and over today, it's that big liquidation candle. And look at names, for example, this is all on one candle, guys, right? Look at the names today, look what happened today on Amazon. Look at what happened today on NVIDIA. This is a normal, okay? It feels like there was a big fund that had whatever the case may be, they had redemptions, they had a liquidate, whatever the case may be, we're not gonna know, maybe we will down the road, but it felt like every name today just got absolutely destroyed, right?  Look at me, look what happened to CRM. They're favorite names, it doesn't make a difference what growth story you talked about, it had exactly the same name. Even Tesla, right? Even Tesla that held up really, really well today, considering, and again, somebody's gonna turn around, so how can you say it held up really, really well today? Yes, it was up 150 points. It gave back a third today, and today you saw a really big call buying coming in on every single dip. And they weren't just coming in for 10, 15 grand, they were coming in for the 1200 to 1250 weeklies, $400,000 or $500,000 Eclipse, and there was a really aggressive buying. But again, even Tesla got really, really hit, right? This is one after another after another, even the one that held up the strongest, Apple, right? And again, these are bad ticks on eSignal, but you see these really, really big aggressive moves. So we don't know what today was, but again, just by looking at the action and seeing how some of these names were getting rejected and really, really aggressively, I wouldn't be shocked if we heard a story a week from now, two weeks from now, that some fund had to liquidate whatever the case may be, saw rejections, whatever the case may be, I wouldn't be shocked because what we saw today was bids being hit, especially in the video. We saw in the video, they were coming in when the video started turning around and hit the 50 day moving average. And we talked about that a couple of days ago. It took out the 50 day moving average and it didn't take it out on a little bit of volume. It took out the 50 day moving average and it was selling of waves, man. We're talking about from 293 to 283 in a matter of 20, 30 minutes, so very, very aggressive. The ironic part about all the stuff that was going on with this big selling, the Dow was still super duper strong. You would never know the market was down today, but it was. I trade technology, so yeah, the market for me was down. And when you look at the pivots, and we'll get to the pivots in a second, you can see how aggressive the moves were. But when you look at what drove the market today, quote unquote, the Dow Jones industrials were, you're talking about oils, right? And you're talking about financials. Look at these moves on financials, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, right? JP Morgan, even Citibank, that just never gets an uptick. The great part about this is, yeah, they're moving up on a potential moves, potential interest rate moves, but the problem is these things are one hit wonders. For every one day that financials are strong, you never hear from them for the next 20, 30 weeks. It's just the most frustrating group considering the Fed is really setting up for them, allegedly, to start raising rates. So obviously, that will be a very, very important part going into a tomorrow session to see if these things can follow through. But the craziest part what we saw today, and again, if you go on my regular Twitter account, you'll kind of see it. Hey, let me actually, let me just show you guys really, really quickly. How big the bounce was on the cues towards the end of the day, right? So if you look at the last thing we talked about, let me just show you really quickly. The last thing we talked about was, I go, look, there's the bounce, here's the bounce, right? Here's the bounce we talked about, this 393.20s area, that's the 50 day moving average. And you could see how aggressively this bounce was, right? You could see how the cues were, they bounced right off. We talked about a three and a half point bounce going into the close. The problem with that, right? That the absolute problem with that closes everything that was setting up, or predominantly a lot of names that were setting up for tomorrow to the downside, right? They bounced three, four, five, $7 off the bottom. So going into tomorrow session, it's gonna be a little bit tough, right? It's not gonna be a session that you're turning around and saying, well, this one looks great, that one looks great, this one's about to break down, that one's about to break down. No, the great part about trading now is you're picking your spots. So after you had a really good value day today, and again, we'll get to the pivots in a second, tomorrow now we have the luxury to kind of wait and pick our spots, because now everything's literally in the middle of the range and that's very, very important to understand that. So tomorrow, you're not gonna, 20 minutes before I left, we were looking at the bottom of the channel here on Amazon, Amazon bounced $30 off the lows. Now this thing is $50 away from the bottom of the range. A name for example, for example, we were watching NVIDIA, right? For tomorrow's downside, this thing bounced 10 off the pivot. So you're gonna be very, very, a lot of you guys are gonna be very frustrated tomorrow.  It's not a chop factor. Stocks are just literally in the middle of the ranges. So now we're kind of forced to look at other areas. And there was some pretty good areas in the market today for some strength. Again, a lot of names maybe not your cup of tea might not be my cup of tea, but a lot of times, okay, beggars can't be choosers. So look at a name for example, like Caterpillar, right? Right, look at that Caterpillar. Caterpillar, monster, monster move above the range here. Again, is this a possible day two runner? Absolutely, you know, keep an eye on this thing, either a dip into rising support or above today's channel, that looks good. A stock like Citrix System, right? Had a good move a couple of days ago, right? Took out this little flag here. You know, it does have range, right? It does have range back to the upside. Even look at an oil name like CPE. Again, right, not the traditional names that we look at every single day that we talk about, but these are real setups. These are names that got above the ranges, got above the 50 day moving average. And if you're not in the business of technology tomorrow, whether to the long side or to the short side, at least you have alternative names that are again, really, and they're valid. Again, they're gonna turn into a Tesla, probably not. But the point is they're real players, they're real charts, and if they do confirm, you should have mirror images of what technology does, just a lot slower. So going into tomorrow, be a little delta neutral. Also a name I like to the downside tomorrow is CarMax, broke down today. Maybe if it starts breaking down below today's channel as well. CRM, first closed today, first closed today below, first closed today below the earnings lows. I want to keep an eye on this thing below today's channel tomorrow for possible continuation. So it's very, very important to kind of pick spots tomorrow, see where you fit in. But the greatest part is, because we had such good value today, you don't have to go crazy tomorrow. You could pick and choose and relax, and if you don't want to trade tomorrow, guess what? You don't have to, and that's the most important part. So let's talk about today's pivots. Again, really, really aggressive stuff here. We'll talk about this in a second. Let me get to the private feed. Okay, let me get to the private feed. So yeah, I woke up really, really early this morning, right? Really, really early. We started talking about different channels here. Again, the first thing I talked about was a 545 in the morning. I go, hey, man, watch this red to green. It was down like three, four bucks. All of a sudden, you saw volume come in. They took it to roughly around that 10, 8, 10, 10 level. Why was that important? Because that was last night's high, okay? And that was really, really important. And the second time, it dipped. And we'll get to that in a second. The second time, there was a pivot, there was a bounce area where we talked about last night buying to rising 60-minute support, and then it went red again, going up another $20, $25. So there was a lot of really good value today on Tesla. So everything yesterday, it was so frustrated. I go, I can't believe everything. We got that back today, right? I got that back today, and I was very, very pleased with the results. As you can see here, let's go. Basically, the stock started exploding back to highs, and this is the area. I go, now we need to see, right? Now we need to see that 12, 10 area again, and that will be a big, big number going forward. And let's talk about some other names, right? Let's talk about some other names. Really, really great action there. Obviously, 307 on the video never got there. It got liquidated very, very aggressively. We talked about AMC last night. They started coming for the $23 and $22 short-term puts. Keep an eye on that for more selling. But 2640, if it builds below, can flush. Nice move on AMC. I think it goes lower, right? So here was the 2640. Went down all the way down to 2464. I think this thing still has a date with $23 before it gets a soft landing. Coin, we talked about coin last night. 250, if it builds below, can flush. I thought it was gonna get down to that 245 level. Got down to 244. So here's, we talked about this channel for a number of days, got down right to this 245, 244 level on coin. Apple, beautiful balance initially on Apple. I took that 81.50s balance. It went about that 75 cents or so, came back in, stopped me out, right? Took some profits on the way up, stopped me out, then went right to 83. This is 83, is me a big number going forward in the name. But nice, you know, pretty decent cash flow. Lucid, we talked about 41.80, 42, never got there. Uber never got to the 44.50 area. Amazon, again, we watch it through the upside, never got there. Here's Moderna, right? 231, if it builds below, can flush, right? MRNA. So it took out the 231 level, went to 225.  AMD obviously didn't confirm to the upside. Nice move on Boeing. So the 209 was the pivot on Boeing yesterday. 211 meets a new base for the 213 push. Here was Boeing. Again, part of the Dow obviously. So it took out the 211, here was the push to the 213, actually traded at 214.50. Let's see what else, what else. Take on the way down, AMC, perfect balance. Take on the way down, could see 226, so 225. Coin, 245, next stop, obviously, that was a perfect move as well. So again, frustration in this business is very, very easy to fall for. I think the most important part is, take every day in phase value. You're gonna have days, you're gonna get everything. You're gonna have days that you're gonna miss everything. Eventually, the universe balances out. Guys, God bless, have a great day. Stay patient tomorrow. It might be a little bit more of a methodical day to kind of picking up spots, but the most important part is, we know we're up against, there should be no surprises. And the most important part is, take what the market gives you. Guys, God bless, and I will see you all tomorrow.


recording as well. So our normal AMAs are all asking questions, but in this case, I think it's great for everyone to get a bit of a background from Zach, especially since he'll be joining us in Cape Town. He'll be visiting us and we'll be there the entire week. So I think it's great for everyone to have a bit of background of what he can do. And I encourage you to look at his background, maybe to open up his LinkedIn and asking questions about what he learned at previous companies about how to run marketing and how to have marketing be more effective, integrate with sales and how to benefit from all this organic demand. Zach, could you please do a better job of introducing yourself than I just did? No, that was fine. So I see all these faces. Most of them are static, but that's okay. And I'm on what is mostly a good Wi-Fi connection, but it occasionally drops in and out. So if it gets slow, just wave your hands and I'll try to be responsive. So I've been in the software industry, I guess 30 years, and I've gone through many different trends of back in the day, client server software, then web software, then mobile software, open source software, all these interesting trends. And I've been part of some companies that were very innovative, particularly on the product and marketing side. So MySQL, which was probably one of the first big open source successes and powers a lot of internet sites, I helped, I ran marketing and engineering at that company and created the subscription business model there and led that to about a hundred million in revenue. And then we sold that to Sun Microsystems for a billion dollars. So I like working in developer markets. I think it's interesting. But it is definitely a little bit different from maybe more mainstream areas. Most of the companies I've worked with are B2B companies. And usually it's where the technology matters. So it's not just a application in healthcare or something. It's usually companies like you guys where the customers care deeply about the technology. And early in my career, I was in product management and then rose through the ranks. So when all else fails, if I'm trying to really understand the company, I always go back to what are the problems that we solve for customers? Who is it that we're helping? What is it that they need to get done? And who will they compare us to? Or what products or internal things will they compare us to? And how do we make sure we're delivering good value to them better than they can get on their own or with homegrown products, etc. And with that, I'm happy to just answer questions. I saw a couple of questions on the web, my favorite restaurants in Ann Arbor, those sort of things. Important, you know, breaking news topics. Yeah, Zach, I'll jump in here and break the ice. The Ann Arbor question is a heads up, I don't know if Siri's on the call, but she always asks, you know, what's your favorite superhero? I'll let her ask those kind of ones. I'll start with a hard hitting. My name is William, I'll start with a hard hitting one. In your tenure, I'm sure you've seen the CMO position or marketing leadership seems to have high turnover within startups. We ourselves have seen a few shifts in marketing leadership. My question is, have you seen a marketing team that executed well despite lack of marketing leadership? And what were the attributes of that team? Or what did they do that made that the case? Yeah, I saw that question. It's a good one. It's thought-provoking because I had to think a little bit. And, you know, I've been in organizations like that. You know, I remember early in my career, I was at a company called Borland. We built developer tools. I helped create products like Delphi and J Builder, which were pretty popular in the day. Some of those products still even exist today, which is hard to believe. And, you know, we went through our series of like random marketing executives who would come and do a whole bunch of branding stuff. They have been very important. I was a pretty cynical guy. And at some point, you know, these guys came and went. And so I was like, you know, product manager, maybe later director of product management. And I would go work with my peers. And, you know, if we decided that the guy in charge was a bozo or maybe he wasn't here anymore, then we just figured out what we thought needed to be done. And we focused on doing things that would, you know, increase our visibility or our awareness or, you know, generate leads or whatever it is that we needed to do. More recently, you know, I'm on the board of a company in New York called Sail Through. They went through quite a bit of executive turnover. I mean, it's not uncommon in any company as you grow, you know, you have people who are there for some of the journey, but they're not for the entire journey. This was a difficult company, though.  We replaced the CEO, the CTO, the VP of engineering, the head of sales, the head of marketing, the head of finance, another head of sales, another head of marketing, another head of sales. I mean, pretty much all but one of the executives has been replaced. And during that time, though, the individuals in marketing stayed actually fairly consistent. And I was pretty hands-on for a few months, helping the company. And there was a guy, Jason, who was kind of director of marketing and he was managing the website and some of the lead gen. And he was very much the de facto leader. And I would give him guidance. And again, he was close. My view is that the people close to the problems often know what needs to be done. And the challenge is everybody has different opinions. And so you have to try to figure out, okay, we can't do everything. We can't do every idea that everyone thinks of. How do we pick a small number of things that will actually move the needle for the business?   But if you figure out, okay, here's all the things we could do. How do people across the marketing organization prioritize so that you're all doing the same thing? You're all pulling in the same direction, rather than in five competing directions. And Jason was pretty good at doing that. And even if he didn't get enough attention, maybe, or guidance from the CEO, I just said, look, your client is the head of sales. And you got to serve your client and deliver what they need. And there's lots of things you could do. But if sales is happy, everybody's happy. And that's kind of a philosophy sometimes in marketing to say, you know, like, I believe that one of the key things for marketing is to help sales close more, bigger deals faster. There's lots of things you can do. But if you say, okay, well, how do we, what can we do this week that helps sales? What can we do this week that generates pipeline? What can we do this quarter that is going to put us in a better position for selling? And then you can kind of prioritize and then figure, okay, maybe there's some things we'll do regarding PR or analysts, but we've got to first make sure we're keeping the pipeline going. And at some later points, we actually promoted this guy, Jason, to be the VP of marketing because we had another leader who didn't work out. And we said, you know, Jason's been doing the job kind of through all these different leaders. Why don't we just put him in charge instead of going out and finding some other person. And I think where you guys are, it is appropriate to be recruiting a leader because your organization is growing very rapidly. In the case of this other company, they were kind of, you know, very modest growth, you know, 20% year-over-year growth, which is a different situation. Yeah, thank you. I have the next one, which I spent some time in Ann Arbor, went to college there. Curious, what is your favorite Ann Arbor restaurant? Okay, so I did put that in. I don't know that these would be other people's favorite restaurants, but it's what came to mind. And whenever I go meet folks from duo and they say, where do you want to eat? I generally pick two barbecue restaurants, Blue Tractor, if you know that one, and Zingerman's Roadhouse, which is, both of those places do good barbecue. You wouldn't necessarily want to eat there every day of the week. You know, maybe Sundays you wouldn't eat there. But the other six days, it would be pretty good. Hi, Zach, I'm Priyanka. I'm the director on the alliances team, and I focus a lot on the cloud-native presence for GitLab. I put in a couple of questions that I'd like to ask. Excuse me. And I have a hybrid background in marketing and alliances, and that's super excited to ask you these questions. In your experience, how do you think marketing to audiences buying infrastructure software, people in our target market, is different from other B2B audiences? What are the key things to do differently or focus more on just your thoughts in general would be great. Yeah, so marketing infrastructure has a number of challenges. One is it's not very visible. Two is it's not very sexy. And three is you're often selling to developers, development managers, DevOps, people who are very jaded when it comes to marketing. The way I always kind of interpret the audience was their view was don't give me any marketing BS, just give me the facts and I'll make up my mind myself. And so one of the things that you want to do is think about ways, you know, what is it that this audience wants? And this may be different in your market. You guys hopefully are closer to the customers than I am, is that usually one of the themes that's very strong in infrastructure is that people want to acquire new skills. And they want to learn, well, what are the best practices? What is it that the great companies are doing? How do we do what they're doing? And so to a certain extent, if you're if your marketing is focused on educating people towards here's what we do and here's why it's valuable or here's how other people are using this kind of technology or here's why this kind of product matters, I found that to be quite beneficial at companies like MySQL or Zendesk, you know, in the early days, we were completely unknown. And our credibility was based on the credibility of our customers. And so we would promote customers who were using our software, whether it was like Yahoo Finance was fairly famous in the early days for using MySQL at scale. You know, that's more common today, but we would describe, you know, the architecture and enable people to see what we did. And so we made a practice in marketing of producing at least three case studies every quarter. Sometimes maybe it was four or five, but it was a discipline. And we, you know, the marketing team was small, you know, in the early days, it was smaller than your team today. And we would all take turns writing up case studies. And we defined a template for this. Who is the company? What's their industry? What's their problem? What were they doing previously? What operating system were they running on? What hardware? And then some way of quantifying the use case and the kind of the volume of the data or the types of queries or something else that we could quantify in this process. And we would usually show some kind of architecture diagram or architecture, meaning it was more for illustration purposes. It wasn't necessarily a super detailed architecture. And the, but the reason for this was important was when you're selling something, especially something that is kind of abstract like infrastructure or middleware or even tools, you want the customer to visualize how they're going to use the software. And so whenever we were in a sales discussion, you know, the the SE or the sales rep would show, you know, typically they'd show a diagram and say, well, here's how this other gaming company was using my SQL. And, you know, we draw some diagrams and say, here it is in their network topology and this part's in the DMZ and this part's outside inside outside whatever transactions coming here over the web or through some other system. And as soon as you went to the white board and drew something, then the customers would often get up and they draw their own architecture. They'd say, well, our system is different. We're not running Linux. We're running Solaris or we're running on top of these HP machines or we have our DMZ configured this way. But what happened as they were doing this is they started thinking about what would it look like if I was using my SQL? What would our situation look like? And so I found this to be super helpful. You know, again, you give people a lot of facts about what your software can do. But you have to subtly make sure that they start to incorporate what would that look like in their world. And hopefully you get them to go from this sort of arms crossed, you know, I don't want to hear about something else to, oh, we could do it this way. And if you get that happening, that's really helpful. So part of the job of marketing is to create these kind of case studies or other tools that help them visualize using the product. I think that makes a lot of sense. Thank you. I'm a big fan of architectures as well. I had a second question here, which I want to ask. And it's along the same lines. As you said, this audience, educating themselves is really important. And for that, they need to sort of believe you. They need to agree that this company is technically credible. I see them as a thought leader. I want to sort of get on the GitLab train or whatever train it may be. And so I've done a lot of work building up technical credibility for products and projects, but it's often, you know, you can apply to so many conferences, you can go speak at so many places. And I'm curious how to take that from this small scale thing to technical credibility at scale. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on how to achieve that. Well, you know, technical credibility is technical credibility. And at scale is at scale. So it basically just means you have to keep building one brick at a time. And, you know, there was no small thing that suddenly gave us massive credibility at Zendesk or Dua or MySQL or elsewhere. It's really more the consistent development of content that was accessible to broad range of people. And partly thinking of the personas, you know, a lot of our content at MySQL was aimed at developers and DDAs. A lot of the content at Duo Security, even though it's a security product, was aimed at IT people, not security experts, because we found in 70% of the cases, we were selling to IT people. So there's sort of an expression courses for horses. It means different people learn and absorb information in different ways. And so we tried to make sure that we made our information available in different ways. Blog posts, white papers, those might require registration, you know, but that's how we generate leads, webinars, those required registration, speaking at conferences. You know, if you get a good audience, that can be good, but sometimes it's a little bit hit or miss if you don't know how big the audience is. Trade shows were sort of a distance 4th or 5th in that category, because you get a lot of people just going to trade shows to pick up t-shirts or choch keys or whatever. And it said, sometimes we would send sales people to those conferences, but we wouldn't necessarily exhibit. So we would always try to measure how many leads were we generating from these activities. And some of the best performing pieces were sort of evergreen content, you know, a white paper on architecture or a IT director's guide to implementing blah, blah, blah, something that signaled who it was for. And then, you know, again, we would reuse that content in lots of different ways so that people could access it in different ways.  Okay, that's not that. If I do this topic, I can get 60 people. Okay, let's do more of that. If I do this topic, I get 100 people. Great, let's do that every month. And we knew, for example, at MySQL, any webinars on how to improve database performance, we would get like 400 to 500 people signed up for that. Because that was a topic, people were always looking for new ideas, new tips and techniques that they could apply. Awesome, that's really helpful. Yeah, you're right, that some topics just draw a lot of folks. I recently heard about a webinar that a different company, Rancher Labs did with GitLab CI, and they had 4,000 registrants. It's like, wow, I know, right? Does that even happen in the webinar world? But I guess it does. So now we have a data point. Thank you for that response. I agree with you that you have to just build brick by brick. There is no like, you know, software that'll just do it for you. I think I'm next here. Thanks, Priyanka. Zach Alex Turner, my lead sales and business development here at GitLab and looking at your experience was very excited when I saw level 11. They're pretty good friends of mine, been a customer and speaker for them, multiple companies over the years. And then as you were speaking about, sorry if I butchered the spelling there, sales room, I think you were saying? Yeah. That's sales related tech. Those seem very different from a Duo Security or Zendesk. Kind of, how do you pick, what are your boxes to check, if you will, as you're looking at, where you have aligned yourself for full-time roles, and then the board and consulting things you've done? Yeah, I try to be generous of my time to founders and occasionally to venture capitalists also. But my heart is more with founders than investors. But sometimes I just get asked. So, you know, in the case of, sale through is actually more personalization marketing software. It's not sales related, but the name is suggested of sales. You know, that was a company that was back in the scale ventures where I had worked as an executive in residence. And I'd helped do some due diligence on that deal when they invested. And it's sort of a funny story, or maybe it's not a funny story, but you know, when they invested, I said, look, I think you're going to have to replace the head of sales and the head of marketing, you know, at some point within a year or two, because they're not really going to be able to scale as far as you want. And then within six months, the head of sales got fired, and the head of marketing got fired. One, I think was performance related, and one was maybe more, well, nobody would tell me what it was. So it must have been pretty bad. And they asked me to help out, and I had some capacity to help out and, you know, sail through, excuse me, level 11 was in Michigan, and moved to Michigan, and connected with a guy, Josh Linkner, who was at Detroit Venture Partners at the time. And he connected me, and within a couple of, maybe a week, I was helping them out. And that was good, since I just moved to the area. But usually what I'm looking for is companies that are disruptive, companies that are in a big market, companies that where the technology matters. And that's maybe more true for you guys than for level 11 or sail through. And, you know, where there's some, sometimes it's just the chemistry, you know, it's like working with people that I like to work with, and seeing if we can't do something significant.  So there's lots of companies that kind of, they get to where they're, they get to some period of growth, maybe it's 20 or 30 million, and then they don't grow so well after that. And so, you know, I always hope that companies will continue to grow dramatically. But, you know, as they say, it's very hard to know if the dogs will eat the dog food, you know, and that's why it's important to be in a very large market. And if you are disrupting older vendors, then it's maybe a little bit more proven than, you know, something that sounds like a good idea. And, you know, I hear a good idea from a founder and I'm super excited. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the customers think it's a good idea. Awesome. Thanks. More questions? So, is Suri not on this morning? Channeler Alex, Channeler, you know you can do it. Okay. Actually, from the ladies on the audience, how about, is it Brooke or Erica or Molly? Maybe there's others. This is Erica. I'll ask a question. One question for you is with regards to video and in your mind how video plays into marketing and content marketing, I believe that it's a very evergreen platform and you can allow stories that will allow folks to kind of connect with the, you know, product that you're trying to sell. So I want your thoughts on that now. Erica, I don't mean to jump in, but I'm going to say that I was going to ask a similar question, but in relation to live chat and conversational marketing. So I don't know if you see those two tying together, but it might be easier for you to reply to both. Yeah. So I'm a huge believer in running experiments. And you might have an opinion. I might have an opinion. Sid might have an opinion. CEOs always have an opinion about marketing. It's one of the occupational hazards. And it turns out if you're in a company of 400 people, how many employees are there now? 230. 230. You have 230. You have 330 marketing experts in the company because everybody believes they're an expert in marketing because they see so much marketing. They're also all a pricing expert. Yeah. It's too high. It's too low. It should be free. It should be this. It should be that. But so the important thing is to test everything. So if you have a hypothesis that chat is going to be good or that videos will be good, run a cost effective experiment and know in advance, okay, if I do this, what would success look like? How would I know if I was successful? And if in doubt, measure it in terms of something that moves the needle for the business. If you can't figure out how something generates pipeline or leads, I consider that to be a lower priority. I'm not saying don't do it. I'm saying activities that are typically higher priority and you have to make sure that marketing does the high priority stuff. And then you figure out how much bandwidth and how much time do we spend on things that are maybe a little bit more speculative that are good for good for awareness in a way that we maybe can't measure. And if you can't measure it, then I'm kind of of the view it's not an experiment then. An experiment means you do something and you can measure an outcome and you can decide before or after what the target was and therefore say was it successful or not successful. Now I'm not saying you have to have everything has a huge goal. You might say we want to run a video and maybe there's a link at the end of the video and you just measure how many people clicked on that link and browse back. And maybe your goal is we just want to see if we get 100 people to click online and then click through that says they want more information. So first of all, always measure things. I have a bias though, which is I am a very literal person. And so when I walk into somebody's house, like I go to their book cases and I can't help but read, take a look to see what books they have.  So I'm a very literal person. I tend to be attracted to written words. I like consuming content in that way. Like I'd rather read something than watch a video. But other people are different ways. So I do think webinars are good and those can be recorded and put online for people to watch later if they're not too long.  At Duo and at Zendesk, we did a lot of videos or particularly at Zendesk, we had a very good creative team that was quite humorous. And they did a video like stuff customer service agents say or stuff customer support agents say I forget the name of it. It's not stuff. It's a different word. But you know, it was a fun video was a little edgy. I encouraged them to make it even edgier to make it more memorable. But in the end, like I don't know if that really like I'm not sure any of the videos that we did that were just for fun really had that much impact. We never created something like dollar shave club that really, really took off. And I'm not sure in the B2B world, whether you really can create something that ultimately goes viral like that. Sometimes, you know, you'll get something cool, but I would be careful on experiments and video if they get too expensive or too elaborate. Chat online, like I think is great. We I've used that in a number of companies. And certainly the sometimes the best source of leads are like the most obvious things, you know, having a prominent contact us, you know, link and button and phone number on every page or at least the high traffic pages tends to perform very well. I sometimes use like when I contact a company like all or I started advising a company all do the online chat just to see if they're responsive. So I would definitely run some experiments there to see what happens. Just to follow up on that, I think there's a difference between like webcasts versus, for instance, like actual production video where you're going out and talking to customers and they're telling their story about how the product has worked for them or how they've gotten into using the products and then that sales the sales team can then take and you with other people as opposed to webcasts, which have their place too. For myself, I kind of revamped webcast that we did and now there's five to seven times more people on this webcast and what was originally there. But there's also this ability to tell the story from the customer's perspective, which could then be helpful as a tool for sales. So that was kind of where I was coming from that as opposed to webcast video, which is I don't think it's once it's done one and done, you know, people aren't as inclined to sit and watch a 40 minute webcast. Maybe that's true. Maybe it's not true. But I would test it and see certainly customer, you know, customers talking about how they're using a product can be very high credibility. And we did quite a few of those at Duo Security and we had a really good production team. So we were able to do it very cost effective. And, you know, we could we could measure the impact of that. No, those were those were very good. And people enjoyed those. Thank you. Yeah. What's your favorite marketing campaign of all time? Favorite marketing campaign of all I don't know. It's not something I really think about. It would probably be like some English advertising, because I think English advertising is very creative and funny. But maybe something will come to mind later and I'll put it in the shared document. What did I eat for dinner last night?  My wife, she's not here in the room. So I can say this, but we had these pizza crusts that were very good, but we didn't have the right stuff for pizza for pizza. So she fried beans and squash and color greens and something else that it was like, you know, I love my wife and she's normally a very good cook. But you know, this is this is not the meal to have. I would rather go to Singerman's Roadhouse. Okay, back to technology and marketing. So let me ask you a question. How often are you guys getting out and participating in sales calls or sales meetings? I mean, I say for me, in my team, it's equal parts sales and marketing. Sales dev is the intersection of the two. But I think we do pretty well here. I mean, the product marketing team is constantly in an enablement mindset and putting on sessions there. I think from like a reporting line, we might feel a little siloed at times in the different functions. But when you think about like the individual people in play, I think it's the right cast of characters and everyone has the right motivations to make it that type of alignment, which I'm pretty sure is what you're driving at there. Yeah, I strongly encourage all of you, even people who are sort of like behind the scenes on things like web stuff, like just to try to hitch a ride on some sales calls or videos that are taking place.  Because when you hear customers, the kind of questions customers ask, and you see where do they get confused? Sometimes that's super helpful in thinking about, okay, how do I create content that's going to be helpful to these folks? What is it that they care about? And if you do it a couple times, it's great. If you make it a routine part of your month or quarter, it makes sure you're always getting fresh input. Because as your company grows, the types of people you get as customers actually changes over time. And you want to make sure that, like I saw this at Zendesk in the early days, Mikkel, the founder, was close to customers. He understood that. But as the company grew, he became a little bit more removed from customers. And his view was kind of cemented in the early days. And that was not actually representative of the kinds of customers we got later on. And I think that was a bit of a handicap for him. Okay, who else who has not asked a question has a question? Luke, Shane, Jordan, Paul, come on. Luke will jump in. Yeah, so thanks for your time today, Zach. So kind of to backtrack a little bit, going back to kind of running experience experiments and kind of looking at the data that you collect. We're kind of in that mindset. But then I think also because GetLap moved so fast, we're incredibly iterative and kind of working towards minimum viable change. So maybe you'd be having advice or sort of past experience to sort of maybe validate a test. Because I think the hard part is waiting long enough to actually see how that test plays out before we start a new one or make another change that will impact that. So kind of giving the advice there. Yeah, tests don't have to be perfect. But you want to avoid a situation where you're changing 15 things all at once. And then you don't really know what has happened. But as an example, in the perfect world, you do some AB tests where a certain audience sees certain things and a different audience sees a different thing. Okay, maybe you don't have that ability, but you have the ability to compare last week's traffic with this week's traffic. And you guys have a pretty high volume.  But if you saw like, hey, we saw a 30% increase or a 40% increase. Okay, that's significant. And you can, again, I encourage you to decide in advance what is it you're looking for in if it's a click through, okay, how many people click through, how many people click through, but then bounced immediately, which suggests they didn't really know what they were clicking on and they got somewhere and then they decided it wasn't for them. So, you know, it doesn't have to be perfect, but you're looking and again, sometimes people are trying to get perfect attribution, you know, when a deal closes, we need to know it was influenced exactly by this campaign and exactly by this and exactly by that. It's like, hey, there's lots of touch points to the customers. We don't know which one was the most significant. So sometimes you pick a simplifying metric and you say first thing that influenced them or the most recent thing you influenced them. And you what you're trying to measure is relative differences. We see a lot of impact from this webinar or from this white paper relative to this other one. We know that the ROI white paper generally produces a lot of content and a lot of readers and a lot of pipeline. More than this case study. Okay. Let's do another thing just like that one. That's maybe a little different.  Sometimes we would try, you know, with Google AdWords. We just look and see if we change the title of the contents from a DBA's guide to embedded databases.  But, you know, 60% of the content is the same. And we change the intro and we change the conclusion, you know, can we at least tell the difference from those things? So, and, you know, don't be afraid to try something that's risky. You know, sometimes we'd try something and we'd see the lead volume drop by 30%. That's okay. We can turn it back to what it was. And at least then we know that that thing we tried, okay, we better not do that one too much. And, you know, Google AdWords, Google Analytics, they have some pretty powerful tools for seeing which things get high click-throughs. And then if you can measure all the way through sales opportunity, pipeline, or purchase, great. But even if you can't take it all the way through to close deals, even measuring the top of the funnel impact can be helpful. That's great. Thank you. Has everybody psyched about going to South Africa? Yeah. I had to look up on the map to see where Cape Town was. Any final questions? What's my favorite color? Well, since I'm a guy blue, although I'm not wearing blue, I'm wearing green today, but one more robust super question. What's the most exciting thing to you about GitLab? I think the category is very interesting. The growth rate is pretty amazing. And I have a soft spot or affection towards building open source businesses. I think it's super interesting. And so I think you guys are maybe in the confluence of several interesting trends. Something that's just interesting for me personally, like I like B2B and technical marketing, I think having a distributed company is scary and exciting. It's hard, but it's kind of worthwhile. And one of the things I think is cool when you build a company like that is you'll meet people over the years and they'll say, GitLab changed my life. And some of that will be employees in the company. Some of that will be your customers where they say, like with GitLab, I was able to do things I could never do otherwise. And I think that's very rewarding. Cool. Thanks, Zach. That was really, really great. Thanks so much for taking the time. Excellent. So I'm flying out tomorrow, tomorrow late, Detroit to Amsterdam, Amsterdam to Cape Town. And then the next day, we're flying north to go on some safari or something that my wife organized. And then I'll be back down on, I think the 23rd. Cool. Thanks so much. Like people, Zach is taking the time to fly out to South Africa for us. So if please walk up to him, tell him what you love about GitLab or why he should get involved as much as he can. But also tell him what we can still learn in marketing and sales and what he should help us with. Yeah. And feel free to pull me into any meetings that are going on. If you just want another opinion, another set of eyes where you want to get examples of ideas or whatever, I'm happy to work with marketing, sales, product, engineering, support, services, you name it. Like my wife is going to see Africa. I'm going to see GitLab. So that's how I look at it. Awesome. Thank you so much. Thanks, everyone. Bye. Thank you. Thanks, Zach.


Hey guys, what is up? So for today's video, I'm going to be giving you guys ways, motivation on how to pick yourself back up, how to live, and feel alive.  Just know that it's okay to feel down sometimes and I've talked about this a lot before in my other videos, but it's really important to repeat because a lot of the times if we feel unmotivated or we feel like sleeping all day or we just don't feel like we're in the best mood, just know that that is okay and that's just a part of life. Sometimes our body's way of telling us that we need rest is to bring on those emotions of feeling down and just think of that as your body's way of nurturing itself. It's telling you that you need to fall into those emotions and you need to stop resisting. The more you resist, the more that those feelings and emotions are going to keep accumulating and then it's going to just like pile up and become worse and worse. The number one thing that you should do if you're feeling down or in a rut is just give into it and feel those emotions. If you need to cry about it, cry about it. If you need to sleep for a couple of days and sleep for a couple of days, you got to listen to your body. We kind of label feeling down or feeling unmotivated or being lazy or staying in bed for a couple of days. We associate those things with it being negative, but what if everything is just neutral? What if everything is just the way that it is and it's just a part of life? So not associating those emotions with being negative and just taking them for as they are and listening to your body and following them and not resisting them because at the end of the day it's so true. Like that kind of lit a spark in my brain when I heard that. I'm like, that is so true. Like we feel things for a reason so tune into that and follow your emotional guidance system and let it lead you.   It's a mess. That literally connects to how I feel when I wake up. Like if I wake up in a messy room, I automatically am thinking negative things and that trickles on into my day. Cleaning up your space and keeping it neat and organized I feel like can be such a huge factor in how you're feeling inside and not just doing that but if you guys haven't looked through your closet in a long time or just like in general decluttered your home or your room or whatever your space is.    Do a huge declutteration and giving away all that stuff or throwing away that stuff. It's the best feeling to have like a decluttered clean space. I'm telling you I feel like it just connects so much inwards because it's essentially your home it's your space so you want that to reflect like what's on the inside. And also just make sure that with the stuff that you're keeping you kind of connect to and it makes you feel happy. Like if you have let's say like this random shirt and you're like I'll just keep it because I find it so much more beneficial to just if it doesn't make you happy throw it out because you don't need that distilled energy there. If that may even make sense like you need to start feeling alive again which means you got to throw out the old. Make sure to put yourself first like a lot of the time we can live like robots and we're just doing our generic thing. We're just doing our daily routines and we're just doing what we've always done waking up whatever it is maybe going to work coming back and we're just so focused on that and we're not taking care of ourselves. And that can like eventually pile up and lead to you know feeling so great and like I said it all happens like your emotions all happen for a reason. So make sure that you're putting yourself first and you're taking care of yourself. Even if that means like one day a week taking yourself out going to get your nails done pampering yourself whatever makes you feel good on the inside that makes you glow from within out and makes you feel more alive. Like for example if I haven't taken a shower in a few days in a couple of days I'll feel like not myself like I'll start feeling gross and that totally messes with me mentally. And so a lot of the things like the way that you're catering to your physical body also can have a huge impact on how you feel on the inside.  Nowadays we have so much at our fingertips that we take for granted. So surround yourself with motivation. If that's listening to a podcast motivational podcast I know I've mentioned that you guys should do this before but it really really does help like fueling your mind with motivational shit it really does help. Whatever it is like whatever you find your motivation within or whoever you look up to motivation for make sure you're getting a dose of that every single day because if you don't it can wear off. So let's say a doctor prescribed you this pill that you have to take for the rest of your life and he's like if you don't take this then you're going to be sick. So you're taking it and then once you stop taking it you're going to start feeling sick again. You have to keep taking that pill every single day in order to not feel sick and it's kind of the same thing with like motivation. If you don't feed that like you're going to get unmotivated that even makes sense. And also if 90% of the people in your life aren't motivating you go find some new people that do because that is also so important like the people that you hang out around.   So pick and choose who you surround yourself with because I find it so important and it definitely like affects my mood personally if I'm hanging around somebody or people that don't necessarily support me and don't motivate me and don't believe in me. I can feel that and it doesn't feel so good and it makes me not feel so good sometimes. So make sure that you're surrounding yourself with the right people. So if you're feeling in a right you're not feeling alive. What are you doing every day?  Are you still going to that same job that you have been for 10 years and you hate?  Now if you want to feel alive you have to take risks.  Is that why you're in the rut? Think about it and reflect on that and think about what would make you happier. Is there another job that you're too scared to apply for because you don't know if you're going to get it?  Step out of that comfort zone because if you stay in there for the rest of your life then you're never going to feel alive. You're always going to feel dead inside or you're always going to feel robot like. It's like sometimes I feel like in our society we're just sheep and or robots that just all won't do the same thing and all fall the same thing because we let fear lead the way. But one of the things that made me feel the most alive in my life was dropping out of college. That made me honestly feel the most alive in my life because that is the biggest risk I guess you can call it that I've ever taken. That's like the biggest decision I've ever made.  Like it gives you that adrenaline to keep going and to keep doing things that are going to make you happy and that are going to make you feel essentially alive. So if you want to pick yourself back up and you're here in a rut just think about it and think about like is what I'm doing right now is just making me feel alive. Is it making me happy and reflect on that and if it's not then think about what you want to do and the steps that you can take going forward to get there. If you're feeling stuck think about maybe something that you can start doing so something new because you never know what that'll lead to. Any opportunity you take is going to lead you to other things. No opportunity can go to waste even if you take an opportunity and it doesn't work out then you know that that's not going to work out and maybe that'll lead you to another door. You really never know. I feel like that's like one of the keys to life is to do what makes you feel uncomfortable sometimes because that's when you'll come out stronger. So another tip for feeling alive getting out of your rut is to take a social media or just a phone in general. I understand like you need to have your phone on you for safety reasons sometimes but social media in general.  I'm guilty for this a lot of the times as well but every spare second we get we're on Instagram or scrolling through something. We're being entertained by our little devices and I feel like a lot of the times that makes us miss parts in life and you can sit on your bed scrolling through TikTok for five freaking hours then feel guilty about doing that and sometimes it can put you even in a more deep rut because then you have that guilt of being on your phone for so long and you're like oh my god I could have been doing this and then you think of all these scenarios in your head that make you feel even worse. So try honestly just take one day just say tomorrow I'm not going to go on my phone at all. If you go out okay carry your phone out for safety purposes but even if you have to like delete all your social media apps you're not on your phone all the time do it because you can be stuck behind this little last screen in your bed for days on end and it's so easy because you have everything at your fingertips here. So once you put this down it'll make you it'll broaden your horizons and make you think like since I don't have this to entertain me what can I do now? Go in nature.  Nature heals all wounds. It really does. It makes you feel alive. Like when I'm in nature I feel the most alive. Even if I just set up a damp blanket and I'm in the trees and in the forest and near a lake and I just hear the sounds of the water it makes me feel so alive. Way more alive than scrolling through on TikTok for five hours. It's so healing and it's so peaceful and you can't go wrong and I feel like since these have become so popular we've had our faces shoved in them and sometimes we don't look up to see how beautiful things really are around us and it's harder to see everything because we're so distracted. Count your blessings and I know I say this a lot but it's so true because you have to realize what you really have. You can complain as much as you want but the moment that you're truly grateful for that is the moment that you're going to live a happy life and you're going to feel the most alive. Even if you have nothing, even if you have zero dollars to your name you can find something to be grateful for whether that's the sun coming out or whether you get to see out of your eyes or whether that's just being able to experience this life and being on this earth. You can always find something to be grateful for and that's the beautiful thing about gratitude is that there's never nothing to be grateful for and once you start tapping into that and being grateful you'll feel so alive inside because you'll keep noticing new things and better things will keep starting to happen to you and it'll be like a snowball effect. So this is like a little saying.  You're only going to start feeling alive and you're only going to start getting out of that rut if you start making decisions for yourself and not for other people. Make decisions based on what you want to do and not what Sally across the street or your parents or society want you to do. Start making decisions for yourself and tune into what you want to do and tune into what is going to make you happy because at the end of the day, last time I checked, nobody else is in your body except you.   Like you're you. Your parents aren't you. Sally isn't you. So at the end of the day if your life doesn't make sense to anybody as long as it makes sense to you, that's all that matters. You don't need to explain yourself to anyone. No one deserves an explanation from you. If you want to do something, then do it. And just because you wanted to is good enough. And the last tip that I have for you guys is stop waiting for the perfect moment because that'll sometimes never happen. Okay. And what I mean by that is like a lot of the times people are like, Oh, I'm just waiting for the perfect opportunity to quit this boring job that I've been miserable in for the past 10 years. And it's like, so when's the perfect moment ever going to be?  A lot of the times or most of the time, there's never going to be a perfect moment. You just have to put your foot down and do it. You just have to take initiative and do it because the perfect moment may never come. You have to create that perfect moment. You just have to sometimes do it. So if you're feeling in a rut and you're making all these excuses for yourself and you're blaming your problems on other things, realize that you're in control of that and you're in control of how you're going to pick yourself back up, when you're going to pick yourself back up, put your foot down, start making the changes now because if you don't do it now, then you're always going to make excuses for why you can't do it in the future. So yeah, you guys, that was how to feel alive when you're feeling stuck in a rut or how to pick yourself back up. Those are just my personal tips. I hope you guys enjoyed. I feel like nowadays in society, it's so normalized to like put shame on people that are feeling down and being lazy because they feel stuck and all this stuff. But it's like, no, that's normal. You don't have to label it as bad. That's just people going through life and that's just people experiencing different things and being in different moments and parts of their life that maybe it's crucial for what they're going to come out and learn from it. And yeah, just know that it's totally normal for you to be feeling these emotions if you're stuck in a rut, if you're not feeling alive and everyone is eventually going to go through something similar. So just know that there is light at the end of the tunnel and you can pick yourself back up out of it and you can feel alive again. I believe in you. Thank you guys so much for watching. I love you. Please leave any video requests that you guys have down below and yeah, I'll see you guys in my next video. Peace out.


What's going on, everyone? Sam here with late sports cards, ripping 22, community prism football hobby, four box break, number 21, random team style. There's a look again at your random results. There they are. As always, you can find these on the website under the results tab, as well as the link in chat. It's good luck here, everybody. Let's do it. First time ripping prism this year. I am excited. Too excited now. Real pack in here. We've got prism break, Trevor Lawrence. These are cool. Orange, JJ Watt to 249. Yep, 249. Skymore Rookie. David DiDrabbo. Chats that they're looking for these on Twitter so they don't have to keep typing prism break in it. It's just kiddie prism breaks for sale. Oh, no. Ray Lewis, nice. Silver, Breeze Hall fireworks. Blue Wave, Rhonda Elmore to 199. That's Andrew Booth and Snoop Connor. I've got Alabama Blake. Yeah, 2025, they will, Niko. 2025, they will be back. Hype, Devonta Smith. Danny Gray on the prism to 175. Jerome Ford and Matt Corral. Yeah, they did look good today, thank God. Silver, MJD. That seemed like pretty good, too. She's used to green scope to 75 for the Chiefs. Now a Patriot. They just didn't win. K.Dotton and Tyrion Davis, nice. That was a tough one for sure, a tough one to swallow. Still got Houston. True. New recruits, Chris Olave. Purple Ice, Patrick Sartan to 225. Lake Willis Rookie and Jeremy Rucker. Come on, Autos, where you at? W-Y-A. Silver, Jerome Ford Rookie. That is Orange Michael Vick to 249. James Cook and Kyle Hamilton. Rodney McGruder. McGruder. Have you ever seen Dramon Green's rant on Rodney McGruder? There's Austin Eckler. There's Orange Isaiah Spillard at 249. I've never seen anybody write about Rodney McGruder. There's Nikovi Dean and Kyle Phillips. There's one day where- That might be the first time I've seen it typed out. They were talking, like, they were talking smacked during the game, but in the pre-game, or the post-game. Jerry Bob was like, I already got to talk some back with the name like Rodney. Rodney. It's like, geez, dude. Silver, Xavier, McKinney. First auto is gonna be, oh, man. Justin Tucker, going to the Ravens. Nice one there. Very jealous of that one. Michael Thomas to 149. Vante Wyatt and Kade York. Yeah, they bought tops, tricky. Yeah, they did. They did. They got both the football, baseball, and basketball lights and starting at 25. That'd be good as well. CPAT, fireworks, Kenny Pickett, Rookie. Purple, Braxton, Honey Nut, Barrios to 125. Wondale and Trent McDuffie. I want my CJ Stroud, Richardson, and something else. A triple threads. Right, that'd be cool. That'd be sweet. We've got brilliance. That is Derek Henry. Nice one there. Reggie Wayne to 175. Naylor, John Mechie. Silver, Bruce Smith. There's Veilish Jones Jr., 77 out of 149. Going to the Bears. Red Wave auto. Nice one there, Chicago. George Pickens Rookie and Boye Mafe. People of Jones. Jerome Ford, Purple, Ice Rookie to 225. Kway Walker and Alec Pierce. Just missed the Chipper Jones auto. Yeah, that happened on Tuesday. I was doing a case against our Caroma. We already pulled the auto. There's usually one auto a case, and there's another auto. And I went right by it with Chipper Jones. Everyone was like, just missed an auto. I was like, oh, my bad. My bad, my bad, my bad. Let's go Auburn.  Prism Break, Jalen Waddle. Purple, 125, Derek Carr for the Rades. Let's tip the LeBron and D-Wade dunk. There's James and William. They were just tossing over like this. Come on, guys. Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Settle down a little bit. Let's settle down. Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Fireworks, Tom Brady. Purple, Ice is Warren Saff to 225. Skyler, Thompson, and John Dotson, Rookie. The other guy. The other guy puts a sign. The guy that passed it. Random guy. Silver, PS2. Got nice. John Dotson on your silver prism auto. Going to the commander's. Nice one there, Washington. Derek Stingley Jr. and Alante Taylor. Let's have them more. Throw them to him next year. Let's not. They have one quarterback right now. Sam Al. There's Curtis Samuel to 175 on the prism. Juan Brisker, Tariq Wollin, two autos of autos. Silver to Kyler Murray, Fireworks to 249. Orange, Daryl Green for the commanders. Malcolm Rodriguez and Drake London, Rookie. What's up? Drake. Drake. John Lynch went down. There's an emergent, Silver, Jameson, Williams, Rookie. Blue Wave, Julian Love to 199. Carson Strong, Jake Ferguson. Julian making a little run. They're down 20 on point. 11. Emergent, Kenny Pickett. Purple Ice, Drake London. Nice to 225. We got London on the track. Nice one there, Falcons. Garrett Wilson Rookie and Evan Neal. Let's go. We got some old linemen loving this. Is there Tyler Linderbaum in this? Question mark? Ravens Center. Brilliance, Justin Herbert. Orange, Drake London now. There we go to 249. We got London on the track again. You can make Wanu and Isaiah Spillard. Silver, Jair Alexander. Alex Smith for the Chiefs. Blue Ice to 99. Logan Hall and Calvin Austin. Alex Smith definitely. What's up?  I can think of these patties. Payah! Same picture almost. Silver, Derek Stingley Jr. Red Wave, Michael Vick. That's cool. 249. Pierre Strong Jr. Roger McCreary. Two to go. Frodo and there it is. It's a Purdy on the back too, not bad. Take it, we'll take it, we'll take it. Silver, Cameron Hayward. Otto, Isaac Bruce. 40 out of 149. That's sick, man. For the Rams. Congrats on that, LA. A little bit of foil peeling on the back there. We'll send an empty box and wrap her with the Rams. Jack Jones and Brock Purdy. Oh, do that. Gotcha. That's actually good to know. It's like in Don Russ, it's literally always Tabari Walker, then Walker Kessler. Got Silver all out, DK and Metcalf. Blue Wave, JJ walked to 199. Trayvon Walker and Drake Jackson. Trying to cool Alice's. There's always somebody in then Paolo. I just forgot who it is off the top of my head. Caleb Houston always goes into Keegan Murray as well. Two top picks. An absolute stud in Keegan Murray. That is Micah Parsons on the hype. Proper power to 49. Nice one there. Got Jermaine Johnson at Red Wave Rookie to 149. Desmond Ritter and Greg Dulcich. Really jacked up base last night. Yeah, it'll happen too. It's like a lot of times it depends on the box. Yeah, they've been pretty solid. Yeah. Every single rookie was miscut to the point where the names were. Oh, my God. It's that awesome. Steve Young Prism to 175. Chris Olave and Charles Cross. Is it go pick it first then Olave? Yeah, pick it at Olave. Interesting. Setting me up for failure over here. Two attack by Loha. Orange Saquan to 249. Arnolda Bikita and Sauce Gardner. It's one of the super hot boxes now. Oh, for sure. Silver John Metschy Rookie. Blue Wave Andre Johnson to 199. Son Haskins and Jalen Petrie. Silver All Out Darren Waller. Who's that? Dacoby Durant's Rookie for the Rams to 299. Aidan Hutchinson and Brian Cook. Kind of pumped for Optic to come out too. Optic football. It's always fire. Silver Devante Parker. Otto is going to be Mark Gaston. 55 out of 199. New York Sac Exchange. Nice one there for the Jets. Nick Benito and Montreal Washington. Camo coming up. Come on, baby. Boris Camo. Traylon Burks. It is Niners Rookie. Ah, non-Rookie. Of Ronnie Law. That's kind of nasty. 415. Nice one there for the San Fran. That's cool. Christian Watson and Jordan Davis. Billions. Josh Allen for the Bills. Orange Matt Judon to 249 for the Pats. Cleal Shakir and Traylon Burks. Silver Amanra. And Malik Willis. There we go. Nice one there on the Silver Auto. Going to the Titans. There you go. Tennessee. Very nice. We'll take that. It's pretty funny, actually. There's Cape on Tivito. Tray McBride. I'm going to start using that. Oh, man. You can use it. Yeah. Yeah, right? Give you permission. Right. Snake Skin. Come on, baby. Give us a big name. Big name. Let's see. Vikings. Non-Rookie. Justin Jefferson. Nice. Heck yeah. Going to the Vikings. Nice one there. Minnesota on the Snake Skin. Case hit. Doesn't recap. Blake. Jolani Woods to 175. Only if you'd like though. I would, Gordon. Okay. Fair enough. I would not like. Fair enough. Probably gave you the choice. Arizona. A different story. Silver CD Lamb. Fireworks. We've got Orange Wave. MJD for the Jaguars. 260. Tristan Ebner. And Garrett Wilson-Rookie. Fiercen. New recruits. Breeze Hall-Silver. Blue Ice. Fletcher Cox. 299. Rashad White. And Kenny Pickett. You just getting there on order? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I only scored nine points. Oh, no. She's a really good fall apart, Joshua. Good Lord, man. They got to get Wembe and Yama somehow. Right. Scored nine points and one quarter is probably the way to go. To get good ol' Wembe. I just gave up that fight really early. Silver Throwback. Jamar Chase. Nice one there. For the Bengals. Blue Wave. Young Way Coot. For the Falcons. 2199. Khair Elam. And Skymore. Got Silver. Brett Favre. Denzel Ward. Blue Wave 2199. Eric Azucano. And Sam Williams. Silver. Chris Johnson. CJ2K. Otto is going to be Micah Parsons. Yes, it is. Nice Silver Otto going to the Cowboys. Micah Parsons on the second year. That's Dallas. He's such a beast. Zach Earth. Purple Ice. 225. For the Cardinals. Canine Rookie. And Jermaine Johnson. fireworks Garrett Wilson Rookie. Squeaks right now. What's up? Squeaks. 2199. James Winston. Yeah. Vilish Jones. Josh Pascal. And the Recap. Yeah. That is Roger Staubach 299 on the Blue Ice. They shouldn't be Simpleton. Jacobi Durant and Bailey Zappi. No need to recappy that Zappi. There you go. That's what you've been waiting for. I know. Hype Rashad Bateman. Kyler Murray 225. On the Purple Ice for the Cardinals. David Ajabo Ravens. And Jerome Ford. Oh, RPA. Yeah. RPA. Let's go. Yeah, dude. Silver James Connor. We've got... Nice. 48 out of 99. Matt Corral. Let's go into the Carolina Panthers. Grats on that. Panthers. Kevin N. Matt Corral Rookie. And K-Dotten. Potentially starting quarterback. Or starting competition quarterback. Somewhere else. Actually CJ Straub's backup. Yes. Very true. Silver fireworks Lamar. Orange. Kenny Anderson. Nice color match there. 249. Tyrann Davis Price. And Devontae Wyatt. Silver new recruits. Malik Willis. Purple Tyree Kill. The Cheetah. It's a 125. That's a cool picture. Isaiah Likeley for the Ravens. And Brian Robinson Jr. Always racing with curves. I know, right? Damien Pierce Rookie. Purple Ice David Bell 225. Furious George Carl Aftis. And Danny Gray. Silver Louis Sine. Lawrence Taylor on the prism. The 175. Nice one there for the Giants. Jolani Woods. Breeze Hall Rookie. Last pack. Good luck everybody. Brilliant. Skipper Cup. The Rams. Orange. Nicoby Dean Rookie. 249 for the Eagles. A.K. York Rookie. And Jalen Naylor. I'll do it for the break guys. Quick recap here. We've got Matt Corral for the Panthers. Micah Parsons Cowboys. Jake Skin, Justin Jefferson for the Vikings. Mark Castineau for the Jets. Isaac Bruce Rams. Jahan Dots and the Commanders. Redway, Vilas Jones for the Bears. Justin Tucker Ravens. And a Silver, Malik Willis. Rookie Auto for the Titans. I'll do it for the break guys. Thanks again for the fill. Next up we've got number 22.