Let's see. Well, that's a big question. Um, so I started. I graduated from university. Ah, with an English literature degree. Um, which didn't really prepare me for much, to be honest with you, Um, I can teach Shakespeare, Chaucer, um, and instead, I was going to be, ah, musician. I wanted Teoh be wanted to play in a band and, you know, like every kid at 22 years old wants to do, um, and I moved to Los Angeles and quickly realised that that wasn't gonna really be my life path. And so as a job, I got into marketing at a TV network and was a very, you know, very menial job, very low end job coordinator job. And I basically, you know, ran around and got coffee for everybody. But I learned so much about marketing and about sales and about the way business work. Then I kind of fell in love with it. I kind of fell in love with the whole idea of what marketing really stood for and and how businesses operated. So I ended up really immersing myself in. You know what? I kind of call my my my offline MBA, right I sort of, um, read as much as I could possibly read about marketing about business and and all of that. And that was right around the 1995 1996 timeframe. Um, and it was right as sort of the dot com boom and all the Internet stuff started to explode. And I found myself working in that space. And so I learned how to build websites, And I learned how toe, you know, code up html on do all of that and ended up getting a job here in Los Angeles with a very large consulting firm. Where, um really, Because of my experience in television, they said, Hey, we're gonna put you in charge of entertainment. So, you know, Ah, I got over promoted, basically didn't know what I was doing sort of had to figure it out as I was going along and ended up doing strategy, which in those days was really like, How do you build a big website, you know, so sort of digital strategy at that time was really you know, just how do you build a big website and put the right technology in and all that? So I did a building Really big websites for companies here in Los Angeles, like Sony and Paramount. And, um and, you know, the Academy Awards and lots of entertainment sites learned a lot. And then when the dot com boom really sort of went away in a very dramatic fashion, I ended up joining up with an ad agent running strategy or an advertising agency for a little while and then joined some friends. And we got together And, um, you know, started a company we started ah, software company here in Los Angeles. And it was there where they put me in charge of marketing and product. Um, and I ended up basically taking all the money that we got from the venture capital people and learning and sort of saying I am going to do something different with this. I'm gonna actually start creating content and really make ourselves thought leaders. And that really worked. And I did that for eight years, and we grew the company and ultimately found this guy by the name of Joe Policy, and he and I partnered up and started this organization called the Content Marketing Institute and wrote a couple of books along the way and basically, you know, really got around this idea of content marketing. And for the last 10 years, I've really been working as a consultant on strategy and in content marketing in helping big businesses sort of figure out how toe really, you know, take content, marketing and their their digital marketing to the next level. So that's my story.

just 10 years I've been working from home, Aziz. Part of a virtual team. Really? When I left the So when I left my job at the software company in 2009 I started working from home, and so it's, you know, really been that since, you know, for the last 11 years now, with my consulting work, um, pre, you know, sort of cove. It, um I was flying a lot. I was traveling probably, you know. Ah, 150 to 200,000 miles every year, visiting clients, going around the world and speaking at events and those sorts of things. So it's not really working from home As much as I was sort of traveling to clients, but really working virtually. Um, And so now in today's world, My work day, um, is really what I would say integrated into my life. And what I mean by that is that I don't start at eight and finish it. Five. Right? I sometimes start at five. In the morning. Um, I sometimes finish nine at night, especially if I'm going to be speaking with clients in India, um, and I But in the meantime, I often take like Tuesday off to go to the movies or to go to the grocery store to go to the park or something like that because I don't have anything going on. So what has happened is that virtual life has really been integrated into my personal life and to the best I can. Sometimes I'm successful with this. Sometimes I'm not balancing those things where I'm working when I'm working and I'm online and I'm available. And I'm doing things versus when I'm trying to balance my family life and my vacation and and and all of that and it's, you know, it's a challenge. The biggest challenge I have is, as an entrepreneur, is someone who's sort of consulting and working with clients. It's very easy to get caught up, and then just do one more thing. Just do one more thing. Just do one more thing, and you can really work yourself to death. So it's probably my biggest challenge to say I have to stop and go rest and actually take time off.

the challenge is so it's really interesting because it's changed, right? Even in the last four months, as as as the world has changed, you know, the way I would have answered that question in January or December of last year would be the biggest challenges are one time management to, um, you know, when you're on your own and your have, you know, you have your own small business, everything becomes about getting the next client and getting the next you know and balancing your ability to market and to go out and acquire new business with actually doing the job that you want to do, you know. And so the one of the biggest challenges that I know just from experience is that in many ways, trying you know the role, the job of being a small business owner or, you know, at a consultant in my case is you know, as much sales as it is actually getting to do the thing I love to do, which is, of course, do marketing and content and all of that, because you spend so much time looking at the horizon saying, Where's that next client coming from? Where is that next client coming from. And so you have to learn how toe really figure that part out where you're not overweighting one or the other, cause it can get really easy to get so caught up in your client work that you never market yourself. You know, you never actually do your own website. You never, never do your own social media and you don't do your own content. And so you have to remember to balance that. The thing that I would answer now, which I'm still learning, quite frankly, is how to operate purely in a virtual format. And it's probably the biggest challenge for me right now because I'm such a big believer in getting together in person and meeting and collaborating and working together in an office. And I really enjoy that. Not being able to do that has been a big challenge in my business, where learning how to do content and collaboration and working with people purely in a virtual sense is a huge challenge.