Penn and Kim Holderness on Neurodivergence And The Creative Journey

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2:03The Anxious Achiever: Is it possible for AI to make room for more human connection, not less? Notion says yes, and it will help you do your best work. Learn more about how Notion can support your business at notion.com slash achiever. That's all lowercase letters, notion.com slash achiever and try Notion today. And when you use our link, you're supporting our show. Hi, I'm Maura Aarons-Mele, host of The Anxious Achiever. Today, I'm going to bring you one of our most downloaded and one of my most favorite episodes from our archives. It's a classic. The Anxious Achiever has been at it for a long time. We have over 300 episodes, and honestly, they're all still more relevant than ever.

2:51The Anxious Achiever: You may hear details in this episode that remind you it's from another time, but I guarantee that the advice you get will be as crisp and meaningful and the stories as resonant as before. If you have a favorite episode of the show, let me know. I'd love to air it again or even re-record it for you fresh. Enjoy this classic Anxious Achiever episode.

3:32is creativity. You might have ADHD.

3:38The Anxious Achiever: That's a clip from the YouTube channel of today's guests, Penn and Kim Holderness. Now, you might know them because they were winners of The Amazing Race, but they've gone on to build a company, a brand, and a big following since then. Penn has ADHD, and together the couple set out on a five-year journey to better understand what ADHD meant for Penn and his brain, but also for their family and the rest of the people they interact with every day. The Holdernesses have learned to embrace Penn's neurodivergence and leverage each other's strengths. And they wrote a book about it called ADHD is Awesome, a guide of mostly thriving with ADHD.

4:17The Anxious Achiever: I wanted to talk to them not just because of their ability to see the upside of ADHD, think extreme creativity and adaptability, but also to hear their journey of making work work for them in the face of neurodivergence and entrepreneurship and all the things. They share lessons I think we can all benefit from. Penn, you wrote something that was so moving to me. You referenced what's called the second arrow in Buddhism, where the first arrow is the hurt of the mistake that you made. The second arrow is the shame that you feel from letting people down. And I'd love you both to reflect on that when it comes to your ADHD and your partnership.

5:01Well, you know, one of the things we've learned is that the emotional component of ADHD is not nearly as talked about as the superficial symptoms of like, oh, I'm spacing out. Oh, I think that the emotional side is something that people are understanding a little bit better. it is 100 % real, not only for young kids, which you can imagine how intense that can be, but that does carry its way all the way into adulthood. I can speak for experience on that. The second arrow of Buddhism, it makes me think that those guys maybe may have had a little bit of ADHD. Shame is sticky for our type of brain.

5:39It grabs hold. And the same wonderful wanderings that our brains have that lead to creativity and spontaneity and creative problem solving can wander in the wrong direction emotionally. And that's how the shame gets to be so powerful and so uncomfortable.

5:56The Anxious Achiever: And the impact on the people in your life, right? Yes. Well, we're imagining the impact that we're making on people in our life as probably worse even than it actually is. I know that I impact people negatively when I make a mistake, but what I dream up and imagine in my head sometimes is even worse. Yeah. Kim, what do you think about that? There are so many gifts that have come from this book. And we say it many times, we are not the doctors. We are, you know, the lab rats ourselves. But one of the gifts from this was learning so much about the emotional dysregulation piece. And I had no idea that was such a big component of ADHD.

6:41And if I didn't know, as somebody who partners and parents with it, then I bet you a lot of other people didn't know. And Penn tells stories that, you know, up until he was a teenager, he would get really upset if, you know, cry a lot. And I think that's not, you know, wasn't really cool for a 15 year old boy to start crying. And obviously, he's outgrown that a little it, but I still see times and he knows now, like I'm flooding and he can name it now. He's like, my executive functioning is taxed. I'm redlining. So he can name it now better. But learning about that was a game changer for our relationship and how I parent my son and also how we work together.

7:24Tell me about how you work together, how it changed it. Work is mostly communication, right? And it's trial and error and it's throwing spaghetti on a wall and if you're with someone eight hours a day, in our case, 24 hours a day, something's going to go wrong. And when it does go wrong, and Kim used the term flooding, that's kind of, that's our nickname for the emotional onslaught that comes, that you can actually feel when, oh my gosh, something is going wrong. And it does feel like your house is taking on water or your brain is taking on water and there's nothing that you can do to stop it.

8:01I think people with anxiety can relate to that as well. And so honestly, like once we figured out that, okay, something's going on at work, something goes wrong, I get really either, I use a defense mechanism, like getting really defensive and say, oh yeah, well, you know, and everything's awful. And then just in acting like that, you know, Kim's like, whoa, what's, what's, you're a 45 year old man. What the hell's going on here? Getting the language that we've gotten in researching this book to understand, oh, that's actually part of your brain. It's in many ways uncontrollable. But if you are aware that it's there, you can name it and get through it.

8:38And it is something that Kim can relate to as someone who's dealt with anxiety as well. Early on, before we had the language of ADHD, so I have anxiety, so I'm very well-versed in what works for my brain and what my brain needs. I would just, you know, with Penn, he can get really hyper-focused on something. But if we add too many things to his list, by we, I mean the people we work with, I would just say, Penn gets really overwhelmed. So let's just, while he's in the middle of an edit, let's not ask him 47 questions. Well, now we know that on a really stressful day, like if we have back-to-back-to-back meetings, we have a project due, we really have to lay out that time and make sure for all of our mental health sake that we are not overwhelming.

9:22I mean, it's a good practice, ADHD or not, but we are just being really realistic about what can be accomplished. And if he is knee deep on a project, he is hyper-focused on an edit, we are not gonna bombard him. We're like, let's pause, let's not blow up the work text string and let's give him an hour because we mark this off for an hour. And after an hour, I'm gonna come up and tap him on the shoulder and get him out of that. So we're just more, I think, respectful of what he needs to be successful. That's just human decency and we all work better like that.

9:53The Anxious Achiever: I mean, I love this so much. It actually gave me so much insight in my own relationship. I also obviously have anxiety, but I'm a really high executive function kind of gal. I can toss things off and dance and tap dance and cook and do all the things. My husband absolutely cannot. I've worked with people who absolutely cannot. And I always thought they would get mad at me when I would be like, oh, hey, what about this? And they're knee deep in a task. I thought that was so powerful. It's like, how do you control the incoming? And so let me ask you a question because my audience loves really nitty gritty stuff.

10:35The Anxious Achiever: How do you schedule for success? I think Kim just explained how we do it. I guess it's funny. I don't love to hear Penn gets really overwhelmed because it makes, which they don't say. They may know that and think that and talk about it behind my back, but they don't say, well, Penn is going to freak out. Let's not do this. Why don't you love to hear that? How does that make you feel? Shame. Makes me feel shame. It's a part of my brain that I can't help. I think, honestly, like hearing overwhelmed, it sounds like it's something that I cannot control no matter what happens. As if it's your fault.

11:12Yeah. Meanwhile, like it's unrealistic for anybody to say, finish this edit, answer 12 questions. Could you write a script? But it's not like you can tap dance and spin plates, but that's not normal. Yeah. So here's the other thing. Like in order for this to be successful, you have to understand the dichotomy of ADHD. It's not just the bad stuff. Like we're talking mostly about getting overwhelmed, flooding.

11:34The Anxious Achiever: Oh, no. Well, don't you worry. We will get to the good stuff. I am all good stuff. Don't you worry. Once you put a schedule around it and you do like Kim says and you say, let's give him an hour. Let's give him an opportunity to be positively fixated on something. Right. There's negatively fixated and there's positively fixated. If you point an ADHD brain in the right direction, it's going to be pretty efficient and sometimes spectacularly efficient, like more so than other people's brains. And so success to us, I'll give you an example of like a couple of weeks ago, is give the ADHD brain a chance to be a hero in some way.

12:13It could be in a very basic way and then let them go. we were trying to put together an ad for a card game that we have which we love it's called family face-off which we are now entirely responsible for the sales and revenue of it we used to partner with someone we bought the game from him and now it's like our thing that we can sell wow and we needed to put an ad together and we were as a team we were like tap dancing around like what are we going to do and the adhd brainstorming brain was kind of all over the place may not have been doing its best work there. And then Kim goes, song. Just write a song.

12:49Yeah, she goes, song. And I was like, what do you mean? She's like, Penn's good at writing a song. Penn, go away. Go upstairs. Come back in one hour with something. And for me, like that is my force multiplier. If you want to talk in business, that's the thing that I'm several times better at other people.

13:06The Anxious Achiever: It's your superpower. Yeah, they gave me space. They said, let's let him do in this, let him hyper-focus, fixate, whatever term you want to do. and that's not, I don't think that's like a normal business workflow, especially in a collaborative atmosphere, but it really works for me. It interrupts and doesn't like, I don't think that it's like great for people who are trying to be in a collaborative brainstorming space, but they all knew as a team, oh, this might be the way to go. And that ended up being successful. It's not always going to be successful. To get to the nitty gritty. So I will say how we have to set up our week and it's, it, it may not work for everybody else.

13:44We try to do all of our meetings on Monday, which makes Monday a huge slog. I'm not going to lie. So it's, we have a nine 30 content meeting. We have an 11 o 'clock meeting with this person. We have a, like it is just, it's a slog, but it sets us up for what we need to accomplish in that week. And then also on Monday, we're like kind of starting writing our stuff that we're shooting on Tuesday. We shoot our videos on Tuesdays. And then we try to shoot two, three new videos on Tuesday. Wednesday is he edits. We also have Sam who works with us and she'll edit while Anne-Marie and I will work on writing this stuff, just writing blog posts, doing all the administrative stuff for the next week.

14:28Thursday, we try to, this week is a little wonky, but if we're going to record a podcast, do something like that on a Thursday. And then Friday is a content brainstorm and we can be free. We are freer to sort of daydream and we try to, in the creative space, give time for daydreaming. It doesn't always happen. This is a really busy time of year for us, but we try not to hyper schedule Fridays. So my best ideas happen on a walk. His best ideas happen, you know, he's kind of like locked in by himself so we have time to get creative. We kind of pitch those ideas, start writing those ideas, and then we kind of start the process.

15:12We find that meetings, and they happen, they spring up during the week, but those sort of like calls with brands, calls with whatever, slow down our creative juices. So we try to rip it off like a band-aid and do it all Monday. That might not be a perfect way to do it, but that's what's worked. and allows us to really get creative for the rest of the week.

15:35The Anxious Achiever: I love that. And actually, I mean, one of the things that I'm exploring in my new book, and this is what I believe about leadership, do less of what's hard for you and what you're bad at and get free to lean into your superpower. Right. I mean, to me, that's basic. And those of us who are neurodivergent, like that's the secret to our success. but a lot of us are told that we just have to get better at what we're bad at and what's hard for us. I have a new driver in my family and as an anxious person, who boy is it testing me. And that's why I love Hey Polo. Hey Polo is the family safety app built on trust.

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20:58And as, as a employer, I'm not going to be mad if one week, they're working 25, 30 hours, because I know there's a week coming up soon where they're going to have to be working on a weekend, or I don't want to work on a weekend, but they'll be working. But this last weekend, we had an issue with TikTok shop. And so Sweet Sam was like on it. She was on a calls on Saturday. Like, we know that that's going to pop up.

21:20The Anxious Achiever: Yeah. I want to ask you about creativity. And I want to ask each of you how your own sort of neurodivergence feeds or empowers creativity? I would say we are a very good team. I think that I do a good job because I'm very, I am, I'm an anxious person, but I'm also very empathetic. But because of my anxiety, I'm hyper aware. Yes. And I'm hyper aware when I go to Target, what everybody's stressing about. I'm hyper aware in my conversations with people about like what everybody's dealing with. Yep. And I think I'm a good noticer of things. But after that, I can kind of come up with a script or a sketch.

22:05But sometimes, for example, we were packing for a trip and I noticed we were going to be gone for 48 hours. And I packed, you know, like 10 pair of underwear. And I'm like, this is ridiculous. Why do I have so many pairs? Like, am I going to like poop my pants? and so I said, Penn, that would be like a really funny song about how many pair of underwear I pack. I can kind of tee him up and then he disappears and... Yeah, so I think I did take for granted how great Kim was at all of this for a long time and I don't anymore because she really does notice everything and I've seen it work against her with her anxiety, right?

22:47Like, obviously, but man, does it work for her in this particular line of work? I think it's probably therapeutic to be able to laugh at those things sometimes, too. So the way that I explain my brain is that while I think a neurotypical brain, it's like a VIP club with a bouncer and a velvet rope that only lets in certain things. Like you can, you know, a few things can come in, maybe one or two, you know, like one or two at a time. And we're going to be fine here and everything is going to be safe. if we're going to be good, and there's just a few things in here. So my brain is Coachella. It's an open-air concert that just takes in everything.

23:25It's why ADHD is the stupidest name ever. I know that's not a great term, but it's not a deficit of attention. We see and feel more than other people. We just don't know how to focus, right? So at Coachella, you feel the wind, you feel the rain, the thunder, and the lightning, and everyone's there, and they're all having conversations and they're everywhere and you can feel them almost simultaneously. And a lot of times that can be overwhelming. And by the way, this is an analogy brought to us by Dr. Marcia. I was about to give her credit. So Marcy Caldwell, who is our kind of our metaphor guru.

23:59Love it. Gives us all of these great metaphors. And this is one that she gave us after the book was written. So we didn't really have that in the book. So anyway, she comes to me with an idea. and all of a sudden I hear music, I hear conversations in my head, I hear lyrics and they're all welcome. And when there's something simple enough for me to focus it on, like underwear, like underwear, then my brain from there is able to find all of these new things that probably haven't been said, thought, heard, sung, written, whatever. and then they just kind of find their way on either into my fingers or onto a piece of paper.

24:41And it's because my brain is saying yes to everything that comes to me. And it sometimes takes several drafts. But to me, that's like a good explanation for pure inspiration anyway, because I think a lot of great ideas are already out there. You just have to find them.

24:56The Anxious Achiever: And it's a really multi-sensory thing for you, it sounds like. No, it is. And, you know, a lot of that has to do with some practice, with, you know, taking piano lessons as a kid, being involved in music as a kid and being in some ways positively fixated on those things when I was growing up. And, you know, getting a college major in philosophical writing and being able to kind of, you know, come up with new ideas. But none of that happens without someone being able to give me the nugget of the idea, which I just I don't do nearly as prolifically as someone like Kim does. This is fascinating. And then, okay, so then, then what happens, right?

25:35The Anxious Achiever: Because your work is all about then you've got the finished product, and then there's a whole other life it has to take off. I mean, we just explained it in a very pure sense. Yeah. Like she does this and I do this. Sometimes, sometimes Kim does what I do. And sometimes, some very rarely I can do what Kim does. But then like, that's where the collaboration sort of starts, which again, is a challenge for an ADHD brain. If they've put all this stuff together and oh my God, this is amazing. And then they send it back out in the world and people are like, yeah, we get a little sensitive about that sometime.

26:07So that's something I've learned in 10 years. So to us anxious people though. Right. Well, I know. I think everybody. Yeah, we're trying to because, again, we have two other people who work with us who, by the way, also bring us ideas and they also do writing. So it's not just pen and I in a vacuum, but we are trying to create a space where you can have bad ideas, not bad ideas, but ideas where they're not going to work right now. Or we need to kind of polish it a little bit to make it make sense for what our audience is expecting. Yeah, but the workflow is stereotypically, Kim, big idea, pen, execution.

26:43Is it a song? Is it a skit? Is there a script? Collaboration with all of us, right? Polish. And then what is called a table read, where we all sit there and we try to either a table read or I go up here and I write a song and we listen to the song. Yeah. Pam and Sam help us shoot it and kind of ideate about what that looks like. And then it's all, you know, posting it and all that good stuff.

27:07The Anxious Achiever: I mean, you produce a tremendous volume of creative work. Yeah. Do you ever feel the pressure to be creative every week wearing on you? And if so, what do you do? We might have different answers on that. I feel like I wake up every morning unemployed. Like I've got to start over again. Like it's, I guess that means it's wearing on me a little bit. Like what? What does that mean that you feel unemployed? It means yesterday's video was awesome. It's getting us some views. We may get a brand deal or two from it. We're going to monetize the videos, but that's going to last two days because that's what happens on the internet.

27:44It doesn't last very long. So what's next?

27:47The Anxious Achiever: And is that an anxious feeling for you or just to like, yes, I'll do it? I think it's an anxious. Or both. I think it's an anxious feeling for me. Yeah, I feel that way. Yeah. You're only as good as like last week's. Yeah, I feel that way. I have moments for sure where I, it usually happens in January. And so I have it marked on my calendar. Like you will freak out second week in January. And I would say when our life gets really busy with the kids and sports and whatever, and I don't have time to just let my mind wander and have time to notice things. I would say three or three times a year, I come to our idea meeting and I'm like, guys, we're at the end of the internet.

28:29We're done. We're going. We're done. We're going to go. I'm like, I don't have an ego. I feel like we can go get jobs somewhere else. and inevitably I go take a walk and then I come back. I'm like, okay, guys, I got it. And I have like five different ideas. But I would say we walk through life or I do. And I think like with these lenses on, I'm just looking at like, is this funny? And I think it's a good way to walk through life or how can I make this funny? So I think real life is funny. And I just have to notice what's happening in my life. Like if I'm going through it in my house, you're going through it in your house.

29:07So yeah, it's interesting. I think like the symbiosis in our family is like on the daily, she picks me up, I would say 360 days out of the year and says, have you noticed this? Have you noticed this? And continues to feed this creative engine that allows me to get going. And then I guess on the other side, on those two or three other days, I guess like big picture, I just know we're going to be okay. Yeah. Like that's the thing that I always feel, despite feeling unemployed every morning when I wake up. But I also don't feel like we're locked into this, that if all of a sudden we're like, you know what, actually I don't have any ideas.

29:42Like I don't feel pressure to maintain something. Because I also feel like I know that our kids are going to, we're going to be empty nesters soon. But so will a bunch of other people. And so they might be following along for empty nest stuff. And I just love the act of creating it. So even if people don't watch it, it's very,

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33:34The Anxious Achiever: Monarch is like having a financial advisor in your pocket. It has easy-to-read diagrams that help me visualize exactly where my money goes each month. and it has investment views so I can compare my portfolio, say, to how the S &P is doing. All kinds of great tools that help me, frankly, take some of the emotions out of money and make it more practical and working for me. Most apps only tell you what you've already spent, but Monarch helps set goals, map out big purchases, and see if you're actually on track before it's too late to adjust. You can write your own money story with Monarch. Use the code Achiever at Monarch.com and get your first year of Monarch Core at half off just$50.

34:17The Anxious Achiever: That's$50 off your first year at Monarch.com with code Achiever. Let me ask you, first, I want to I wanted to share something with you that like changed my life this summer. You said, you know, I see things and then they become my ideas. I went on in New England at a camp, a walk to see mushrooms growing in the wild. mycology and I went with an incredible wildlife guide and he said that when you're doing something like a safari or you're out in nature you have to turn on your seeing eyes and then once the seeing eyes are on you see everywhere you can't unsee it that mushrooms like once you see you look for the fungus you see it a few times your seeing eyes are tuned in and you see it I feel that way.

35:10The Anxious Achiever: So I work with leaders who are anxious or neurodivergent. My seeing eyes are tuned and I see it everywhere. And that's my superpower, but it's been a skill I've had to hone. And you're sort of saying the same thing, you two. It's like, I have seeing eyes for what's going to resonate with my audience and I can see it on a trip to Target. Right. Yeah. And that's, And it's a fun way to walk through the world, don't you think? It is. It's endlessly inspiring. Right. It can be exhausting, though. How many people that signed up for the mushroom walk got there? And thought they were going to go on mushrooms.

35:48And were like, oh, wait a stop. Wait, we're not wanting to eat this mushroom. This is a bummer. But then they had to go for the whole mushroom walk. And it's like there is a girl who signed up for a, she thought she was signed up for a meditation class, but it was a mediation class. And she had this thing. And it was like in college. And so it was like all law students. And they're like, why did you say I'm? She's like. Looked me to chill out. She was like, I just. Yeah, but she stayed through the whole thing. Because she was like, I was too embarrassed. She was in yoga pants.

36:20The Anxious Achiever: Okay, so you build a picture of what the world would be like if it were run by people with ADD or ADHD. What would it look like? And what would school look like? And what would meetings look like? I think schools would be a lot more jumpy. It'd be outside. Yeah. I think that the class length would be shorter. I think that we probably would excel as human beings at quick processing, problem solving, maybe even like math in some cases, because you can move from one problem to the next. We would search for better ways to do reading comprehension. I mean, we might try to find ways for people to learn things without having to read 80 pages a night.

37:02knowing that a lot of us, that is a negative, that it's the ability to get through a page without being distracted and moving elsewhere. They're definitely, you know, we're moving in the right direction for some of these things. It wouldn't be a bunch of people all facing in the same direction listening to one person talk. And they're doing a better job. They are. Much better. Yes. I think that there would be exercise in the morning. I think there'd be like, there'd just be brain, like fitness breaks. Just nuts. Yeah. At work, offices would look different. There'd be fewer silos. There would be more breaks, but shorter.

37:39And I think that people would work on micro deadlines instead of like these long lead deadlines.

37:44The Anxious Achiever: What's a micro deadline? It's how I wrote the book. It's like finish this paragraph instead of finish this chapter. It's just, I think a lot of ADHD brains work better on micro deadlines. Anxious brains too, right? I call them bearable chunks. Like maybe the world's going to end tomorrow, but for today, if I can just, you know, be okay this next hour by doing X, Y, Z, like I'll be okay. Yeah. I don't, I've never heard it from anyone else, but I'm not saying I invented it, but I'm pretty sure I invented it. Well, someone has to have said this before, but like, honestly, I, it's not like I, I discovered it because it was how I wrote the book.

38:17I had this editor who did an awesome job getting me micro deadlines.

38:20The Anxious Achiever: Is it a myth that most ADD folks have trouble completing tasks in your experience? Well, the sentence has to be longer, right? ADHD people have trouble completing tasks that don't interest them, that don't interest them, or while they have other tasks that are in conflict with what it is that they're trying to do. So, I mean, something as basic, which I see in my house, and I do all the time, your kid is helping you wash the dishes, and you say, when you're done with that, That way you take out the trash. We don't have the working memory to hold both of those things in our brain. That one hits close to home.

39:00I think it happens to everyone, right? That when an ADHD brain hears and then, that's a bit of a short circuit situation. So you need cues or the patients to try to ask them once they're done or give them some grace when they forget that second thing and say, hey, let's also get that done. I don't know how to explain it. I'm 50 years old and I've been trying to figure it out my entire life. Unless there's a blaring alarm, a checklist or my mom, it's not going to happen. Just just doesn't happen. I'm sorry. It sucks. The thing I struggle with on this front is, yes, I did learn a lot that the working memory.

39:42Perfect example. Hey, you know, you got to take out the garbage after you do the dishes or our son this morning after you finish eating breakfast, go brush your teeth. And I'm like, I'm sure he didn't brush his teeth this morning when he left. Like I gave, it was like too many. The thing I struggle with is pen to cash out this morning. And like the hamper's right there. Like he's creating an extra step by leaving the clothes right in the middle of the floor. So I'm just like the processes of it.

40:09The Anxious Achiever: As we round out, I do want to actually finish with something that I think those in the audience who might have ADHD or just have really different brains want to know, which is how do you become you guys like people ask me how did I become me I was never gonna make it up the corporate ladder as badly as I wanted to or thought I wanted to how do you find and create the life that allows you to live out those superpowers of your neurodivergent brain and earn a living from it? Like, what's your advice? Or what was your story? How did you stumble into this existence? We stumbled into the existence with a fairly insane leap where we didn't have a whole lot of savings.

40:59But something had to change because I was working in local news, which is a dying business. I made money, I had benefits, but I never saw my kids. Can I also say that we are doing this. We desperately wanted to be like network anchors and reporters. We auditioned and sent tapes for those network jobs in the news business and got zero calls back. You got more than me. I did. But Penn was told as somebody who was a non, who initially worked in sports as somebody who is a non athlete, this is as high as you were going to go. This is, and his agent told him like, this is the best I can do for you.

41:44And this is it for you. This is your, you reached the ceiling. And so I thank God for that every day, because I feel as if, if we had followed that path, first of all, we would have been working for someone else. And we would have seen the kids last week. And honestly would not have been able, like that is not a situation that would have allowed space for either of our neurodivergence. I think it just would, it would have been a miserable life. So we heard no a lot. And so we got very lucky because we put out a video and it went viral and you cannot plan for that. Right. So we were very prepared for it.

42:21But what made you create that video? What made you think like, Hey, we could be, we're going to do this. This is fun. We needed to start a business and publicize it. But even more nitty gritty, because I know you like that term, we wanted to make something that was just us that we weren't making for somebody else, which is what we had done for 20 years, which is making content for other people based on whatever it is that they want us to do. And that video was us. It was fun. It was, I think, way more relatable than anything we've ever done because other people were going through what we were going through.

42:54And it allowed us to use some of the art and like artistic skill that we had honed when we were children that was like begging to come

43:05The Anxious Achiever: back out I think oh I love that I love the joy right the I think if you're an artist like it comes out if you have a creative bone like if you're an attorney or an accountant like if you have a creative heart it's going to come out in that world or somehow it's like there's something yeah or in a hobby you don't always have to make money off of it but it's there's no way you can stifle that. So it's, we feel every single day we knock on wood that, that we are able to do this. And we feel like, yes, we are prepared. Yes. We work very, very hard. We've been able to sustain and grow, but I, I feel like we like kind of won the internet lottery that first time around.

43:46So like we got really, really lucky. But, but then we did it again. Then you do it again and again and again. Like that's, that's, that's the hard part. That is very hard. And I'm proud of us that we've been able to do that. But so many people who are very, very qualified and creative, like don't get into the algorithm or whatever it is. I don't know. I feel like there's part luck and then part a lot of work.

44:09The Anxious Achiever: But maybe there's a piece of it also that you, you listened to that creative spirit in the first place. I think if it less is luck, maybe the main lucky thing was that that a platform came into existence that allowed people to express themselves away from traditional media and make a living. So the real luck was that that existed, right? I think if YouTube existed when we were 20, we would have done this when we were 20. But also I will say that Penn and I at that time in our lives, although I'm very risk averse, but we only had three months of savings when he quit his job. Wow. And we didn't, by the way, quit to be influencers.

44:47We were quitting to run a marketing company and do videos for other people behind the scenes. So we were not doing the content creation stuff. Our hope was to like make videos for other people. There was nothing in our being that would allow us to work in newsrooms for other people one more day. Like literally, I remember I was on a trip and you called me and he goes, I'm gonna walk in and quit. I'm gonna do it. I'm like, do it, do it now. Go, go, go. Call me when you're done. Because when you have that feeling of like, I cannot do this one more day, you got to honor that and it was scary and we did it we're some of the few that it actually worked

45:24The Anxious Achiever: I've learned so much listening to you both and I really just want listeners to hear how you've made work work for you I hope it was helpful

45:40The Anxious Achiever: that's it for this week's show if you like the show follow us and tell your friends and please leave us a review. It really helps the anxious achiever get found by people just waiting for our content. I'm your host, Maura Aarons-Mele. Lots more to come in the next episode.