Transcript
Annalisa Holcombe:
If you've ever listened to this podcast, then you know that it is where we explore what it means to bring your whole self to work and to spend the vast amount of our lives that we spend at work well.

Annalisa Holcombe:
He has a Ph .D. in American history from the University of Delaware, and he has served as provost, vice president of enrollment management, and vice president of student affairs at different universities and colleges. He's also chaired the boards of several nonprofits and led economic development efforts in small towns. He's the principal consultant for Back Porch consulting. And today, he will be talking with us about devotion.

Annalisa Holcombe:
I'm super excited to welcome Gary Danes to the podcast. Gary is, as you know, Gary, I've known you for a long time, but every time we get a chance to talk, actually, even when we get a chance to talk about professional things, it always ends up getting to be a little bit deeper. and I think that that is something that you bring to conversations where you help people to focus and I can't wait to get into this conversation today. So thank you so much for coming.

Gary Daynes:
Well, thank you for having me, Annalisa. It's great to be with you and great to be on the podcast.

Annalisa Holcombe:
Awesome. So you know the way I start the podcast. Every podcast has the same initial question, which is the big question. removing all the things that you do. Tell me about who you are. What are you proud of yourself for as a human being?

Gary Daynes:
Thank you for asking that. And thank you for telling me that you were going to ask that in advance so I could chew on that a bit. At this moment, I am proud that I have learned in the last maybe eight or ten years to try to see things as close to the way they are as possible. By that I mean, you know, as an academic and like a word person, I, for most of my life, I've sort of seen, my practice has been to see things through the prism of, you know, an ideology or like like a set of assumptions or the literature in my field or whatever.

Gary Daynes:
And I remember just before Covid having the sense that probably it was time to pay attention to the world and to the actual people in it and try to see things as close to the real way that they are as possible and that has that sort of change in the way of thinking and being in the world I think has led me to be a different sort of person than I was when I was younger in that and I don't know if this is all good but in that I see interactions and things like I'm looking out the window at some beautiful trees in my backyard as having a kind of integrity and dignity to them that I think I looked past in the past.

Gary Daynes:
So I've spent a lot of time just like trying to pay attention to moments where people do good and interesting things for strangers in a really kind of low stakes but hopeful sort of way. And that has both given me more hope than I used to have for people and for communities and for people, particularly in communities, particularly with whom I might differ on political or religious things. And it's also led me to wonder if I have sometimes placed my trust in organizations or processes or systems or, you know, prestige and class to my own detriment and to the detriment of people around me because I just didn't realize that like, you know, regular people staffing a booth at the, you know, the Smyrna, North Carolina neighborhood festival might, in fact, be living in the world in a way that would help make me better off if I was willing to pay attention to it.

Gary Daynes:
So I think the thing that I'm proud of, or at least pleased with in the last several years of my life is trying to pay attention to little bits of the world, the bits of the world that I can see, and try to see them as honestly as possible and recognize in that that there might be hope and goodness, you know, hope with a lowercase age, goodness with a lowercase G, but that that might, in fact, be the basis of the way that we live together in the future. So that's what I think I'm proud of.

Annalisa Holcombe:
Well, I mean, so I set you up by saying, every time I talk to Gary, it gets deeper and more focused. And then you land that. I mean, we could talk about that for two hours. I am moved by it at the thought of the intention with which to see the world, like the choice that you're making to view the beauty that you see. Like, it's a choice that we're often not making nowadays as a society.

Gary Daynes:
Yeah, and it's nearly always in small stuff. So let me tell you a story. One of my kids is non-binary. One of the things that it means for them is that they tend to locate themselves sort of on the progressive end of the political spectrum. So we're together at a neighborhood festival in Little Washington, North Carolina. It's this little town kind of on the coast in northeastern North Carolina and we walk around a corner and there's a booth that has this giant trump flag on it this big burly guy with like a giant beard and a trucker cap. But it's a booth about beekeeping so you know you would expect I would have expected knowing my kid and just reading a signal from the big trump sign that we were either just going to skirt right around it or there might be some certain sort of amount of snarkiness or whatever.

Gary Daynes:
So we get close and the guy says to my kid are you interested in bees and my kid says yeah I think I am So the two of them stand there for 20 minutes and talk about bees and beekeeping and what it might mean to learn how to care for bees. And during that entire interaction, they are both, you know, they're both still themselves. It's not like they were turned into like some depoliticized human being. But they were also in a sort of moment of community.

Gary Daynes:
So I used to think of things like that as just being transitory, right? Like that that was the false thing and the real thing was the bigger political framework. Maybe that's true. But that was not false. Like that was two actual human beings talking about bees in a way that acknowledged and transcended their differences and also could only have taken place in that particular little place at that moment in time, you know, if they'd have walked past each other just on the sidewalk, they never were to set a word to each other. So just as an example of how like paying attention, particularly to little things, might in fact, at least I have found it to be enlightening in terms of understanding the world that I happen to live in.

Annalisa Holcombe:
It's funny because it reminds me of I mean, I don't know why it reminds me of this, but it reminds me of the story I tell of children and how easily like my noticing of my children when they're little especially noticing beauty everywhere and pointing it out and having joy about it, especially in the things that mean nothing to us later. That a breeze blows by or there's a really cool dragonfly or whatever um stopping and like really being in that present moment and then noticing the beauty. I feel like that's what you're doing is being in the present moment and noticing the beauty

Gary Daynes:
So I'm going to tell you one other story I realize that the purpose of this podcast is not here Gary telling stories. I used to work at Salem Academy and College. It is the oldest continually operating educational institution for women and girls in the United States. It's over 250 years old. And it's in Old Salem, North Carolina. So there are like stones in the sidewalk that have been there for centuries and have been walked over and parts dragged over them so long that they're smooth and rounded and they sort of bear the shape of history.

Gary Daynes:
It's like, I'm driving to work and I'm listening to a podcast as I often do. And a person is talking about, like, you know, one way to unlock your creativity is to deal with the trauma that you faced as a young person. And this is not necessarily a bad thing, right? Like, you know, if creativity comes out of challenge, so you need to examine that. So I'm thinking about that. And I parked my car and walk through the plaza and there's this class of kindergartners and they're all squatting down and they're rubbing their hands over the stones.

Gary Daynes:
And they said like, look, rocks. And the juxtaposition are those two things, right? Like the notion that the challenges that we face as young human beings in a complicated world shape us in some ways penalize or diminish the possibility that might exist in people, which is absolutely true, right? And also, at that same time, little five-year -old's just like great joy in old stones. That's the actual world that we live in, right?

Gary Daynes:
It's not one or the other. It is the tension and the creativity that comes out of the touching of the two that makes this an interesting time to be a human being.

Annalisa Holcombe:
Well, this is really great because as we talk about that, our subject that we wanted to talk about today, especially in terms of this theme of 92,000 hours, and you picked a doozy, which is the idea of devotion. And That is the subject that really intrigued you. And I'm interested in, what does that mean to you? How does that apply to your working world? And how do you define it?

Gary Daynes:
So I think devotion is love entangled with commitment. And the reason I think it's important is that love or commitments separate from being entangled with each other often lead to behavior that I think is decent but superficial, right? It doesn't go as deep as it might. Or perhaps looked at the other way, the people who I have come across who seem deep and wise and somehow okay with where they are in the world demonstrate devotion more than they demonstrate on the one hand like obligation or duty or on the other hand kind of love the pursuit of passion the desire for fulfilling that thing that like resides uniquely in you that only you can you can bring out.

Gary Daynes:
So I've wondered a lot about folks like that. A lot of the work that I do in my career is with people who work at schools or churches or organizations that are struggling, right? They're facing serious decline and or are located in places that are struggling and or serve people whose lives are often framed by struggle, right? They don't have good access to health care. They may not have good access to education. They may face racism and class discrimination. And so in working with people in places or institutions that are in the midst of struggle, I'm struck by these people who are there and seem to be okay.

Gary Daynes:
And I think those people have devotion, right? They certainly love the place that they work for. Like, you know, at colleges, these are the people who, like, naturally put on the t-shirt that says, fill in the blank college. And they go to the stuff that, you know, they go to the volleyball game in February in a sleet storm. Because of course you go to a volleyball game in February sleet storm. And they are often the soul of those places so that if or when they leave, the place is diminished in a way that you would never expect just by looking at their spot on the org chart.

Gary Daynes:
And so anyways, that's why I got interested in devotion, because there are many people like that. There are people like that in every single one of those organizations or places or communities. They are often unacknowledged or officially, or at least they are not as officially acknowledged as the people who have power influenced because of their jobs or their degrees or whatever else.

Gary Daynes:
And I think, though I don't know exactly how to do this, that by learning from them and seeing how they affect organizations and systems and places that those organizations and systems and places might, in fact, find ways to survive, to flourish in the world that are unexpected and they look way different than the like, oh, just go raise some more money or add a new program or move to a more prosperous kind of place, which is kind of the narrative of prosperity or flourishing that is the mainstream or the most common narrative of prospering of flourishing.

Gary Daynes:
Like, you know, you grow up in a tough situation and you're in a run downtown and you can get out and go to a great college and then get a job someplace else. Kind of the narrative is you should go do that. So I'm interested in folks that maybe choose not to do that, and I think often they choose not to do that because they are devoted. They love entangled with a sense of responsibility to a place or to an organization or to a community.

Gary Daynes:
The sense of devotion seems to me to be, in some ways, inextricably linked to mission, but maybe it's not. And so, you know, like, it could be that someone is devoted to an employer. I'm thinking about that. Like, I traveled to Ohio the first time to a small town years ago, and I was struck by this town that was clearly in decline. And I was feeling depressed, but there was also beauty. There's like some really amazing things around it.

Gary Daynes:
And so I was thinking that similar thing, like, who are the people who live in this town? How are they handling it? And I met a person who loved that town and was doing murals, but also worked in the factory that was the last one that was about to close down. So maybe the idea has something to do with, like you can feel devotion to a factory if it also, maybe it's even the factory, but I can see the factory helping you have community.

Annalisa Holcombe:
How do you see that idea of devotion in like these, in a place that's not about community, but it's also a, but it's a company where somebody's great and they're devoted to the company. Is that a thing?

Gary Daynes:
That is a thing. And that's a really wise question because companies can betray your devotion. And your devotion can be inadequate for the survival of the company, right? And so this story that you told is about a person who love the company and love the place, and the factory was going to close anyway. So I think we need to learn a couple lessons from that, right? One is the devotion does not save, right? Perhaps if all the factory workers were devoted to the factory in such a way that when things went bad, they, you know, like formed a worker co -op and bought it and, you know, I think devotion could, devotion opens up different pathways to viability than do other kind of values or commitments, right?

Gary Daynes:
So I think we shouldn't, we shouldn't set that aside. But one of the most painful and widespread stories in our nation today is about people whose devotion has been betrayed by the institutions that they serve. So think about nearly every denomination, every nonprofit that has had a sex abuse scandal, has had embezzlement, has had leaders in it for their own profit, right? And hence the deep skepticism about institutions that appropriately infects the United States.

Gary Daynes:
So if all that stuff is true, what is it that you're devoted to? I think some of these, some people, and maybe this is a good thing, are devoted to the work itself, right? So it's not just to the factory, but it's doing the work or painting the mural, they are devoted to the discipline of getting up, coming in, answering the phones, just doing the stuff that walks in. And that sort of devotion is portable. So I, that the, there is a woman, Judy Etheridge, who is a good friend of mine, who worked for me when I was the provost at Barton College in Wilson, North Carolina. Judy started her career as an elementary school teacher, and she loved kids.

Gary Daynes:
And it was that sort of love of kids and helping them do like simple stuff that really characterized her. She had heart problems. So she had a heart transplant. She could no longer work full time as a kindergarten teacher. So she got a job at Barton College as the switchboard operator when Barton still had a switchboard. Now, of course, Barton had that position well after it had a switchboard. And so she was the person that would answer any call that came into like the 1 -800 number. Well, Hartlaney calls came into that 1 -800 number, and so we were looking at, you know, to optimize our employment and stuff, and we were going to eliminate that position. And a wise friend of mine said, I bet Judy would be a great assistant in the provost office.

Gary Daynes:
And so she became my part-time assistant. And the same devotion that she showed those kindergartners and showed answering the phone. Turns out she showed to faculty members. So I loved to have Judy meet with the faculty, especially the ones who were upset before they met with me because she just had this way of being that was formed as a kindergarten teacher that shaped the way that she interacted with other human beings.

Gary Daynes:
And she does that now at that school, and she does it in her trailer community down in an Emerald Isle, and she does it with her motorcycle friends, and she's wildly in love with Garth Brooks and sort of tolerates her husband. So like that sort of devotion now characterizes everything that Judy does, and she was a that was sort of the bedrock of Barton College because Barton could rise or fall, it could shift, it could people could out, but she managed through that devotion to a way of working, a way of being with other human beings to make Barton and every other thing she touched better in her own particular way.

Gary Daynes:
So anyways, I say all that to say, I think you're right that devotion manifests itself in institutions, but is experienced through commitment to ways of working and being with others that aren't dependent on the particular institution.

Annalisa Holcombe:
That's amazing. I have two questions for you. One is because when I was trying to think about devotion at work, I was thinking about things like, is it devotion to a mission or is it devotion to the people you work, like your team, or is it devotion to the community that you live in that is there because of the place you work in?

Gary Daynes:
I don't know the answer to that.

Annalisa Holcombe:
I’m interested in when you have experienced devotion. Like what is it in a practical, not theoretical, but what has it looked like for you, or have you experienced it?

Gary Daynes:
Yes, I've experienced devotion in a practical sense. And my devotions have changed over time, right? And in some ways, like the opening of this conversation traces the shift in those devotions from a set of devotions that were largely organized early in my career about my own career, about my discipline, about like being an academic to whatever I am now. And I think I've learned that my devotions are to certain types of ideas that are largely grounded local to certain types of organizations that tend to be smaller or distinct, right?

Gary Daynes:
As they try to be clear enough about who they are, that they can line up what they do with who they are in a way that has integrity. And this is the other piece of it, and that maybe the best way that I can serve or be part of those things is in an advising role. So I spent 25 years of my career trying to be a devoted employee to particular institutions and maybe have learned at this point that that has led me to be devoted to a way of being that helps those institutions alongside and outside as opposed to being, you know, like the vice president for academic affairs or the chair of the board of a nonprofit or whatever else. That may just be because I'm old, right?

Gary Daynes:
And as I get older, I think as you age, your devotions change, your talents change, the ways that you can contribute change. And importantly, the people who are emerging into leadership will be different from you. And so you need to make sure that they have all the space necessary to emerge into leadership and that you can maybe be a useful or wise guide to them as they do that. I'm not sure that was as concrete as you asked for it, but I am still an academic.

Annalisa Holcombe:
It's interesting because I was just talking to someone on one of my other interviews about that finite resource of time. And in some ways what you talked about kind of aligns with that and how you're thinking about what you're devoted to changes over time. And I see it changing for you in terms of how you devote your time to the work you do in a different way, which is really interesting.

Annalisa Holcombe:
And even the word, like the way that we think of the word of devote my time, devote, whether it's a devotion or we devote something or as I was doing research for this, everything I could find was saying it was all about devotionals and like, here's some devotionals for work. And I, and it had this, I feel like we need to actually talk about this. It had like this kind of a religious or Christian bent to everything. So how does that align for you when we're talking about work, and the word devotion, it does have some like bigger spiritual or, and really, like I saw it as a Christian meaning. So talk to me about that.

Gary Daynes:
The term does have a spiritual meaning to me. And it comes out of a struggle both to find the right place or a good place in the realm of spiritual religious organizations and also to figure out how I might as a human being that has a spirit as well as a body and brain come to terms with the conflicts between those things and what I learned is that in many experiences in many places the thing that moved my soul right the part inside of me was less about talking and it was more about an experience that would be very hard to describe.

Gary Daynes:
And those experiences in like in a religious setting, and this is whether you're a Christian or a Muslim or a Buddhist, right, often take place in the act of worship when you are in a watchful or meditative state or when you're musing on, you know, parables, just little stories, right? So I'm okay with the word devotional having a spiritual sense.

Gary Daynes:
I think most of the people with whom I've interacted, regardless of whether they have a faith tradition or none at all, when they talk about what they are devoted to, they use language that has spiritual resonances or they talk about, like, think of all the people that you've heard described as being like the soul of an organization.

Gary Daynes:
Or, you know, people who, when you say, like, what makes your feeling of like your college, your business, your nonprofit, um, different. They say, well, like, you know, the soul of this place is this, that, or the other thing. So I think that's two, that's evidence of two things, right? Like one, language is limited. And so you pick a word that sort of says what you, was close to what you wanted to say. And also that that thing at the heart of the lived experience of people in organizations often is something that resonates more with devotion or as much with devotion as it does with somebody's mind or their self-interest or whatever else.

Gary Daynes:
So it's probably good to try to use language that describes our commitments that has spiritual resonances, or at least I have found it to be good in trying to understand other people and trying to understand myself to use that kind of…

Annalisa Holcombe:
I think that's right because we talk about things like that across the board, whether it's, it's that, that moment at work or those times at work where you go like, this meant something, I, like, it meant something to me or to my community or to, to, you know, my, the people that I care about at work, there was something almost sublime that just happened or that I'm feeling I'm part of.

Gary Daynes:
When faculty members describe what they love about teaching, they are quite often describing moments like that. That moment when you're in the classroom and a student makes a comment and this sense just settles over the room, that thing of importance has just happened. some measure of the health of a particular organization, if you could count them, would be the number of sublime moments that they have in ratio to the number of crappy moments or whatever the opposite of sublimity is.

Annalisa Holcombe:
I love that. So if we were to talk, we've talked a lot about devotion at work, and I've been trying to think about how you would describe what devotion means to you in your personal life as well.

Gary Daynes:
I have a set of devotions in my personal life that are to the people that I am fortunate to be tangled up with. You know, Christine, my wife, to whom, you know, we've been married for 36 years, have four children, a small handful of friends and a shrinking handful of friends. I think that's a friendship can mean a lot of things and some friendships are really devoted and lots of others of them are like, hey, let's go get cocktails.

Gary Daynes:
And so I've had my share and have been more frequently than I'm proud to say that sort of friend as well. So certainly devotion to people, devotion to a handful of ideas that I described earlier and maybe the overarching idea over all those other ideas is I believe in my soul that the world is better off when places and people on the margins and the organizations that exist there flourish.

Gary Daynes:
I worry, alternately, at the expanding power of big, generic things, and the way that those things iron out particularity, they iron out concreteness, and they replace them with abstraction. And, you know, AI is just like a perfect case in point. It's like masquerading as particularity when it's just like the world's most powerful generic machine.

Gary Daynes:
And in my industry, I am very glad that there are large research universities. I don't begrudge the University of Alabama. It's football team at all. But it pisses me off when the policy context, when the marketing context, when the discourse about learning in the United States is framed by a belief that the only sorts of institutions that matter are ones that can amass huge numbers of people, feed them into a power and prestige generating organization and spit out folks who are less connected to place and to values and to other human beings and who are more connected to wealth and power or the things that pass for them today.

Gary Daynes:
So given that I'm obviously very riled up about this and that that's something that sort of emerges from the inside of me, that is a devotion of mine, right? And for a long time, I thought, well, like, maybe I could fight it head on. I'm going to write that article or whatever. It's just nonsense. But so I just want to live in concert with people and organizations that instead of fighting that or just willing to say, like, there's this different way of being and we're just going to do it. Like the beekeeper guy, you know, I'm going to show up on a sweaty Saturday afternoon and talk about bees to strange people. We need way more of that.

Gary Daynes:
We need way more schools and colleges and churches and nonprofits and businesses that are satisfied being distinct, that are satisfied with drawing a certain measure of devotion from the people that followed them, and are willing to say, given those commitments, given that satisfaction, We may be small, we may be marginal, we may never replace the big thing X down the road, but that way of living is good enough. And if long history of humanity, that way of living being good enough often results in whatever the next thing is that turns out to be the next good thing.

Gary Daynes:
Every major movement in religion, in society for the common or the public good has come from devoted people on the margins of organizations living in a distinct way. And then ultimately those organizations looking around and saying like, well, damn, they're doing a good job. We should follow them. I'm hopeful that we live in a world even today where that same process takes place, whereby people living with devotion in meaningful communities on the margins, marginal places, marginal organizations, marginal people with goals that might seem a little bit outside the norm, that that's where the creativity is taking place that leads to their regeneration of the society that we live in. I want to work with you on those things now.

Annalisa Holcombe:
Like you just turned me in, you turned me into a proponent. And I think the way that you described devotion fits that so well. Because I don't think, when I read about the word, it didn't include the really interesting language that you used about being entangled. Like, I just think of the, like, we're all tangled up with each other and the people that are tangled up with each other and the organizations that are, the more they acknowledge and just own that tangled up situation and are devoted to that entanglement, That that's actually what creates life and community.

Gary Daynes:
It absolutely is. And to say the obvious thing, it's also messy. It's inefficient by like the ways that we measure efficiency, which is really a challenge, right? If you both want to duplicate that or if you want to make an argument that or institutions like that can flourish, right? Like, you can't flourish if your bookkeeping is messy like that's illegal so you shouldn't do that so like somehow figuring out how to be all entangled and creative and messy while at the same time functioning in a way in a world that allows you to keep your doors open.


Gary Daynes:
I think that's the true task of every radical leader that I've ever heard of like Dorothy Day, you know, we started the Catholic Worker Movement. If you read her journals, like, day after day, say, how do we keep the doors open? How do we feed these people, these people that we invited and they stole our stuff? How can we, like, have a farm in the crummy part in New York? Farming doesn't work that well here. But again and again, day after day, she and the people who were devoted to that enterprise, you know, they just, that was a given.

Gary Daynes:
Like, you don't, their goal was not to eradicate messiness, their goal was to see in the messiness some hope for the future and some way, yeah, to be connected to each other. That's awesome. I am deeply grateful. When we talk about that idea of entanglement, I would love to use that as our closing question in terms of folks that you've been entangled with in your life.

Annalisa Holcombe:
I always ask people to provide a moment to honor someone who may have been a mentor of theirs since I'm such a big believer in mentorship. Is there anyone that you'd like to honor by talking about their mentorship or the entanglements that you've had with someone?

Gary Daynes:
Absolutely. So I'm thinking of a couple of friends who are who have been true friends and I won't name them because I might embarrass them but I used to think of mentorship as being um sort of across distinctions right like so old and wise and young and curious or you know, leader, follower, or different organization, whatever. The two people that I'm thinking of, though, have been mentors because we have faced essentially the same set of problems in slightly different contexts.

Gary Daynes:
So one of them is a person who was a provost when I was a provost. And so we got to know each other because we both had crazy ideas and we also both worked at schools so I could call him up and say, like, you wouldn't believe what happened here. And he would say, oh, yes, I would because it happened here also. And so out of that has come a certain sort of friendship, candor, the ability to get on a call with somebody and just know instinctively the question to ask or to not ask the time to be silent, the time to say, “well, let me tell you a story” or “have you read this thing” or “the advice that I would give to you is this out of the other thing”.

Gary Daynes:
And that has only happened, I think, in these instances that I'm thinking of where that person has, we have been alongside each other. So that's makes me to think differently about what mentorship looks like, right? It's not old young or whatever. It can sometimes just be actually we're two people trying to figure stuff out.

Gary Daynes:
We're facing the same set of problems that allows us to shape and guide each other in ways that would be impossible if we didn't share that common difficulty. Probably more mentorship takes place that way than in the formal like, here's an older person in your job, have lunch with them once a month, they'll give you wisdom.

Annalisa Holcombe:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I hope that when this podcast comes out, we might be able to share with them a little note so that you could tell them that you were talking about them.

Gary Daynes:
I'll do that.

Annalisa Holcombe:
Awesome. Thank you so much for spending your time with me today and for talking about this big subject in a way that really resonates. I'm going to be thinking about some of the comments that you said for a very long time, and I'm going to, I have my notes about who I'm going to look up, that I'm going to do some more reading and thinking about commitment and passion and even Dorothy Day. So I understand what she did.

Gary Daynes:
Thank you, Annalisa. It's great to be with you. I appreciate the invitation.

Annalisa Holcombe:
Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Annalisa Holcombe:
My deep gratitude to my friend Gary Danes. He is actually the very first two-time guest that we've ever had on this podcast. So if you're interested in listening to a bit more of Gary here, you can find him on Season 1, Episode 8, where he speaks to us about trust. You can also connect with him on LinkedIn, where I suggest you take a look at some of the LinkedIn articles that he's written about working in small colleges and living in distinct communities and how you can make a difference.

Annalisa Holcombe:
You can find his company, Back Porch Consulting, at www.gdaynes.com . Next time, our guest will be Caitlin Brazil. She's from an incredible organization called Perskolis, and we will be speaking about dignity. You won't want to miss it.