In this episode Josh, Starr, and Ben talk about each of their results from taking the CliftonStrengths assessment and debate the validity of the results. They also discuss if having differing strengths and weaknesses has helped or hindered them working as a team.
Show Notes:
Links:Macklemore
Full Transcript:
Ben: So, how's the vacation been everybody?
Josh: Good. For the most part.
Starr: Yeah. What have ya'll been doing?
Josh: Well, so I've been a little cynical today maybe because my family has been sick for the past few ...
Starr: Oh no.
Josh: My wife specifically. She's not feeling well and I've been on kid duty and kids are cooped up and tired of dad.
Starr: I'm so sorry, Josh. That sounds so rough.
Josh: But we'll get through that. Well, it is what it is.
Starr: Well, if you need to take a little break and go away, wrangle some kids.
Josh: Oh. I am ready to get back to work.
Ben: Just remember what Macklemore said, right? "These are the good ol' days."
Josh: Yeah. It is true. I have been enjoying the time with the kids for sure, especially after they go to sleep and I have time to reflect on the day.
Starr: Yeah. So, was Christmas great? Did your little ones just love it?
Josh: They did.
Starr: Did your little ones love it, Ben? Your slightly bigger ones.
Ben: Well, if they both hadn't had the stomach flu, they would have loved it.
Starr: Oh my God, everybody is sick this Christmas.
Josh: Everyone is sick, yeah.
Starr: Even when one of my friends back in Arkansas. I was like, "How was Christmas?" And she's like, "Oh, I got the flu." So, I don't know what's going on.
Josh: Yeah, my brother's daughter got the flu over Christmas too. So, it seems to be going around.
Ben: But we did get a new board game as a family thing?
Starr: Which one?
Ben: Five minute dungeon. If you haven't heard of that-
Josh: I have it.
Ben: ... it's a co-op card-based game. It's got a five minute time limit thing. So, you're rushing, you're playing cards to try and beat the monsters and obstacles to get through the dungeon. And it's pretty frantic and it's a lot of fun, so yeah check it out. It's three to five players. It's eight years old and above, I think. It's a lot of fun.
Josh: Pretty cool. Can we link that up in the show notes?
Ben: You betcha.
Josh: With an Amazon affiliate link.
Starr: It's so cool that you can just say that and somehow it'll happen. I'm not sure anymore how it happens. It just does.
Josh: It doesn't have to be an affiliate link for the record, Ben. But if it is, you're totally covered because I've just disclosed ...
Ben: Well, Ben will just slide his own affiliate link in there.
Josh: Right.
Starr: Yeah. So, I know for a long time, Josh, you listened to Dan Carlin's Common Sense podcast, which is now I think pretty much defunct. I listened to that too. He always talked to his producer ... I think his name is Ben, right?
Josh: Yeah. His name is Ben yeah.
Starr: And the joke is like you don't know if Ben is real, but he's just talking to Ben throughout the show. And so, I think maybe we should start doing that with our own Ben Findlay.
Josh: He really is our ... he's our producer, so yeah. I love him.
Starr: Yeah. Got our marketing expert, Ben Findlay, who is involved in the production of this podcast, so we should just start doing that and that would be really weird.
Josh: The dynamic on Common Sense was great though because he's always making fun jabs at him. And then, like any intro's like the announcer voice is taking jabs at Dan because I'm assuming Ben is writing the scripts for those.
Starr: Oh yeah. Fun fact. Our cheesy announcer voice was a direct ripoff of that show.
Josh: Yeah.
Starr: Cheesy announcer voice.
Josh: We're fans.
Starr: I don't have any original ideas, so what are we talking about today? We're talking about StrengthsFinder, right?
Josh: StrengthsFinder, yeah.
Starr: Should I set the scene?
Ben: I'm looking at it right now and, Starr, your number one strength. I'm just looking at it right now. Is ideation.
Starr: It is. I've got all the ideas. So, maybe we should back up and be like, what StrengthsFinder? Why are we ... Okay. So, a couple of months ago, we all took these StrengthsFinder assessment, right? StrengthsFinder is a test you take online. There's a book that goes with it. I think it's called StrengthsFinder 2.0. link that up in the show notes.
Josh: This assessment's run by Gallup, right?
Starr: Yeah.
Starr: They're good at asking people questions.
Josh: yeah.
Ben: They have some experience there.
Starr: Yeah.
Josh: They changed the name to Clifton Strengths, by the way. You can still find it under StrengthsFinder, but they call it Clifton Strengths now. I'm just going to call it StrengthsFinder for consistency.
Starr: Okay. After beloved Cheers character, Cliff Clavin.
Josh: Yeah. I think you're right there.
Starr: So, can somebody tell me what's the purpose of StrengthsFinder?
Ben: Find out where your strengths are, so you can be better.
Josh: Yeah. I think one of the big things is it's a ... A lot of businesses use this as an assessment tool or as an alternative assessment tool. And I think the idea is that like a lot of traditional assessments would focus on the areas that you're weak, your performance is weak in.
Starr: Yeah. We're talking about personal assessments, right?
Josh: Yeah, personal assessments. Yeah. So you go in for your whatever annual assessment with your boss or whatever, or performance review I should say. A lot of those have tended to focus on areas that you're weak in or that you're working on improving and kind of like where you are with your weaknesses. But the StrengthsFinder assessment is basically focused ... the idea of focusing on your strengths, you get a lot more ... I guess a lot more bang for your buck if you focus on your strengths versus on your weakness. So, if you can focus on improving what you're already good at, versus trying to get better at something you might be weak in, you might find a lot more success.
Starr: So, the idea is you log into this thing and you take this test. How long did it take? Half an hour or something like that?
Ben: Yeah, something like that.
Josh: Something around there. It was less than an hour, I think.
Starr: Yeah. And then, it spits out a report and tells you a list of your strengths. And it's got a lot of them. The book goes through each of them. I don't know how many there are. Like, 50 or something. And you sort of get ranked in them.
Josh: Yeah, there's a lot.
Starr: Yeah. So, you can see your top five and it goes through and gives you sort of a list of action items. It gives you this whole report, it's all suggestions, how to take advantage of this strength, things to watch out for, and all this stuff.
Starr: So, I got a question for you guys. We're the scrappy little bootstrapped tell it like it is company. So, is StrengthsFinder late stage capitalist corporatist bullshit?
Josh: I don't know. I don't think so.
Ben: I got introduced to StrengthsFinder through a friend who worked at Microsoft. He said that their whole team took this assessment and shared the results with each other. And he said the benefit that he saw from doing that was being able to interact with his teammates better, to understand what their motivations were, and to understand what they would be good at, what he would be good at, so they could as a team be stronger. If late stage capitalism is all about working better, sure, yes. It's all about.
Starr: I'm trying to throw some spice in there. Ever since like Mike Perham said, we weren't spicy enough, I've been trying to court controversy.
Josh: I love that question though. I think the idea behind the StrengthsFinder thing, not only in improving or making yourself better, more efficient or whatever. It's really about working together. I know the corporation, the whole enterprise synergy thing, people love this idea of like if you put different types of people together and all of their skills blend and they synergize. That's the bullshit lingo of what we're talking about a little bit.
Josh: But I think this whole idea of a bunch of different people with different skill sets or different things they are good at coming together and then working together, originally came out of an economic idea, which was called comparative advantage. And that was the idea of actual countries or nations or economies. And the idea of specialization. So, back in the day when they were studying is it better for a single economy or a country to be completely self-sufficient and produce everything themselves so that they can basically be an island and be completely self-sufficient? Or is it better for countries to basically specialize in certain areas, and then, trade with other countries who specialize in other areas? And they found that it turns out most countries have things they are good at and other countries have other things they're good at, and it's better to trade and share either ideas or what they're producing.
Starr: And that's comparative advantage, right? I initially read that as competitive advantage and I was more confused.
Josh: Yeah, no, competitive doesn't enter into it, I don't think.
Starr: Yeah. Sometimes I feel like this is my role in the podcast. Is I just go into the minefield and blindly walk through it. And whatever explodes on me, I'm like, "Hey, there is a mine here." And then, I just point that out.
Josh: You just like to blow things up.
Starr: Yeah, yeah. So, personally, it's a little bit corporate, but I think it's useful. I found the results useful. I wouldn't necessarily use this as a way to like it's the only way to assess somebody or get to know them or assign them tasks or whatever. I wouldn't be like, "Okay, take this StrengthsFinder test. I don't know you. And then, based on this I'm going to give you a job or give you a particular responsibility." I wouldn't do that, but it's sort of interesting as a prompt. Sort of like, "Oh, think about these things. Maybe think in this direction. Maybe focus a little bit of your introspection in this area. And here's some interesting prompts."
Josh: Yeah. I think I found it really useful. I was in a burned out state. This is back in August or whatever. I wanted to reevaluate what I was doing at the time, in the business and just in my professional life, and see if I was doing the right things. And this was one tool that helped me figure out ... think about where I should be putting my effort basically.
Starr: Yeah. Totally. I think it's also useful ... and one reason we brought it up in conclaves in the past, I think Ben brought it up because his friend had mentioned it to him. Like Ben said, to essentially help us understand each other and work with each other in a way that plays to each other's strengths. So, I think it's been pretty useful.
Josh: You mentioned not using it as a hiring tool, which is I think one thing that a lot of people do use it for. It might not be the first round of an interview, but if you pass a couple initial rounds of an interview, they'll ask you to take it as one I guess facet of the process.
Starr: Oh really?
Josh: Yeah. I'm not totally against that idea. I think the biggest advantage of using it is a potential hiring tool or as a way of really just evaluating people on your team it's not that you're looking for people that are going to fit well in terms of having similar strengths, but you're really looking for people that have opposite strengths from you. Like, that's the whole idea. It's kind of like a tool to increase the diversity of strengths on your team. So, the idea is you want to find people that don't necessarily have all the same core strengths as everyone else.
Josh: And I think it's funny being three, now four developers who are pretty much the same type of person. We found that we all actually do have a lot of similar strengths. And at least for me, that was one thing that came out of it. For me was like, in the future I think we could do well to hire more people who have different skill sets.
Ben: Yeah. Though we are pretty similar, we do have some pretty distinct differences in the top five. So, the CliftonStrengths, the StrengthsFinder 2.0, it focuses on the top five things as areas that you really want to be spending time to develop your strengths. Of those top five, the three of us we have a pretty good spread there. There's not a whole lot of overlap. So, even though we are very similar and have very similar business backgrounds, we do have some diversity when it comes to what our top five strengths are.
Josh: Do we want to share what our top five ... because I don't have yours up here, so I'm speaking from memory. My memory might be fuzzy.
Starr: Does everybody have their own up?
Ben: Yeah.
Josh: I do have my own here. I actually have mine printed out because I've kept them on my desk to review.
Starr: Wow.
Josh: Old school, right?
Starr: You have a physical desk, Josh.
Josh: Right. I know.
Starr: That's so 1996 of you.
Josh: And there's paper on it.
Starr: Oh my God. I just-
Josh: Not a lot of paper.
Starr: ... fell off my gravity well. Nothing is real.
Starr: Oh my God. I've got a funny story. Can I go off on a tangent before we ...
Josh: Yes.
Starr: So, partially I'm going off on a tangent because it's a funny story, but partially also I really want to tease these results because I feel like people are just sitting on the edge of their seats waiting to see what our strengths are.
Starr: So, my daughter's birthday is coming up. Yeah, it's coming up soon. We're like, okay what should we get her? She already has Christmas presents. And we're like, okay, we should get her something where she can play music that is not a iPad or any sort of tablet or anything like that where she's going to want to watch stupid YouTube videos all day. And so, we're looking at all this stuff. We're like, okay, here's this ... There's a couple different devices. It's like, okay, kids' mp3 player, that's cool. It's like, I don't have a ton of ripped CDs, especially not children's CDs. Well, there's one that looks like Spotify and it's got these little statues and things, and you can move the statue in a certain slot, and then it plays ... sounds like some video game or something.
Starr: But then eventually, Abby and I were just sitting back and we're like, "Wait a second, wait a second. We just want a CD player" for the price of one of these fancy things that hooks up to Spotify, which is $200. We can get her a CD player and a lot of CDs.
Josh: Yeah. Put those CDs to use.
Starr: Yeah. So, we just got her five CDs and a CD player.
Josh: Nice.
Starr: Anyway, so that's the whole thing. For me to think about that it's like the physical desk versus everything virtual.
Josh: Did you ... sorry go ahead.
Starr: Oh, I was just going to say this. My first instinct is to be like, "Oh, it's got to be hooked up to Spotify and do all this stuff."
Josh: Yeah, it has to be.
Starr: No. It's just physical thing is fine sometimes.
Josh: Did you introduce it to her as a compact disc player?
Starr: We should. It's not her birthday yet.
Josh: Yeah. Oh right. Okay. Yeah. So, you got some to think about how you explain-
Starr: A compact disc player.
Josh: How you explain what this thing is that you put a physical media into.
Starr: I don't know. I think she's going to love it. She really wants to put the DVDs into ... When we occasionally rent DVDs because we have the only surviving movie rental store near our house. So, we rent those and she loves putting them in. But anyway, so StrengthsFinder. Do we all want to read our own strengths?
Josh: Sure.
Starr: Or is that TMI?
Josh: I mean, I'm cool with it. I'm not going to encourage you guys to if you don't want to.
Ben: I was reading through my strengths getting ready for this podcast and they were, like a lot of personality tests, when you look at it, it's like, "Oh yeah. That makes sense" because it means you, right? You know you. But my number three strength actually taught me something, as I was reading through the notes, the extra material they give you to understand what your strengths are.
Ben: So, my number three strength is achiever. And the way that they describe this is basically you're a person always needs to be accomplishing in something. What they said is that every day, because of this achiever strength, every day you need to have some sort of accomplishment or else you feel like the day was wasted. And not just every work day, but literally every day. Work days, weekends, vacations, you have to be doing something, you have to accomplish something. And I was like, "Wow. That really is me. I'm so frustrated if I'm not doing something."
Josh: This is coming from the guy who upgrades a database for fun on New Year's. On New Year's Eve.
Starr: What are we paying money for this for? You could've asked me Ben.
Ben: But as I thought about it some more I thought, that's also though to me a warning. It's like some video games could be dangerous to me because they have these game mechanics that are based on achievements. You unlock this goal or you get this level or whatever. Those kinds of games can be addictive to me because I'm like, "Yeah. I want to get that next thing. I want to accomplish that thing." So, it's both a strength and a potential weakness I have to watch out for.
Josh: Yeah. I like that about how ... because you get a page basically on each of your strengths that describes what the upsides and the downsides are. I really like the downside. That they include the downside, things you need to look out for, or the pitfalls or whatever.
Josh: So, my number one was intellection, which is I guess I appreciate intellectual discussions and I guess going deep on topics. Two is input. Three was learner, which is I guess I like to learn things. Four is context, which I thought was interesting because context, as I recall, really like historical context and the past. I had noticed I've been gotten a little bit into history and history reading. I've always appreciated going back to the past and looking for lessons or trends and that sort of thing to see how things work. And so, context, that kind of fit with that. It's distilling lessons from the past or whatever.
Starr: That one's interesting because that one is also online and you and I have had lots of historical discussions.
Josh: So, that explains probably why we love to talk history and all that other stuff. Yeah. And then, five was strategic. And I'll just go through ... Those are the top five. They put those in bold. Those are the ones that you really focus on. And then, the next five. So, there's ten total that they'll tell you are your strengths. So, six through ten are basically additional things that you can focus on after the first five. So, those are focus, relater, futuristic, discipline and responsibility. The last two are fun because those were learned over time. Over lots of mistakes and lots of slacking off.
Starr: What were the last two again?
Josh: Discipline and responsibility.
Starr: Oh okay.
Josh: Probably if you would have known me in my early 20s, those would not have been in my top ten. But ten years of freelancing will definitely instill some discipline and responsibility if you're good at it.
Starr: Well, cool. So, you mentioned ... I'm looking at this report right now. And you mentioned already that they give you ten fields to strengthen. These were listed under a heading called "Strengthen". So then that leaves fields like 11 through 34 ... I guess, category or strength ... like, what are they? If they're not your strengths, what are they, attributes?
Josh: What are they called? Yeah, something like that.
Starr: Anyway. Themes.
Josh: They don't call them weaknesses.
Starr: No, they don't call them weaknesses. They put them under a heading called "navigate" which I thought was the most mealy mouth, neutral.
Josh: You just have to deal with it.
Starr: Yeah. You just have to navigate it.
Josh: Yeah. So, the idea is it's not like you get ten things you're good at, and then, all of the other skills, you just completely ignore. You're not supposed to completely drop off. So, empathy is not even in my top 20, I don't think. That doesn't mean that I shouldn't try to have empathy, right?
Starr: Yeah. All right. Well, I'll go. My first one is ideation. That's basically coming up with ideas and tweaking things. It was interesting because it gives you these action items you can do to take advantage of this. One of them I found interesting was this: "Make small changes in your work or home routines, experiment, play mental games with yourself because you will get bored quickly. So, these adjustments can help keep you engaged." I thought that was really interesting because I have never explicitly sort of figured that out, but that's something I do just intuitively.
Starr: And then, also it's like "Your limitless thoughts and ideas" which limitless is a bit much. "Your thoughts and ideas can sometimes overwhelm and confuse people." Yes, yes. I often I'm like, I've come up with the best thing ever, and no one has any idea what the hell I'm talking about. So, yeah that was number one.
Starr: Number two is strategic, which is coming up with strategies and thinking about all the different ways, scenarios can play out, and picking the best one.
Starr: Number three is context, which is historical stuff like Josh already talked about.
Starr: Four is developer because I'm a web developer. That's not what that means. It actually means that you like to develop people's skills. Like a teacher almost. You help people get better.
Starr: Five is empathy. I'm pretty empathetic person. Then the next five, which is sort of like your not-so-great strengths, I guess, are intellection, being intellectual input. I don't even know what that is. What does that mean? What's input, Josh? You got that too.
Josh: Yeah, I do. I have it here.
Ben: It's all about ... that's my number two. It's all about when you're gathering information from all over.
Josh: Gathering yeah. It's like gathering and collecting and storing it, right?
Starr: So, like the Fieldstone method.
Josh: Yeah. So, like Fieldstone. Yeah. So, that was having, like we talked about, a place to store your research and that sort of thing. Yeah.
Starr: Okay. So, there's that. Number eight is maximizer, which is sort of like min-maxing and trying to find optimal paths for that. That's definitely something I've done. That's something that ... I don't even know if this is in the negatives to this, but I'm just going to say it's a negative. It's like I'm a sucker for premature optimization info. It's like I will spend like ... If you're like, "Okay, Starr. Give me a dollar." I'll be like, "Okay, here's a dollar." But if you're like, "Well, there's two products and one's a dollar cheaper." I could spend an hour trying to figure out which one I should buy.
Starr: The other day I ordered something on Amazon and it seemed to be the same product. One was $3 more expensive than the other one. It seemed to be exactly the same. It drove me insane. I couldn't figure out what it was. I eventually ordered the more expensive one because it had the most reviews, so I was like, "Well, maybe it's not a fake one."
Starr: Number nine. Positivity. I'm a pretty positive person even though I think I haven't necessarily displayed that a lot.
Starr: And number ten is learner. It's like learning things. I would also like to share my worst one. They say these aren't your worst ones, but I'm going to say they are your worst ones because it's more fun that way. So, my number 34 strength, the thing I'm least good at, is significance. I don't know what that is. Let me scroll down. Hold on, significance. Oh, "People exceptionally talented in the significance theme want to make a big impact. They're independent and prioritize projects based on how much influence they will have on the organization or the people around them." I don't give a shit about that. So, that's about right.
Josh: Yeah. You mentioned one of the ... what was your number one by the way?
Starr: My number one is not remembering things. Ideation.
Josh: Ideation. So, you were talking about how you need to be careful of overloading people with information. Was that what it was?
Starr: Yeah.
Josh: Yeah. I forget which one of mine was that, but that was one of the potential whatever they call them. Things to watch out for. That totally made sense. I tend to give people too much information when I'm trying to ... especially people that aren't interested in business theory and stuff like that.
Starr: Yeah. I can think of several examples where I've gone away and worked on something for a month and then just made some sort of summary and given it to you all and just been like, "Here. You've got five minutes to fully understand all the nuance in this." It's like, okay, maybe that's not the most fair approach.
Josh: Yeah. Yeah.
Starr: So, what do we take away from this? Do you think this is a useful exercise?
Ben: Totally. Yeah. I think you can learn some things about yourself. I mean, you can do it other ways too. You can take the Myers Briggs and you can take "what color is your parachute" that's a good personality test. I like that one. But I like the way the StrengthsFinder list out the things that you'd be good at and based on your input into the questionnaire obviously. And what things you can focus on too. And how you can present yourself to your team on things you can take up.
Ben: Like, my strength on achiever, for example, I talked about a while ago. I know that I'm going to every day be wanting to accomplish something. So, if something needs to be done, I can say to my team, "Hey, I can take that because that's my thing. I want to mark things off a to-do list." Someone doesn't have that strength, they're like, "Okay, Ben. You can take that. The thing that has to get done that I don't want to do."
Josh: Yeah. I have noticed that I have ... I mean, I think we all have that to some extent where even just as people, people like to accomplish things. One of the things that makes us happy is actually making progress in our worlds. But I found for me it doesn't have to necessarily be something checking something off a list because I have the learner, whatever intellection thing high on my list. I'm okay if I learn something that I feel like has really moved me forward or something like that. I'm okay ... I can consider that making progress on a task or something like that, which isn't something I probably would have thought of before I took this thing. So, I've tried to double down on that. If I find myself spending a day just reading a book or something, I'm not feeling like a total slacker. As long as it's not like Harry Potter or something.
Starr: Yeah. We don't support JK Rowling in this family. So, I just want to expand on your point a little bit, Josh. I think it was a really good one. It's very interesting because one thing that I really like about the test and the results is that each of these different ... I'm going to call them strengths even though not everybody has them as strengths, but I'm just going to call them that because I don't know what to call them. Each one of these is weighted the same. None of them is given any sort of priority over other ones.
Starr: I think that's really cool because some of these things in society I feel like are kind of weighted. I feel like ... or at least in my mind, I will feel guilty if I'm not checking tasks off a list, but to be honest, lists can be very overwhelming to me. I really don't enjoy working off of list and that's why achiever is number 29 out of 34 for me. But it's really interesting because it's like, okay, well, maybe I'm not so great on working on my tasks on lists, but I've got all this stuff up here. I've got empathy. That's something that's not super explicitly valued a lot because it's kind of a soft skill. It's hard to see. Same thing with the developer and context. In a weird way the whole assessment made me realize maybe I'm not the best at checking tasks off a list, but there are all of these other things I'm really good at. So, that was kind of cool and that was eye opening.
Josh: Yeah. And the idea of giving those skills, those strengths the time to develop or improve, you can get the most gain out of that. And you don't know what will come out of that in the future. Maybe focusing on empathy will be the most productive thing you can do right now.
Starr: Yeah. You get the most gain. Also just kind of be happiest, I think, because it really sucks trying to do stuff every day that you're terrible at.
Josh: Well, I mean, a lot of times you're happy if you're successful or something. It's easier to be successful at something that you're really good at versus something that you just aren't built for, doesn't come naturally to you.
Starr: Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense.
Ben: I think when it comes time to sell yourself, whether it's as a freelancer trying to get a client, or it's if you're trying to get a job in that interview, I think having a good awareness of what your strengths are and being able to market yourself to create the packaging around yourself that will sell yourself the best. If Starr goes into an interview and says, "Oh, I love working from lists" right? And they hire him. Like, "Uh, no. This guy sucks."
Starr: Hello! They're not called "sucks" they're called "navigate" Ben. I navigate lists.
Ben: But as Starr goes into that same interview, saying, "I can really connect because I have strength in empathy" or "I can really bring good ideas to the table because I have a strength in ideation," if he focuses on those, then that's going to make all the difference in finding the right fit for yourself, whether be a job or a client or whatever.
Starr: That's a really good idea. That sounds like the Woo strength, Ben. Do you mind telling me what number you are for Woo?
Ben: Let me get that.
Josh: Mine is 33 out of 34.
Ben: 32.
Starr: Wait what? I've got the highest Woo? Oh my gosh. Okay. I'm sorry. I assumed your Woo would be much higher because that was a great point and a great argument.
Josh: He totally Wooed you.
Starr: He did. I'm Wooed. Okay. Wait a second.
Starr: No, that's not actually ... okay. I looked it up. That's not anything about convincing people. It's like when you're out in a museum, you go "Whoo!" That's what that is.
Josh: Okay. So, yeah, he's just a party animal. Yeah. Number 32 for me is developer, which is in your top ten, Starr, right?
Starr: Yeah.
Josh: Yeah, I'm glad that we have some things that are completely flipped or inverse. Maybe that's one of the reasons for our success.
Starr: Yeah. And honestly, this is kind of ... I wouldn't say this has led me to consider this, but I've been thinking going forward, things involving training, things involving ... I wouldn't say HR, but things involving a bit more of the management, sort of mentorship type role seem pretty appealing to me as opposed to more individual contributor stuff. So, I don't know. It's an interesting mirror to look through.
Josh: Cool.
Ben: A plus. Would buy again.
Starr: All right. So, this concludes our infomercial for Clifton StrengthsFinder.
Josh: I don't think they have an affiliate program unfortunately.
Starr: No, they should, they should. They can buy us something off our Amazon wishlist if they wanted.
Josh: There you go.
Starr: All right. Do you have anything else to say? Are we done here?
Ben: Happy new year.
Starr: Happy new year.
Josh: Happy new year.
Starr: I just want to say I appreciate y'all's diversity in spirit or whatever we're calling this stuff.
Josh: Likewise.
Ben: Agreed.
Starr: All right. Well, signing out. And wait. Oh wait, wait, wait. I've got to do the-
Josh: You got to do the spiel.
Starr: I got to do to the spiel. Okay. If you want to write for us, we hire writers. You can do technical blog posts and stuff for our blog. Go to our blog at honeybadger.io and look for the "Write for us" thing in header, at the top nav. If you would like to go and review us on a podcast service of your choice, that would be awesome. Does anybody else have any reviews or announcements or anything?
Josh: Nope.
Starr: All right. Well, we all survived the holidays and so I think we're going to get back to our regular schedule and not having breaks until the early spring vacation, month off that we all take. And after that comes the May vacation.
Josh: I still got to take the Santa hat off the honeybadger.
Ben: Oh I did that yesterday.
Josh: Oh did you?
Ben: Yup.
Josh: Okay. See, he's got it on his list.
Ben: That's right.
Josh: He probably went on the list, submitted and put it.
Starr: I didn't even know we had a santa hat on the honeybadger.
Josh: Um. Well, I'll post the graphic anyway.
Starr: Okay. Thank you. Thank you. So, I was just joking about all those vacations, but we'll be back to our normal schedules. So, look forward to having lots of chats with you all.
Josh: Yeah, for sure.
Starr: All right. So, see you later. Bye.
Ben: Bye.
Josh: Bye.
S2E12