Where did this vision of bridging gaps come from?
Okay.
So, yeah, that's, so there's the vision.
The mission is the present current day thing.
And then there's the origin.
It's a little bit of my origin
and it's a little bit of my mission.
A little bit of my origin, as I've mentioned before,
is my mother and father, right?
Them staring.
I say it's one of the three great gifts my father gave me.
He gave me life.
He gave me my name.
And he gave me his story.
This book behind me, it's called the Goodbye Book.
Can't really see it.
And it was given to me by fifth graders and sixth graders
when they were graduating.
And I used to share storytelling and writing with them.
And when I was leaving,
they presented this book while I was on the stage
and I was surrounded by a bunch of fifth graders in Penny.
She said, turn to the last page,
turn to the last page.
And you can't really see it,
but the last page it says,
you of all people deserve a happy ending.
And I thought about that.
And I thought, do I?
And it wasn't doubt.
It was just critical thinking, curiosity, like, do I?
And I said, yeah.
And how do you do that?
And it's still small voice said, you write it.
I'm a writer.
And I got choked up.
And then Penny said, are you crying?
To which all these fifth graders started hugging me.
So the whole idea is I'm bringing
these communication techniques to parents
so that they can connect with their preteens.
I wanna stay in the game long enough
so that these fifth graders
can teach these same principles to their kids.
Because the principles stay the same.
This is all human development.
It's still the same.
That helps form some of my vision
of what I have for the future.
Yeah.
Thank you for sharing that.
You said a still small voice said it.
That statement, still small voice,
I've heard only a few places.
Why do you say still small voice?
Where did that come from for you?
Sure.
I've always had a sincere relationship with the divine
in my prayer life growing up.
I'm named after Marcus Aurelius.
And I am a practicing stoic,
but one thing is to recognize greater power,
higher forces and so on.
Even when I was shifting my religion
or my understanding of what the divine was,
there was always that connection of,
yeah, there's something greater than me sustaining me,
asking me to contribute back to something greater than me.
And it doesn't have to yell.
It doesn't have to hit you over the head.
It's a voice that anywhere and everywhere
you can just pause and turn inward and hear it.
That's why it's a small voice.
It's a still voice.
Yeah, that's what it is for me.