I'm very excited about it. It feels like a perfect fit. Like a mech-suit in one of those anime series that fits me perfectly. It's a great feeling, but I'm wary of the feeling. Did I really find the perfect-ish job for myself? Or am I so glad to have found a job after months of looking that I'm smoothing over or ignoring the ill-fitting parts? To paraphrase advice columnist Dan Savage, "There is no 'the one' there's only the 0.63 and you round up to 1."
It's probably both. But, I'm pretty confident that I'm not rounding too much. Why? Because I knew this was going to happen.
Not that I was going to get a job (although I kind of did?). I knew my memories were going to morph like this. I've been through this experience before when we adopted kids. Once I achieved my goal, the pain and the uncertainty and the doubt and rejection of being in the middle of the process faded, because now I know where it was all leading. In retrospect, it felt like it was inevitable. But that's not what it felt when we were in the thick of it.
Since I knew this would happen, I made a mental note before I got here about some things that were working while I was still in that uncertain place, so that I could write about them now. These were things that I could feel were helpful at the time. When I look back at what I wrote and understood at the time and compare it to where I am. There's a lot of overlap. I may be rounding up, but I'm rounding up from 0.95.
So here they are:
2 weird tricks* that will get anyone** a job***
*This is a lie. They're not actually that weird. They're quite simple.
**This is also a lie, I'm pretty confident very few people will do either of these things, let alone both, even after reading about them and despite how simple they are. Why? I don't know. Probably the same reason so many people are unhealthy and do weird fad diets despite "diet and exercise" being the key to staying healthy. It's enough to just look around and see how many people are doing these things. The answer is very few.
***Another lie. I have no idea if they will get you a job. I don't even think they got me a job. What they did do was significantly improve my effectiveness and focus during my search. They gave me a structure that kept me proactive, organized, and resilient in the face of an objectively difficult, emotionally draining, and uncertain process. I’m can't tell you how to get a job (because there is no how). These are just 2 helpful things I did. Maybe you’ll find them helpful too. Maybe not. Consider this my financial advice-style "past results do not indicate future performance" disclaimer.
That's enough preamble. I know you're going to be disappointed when you find out what the two things are, so I've been putting them off.
Make a list
Send 1 email a month
That’s it.
I’m going to spend more than 3800 words below explaining those two things, so if you’re rolling your eyes because you already get it, you can stop reading now. Also if you’re rolling your eyes because you were looking for some interesting trick, you can also stop reading now.
Because that’s it. Anyone can do those things. If you’re looking for a job, you can do them. Right now. It doesn’t cost you anything except time, focus, and effort.
And here’s the first reason why these work: despite the fact that anyone can do these things, very few people will.
Why they won’t is actually a less interesting question. It could be any number of reasons:
They’re scared
It takes work
It requires being vulnerable
They don't like being introspective
It means taking responsibility for why you feel bad instead of blaming factors outside yourself (hint: it feels bad because looking for a job objectively sucks)
Ultimately, there's something most people want to do (or not do) more. When it comes to choosing between that and "try this thing that will help me get a job I love," they will tend to choose the former.
Want more confirmation? Once I started doing these two things I heard from a number of people: “Wow, I’ve seen very few people do this.”
But don’t take my word for it, just think about your initial reaction to hearing those two things. Was it excitement or resistance? It was probably resistance at some level. That is how most people feel.
Most people won’t do these things. So if you do them, you will stand out. one of these things is not like the other
Differentiation
Differentiation is a product-y term, but it’s a pretty straightforward concept. Instead of being “the best,” be different. More specifically, be different on the dimensions that matter to your target customer.
Differentiation is why entities like Hertz, Enterprise, Zipcar, public transit, Divvy and Uber can all be successful in the space of “getting people from place to place.” It’s because they’re all different in the ways that are important to their target customers. The fact that they’re also worse in the ways that are important to other customers doesn’t matter, because those other customers aren’t their target customers. In fact, it’s almost a requirement to underserve non-target customers because every choice comes with tradeoffs.
Now think about the job search. Only one person from a large pool of potential candidates is getting the job. Why will they get it? Because they stand out from the crowd.
If you're looking for a new job, you’re one of millions of people right now looking for a job. You’re probably one of hundreds of thousands looking for a job in your field, and even if you’re looking for a highly specific role, you’re one of dozens looking for that specific job.
Finding a way to stand out from the rest of the people in your same situation is the key. Doing these two things not only makes you stand out, they also help you figure out all the other ways you stand out.
pity the poor stock image actor pretending to be a poor recruiter staring at a massive stack of resumes
Imagine the resume of every person applying to a job as a physical piece of paper in a stack of resumes. Now sort them by how “right” they are for the job. Hundreds or thousands of pieces of paper. If your resume is in the middle, you’re almost certainly not being considered (if you’re even being seen at all). If you’re in the top 30, there’s still a lot of competition. There’s no guarantee that you’ll get the job, but if you're going to pick between two resume stacks to be in, you're going to pick the one where you're in the top 30 than the one where you're somewhere in the middle. 30 is a totally random number, by the way. It could be 100 or it could be 5. The point is it’s better to be at the top.
It sure would be nice to be able to pick which pile in. The good news is you can pick! Simply only apply to jobs where you have a good idea that you'll be at the top. You have limited time and energy. There’s an opportunity cost to applying anywhere that you’re not at the top.
Now you're probably thinking I'm saying "settle for jobs where I'm overqualified. I'll definitely be at the top of those piles." That's not what I'm saying.
This brings me to the list. This will be the list of companies where you're at the top of the pile. Build it out of companies that meet two criteria:
It’s a company that is differentiated for me. They have the qualities that I value more than others. If I were to rank all the things I want in a company that I work for (I highly recommend actually doing this, btw), this company would have most or all of the things at the top of my list.
It’s a company for which I am differentiated on the skills that matter to them. If they wrote a list of the skills that their ideal candidate would have, my best skills would all be at the top of that list.
who doesn't love a good venn diagram?
Your first reaction is probably “that’s going to be really difficult.” And you would be correct. That is another reason why few people will do it, why it will differentiate you if you do it, and why it will increase the chances of you finding a great job that you love. While everyone else will be "spraying and praying," you'll be focused and efficient. Even if you had the same skills as someone else (you don't, because everyone is different), you're more likely to land a job because you're only focusing on the companies that value those skills and not on the companies that don't.
Your second reaction is probably “but that will leave me with a list of only 3 companies.” Here, you would be incorrect. I understand the thought, I thought it too. And it’s just plain wrong. Don’t believe me? Try making your list and find out for yourself.
Even if - especially if - you are very specific with your criteria, there will be dozens if not hundreds of companies on your list. By the time I got my job, I had a list of around 100 companies that met my criteria and around 40 that I had not even contacted yet.
it's like this but with companies that are perfect for you in stead of money
You can come up with these two criteria in any order. I kind of co-created them, flipping back and forth, refining as I went. They tend to inform each other.
Finding companies for whom you are differentiated
We’ll start with the second one first: What kind of company are you differentiated for? Another way to think about this is to remember that list of resumes ordered by fit. At which company will you be at the top of the pile? Start with the ways that you personally are differentiated. What do you do that is better than everyone else? In what thing are you in the top 1% in the world at that thing?
Deep breath, because this is hard. Introspection is difficult. It takes a lot of mental and emotional energy (which we mistakenly think we should be spending on applying to more jobs), it brings up all sorts of self doubt (Am I being arrogant? Do I really know myself? Am I any good at anything?), and it’s just hard to do. We can’t see our own eyes, and when we attempt to, we’ll run into all sorts of obstacles.
But a great way to get around those obstacles is by leaning on others. Ask former managers or trusted friends or recruiters who’ve helped you get jobs for feedback. Ask them what your superpowers are.
everyone has multiple superpowers. wolverine also probably makes top-notch mexican food
I've got a whole series of posts about superpowers I'm planning on writing, but remember this: your superpower isn’t like being a superhero - the strongest or the fastest - but that doesn’t mean your skills aren’t superpowers.
Let’s assume there are 1000 skills in the world that matter (obviously, in reality there are many more, but let’s assume). In that situation, there can only be 1000 people who are the best in the world at those things. But start combining skills and things look a lot different. How many people are the best in the world at each combination of 3 skills? There’s some math involving factorials, but the answer is 166,167,000. 166 million!
Keep in mind one of those people could be in the top 15% of skill A, top 20% of skill B, and top 50% of skill C. But of all the people, they are the highest in those 3 skills combined.
Now remember that there are way more than 1000 skills that people can have and way fewer than 166 million people that you are competing with for the job you’re looking for.
Here’s a couple of clues if you’re wondering what your superpower is:
What is something you do that you think is easy but others think is hard? What do you do that people tend to say “how did you do that?” and you think “I don’t know, I just do it.”
What have you done continuously since you were a little kid? You just love doing it. What skills do you pay other people to let you practice in your free time (clubs or video games or hobbies)?
Here’s a few I came up with for myself. Please remember that these are mine, not yours. I guess you could take mine for yourself, but that won’t really help you. They have to be the things that differentiate you. Not the things you want to differentiate you. The things that actually do.
3 of mine were:
Storytelling (I majored in theatre in college, I love mythology, I read The Hero with a Thousand Faces for pleasure, and spent 10 years post college as an actor and circus performer)
Strategic thinking (one of my earliest memories is being 6 years old playing soccer and not being the most athletic kid but standing apart from the scrum and watching where the ball would pop out so I can run to it, playing every iteration of the 4X game Civilization from for hours as a kid)
More than the skills themselves, notice how I’ve been practicing them for almost my entire life and often for fun. I can’t turn them off.
Once you start to figure out your superpowers, think about what companies and jobs would value those skills over all other skills. Startups, pre-IPO, public, non-profit, large corporate conglomerates, tiny lifestyle businesses, they all need and value different skills.
An effective way to do this is to go back and forth between two things:
Understanding your own superpowers and imagining the role and company where you’d do nothing but using those skills.
Finding interesting companies and imagining being a hiring manager there. Think about the skills you would find most important in someone you were hiring there
In my head I visualized the hiring manager or recruiter or interviewer getting of a call with me and thinking “Holy cow. How did we get so lucky to find this guy? He’s exactly what we’re looking for.” But I know the reason is they didn’t find me. I found them. I picked them because I am exactly what they’re looking for. More so than anyone else they’re talking to.
are you getting tired of visualizing yet?
To take my example (remember, this is my example, not yours):
A mega-large tech company like a Google or Meta? Their strategy is already set. They’ve got very skilled CEOs and senior vice presidents in charge of setting their product direction and communicating it to the rest of the company. In fact, they have entire teams who sole job is to do internal-facing marketing so employees understand what is going on. They don't need what I'm really good at. What they do need are skilled operators. People who can execute. People who can navigate a complex bureaucracy to get things done. I can do that, I'm probably above average in that skill, but nowhere near the top. There are definitely tons of people who are better than me.
A new start-up? They’ve got the founder, who’s got a handle on the core customer and the strategic vision. Why would they want to hire me to do the same thing? Besides, I need a little more stability in my life than a new startup can offer.
But a mid-size software company with a successful core product that is looking to expand their offering and is either looking to IPO in the next 3-5 years or has just IPOed and hoping to shore up their strategy and expand their customer base as the competition starts paying attention? The founder/CEO is probably focused on lots of other things. They could use someone like me.
Finding companies that are differentiated for you
This part is slightly easier (still hard though). It’s helpful to start by jotting down a list of everything that is important to you. I mean everything - big or small.
Doing this in two parts is the easiest way.
Braindump everything that is even slightly important. Try not to care about whether it’s more or less important. It could be something big like working (or not working) in a specific field or tiny like having free lunch in the office. Channel Marie Kondo. If it sparks even the slightest bit of joy when you think about a job or company having that thing, put it on the list. You can also think about the things you don't want and invert them, then add that to the list.
the old sweater in the back of your closet is a metaphor for your 1.5 hour commute
Then stack rank the list. This gets much more difficult as you get to the top. Hopefully you won’t have to pick between working on a problem you genuinely care about and getting paid a certain salary, but if you had to choose one, which would you pick? Do that for everything on the list.
For me (not you) things on my list were being able to work remotely, above a specific salary, not in a few specific fields, with very smart & passionate people, as an individual contributor. Again, the more specific those criteria are, the better.
Make the list
Now that you’ve got the two criteria clear for yourself, start jotting down companies. Just go off the top of your head. When you start to run out of companies, look for patterns (Lots of media startups? Big banks? Non-profits serving the homeless?) and then google search for “lists of companies that are X.” Go through the list and add companies that you didn't think of before.
You can throw the list into your AI tool of choice and ask questions about what they have in common. That'll give you more clues about what you want and what's important to you (which you can use to search for more lists of companies).
Now put the list in a public doc and share with trusted people in your network. They’ll give you more ideas.
Include links to each company's Linkedin page so you can check to see if you know anyone at the company that you can reach out to in order to learn more. Or if you don’t know anyone at the company, the person you share your list with can easily click and see if they know anyone there they can introduce you to. I also added a column for whether or not I had a contact at the company already so I could filter out the companies where I had a contact already. That made it simple for anyone I shared it with how they could help me.
Building this list and sharing it out will activate and expand your network dramatically. This is helpful whether you’ve been working for a while or if you're starting out your career and you don’t already have a robust professional network. When you talk to someone at a company you’re looking at, you can share you list with them. That person becomes a contact to help you find a job at that company and someone you can leverage to find someone at any other company you’re interested in.
"are you getting it yet?"
But that’s not even the real magic. When you reach out to people at the companies on your list, you’re not reaching out for a referral. You’re not even pretending to reach out “to learn more about the company” but really it’s just to get a referral. You’re actually reaching out to learn more about the company based on the venn diagram criteria you came up with. You can only tell so much about a company from the outside. Knowing where there are gaps in your knowledge and then asking specific questions about those gaps means the conversation will be completely different than a generic “tell me about the culture” conversation. The people you talk to will feel that difference. No one does this.
You might discover that the role/company is not right for you. And that’s great! You’ve learned right at the start that you shouldn’t waste any more of your time applying or thinking about it. At the very least, you’ve got a better sense of what would need to be true for that role/company to be right for you. And if the role is not right for you, maybe it’s right for someone else you know. You can always let them know and connect them. It feels great to help others on their search.
If/when you find a role that seems right for you, ask your contact for a referral. Or ask them to introduce you to the hiring manager. Or a recruiter they like. Or ask them what the best way to get a foot in the door is. They’ll probably have some good ideas. At this point, the relationship isn’t merely a transactional one. They know intimately what you want. And they’re invested in your success.
Then add them (and the person who introduced you) to the email list you’re making.
Send the email
Now back to the first weird trick*.
Everything about looking for a job feels transactional. Every conversation with a recruiter or contact is related to “can this person get me a job?” Even if it’s at an unconscious level, everyone involved knows this and it’s one of the many reasons looking for a job feels so gross to everyone involved.
Despite this transactional nature, leveraging your network is essential to finding a job. I was very hesitant to "network" even though I knew it was important. That hesitancy was telling me something important: I was doing it wrong.
Think about how most people network from your network’s perspective: they hear from you once, give you a referral, and then never hear from you again. It’s a one-and-done thing. It feels bad to be ghosted in personal relationships. It feels bad to be ghosted in professional relationships. Yet, that’s what everyone does. So don’t do that. Differentiate.
I ain't afraid of no networking
Whenever you talk to someone, whether they are a recruiter, someone working at a company you’re targeting, or someone introducing you to someone else who works at a company you’re targeting, ask them:
If it’s ok to add them to a little email list you’re starting
It’s just to keep people updated about your progress.
No spam.
Just one email a month.
It will feel scary. But do it anyway. No one does this.
Everyone will enthusiastically say yes.
Because they want to help you and care about you. As Phyl Terry says "they are invested in your success." Also because no one does this.
No need to get fancy with a newsletter or blog or whatever. This is not the start of your influencer career. Create an email group in whatever email program you use and add people to it. Just make sure to put your own email in the “to:” field and the group in “bcc:” so you don’t give a bunch of strangers each others’ email.
The email itself will be nothing fancy. Just a straight recounting of what you’ve done in the last 30 days. What jobs you’ve applied for and any progress you’ve made on those interviews. That’s it.
I included some other things like a joke about the weather and something fun I found on the internet because I wanted to. You can do whatever you want. There are no rules.
The most important thing is that the email should feel like it’s coming from you (because it is genuinely coming from you).
Write it in your voice. Don’t use AI to write it. After a couple of iterations, it’ll take minutes. And you’ll enjoy writing it. It’s a mini check-in that lets you reflect on everything you’ve done to make progress towards your goal. Each time you write it, you'll be shocked at how much you’ve done. It feels great.
who doesn't love the feel of tapping the email button on their keyboard?
Why does the email work?
It’s natural to wonder why people are helping you if they don’t “get” anything in return. But that’s transactional, zero-sum thinking (and remember, no one likes the transactional nature of looking for a job).
Every person who helps you is invested in your success (after all, that’s why they’re helping you). And every email you send is giving them what they really want in return: information about your progress towards success. It transforms the relationship from a transactional zero-sum one to a relational positive-sum one. Again, no one does this.
Transforming the transactional relationship with your network is only one benefit of the email. There are many more.
Remember that list you made? Put it in a spreadsheet and link to it in the email. With those URLs to each company’s LinkedIn page, anyone who receives your email can easily check to see if they know anyone at those companies that they can introduce you to. With that filter for companies where you don’t have a contact, you make it even easier. You’re going to be constantly updating the list (and adding new people to your email list).
Remember - they’re invested in your success. Sending your group this list gives them multiple opportunities to help you succeed. Also remember - no one does this.
Here's another benefit. If you’re looking for a job, you’re doing a lot of different things, constantly jumping back and forth. It’s very easy to lose track of what you did last week, let alone 30 days ago. So if you’re going to write that email well, you need to be organized. Use whatever works for you, be it a physical notebook, the notes app on your phone, a kanban tool like Trello, or whatever.
I went with a kanban feature on a notetaking app I use because it worked for me. I gave each interview process a “stage” so I could see at a glance the status of every interview or potential interview. All of my schedules, and notes, and questions went into those cards.
Staying organized like this not only makes writing the email at the end of the month simple, it also helps you stay focused every single day. If I ever felt stuck about what to do (and this happened often), instead of doing something unproductive like scrolling LinkedIn or randomly applying to whatever recommended jobs some email list was telling me (and thousands of others) to cold apply to. I could look at my dashboard and decide what to do next. I had a whole bunch of options to choose from depending on what I felt like doing - Research a potential company? Reach out to someone in my network to learn more? Prep for an upcoming interview? I knew that each and every one of them would be productive.
it might a stretch to say looking for a job can be like being a kid in a candy story, but it's not not like that either
Having “stages” for each interview process meant I got little rewards for making a little progress. Each interview process was no longer a “get the job or get rejected” binary. Moving from “hiring manager screen” to “group interview” was a small victory. I even built in extra rewards for myself - whenever I got through the recruiter screen, I generated a little AI image related to the role and made it the cover image for the kanban card. This was a fun way to exercise a little creativity, make the job feel slightly more real, and made the whole kanban board much more colorful.
The more proactive and self-directed you are during the job search, the the better you will feel. Why this works is related to avoiding something Joan Westenberg calls the cynicism trap:
The way out of cynicism isn’t through argument but through example. Every successful project, every solved problem, and every improved system chips away at the cynical worldview. This is why builders are so important — they provide proof that change is possible.The most effective response to cynicism isn’t to argue against it. It’s to build things that make it obsolete. Want to prove systems can work? Build better systems. Think people are fundamentally corrupt? Create incentive structures that reward cooperation and long-term thinking.
You can’t argue or think your way towards the job search sucking less. But you can build your way towards it.
It’s important to remember that it’s a marathon, not a sprint. Doing a little bit of productive work every day (even if there’s “nothing to show for it” except learning that a company you thought was right for you actually isn’t) will keep you resilient. The job search objectively sucks, what the outcome will be and when it will happen is totally uncertain. Uncertainty is inherently scary so you will feel bad. In Oliver Burkeman's final advice column, he talks a lot about uncertainty:
This is why it’s wrong to say we live in especially uncertain times. The future is always uncertain; it’s just that we’re currently very aware of it.
The issue isn't the uncertainty. That's baked in. There's nothing we can do about it. No amount of information is going to make "what will happen in the future" less uncertain.
oh look, the future
The issue is how we react to the uncertainty. Our attitude towards it. We can react to that negative feeling by doing unproductive things like spending 2 hours cold applying to 15 jobs that you don’t actually want then getting ghosted or rejected by all of them (and then feeling guilty about wasting that 2 hours). Or we could react along the lines that James Shelley describes in a brilliant essay from May 2020 titled Uncertainty as Mantra. Remember this was the very beginning of the pandemic. No vaccines, everything was shutting down, people were dying everywhere. It felt like nothing was certain:
Uncertainty is beautiful. To live in uncertainty requires us to become perpetually humble learners. Instead of chronically fearing, dreading, or ignoring the inevitable surprises and shocks to come, what shall we do with them? We could try examination and exploration.
As my mindset shifted, I noticed something. When I got rejected (and I got rejected a lot), I was wrecked for an hour or two, not days. There were some really close calls too. Coinflips. And it hurt. Of course it did. But I had so many other productive, exciting things related to my job search to focus on (the proverbial kid in a candy store). Relatively quickly, I got to the perspective "Well, at least I did the best I could at the things I could control. I'm proud of that." It was genuine, not delusional. I remember noticing at the time. I felt a pull towards all the things I could do that felt good and it made it easier to not wallow in the bad feelings.
Resilience. Examination. Exploration.
Practically speaking, how much more productive was I able to be by devoting that extra few days I gained towards things that helped me find a job and gave me energy. It all compounds.
Here's another benefit! The email is like a built-in monthly mood booster. Like an really good espresso for your mental health. Every time I sent it out, I would get responses! Some from people with additional ideas for how to help. Some with simple encouragement. The job search is lonely. Knowing that others are out there (and that they are invested in your success) helps alleviate that.
Managing your mood
Which brings me to another core truth about the job search. I was listening to Phyl Terry, the author of Never Search Alone, discuss his book and the method he descries on a podcast and he said something along the lines of “if you strip away everything from the job search, at its core, it’s about managing your mood.”
bingo, bango, bongo
This is unequivocally true.
It’s not about the right resume or the right networking or the right behavioral question answers. Those are all part of it, but underneath all of it is your mood. How you feel is upstream of everything else.
Because looking for a job sucks. It just does. It’s hard and it’s scary. And whether you don’t like your current job or you don’t have a job, what you do is tied up in all sorts of important things. At least in the US, two of the most common conversation topics when you meet someone are the weather and “what you do for work.” Our job is tied up in our identity, it’s where we get money, health insurance, stability, meaning. This is not to say we can’t have all those things without a job, but having a job sure helps a lot of people with those things.
A common refrain is “the job market is really hard right now.”
Controversial statement: I don’t think this is actually true.
ducking, virtually
Now, I'm not saying the job market is easy. That would be a ridiculous thing to say. I was just looking for a job! Of course it's hard. It's always hard. But is it especially hard right now? There’s really no way to know. Compared to when? No person has been continually applying to the same job in the same field for years. One could look at unemployment data over time, but that doesn’t really say anything about any individual’s experience. When people say "the job market is really hard right now" they're talking about their own experience, not the country's unemployment rate.
I think what the statement is really saying is “this really sucks” and “I want to connect with other people about that” (also sprinkle in some of “the world is really crazy and uncertain”). Spending any amount of time on LinkedIn means being bombarded by people posting about losing jobs, getting jobs, or how to get jobs (which just exacerbates the feelings of loneliness and frustration). Since other people are saying “the job market is hard right now” too, it’s a way of connecting.
It’s likely a manifestation of a human bias called the fundamental attribution error (remember I’m constantly thinking about that Wikipedia page on human biases). When good things happen to us, we tend to attribute them to internal factors (our personality or hard work). When bad things happen to us, we tend to attribute them to external factors (luck, circumstance, “the economy”). This bias is reversed when we think about other people.
It’s just a human thing. We can’t help it. In most cases, the fundamental attribution error results in confusion at best and racism and ignorance at worst. In this circumstance, it may seem relatively harmless but is in fact incredibly disempowering.
If the job market is really hard right now, that’s completely out of your (and anyone else's) control. It's saying if the job market were easier, you wouldn’t be in this situation. But making the job market easier isn't something you have any control over. There’s literally nothing you can do. What are you going to do? Lower interest rates? Start a company to hire yourself?
It takes your focus away from the things you can control. The things you can do right now. Things that no one else is doing.
You know, like making a list and writing an email.
——
I wrote this, but the source of most of the wisdom in here doesn’t come from me. Phyl Terry’s Never Search Aloneandthe job seekers who supported me in the job search councils that I was a part of were huge influences.
The biggest influence of all was the collective efforts and care of the hundreds of friends and former colleagues in my network (i.e. probably you). Whether it was something big or tiny, it added up. I did this, but I couldn't have done it without all of you.
