You Can Be Brilliant and Still Get Passed Over: A conversation with Behdad Jamshidi on The Way to College Podcast

Thank you. hi this is dr says i'll leave it with another episode of the way to college podcast and uh yeah i i've said this i feel like i've said this over and over again but it but it it still rings true in that when i started the podcast i never knew where it was going um i didn't anticipate getting to 200 episodes uh this is 200 and something now and never anticipated that the network would grow as it has. Today's guest is a new addition of that network. But as always with every single one of my guests, I'm going to go ahead and allow my guest to introduce himself. So, Midad, would you mind introducing yourself to our listeners and viewers out there? Yeah, absolutely. The one minute background, very quickly. So I actually started out as an engineer. So I went to university studying engineering. I ended up doing a whole bunch of different types of things, but I ended up working as a customer solutions engineer for a company called Telus up in Canada. And I did that for about seven out of the 10 years that I was at that company. And I got to work with like C-level executives, IT, understanding, you know, medium-sized businesses, anywhere from about 50 to 1,000 type employer range and build out technology roadmaps for a long time. So how do you get from A to B to C within a company? And so that's where a lot of my business consulting, sales, leadership and technology experience comes from. But on the marketing side, I got into marketing really randomly. So you go, how does this engineer go from being an engineer to marketing? I started building out websites, Google ads, and SEO for fun, you know, outside of work. And as I did that, I realized it wasn't fun at all. I didn't enjoy doing 80 hour websites on the weekend. And so I started working with different marketing agencies and starting passing work off to them and found a whole model where if I pass the work off to them, they gave me a little bit of a referral fee. And I started building a business out of that and realizing very quickly that most marketing agencies didn't understand business and most businesses didn't understand marketing. And I ended up being the connector. So I connect businesses to the right marketing partners. And to date, I've talked to over 1,102 different marketing agencies and experts. And I've just played this kind of middle marketing broker role now. Wow. Wow. Okay. And so, yeah, now I want to get into this. So with all of my guests, I always ask, You know, where does, we had to identify a starting point for educational journey. Where would that starting point begin for you? Yeah, it's a big question. I mean, I always thought I knew I was going to be an engineer because when you're in an immigrant family, you have three choices and the choices are, you know, the doctor, the lawyer or the engineer. I did not want to be a doctor because that took too long. The law firm stuff, I don't really like to read in depth. And so what kind of was left was engineering. and I didn't actually realize at that time, like in high school, I was like, oh, my brain just kind of thinks this way. It just thinks very logically and it thinks in systems and processes and that kind of stuff. So I ended up choosing the right path. And so it kind of started just in like, you know, going through high school, knowing that like engineering was the path because it was the path that it was only four to five years. I get paid well. And it's something that I was somewhat interested in. You know, for it's one, I, I, I, yes, I absolutely, I'm familiar with, right. The three paths for a lot of our immigrant children and families. You, uh, you said, you know, I, I think recognizing early on that you just thought logically engineering fit sort of this natural fit for so many young people though, they struggle to find their way and to identify, okay, what is it, you know, maybe not necessarily what comes naturally to me, but what does that fit? Where do I fit? But because of that, was it easy? Was, you know, was school easy for you? Was it easy to say, this is the next step? This is, I'm at point A. This is point B. This is what I need to do, dot, dot, dot, dot. I wish. No, it was not. School was not easy for me. The first year of engineering, like, I don't know how much people know. Like, they've walked you into a class. You have 400 people in that class in the first year. And they go, look to your left and right. 50% of you won't be here next year. and then after the second year, 50% of you won't be here of what the people that are remaining. And then over the course of the next three or four, you know, the final years, you're going to lose another 25 to 50% of people. So like that classroom goes for 400 to a very small number of people by the end. I think it's somewhere between like 50 and 80 people that make it through. It was hard. And then I didn't know at the time that like engineering was my thing because when you're going through engineering school, it's a lot of like math. It's a lot of theory. It's a lot of stuff that you can't like tangibly put your hands on. like you're working with imaginary numbers like there's a whole bunch of stuff that you're like what like how do people figure this stuff out um it didn't really hit me until the fourth year where I actually got to do cool things like I got to code and build the game Bomberman um I got to do um a whole bunch of different stuff where I like you your capstone project and you build these devices like you know a fall detection device for older people that's when like engineering started to become fun and realizing oh they were just training us this whole time to be able to solve problems. It doesn't matter like the actual like math and stuff that you're doing. It's just like, here's something really, really hard to figure out. Go figure it out. And is that process of doing that like repetition that you start going, oh, the whole thing about being an engineer is like when you get a problem in front of you, your brain just starts thinking in solutions and how to solve it. And so that's why you see so many engineers when they go into full-time work, they might end up in a totally different career outside of engineering. Like I have quite a few engineer, You know, people in my family, some of them are project managers. Some of them are managing different projects at Amazon, but they're not doing engineering work anymore. You know, um, they're just problem solving. Uh, I'm glad that you shared that because I had a conversation with a student today and, you know, one of the, I still teach part-time. One of the projects that my students have to do is this, is this adaptable career plan. So kind of helping them see, okay, this is the path that I'm on, but it could branch out into one of these things so that if I am, you know, the young man that I was speaking to, he's, he's pursuing civil engineering. And I said, so you might start in civil engineering, but then you might go into project management or you might do this, you might do that. So it's just recognizing that there are a lot of different options. What kind of engineering, because, you know, that young man was doing civil engineering, was there a specific focus that you had as an engineer? Yeah. So for me, I went through electronics engineering and the main reason I chose electronics engineering was I get to pick more of my, what do you call them in fourth year where you get to choose, like you have more courses that are not predetermined that you need to take. Like you have more flexibility in the courses you want to take. I don't know how else to explain that. But basically I got more options in fourth year to choose the courses that I was more interested in. And so that's why I chose electronics engineering, not because of any specific drive or enjoyment of it. At that point, I was just doing engineering to kind of get through and just get a job and, you know, get to retirement and, you know, that kind of thing. That's the only thing that's kind of in your mind at that time, like get the job, get paid and just do a good job overall. So it wasn't a lot of like passion. And if sometimes like your passion comes later in life, right? Like you go to things. And so if I was a student, I would just say, look, Like wherever your interest is, is somewhat like just do that thing. And as you do that thing, little things will come up that you're like, oh, I can dig a different path or your intuition comes in. So I'm going to try something new. The more things you try, um, the more you're going to get an understanding of what you like and what you don't like. And so it's, so if you're sitting there trying to decide, oh, what do I do? What am I going to do with my life? And all this kind of stuff, like there's only so much you can do by just sitting and thinking some of it, it just has to be done. And as you do it, you get feedback. And as you get feedback, you can make changes because you're not stuck, right? To do the things that you enjoy is kind of what I have to say. And as things come up where you're like, I'm not enjoying this anymore. It's like, okay, we'll see how you could pivot. Try something new. Maybe take another course. You're not stuck down that path, right? Things can change. Thank you for saying that. Because I think too often I, so I've also got a sub stack and I put out like TikTok videos where I give advice to students because too often I see students that say like, I haven't found my passion or I'm going to take some time off or maybe this isn't for me, but the alternative is I'm going to sit and think about it. And I always encourage students, you know, that's fine, but really you've got to be doing things because you're never going to figure it out if you're not trying to do the things that you might want to do or that think you want to do. So thank you. thank you for that It sounds like you know as you said you were trying to get through to get to the job to get to retirement So it sounds like you were really focused Tell me about what were you like as a student besides being extremely focused? What was what was it like for you as a student? It's funny. I would say that I was actually an extremely unfocused student. I could like I could not really pay attention in class that much, to be honest. So as a student, I was always the kid that was kind of like loud, would put comments out. And like, I was just kind of like a disturber of the class, but in a nice way. Like my teachers didn't hate me. They'll actually thought very highly of me. So it wasn't like that, but yeah, I was the guy that was just like loud and wanted to like have fun and that type of style. And so that's kind of like the student that I was, but I would also work quite hard. Like, you know, whenever I was in engineering school, I'd get to school at nine and sometimes be leaving at like one in the morning. Because there's so much work that needs to be done and then you're partnering with other people. So there is an aspect of like, you know, being focused on getting things done, but also in class, I was kind of like a little bit of a disturber of the class. So it was a mix. And then even to this day, like I still have fun with things, right? Like it hasn't really changed. My personality hasn't really changed that much. But I find that like one of my skillsets, even from in university was like, I was really good at delegating. Like I'll find the smartest people and I would be friends with them and I would support them on anything that they need. And they would help me get a lot of the work done. And I started realizing, like, you know, if you look at the business that I run, I'm essentially delegating, right? Like businesses come in, they tell me what they do on the marketing side. And then I go, based on that, here's the best people to work with. I'm not actually doing the work. So it's like I literally took the same skill set I had in university and now I've built like a business around it. Um, so that's kind of cool watching that in reverse, but not realizing, you know, at the time that that was like a, um, uh, almost like a superpower or a skill that was actually worth something down the road. And, and I imagine it certainly wasn't something that you could see, like you said, that it would, that it would pay off that like, I could get paid to do this, like this skill, I could use this and this really build a whole business around this. Right. Yeah. There's no way, no way. Even if like when I started my business, I still wouldn't have seen this because when I started my business, I was building out like websites and doing some Google ads work. And then I started passing work off to some people. And I was like, oh, this is like a cool way to make some side income, right? Like even though I didn't really need the side income, I was already making six figures as an engineer working full time. But it was kind of cool to see like, oh, there's an extra thousand dollars or oh, there's an extra two thousand dollars. And then all of a sudden, like three and a half years in, you're like, oh, this business is now making more than my engineering business is making. or not my engineering business, my engineering job is making, I would have never seen, I wouldn't even seen that at the beginning of the third year where things happened, right? Like I was like at the point where I was like, maybe this business thing is not going to work. Like, but then in that one year, that three to four years, my business 10X'd. And I was like, oh wow, like the flywheel hit. And I would have never imagined that, right? Like I was just doing things because I felt like it was fun to do and I was working harder. It gave me stuff to do on the weekends. I played sports and stuff, but like, there's just something that was just fun about what I was building at the time. After, um, after university, was he, was it easy to, to find a job? Um, it took me six months to find a job after university. Um, it was actually hard. Um, cause I had finished the co-op, uh, at the end of my, um, my university year and that co-op one was, uh, QA like testing. I, my, my heart was not in QA testing, like putting me in testing, like every firmware update, you're plugging things in, like, and you get paid like, I think 60 or 70 grand a year at the time to do that type of work. So I had switched during that co-op to doing firmware development, which was like software debugging, that type of stuff. And at the end I was like, oh, is it possible to get a job in the debugging and software space? Honestly, I didn't really enjoy it that much. And I think the, one of the directors was like, yeah, I don't think it's a fit. and then I went back to the QA director and I was like, hey, I need a job. They're like, be it at, like I'm not doing you a favor by giving you this QA job. And like, I really respect that because there's like, this is like, you're an extrovert. Like, you know, you shouldn't be sitting in a cubicle doing this work. And so after that, I was like, oh man, now I've got to go find a job. And it took me about six months. So I went and took some extra courses at BCIT, which is a school in Canada. And then one of my friends in soccer, like we played soccer, he was older than me. I played on an older soccer team. He gave me like a part-time job just working on like IT stuff, like, you know, raids and, you know, tickets that come in and that kind of thing. And it was funny because at one point he was going to offer me a job. I think it was like $36,000 at the time. And I was like, oh man, I might need to take this job. But that same week I got two job offers come in. One from Telus, which is the job that I ended up taking, and one from Ericsson. and the one from Ericsson was going to pay me $68,000 to be a software programmer. And then the TELUS one was $60,000. But you go into something called a graduate engineer leadership program, where you do like three different types of roles over the course of three years. And then you end up choosing where you want to work. At the time I had gone to like a job fair at TELUS. And I met this guy that was a customer solutions engineer. and I was like, what? There's this role? I didn't even know this existed. Like, what do you do? He's like, basically I talk to businesses, understand what they need and then match them with technology services. Like I built, I architect technology for them. So it's like, they basically look at the time they didn't do like cloud services, but it was like internet, voice over IP systems, phone systems, creating backup, that kind of stuff. And I was like, cool. So like, I don't actually need to do the implementation. I just need to understand what a business needs and then go based on that, here's how I architect your network and here's the solutions. and then sell them on it. And then the implementation team takes over. That was cool. I was like, all right, I could be this extroverted sales engineer. I like that. And they get paid very well, right? So that's kind of how I ended up going from, you know, finishing my school to doing some stuff in the middle and then going down this path, doing the three years as a graduate engineer leadership program. And to become the customer solutions engineer, most of those guys were in their forties. And so the way that I got to that role was I made the director my mentor and I kept very close touch with the manager. And they're always like, Beda, you're too young. Usually this is a very senior role. And I followed everything that they told me. I would just like every quarter I would meet with the director. Every like couple months I'd meet with the manager. I'm like, what's my next step? What do I do next? And they would say, Beda, do you need to do this? Or do you need to get this experience? Or you should run the innovation center because then you'll get to talk to CEOs and stuff like that. And if you can do that, then you can start talking to businesses. And so I followed everything that they told me. And by year, I think it was six of the company, I had finally gone into that role. And I was 27 or 28 at the time. I think I was like 28. 28, 29. Wow. And so I was like one of the youngest sales engineers to be in that team. And once they saw me do the work that I did, and they're like, oh, this guy can actually figure this stuff out. other young guys got hired into the role. And so now it started becoming, oh, it's not just people above 40, but the younger guys can actually come in and learn and also be quite effective. And so that's the whole kind of like journey of getting into that. So Medhat, you, was that like, I mean, there's so much in your story that I would love to go to, but immediately what comes to mind is you talked about who you identified as a mentor and who you were talking to, was that deliberate on your part? Yeah, it always is. Yeah. How did you know that? How did you know, like, okay, if I want to get here, these are the people that I need to speak to? Yeah. So for me, it was like, if I want to be a customer solutions engineer, I knew that, like, who the manager was for the teams and who was making decisions on that front. Because that guy actually hired me into the GLP program. They got one headcount. So they wanted to see me succeed. Two was the director. I knew that if he's the director, he's the director of all the customer solution engineer managers, right? Like, so if there's no role in Vancouver, then there could be a role in Edmonton. There could be a role somewhere else. And so I knew that he's going to be part of the decision-making process, obviously, right? And so when my name comes up, I wanted to make sure the director knew who I was. I want to make sure the managers knew who I was and that I was a part of that environment, right? And I was adding value to that environment. And I was already building, like one of the rotations that I did in that part of that program was on that team. So as I built relationships with them, I kept in touch with them. And so once I knew the role that I wanted in a company, I just looked at who are the decision makers, who's going to be making the decision on hiring me and who potentially has some influence on it. And as I figured that out, which is like just by asking questions, being aware, talking to people and listening to advice, that's going to forget that. Wow. Your, um, your journey, you know, one, thank you because all of this, all of this is like gold, uh, a particularly for young people, because I think, I, I, I think so often, and I, and I pointed to sort of your mindset or at least how you were approaching school and like you know I going to get through this because I need to get the job so that then I can work and then I can get to retirement Right And but it it sounds like just in your in in in your story the technical aspect the, the knowledge aspect is just one small piece of this larger equation of someone who was aware of their strengths, recognized, you know, their personality, but then also just paid attention, asked questions, networked, like it was all of these other things. And the, the, the technical side, the, the, the degreed side is just such a small component. Would you say that's accurate? Yeah, that's a, that's super, super accurate. Um, it was such a small part of the puzzle. And it's kind of interesting because when I was, when I became a customer solutions engineer, about five or years later, I asked, I was like, I want to be a senior customer solutions engineer. And this is like, and it's crazy because the person that I was going up against was my mentor. It was the guy that was like in his fifties knew way more technically than I did, like way more technically. But what I brought to the table was this like balance of like I brought the team together and I thought differently and I came up with different types of solutions because my brain just worked differently. Right. So I wasn't the strongest technically at all. Um, but I got promoted because I did things differently and I was adding value in a different way. Um, and that's something that the managers and the director wanted to show. It's like, Hey, the only way to move out isn't just by being really strong technically. Like there's all these other soft skills that we really care about. And by promoting me, they're like, that's why he got it is because he thinks differently. He brings a sales teams together. He does conflict resolution really well. He's constantly learning and growing. Like I took like probably a hundred thousand dollars worth of courses that tell us paid for on conflict resolution, mediation, training, emotional intelligence, leadership. I did a mini MBA, like all the training that I did was actually not like I did the technical stuff because we had to do the technical stuff, but I did a whole bunch of non-technical things. Right. Um, that just kind I like rounded out my, my overall, the character in that role. Right. Yeah. With that, if imagine, um, so you are, I've invited you to come speak to a room full of engineers. So these are young, aspiring engineers. What advice would you give them in terms of, you know, let, let's talk about adding value. What advice would you give them on learning how to add value? Yeah. So the biggest thing for me, if I'm talking to like a room of engineers or honestly anyone, I would say if you want to add value to people is to find out like one, be actually curious in who they are. As you understand like, and become curious on who people are, you get a sense of like what matters to them. What are they struggling with? What do they need support with? There's people that like some of the value that they want to add is just to be a mentor, right? Like they've gone through a whole series of life and they're like, at this point, I want to give back, right? And so you being their mentor and listening and asking questions actually adds value to their lives, right? And as in any kind of like mentor relationship, I'm always thinking, okay, in the beginning, I might be taking, even though they're giving, but I'm always thinking like, how do I add value back, right? And so my strengths are like emotional intelligence, my thinking about things deeply, being able to hear people and listen to people. And so just find what your skill sets are and what your strengths are and how you can add value to people whenever they're talking because you're just being curious, listening and seeing what they need support with. Yeah. If so, if you're really good technically and you're good at programming, like maybe your gift is giving people programs that help simplify their lives. And with AI, that becomes easier and easier to do, right? Because you can build out whole workflows and things like that. But if your skill sets are like mine, where you're really just good at the people skills, then just like lean into that a little bit more and see how you can build relationships. No, I love that. I love that. Thank you. So here you are, you've kind of walked us through this journey. And to this point, it sounds like one, you've told us about sort of, again, the little things, the talking to the people, identifying the people, also investing in yourself, going above and beyond in terms of your own curiosity and learning and growing as a professional. So what comes next for you? Do you remain with TELUS? and what was that next pivot for you? Yeah, so I haven't worked at Telus for over three years now. So I've been running my business for seven years in total. It's called CJM, the Marketing Connector, and I've been doing that. And so right now, the goal is just to continue running my business, keeping it efficient. And I'm working on some personal brand stuff. So the business brand is business. And then the personal brand, I'm going to be talking about human connection and how to bring people together or how to build deep relationships in less than 10 minutes just because like I built a business out of connecting people together. So that's kind of like where the focus and stuff is. You realize in business, you never know what will happen, right? Like markets change, technology changes, all this stuff happens. So for me, I'm just kind of like open to, hey, let's continue running with what I'm running and doing the best I can. If at some day I've seen businesses that have been around for 16 years, all of a sudden not be there anymore. So I'm just kind of like with an open mind of like keep building the relationships that I have, keep working on my business And if at some point the business continues to take off and I can keep making it better, great, I will do that. If at some point I have to make a pivot and do something differently, totally fine with that. So I'm a pretty flexible person. I used to love being an engineer. I still do, right? So being a sales engineer is always a fun role to go back to. So I'm kind of in a world where I just kind of have these opportunities and I'm just going where life kind of takes me at this point. that you say it with so much confidence and disturbance. Because I think you talk to anybody and everybody's got an idea. Everybody's got an idea about a business, about something they want to start, something they want to do. And I think a lot of times we're overcome with fear. We're overcome with fear. We feel like we make all kinds of excuses about, I'm just not ready. I'm not in the right place. Such and such things have to kind of happen. And when did you know, you said, you know, you haven't been with Telus for three years, but you've been doing your business now for seven. When did you know, okay, I want to do this. And where did you get the confidence to, to move and to enact to that? Yeah, that's a great question. I want to first start out with that, like fear and those beliefs and those feelings, like they are never gone. They don't, they don't disappear. You just learn to work with them. So I could be in like full fear and I'm still running my business. Like, that's just what I do. There's been times in my business where I've had lows of lows and it's like, oh man, is this going to work? Is this going to move forward? Like, you know, there's always that thing. But it's like, you just start learning how to deal with the emotions. You're like, oh, this is back. Okay. I know kind of like what I'm dealing with is stressful, blah, blah, blah. But I still need to move forward. I still need to move my team forward. To answer the question of when I made the jump, my whole thing around running my business, I'm an engineer. I don't like risk. I don't like risk at all. So as I was running the business, my thing was always when this business can make more money than what I'm making now and I have money saved up. So I had a year of money saved up in the business to run the business for a year, even if I made no money, right? And the business was making in profit how much I was making as an engineer. That's when I was like, okay, I should probably put my full time and attention to this and see where it goes. And that was a big step. Like even with that safety net, those safety nets set up, it was still a big step. It was very scary. It's very uncertain. And it was funny because three months later, well, two things going to happen when I did bake that job. One was on January 20th, I left my full-time job. And this was like three years ago. My wife got accepted into a master's program, international law master's program on the same exact day. So I found out that when I left my job, I'm going to be moving to the Netherlands for at at least a year or a year and a half. And three months later, interest rates went up in the US because we were hitting like the inflation stuff. And so a lot of the companies got hit. And so the first thing that gets cut is marketing. And so I lost, I didn't know at some point, like quite a few customers were in the same month. Like I had more customers lost in that month than I would in an entire year normally. So, and I'm moving internationally. So all of those things hit at once. And I was like, oh man, what did I just do? um, right? Crazy time. Um, but as it's, uh, we got through it, um, that year, funny enough, I did better than the year prior. And so far every year I've done better than the year prior. My whole thing is at the end of every year, I'm like, can I do this again next year? Like, it's always a question. Can I, can I do as well as I did last year? I don't know fundamentally. Right. And so, um, that's kind of just how I made the pivot and the jump and still kind of like how I'm running my business. So you were able to account for the risk and, uh, and then in spite of all of these changes, right, that uncertainty, um, it, it paid off. Yeah. Right. You're, you're, you're, and, and I, I don't, anytime we, you know, a lot of times people will describe it right When they start a business or they pin it something that sometimes they call it a gamble It doesn sound like it was necessarily a gamble for you because you already thought about some of these things Of course you can always prepare for uncertainty but it sounds like you navigated that well Tell us about where you're at now and how you make that transition to personal, you know, because you've said you want to grow the business and you're thinking about personal branding and some of these things. So tell us about that transition, like just navigating that. Yeah. Yeah. So, so the stuff that I'm working on now, like it's all kind of aligned. So when I think about the personal brand, like I have a whole thing called amplified relationships around it and adding numbers to relationships and knowing like your efficiency ratio between two relationships, all that different kind of stuff. And that was more something that like intuition was like beta, like there's stuff that you know, that you know, but you've never really reflected on it. And human connection is something that I know that I know and I knew it naturally, but I'd never reflected on it. And so out of doing that, I built like this whole structure of like, basically how to one, attract people to you, which is understanding self. Two is then how to structure conversations so you go deeper, faster. And then three is the amplified relationship stuff. How do you actually add numbers to the relationships you have? And how can you make them more efficient? Like by more efficient, I mean just deeper. And so I built a whole model around that. And the whole thinking around that is like, well, everyone cares about human connection. And so I'm going to be building content around that, talking about it because it's of interest to me. And I'll build a newsletter out of it. And at the bottom of the newsletter, it'll be, hey, do you ever want to work with a solid marketing partner or whatever? Like there'll be business people that are going to be following me likely to. And that feeds into C-Jam, which is the process of connecting businesses to agencies. So it all kind of plays together. And so right now, about 30% of my time is like focused on the amplified relationship stuff. And then 70% of my time is focused on my C-Jam work, right? And depending on where the business is at, sometimes that'll take more attention. And then sometimes the implied relationship stuff take more attention. I just kind of like go with what makes sense and hoping that I can keep both going until one of them kind of takes off again, which is similar to the model that I ran when I was running TELUS and my business at the same time. Right. Wow. Wow. You know, you've come, it sounds like you've come a long way from, right. that electrical engineering background. I mean, but it also sounds like you were, it seems like you were always attuned to you and, and the, the particular skills that you had, whether it was, you know, the, the delegating, but even connecting with people and to see this evolve sort of through the work that you've done and be intentional along the way and to look at it now and not, and, and I think if you look at it now, I don't know that if anybody's looking at you, right now where you're at in the company that you have would assume that you've come from the background that you've come from yeah right um or even assume like if if i went into a room and i pulled a bunch of young engineers you know i think regardless of the type of engineering that they're doing that they might immediately point to the value of being able to connect with people and the value in building relationships. I think some, you know, and I hear this with folks that I work with, other instructors that kind of, oh, well, they're engineers, they're very logical. They're not all about their feelings and they're not about getting in touch with people and connecting with people. And yet here you are and you've been very successful with it. You've been, again, just being very intentional and aware of who you are, what your strengths are, leaning into those, not necessarily neglecting anything else, but again, continuing to grow and always learn. Yeah, 100%. And I think it's something you talk about. And if there's engineers listening to this, like study the left and right brain, right? Like there's a really good book called The Master and His Emissary, a very, very difficult book to read, but it actually opened up my eyes to a whole bunch of different things. And when you start thinking about the left brain, it's very logical. It thinks about things in parts. It doesn't see things as holes. All of language sits in the left brain. And one emotion sits in the left brain, which is fear, right? So when you're like fearful, you're like, and you're thinking logical and you're in your head, you're typically in your left brain. The right brain, though, is quite different. And I'm learning to tap into that more and more because the right brain sees things that holistically. They take like all the parts together. It also sees things within terms of emotion. So it's like five out of your six emotions sit in the right brain. So whenever you take in something new that always goes through the right brain and then it goes, passes it to the left and the left goes, okay, the right takes in something new and it says, how do we feel about this? It gets a certain feeling and then it passes it to the left and it tells the left, hey, we feel good about this thing. And then the left goes, well, why do we feel good about it? Right. And now it'll create reasons. And so when you start tuning into your right brain, you start seeing things as holes. You start seeing things in terms of emotions. You start seeing all the bigger picture of things. And when you can do that, that's when you become like an ultimate form of an engineer, because then you can tie things together. Right. And you can start understanding other people across the table, because a lot of times you want to have empathy and understand people emotions and where they're at. It's a right brain activity. And so if you just focus on your less logical brain all the time, it's not going to work. And so it's important to find that balance, strengthen the left side, but then focus on the right side as well. It's essentially when I think about it in terms of marketing is when you've built a really amazing brand, that's a right brain activity. You're getting into people's emotions. When you see a logo, you feel a certain way. You get excited or you hear a jingle and it just elicits certain emotions. That's because they've spent so much money to activate your right brain's emotions on how to feel good about the brand. so that when it goes to the left brain, they already go, oh, I already like them. Whatever they do, I'll buy. At some point, Apple, right? Like they haven't done anything crazy in the last little while, but everyone's still buying their stuff because they feel a certain way about the brand and the way the brand was built. And you can use a lot of this across a lot of the big brands in the world. Wow. Wow. Thank you for your time today. Thank you for your story. And again, so much value, so much insight. And, you know, I'm eager to share this, get this out to share with students, but also just anybody out there. I mean, there's so much because it's just not about, you know, again, the lessons, right? Investing in yourself, going above and beyond to learn, but also the importance of connection and building, you know, finding that talent. I mean, there's so much as we transition out. And as we think about your story, what's one final piece of advice you'd like to leave for our listeners out there? I think the one that comes to me like just naturally right now is that you're always going to have fear and you're always going to have uncertainty. Like that's just that's just part of life. It can never be get rid of, but you just become stronger to deal with it. and the more that you sit with it and don't ignore it, right? And just try not to numb up with different things, like step into it, you become more of a powerful human moving forward because you're gonna be able to deal with much more. So life will throw stuff at you and you're like, all right, I've been through this before. I trust myself. I'm gonna probably figure this out. And if I don't, I'll still be fine, right? Like you have all these support structures. So don't let fear and uncertainty stop you from doing something. It's the hard things that you do that make who you are. I love that. I love that. And I couldn't agree more. But where can we find you? Our listeners out there, where can we find, learn more about you, but also about your company and maybe about some of the things that you're working on? Yeah. I mean, the best places to find me are either like LinkedIn or Instagram or Facebook. Like if you look at my name, you'll find me across all three. Usually you'll get more personal posts on Facebook and a little bit of personal stuff on Instagram and then LinkedIn is more business stuff. So as they go into the business world, that's kind of where I am. And then if they want to see more stuff around my website and that kind of stuff is www.cjammarketing.com. And that's kind of where all my business stuff happens. Fantastic. I'll go ahead and I'll make sure to drop a link in our show notes. And actually, the title of the book was Master and the Emissary? Master and His Emissary. And His Emissary. Okay. Yeah, I want to check that one out too. All right. Radha, thank you. Thank you for your time today. Thank you for your story. It was phenomenal. You got, like I said, so much there, so much richness. I'm excited and eager to share this. I kind of want to share this with my students already. So thank you. This concludes another episode of the Way to College podcast. Thank you to my guests. Thank you to our listeners, viewers out there. Remember, please share the podcast with one other person. I'd appreciate it. And we'll see you again soon. Thank you and bye-bye.