Podcast Episode 123: Episode 96: Getting It Right

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Join Jon, Emily and Nick as they talk about the importance of scalable projects and getting it right.

Transcribed Content

This episode of Rockcast is brought to you by Rock partner Triumph Tech, a full service specialist partner. Rock partners provide crucial support for Spark Development Network and important services for the Rock community. Connect with Triumph Tech today at rockrms.com/partners. Welcome to the Rockcast podcast. I'm Emily Forman and have with me here today Jon Edmiston and Nick Airdo. And we are going to tell you a little bit about what we've been up to around here, the latest Rock releases, some things we're excited about for the community, and kind of what's been on our minds and conversations lately. Thanks for joining us. Now we always kick this off with the latest update on Rock updates. Nick, what can you tell us about, what's coming up next? I can tell you happily that we just moved eleven point two to beta, and it went through the alpha team. The alpha team tested pretty much every single fix that was in there. It was a small set of fixes, started as 11, and then we kicked it into gear and it got up to 28 by the time we were ready for alpha. So all 28 fixes have been tested, but now the beta team, we're just asking them to get out there and kick the tires on all of Rock, and then we will should see that going to early access on the October 5. Wow. That's great. That team's been really active. I've seen a lot of activity going back and forth. It it seems we have a highly engaged alpha and beta testing team set right now. Yeah. I think Virtual Rx, the excitement of that event being everyone online, I think because our alpha and beta team is online, that just carried over, and there's been extra excitement between those two And I just wanna give a shout out again. You guys are killing it, and it's just gotten better with each release. That's awesome. And that makes such a huge impact on the work that we are able to do as a team, the timelines we can work from. The more diverse that testing group is, the more we're able to find things that otherwise we wouldn't find until later in production. So there's so much value to having a diverse, wide, excited, and engaged testing team. It's fun to see that in action. Yeah, for sure. As the community has grown and more churches have come on board, more issues have been discovered that wouldn't otherwise have been seen just based on the shape of that church. I think John's seen that lately as well. Yeah. I mean, there's just so many different churches using things so many different ways. As walking up the stairs, in fact, this morning, just thinking about a certain issue that had just come in, I was actually reading it on my phone as I went up the stairs, which I don't know if I'd recommend. Made it to the top safely, though. But I was , this one's been in here forever. This issue must have been here from almost the day we wrote that feature years ago. Why has it not been found yet? And and as I was realizing, oh, it's kind of a little bit of an edge case, but, , if we finally had that one church who was trying to do that just that way. So I think it's just a matter of scale now. There's so many churches using Rock, and they're all using it in a slightly different way. Rock is an interesting thing because it's was talking actually, Nick and I were talking about this yesterday, in that everything in Rock, nothing's in concrete. We're looking at this one system, not Rock, but a different system. We're trying to make a feature similar to it. I'm , This isn't fair. They get to pour everything in Concrete. This settings page here is backed by a database table for just those settings, and that page is written just for those settings. We get nothing that. Everything is extensible and moldable and rubber, and it's just really hard to get that. But that's a trade off for the power that we can give everyone. By no means am I saying we should do that, but it does feel a little bit unfair that certain systems get to do that, and, , we can't. And and I think that's why it takes so long to do some of the stuff we do and and to launch things Rock Mobile because we're basically creating a mobile now for all of this extensibility, and you spend a ton of time and energy building that framework, and yet to get the first screen to show takes so long. But once you get it, then everything just builds quicker off the top of that. Yep. Well, I think if I can sit in the community seat for a second, I would imagine I'm hearing them echoing from the other side of the podcast from our listeners that it's great that we put that extra effort into building things out to be extensible because that's really extensibility is what's powering ministries, and and I know that's what has gone into the architecture from the very beginning. Yeah. But it is it is much more challenging. But it is great too that those those systems, this the report bugs are completely open, and you can see them all. I mean, I don't know another vendor who does that, not that we're a vendor, we very much hate that word. But our bug tracking system is completely public. You can see all of them that have been fixed, those who haven't. You can add on to those who have reported. And that that is really such a blessing because I I I would love to be able to see that for the tools I use. Yeah. Sometimes you report something and it's , they're , oh, yeah. They they tell you you're the first to, , have seen it, , there's no way. There's thousands of people who've gotta be seeing that same, and now you can just go into it, search it yourself, find it, tag onto it. And that that actually happened this week, that very minor bug, I would think, in that the check-in, Windows Check-in Manager screen, you couldn't see the start and end and cancel button. Whoops. If if you're on a very small screen, ten twenty four by seven sixty eight, which I think everybody would agree is kind of a legacy size screen. But we understand that churches can't always afford upgrade those, so we jumped in, it was just reported, but we jumped in and fixed it. Actually, John fixed it, and Nick created the bug. Well, all you did was add a checkbox Not intentionally. No. To a screen that had plenty of space on a normal sized monitor. You'd have thought. But, again, part of us were I think there's a part of me that was thinking, well, should we just close this? It's , we don't support screens that small, but our community is unique in that we can't afford to buy new touchscreens very often, and so we did fix it. Yeah, we knew the position we might have just put you in. So in fact, we fixed that. We even pushed it into the link that if you have version 11.1, you can now get that version. The only change is that screen size issue. And we and we also, we did it the right way. , we could've just quickly just shrunk down, , this one little scroll area to the point where it's really small, but that would've impacted people who had monitors that could fit all that. So we actually took a little bit of extra time and made it dynamic and flexible and did it the right way. But again, I think most other industries and most other competing products would have just been , get a bigger monitor. That's the right answer. And it might be the right answer, but it might not be that you can afford to do that right now. Yeah. You have to might wait till next year or or maybe it takes two years to do that. Yep. So thanks again, John. That's No. I wasn't wasn't trying to say it to pat myself. No. I It's just the way we approach what we do here. Yeah. No. And I I mean, I appreciate that. When when our leader here can jump in and fix code, that's pretty unique at most of Well, I did it because I I was about to comment trying to close it, and then I I looked into the code. I'm , no. Think they're right, that that this really needs to be fixed the right way, and and I have been working a lot. It's all done in XAML, and I've been doing so much XAML for the mobile stuff. Was , it won't take me long to fix this. And we were all in the same wavelength because I had just talked to another developer, he was about to start. And John walked over and said, hey. I just fixed that. I'm , oh, that's awesome. Thank you. Yeah. I think I might , way the grid was doing it not to get too tangled, but the way the grid was doing it in there was was was not right. Oh, interesting. And I think I might have done that part. So in a sense, I might have been fixing some of my own code too. So Well, that's what it's all about. Yeah. Iterate, and then it'll be good for today, and who knows about tomorrow? I do think, though, and it's been tested by the person who reported it, he says it's working great. I do think it's actually a better experience, even for people with bigger monitors, because it's going to use all the real estate. Even before, if you had a big monitor, it was putting a scroll area that was really small, and you'd have to scroll even if you had the space. So I think for everybody involved, it's better. Yep. Nice. Speaking about better for everyone, we're excited to talk about our training options. It's something that we introduced in the masterclass, and we've been really wanting to do this for years, but everything in our world, it's a little bit about resourcing and timing. And so we approach things slowly, and we're excited to finally have some progress on the training front for those who need something beyond our masterclass. Now the masterclass has been very helpful, very successful, but there is a lot of content. And that's not always the right option for depending on your timeframe and an implementation or depending on the role of someone at your organization. There may be different needs. So we do have a masterclass coming up, I think, next week that we're excited about. I believe it's the last one of the year. We do try to have four to five a year, and we'll continue to do that because this is a great way to gain insight into the features of Rock and to really create that open door of knowing where things exist, how to approach them, getting hands on practice, working with a Rock instructor. It's an incredible class, and it's getting better. Right, John? Yeah. So Michael Garrison has been working on adding some new technology to it just for that remote experience to make it even better. So I'm super excited to see that. It's it's really cool, this new tool that if you're doing virtual, , presenting or or training, it just really enhances the the experience. So I'm really looking forward to seeing how that, looks, and I think people going to the class are gonna be impressed. That's great. I think we might have a few seats still open. So last minute, if you've been holding off on doing this, you should probably sign up for this one, get the new experience, get that under your belt before 2021 comes around. Because as we've learned, you never know what a year's gonna throw your way. Good thing to have that Rock masterclass under your belt. In addition to that, we also have our first Rock 100 series class available, and that's exciting because that's a little bit higher level survey of Rock and the general features that are there, but it's more accessible for a couple of reasons. The pricing allows it to be something that could allow you to send more of your people to the class. So potentially, you might have some ministry admins that should really understand more about Rock, but maybe Masterclass isn't quite the right fit. It's too deep. It's, too much information in different areas. It's too much of a time or financial commitment. The Rock 100 series, it will be a great option. It's also possible that if you're, early implementation phase on Rock, you might wanna come to a Rock 100 series to really get a good overview of what it is Rock can do, and maybe you'll be prepared for a masterclass later after you're inside your own Rock instance. So it could be an on ramp to masterclass as well. But that 100 series class has a grouping of videos for you to watch on demand every morning for two weeks, and then a meeting time as a group with a Rock instructor who will do a q and a session. So your goal would be to watch and digest the videos on certain feature sets and then to bring your questions to that instructor led q and a. And we've had really positive feedback on a prototype class we ran over the summer, and the first one is coming up available this fall. Registration is open now. So that's another great class. We took an interest list about it at the conference and realized that there were quite a few people that thought that was exactly what they needed right now. Additionally, you can go a little deeper than Rock Masterclass soon. So we are working on putting together a Rock Sequel class, We've been making some progress on the content for that. We don't have a registration open yet, but we are working on building that class out. That's really based on community demand. So do realize we listen. It might feel a little bit slower, but there is so much work involved in putting together a really high quality training class. And I mean, us, want to do it right if we're going to do it. Yeah, Colin's been putting a lot of time on our team on that. And he and I have been kind of brainstorming through, , how do we lead someone through this in a way that they're not going to get overwhelmed, that we kind of incrementally build on it. So just putting that kind of level of thought into it, and he's spending a lot of time on formatting everything, so it's going to be good, but it does take a lot of time to walk that through. There's probably 10 of us on-site here who could just jump on and just start doing it, but I think we'd lose people if we don't get it all done in the right And it's really a talk about SQL and the data models within Rock. So you're gonna get both of those topics covered in in one class. And we keep saying it, but the way we work is ready, aim, fire. Right? So, sometimes the only publicly visible part of that equation would be in fire, but we never want to operate fire, fire, fire because that often means you put something out that's not well planned, and so it can't be well executed. And we wouldn't want to have someone go through that the first time and be , well, I thought that was gonna be a lot better than it was the quality stunk. And we're , oh, yeah. It'll get better later. We wanna make sure that we would go out with a really solid quality product. So we're spending a lot of time right now in that, , ready aim, planning, working on it, looking at it, making those quality revisions before it would ever turn into something that's publicly visible. Yeah. And then same thing we did with the Masterclass. I mean, we spent a ton of time making those slides for the Masterclass so that we would have a quality product. And I think the one thing that when we say Ready, Aim, Fire, that we know, but sometimes people don't know, that doesn't mean it's slow. Just means that we're going put things in the right order and we're going to get it done. But sometimes when I've used that phrase with people, they think, oh, that's gonna be slow. It's , no, we're still gonna get done tomorrow. , maybe it's a smaller We're still gonna get done tomorrow, but we're just not gonna start just doing it. , that's dumb and it's slow. We're gonna do it think about it first, , get everything planned, and then we're gonna go do it. So actually, that phrase is actually speeding projects up too. It really is. I know I just applied that to a school project that my son was working on. He needed to put together an explorer report, and he really wanted to do a presentation board with it. And so he was trying to just start putting things on a poster board and was a little bit stressed out about it, and I asked him to describe it to me. And as he began describing what he wanted, that's not what he was working on. So I said, oh, okay. I think what we need to do is get our planning done. So I gave him a blank piece of paper and I said, make it here, pencil and paper first. And as soon as he did that, it gave him the clarity to realize he had the wrong materials in front of him. We got him set up with the right materials, and it came out to be a really great project. So, I mean, you you can apply that for a 10 year old, or you can apply it for the the work that we're doing. I think it's universal. Yeah. It seems trivial as the example, but we do the exact same thing, as adults. Right. I mean, I do it. Yep. And when I don't get out, when I get out of sync, it's , oh, wait, shoot, I was doing the wrong thing. Sometimes we have the wrong materials in front of us if we would stop and think about it. Exactly. Yeah. You heard about a lot of these things we're saying you probably heard echoed from the conference, but I do wanna just put that reminder out there. We're a little bit removed in time now. We're all busy. We're all thinking about other things, but most of us still have a few videos out there from the conference that we've told ourselves we're going to watch. Don't forget to do that. I've heard from a couple people in the community that they have a pattern where they make sure they watch one to two a week until they get through all of them. Having a goal that is probably a really good idea because it's so easy to forget about it. Yeah. And I think that's awesome. I've seen that too. I think what you need to do right now, unless you're driving, if you're driving, stop, pull over, schedule that time right now. , get on your calendar, book the time. You don't have to pick the session. You can do that when that time comes. If you don't put it on your calendar, it's not gonna happen. Every Friday morning, I listen to one or something that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I would stop and do it right now because there is so much great content. We we keep hearing it from so many people that you have to get that in in done. You have access to it. Absolutely. And while we're on the topic of conferences, we are still crossing our fingers that this next year, we'll be able to meet in person. Don't have enough information to put out a registration link yet, but do realize that this is something we're actively paying attention to, working on. We'll be giving more information as we have it, but we are going to need speakers for next year. So we will, I'm sure, be reaching out to people, but we're we need you. And if you're the person sitting there going, oh, wait. She's talking to the other people? Nope. It's you. If you're listening to this, whether you've spoken at a Rock conference or not, your experience is valuable to someone else. And I think one of the traps I fall into sometimes is thinking, well, if I know this thing, that's because it's readily knowable. I don't know if that's a word. Everybody can access and know that. Probably everyone knows it. And I don't necessarily give weight to the fact that I had to learn it at some point. I got it from somewhere. And if I don't share it with other people, I'm kind of keeping it to myself, and that's not the perspective I wanna have. So don't take for granted your Rock experience. We need speakers to share what they have, even if you're saying, well, we're kind of new. What was your implementation experience ? What kind of advice would you give someone before they're coming in? And your advice is probably going to be reflected on maybe the size of your church or the location or your particular role at your church. There's so much inflection there that can help someone else. Your level of knowledge of Rock is less critical than your Rock experience currently because someone else is on the cusp of that same experience, and that's what we need to be sharing. So reach out to us about speaking next year, and just John said, it'll be on the calendar then, and you'll just be aiming for it, and we'll help. We have some mini deadlines along the way that help you plan out and approach that the right way. And it feels a little scary, but once you commit to it, it's a good thing. And , hey, I It's growth. It is. I've marked out a growth pattern for myself this year. And talk to people who have done speaking for the first time at a Rock conference, and they will tell you that they learned as much going through that as what they were able to share with others. It's a great opportunity. Yeah. It goes back to what you said, Rock community is about giving. Mhmm. You got you have to give back. You can't take take. I get it in the first, , couple months, maybe you you need to do that as you get on. You need to take in content, answers, but the Rock community is about giving, and there's a lot of people out there who are giving, and we those who aren't can't take advantage of that. They have to give back. Otherwise, we won't be able to keep growing this. And honestly, that's not what the community's all about, and I don't think that's what a Christian community's about. We should always be be thinking about how we can give back something. Right. And so to reinforce it, you, my dear listener, are the one who should be signing up to speak at the next Rock Conference. Yeah. Let us know. , this is a little off topic, but it reminds me of of this analogy I I read on Facebook of all places. So picture this, there is a school hallway, high school hallway, and it's filled with balloons, up to probably about three feet high, the whole hallway. And so what these school administrators did is in the night, they filled the whole hallway with balloons, and on each balloon was a kid's name, and they just all ran them throughout the hallway. And so they told the kids, alright, guys, you have, , five minutes, find your balloon. Oh. Not one person found the balloon. Oh, , I think they they might have given them more time. It maybe was, , thirty minutes. No one found their balloon. Wow. There's just too many balloons. And then they changed it, and they said, okay, now the game is find a balloon, pick one balloon, find the person's name, and then find that person. Oh. And so within ten minutes, everybody had their balloon. That's cool. And what they said is, in life, if you go about trying to find happiness, find your happiness, you're never gonna find it. But if you can find give happiness to one person, we're all gonna have it. And it kinda reminds me of this. , if everybody's trying to just get, get, get, and take, take, take, whether it's content or ideas, we're gonna not have as much. If we're just constantly trying to go around giving it, giving it, giving it, we're gonna have it in abundance. We're gonna stop. This is just too good. And I see a lot of people in the community who are giving, giving, giving, and it's so admirable. But then I see a lot of people who are still on the sidelines taking, And it's , I just see the missed potential. Mhmm. I don't see bad behavior. I just see missed potential. And I think if everybody was just constantly trying to give more, the community would get much more out of it and they would get more too. They would. That's a cool illustration. I think sometimes what keeps people on the sidelines is anxiety or fear that they're not enough. We all have that, though. I know. And I think that some people allow themselves to be paralyzed a bit from that, and I don't don't think that they should. I think that they should jump in there because, , if you it's it's about the same thing. It's about sharing happiness. It's about sharing your joy, and it multiplies. That's one of the cool things about the way that works, the way God's created it. You can be really internally focused and things seem to shrink, or you can be externally focused and share that joy, the happiness, the knowledge, and it just is an exponential growth pattern. Yeah. And I think if you look at the people who did the VRX sessions this year, I guarantee you 99.9% of them would feel that their content was unworthy. That there's more and it wasn't quite up to the bar. But all the ones I've seen, I'm , wow, this is amazing. This is great content. And so to think that you're gonna be different from that is probably the fallacy that we're all everything we put out there, we're not quite sure. Is it good enough? Is it I mean, even though I I put stuff out, I'm , I don't know. This just seems kinda, , shoddy. I mean, I was slacking you some stuff last night thinking, I don't know. This might be too campy, this design. We all have those self doubts, but you just have to, , push through it and just put it out there anyways. You do. Because you can think about it forever and have no action, and that doesn't move yourself or anyone else forward. Right. Well, speaking of that, let's talk about getting it right. I mean, Rock has so much potential, and it's very configurable. It's very extensible. And we talk about it a kit of Legos, right, that can be reassembled in a lot of different ways. But there are still some patterns and structures that would be considered best practice of how to build something to last. Yeah. And it's something we kinda continually see as we work with churches. It happened again in the last couple weeks. We've been working on with some churches on some performance. And I think the the mindset that we need to change is we're not done when something works. We're done when it works at scale. Because it's so easy to get something to work. There's a couple examples that we even saw recently where the page is working. It's great. It's exactly the right content. It's correct. But it doesn't scale at all, and it doesn't take much to figure that out. And so I think the mindset we have to change is, okay, yes, it works. Okay, step one done. Now step two I move to is, does it work at scale? And in the past, I might have said, well, , and sometimes if you're not a big church, you don't have to worry about that. And I would probably say, no, that's not true. All sized churches need to evaluate their solution at scale. And that really should start before you start your solution, going back to the Ready, Aim, Fire. You should think of, is the plan I'm about to put in place going to scale? We don't always Sometimes that's a learning process. And so when we get to the end, don't stop until you realize it does scale. , Rock is a very powerful toolkit, but we're also in a new world where lots of people are hitting these things. And you can't say, yeah, but it worked, on Wednesday. Does it work on Sunday? That's the big thing, and you don't want to wait till Sunday to figure that out. And it's not rocket science to figure this out. It's just that we stopped. When we got the right answer, when the mathematics all worked and the answer's twelve, yay, we're at twelve. Okay, but can I get 12 quickly? Can I get 12 quick enough for the load that I'm expecting? And I think we need to keep working on that because I'm continuing to see whether it's churches or partners, the Rock community is stopping too quickly. And, , I was thinking a little bit about that again on the car ride in. , well, maybe maybe we should just make caching on by default in so many different places. And I don't know if that's the right answer though, because a lot of times you don't want that cache until you're done, because act of creating is almost impossible with a cache enabled. You're getting the same answer, you just made a change, and you're constantly fighting the cache. But there has to be this logical step afterwards that says, okay, now I'm going to do this. And I think eventually there's going to be two phases or two switches in Rock. The I don't care switch, which is just this feature set is going to be so locked down that you're not going be able to really do all the extensible things, but it's for the basic stuff, and it's going to come pre patterned. And then there's the toolkit piece, which you're gonna have to do right. Right now, we're we're more in the toolkit side than in the, , this is the way it is and, , it or leave it. We've worked on the toolkit side because that's harder and more powerful, and that's what most of the people in the community want. But just because we give you the toolkit doesn't mean you can also act it's the simple kit. Again, it's not hard. It's not rocket science, but it's diligence just keep working at it. And someone said recently, and I love the saying that there's two ways to do something right. You can do things the right way or you can do it again. And we don't wanna do it again. We don't have time for that. But the again is even worse when everybody saw that you didn't do it right. Right. When your members and attendees saw you didn't do it right, that stinks. That's embarrassing. I was working with a a different client on a different project, and and they were gonna, , release this big project, and it it wasn't even done yet. , wait and they wanted to release on the weekend. I was , it's better to release stuff that on a Monday and have a little soft something more public, not have a soft run at it than to get up on stage and go, ta da, and it hadn't been tested at scale. That's scary. I've done that, and I've provided a solution when I worked at the church, and they rolled it out, and I hadn't done I didn't do my due diligence, and it didn't go well. , I know how that feels. That's not what we want to do. And I think maybe that's why I'm so passionate about it because I've made those mistakes and I don't want to see other people make them. It's super embarrassing and it's unnecessary. So that's my soapbox for today. That's a good soapbox. It's just really trying to help other people. Don't it's coming compassion for for that. And I think at the end of the day, I feel bad badly for the for the person because I don't think, , that team at the doesn't look necessarily great when these bad things happen publicly. But I also worry too about the product too. A lot of times, Rock gets it. Well, Rock can't do that or it can't scale to that size. It's , well, no, you didn't you didn't do it right. It's almost blaming the water company, the water system for your city that it can't it can't water my lawn, , at a fast enough rate when you have and you're using, , a micro straw hose, ? It's , well, it really the water company or is it really the hose you're using? , you you used the wrong hose. It's the firefighters showing up with a garden hose. , you wouldn't have a lot confidence. And they hook it up to the fire hydrant, they're , Yeah, we can't get enough water out of this thing. I don't think it's a fire hydrant, I think it's a hose. It's the same thing if you enable the caching, if you don't have these patterns. And again, it's not one church. I think every church is having these new understandings. Mhmm. And so we're just trying to wave the flag and and kind of educate on that. And this year with everything going virtual so quickly, I think a lot of people who probably thought their solution didn't have to think through scale, suddenly had to think through scale in a different way. And that's the kind of thing that you just wanna always be prepared for. You don't wanna have to have it all go wrong. Yeah. And it's not going away. Right. I mean, I was watching the virtual telecast from my church's kind of state of the church, and they're a smaller church. They were not super digital. , they didn't have live streaming. They didn't have, , cameras to do that kind of stuff. They do now, and they're doing a great job. Mhmm. But in their telecast last night, they're saying, we're not going back. , we're gonna keep having this stuff. Have to be digital. Even when we're all back, we're not , there's too much value in this. There's too much outreach potential. There's too much, , lessons learned. And I think that's they're right. Yeah. Mhmm. We need to get back to some of the stuff we were doing, but we can't we can't lose this new functionality and this new Stage. Yeah. Yep. It's the second stage. I think we even talked about that at the other podcasts. , don't lose that second stage, but build that stage well. And it saves yourself pain down the road. I mean, taking the time to put something together the right way, test it, and make sure, now you have something you can be confident in. But if you're not able to be confident in your solutions and then something goes wrong, personally, there is nothing worse than troubleshooting something that I did wrong. And it could be anywhere at this point. Right? If you built it right the right way from the beginning, what you're looking at. what you're pinpointing. the general area to look, but just a, hey. Everything's not working. Go. ? That's the time when you're , oh, I wish I had planned better. Yeah. I think that wise person says that. There are some that have no, , I guess almost shame in that, and they just will blame anything. And that, , tap out then because no product's gonna be able to meet that level of planning. It's not a product problem anymore. It's a solution provider problem. Mhmm. But in general, the people I've talked to are all really receptive to this, and they just need the content. It's just a matter of learning it. Yeah. I mean, again, I've been very impressed with one of the churches I'm working with on the level of data quality that they have and the level of seriousness that they put into their product. Their data quality's off the chart. I was just running some metrics for them and the amount of actives, inactives, amount of duplicate records that, I mean, they're doing a great job at that. I think in this community especially, a lot of people are tuned in for growth, right? So this is just another avenue of growth that maybe, , maybe we think in features, , I'm gonna learn that feature. I'm gonna learn that tool, that language, but maybe we haven't thought about this as being another area or avenue for growth in the Rock community, but it really is. Yeah. And we've we've talked about how growth and comfort can't coexist. , that's straight Craig Groeschel, and I think he got it from somebody else, I'm sure. But we keep saying that. But recently, I think the verbiage has changed a little bit in that growth and pain must coexist. And I think that's been a wide open my eyes are wide open on that because lately, there's been a lot of growth, and I feel there's been a lot of pain in trying to drive that growth. Internally, you're , Oh, this is terrible. But I think the new reality is no, pain must exist. And why is pain bad? We got that from the conference, right? Right. , why is hard bad? Well, hard is a form of pain a little bit, or definitely discomfort. So why is it bad? And I think you and I have been talking only about this concept. I think several books have come up that we are looking at reading, and that is a topic, I think. More than that, I mean, it's something that you have to be aware of and push through. And I really one of the books that we've been reading and talking about just really says that you have to acknowledge that that pain's there. And sometimes what we do is we just say to ourselves, once I push through this little growth pattern, everything will feel better on the other side. And what they're saying is no, if you want to remain in growth, if you want to become more of a leader, if you want to have a path forward that includes new achievements, more leadership attainment, more personal growth, it's always going to be pain. And in fact, it might ratchet up with every level. So we shouldn't avoid it and tell ourselves it will all be gone soon. We should lean into it and say, this tells me I'm on the right path. This is what's stretching my muscles so they can be stronger in that area going forward. So once I push through, the pain won't go away, but my tolerance for increased, and I won't feel that pain anymore. Yes. So one of these books, just wanted to read this one quote from one of the books. It says, Pain is necessary. Pain is good. Pain is the period prior to any significant growth. Pain is prior to anything incredibly notable. That's why they're called growing pains, which I was , Oh, that's a really good point, growing pains. I think the newness of the thought on this is that growth and comfort can't coexist is probably better stated as growth and pain will coexist. And we can either choose to grow and then therefore get the result of a little bit of pain or maybe a lot of pain, or we can choose not to grow. Right. But you can't say I want growth and I just don't want any discomfort or pain. But I do think tolerance for pain grows quickly. Sometimes I look back where I was five years ago, I'm , Oh my gosh, that's such a small problem. That would be a five minute worry for me now. Back then it was a week of stress. It's , okay, well my tolerance for pain has grown and maybe it's just understanding capabilities too. Sometimes pain is artificially put on us because we don't understand our capabilities or That's Our true capacities. And one of the other books we were reading, it said your capacity for leadership is directly tied to your capacity for pain tolerance. And so if you're not willing to push through that, you are putting your own ceiling in place. So just realize that, and you might go through stages in life where you're , okay, I'm ready for the next growth path. And then you might be in a stage where you're , okay, I need to breathe for a minute. Just realize that those decisions that you make about how much pain you're willing tolerate right now are directly impacting your capacity for growth. And if you get too comfortable in a stage where you're trying to catch your breath, you might be putting some serious limitations on yourself. Yeah. And I think that's right. And I've been having a lot more empathy for the people who have been my leaders in the past. I can think back and go, Oh gosh, and now I understand why they did that, which didn't make sense at the time, or why they maybe felt that way because it didn't make sense at the time. So I think I have a lot more empathy for what they were going through, which makes me think, okay, well, the people maybe they don't understand, the leaders they don't understand, they're probably doing the same thing. And I'd always wonder, well, why don't they come and ask for more input on this or that? It's , man, they're running and gunning. , they have no time for that. And, , if I want my input put in, better have it, , completely in a way that's gonna help them immediately, not, hey, why don't we , they don't have time for that. So I think it's interesting just looking back in time and going, oh, I get it. It is because so much of what we do in life is trying to, , make the pain go away. Right? That creates addictions for some people. I mean, but it's as simple as , oh, I cut my finger. It hurts. I'll go get some but pain is so it's something we avoid everywhere that we can. But that's not the right approach when it comes to leadership and personal growth. Yeah. And when you, I guess in personal growth, when you feel that pain, it's, what you're saying is don't run away from it. Right. Because you're gonna run away from growth. Right. So if there if there's a fork in the road and one is painful and one is not, your choice on whether or not to avoid pain is your choice on where you're going to end up. Yeah. Just make sure that that pathway is driving towards growth. I'm sure there's a pathway towards pain and no growth No. It's probably true. But just make sure that, okay, I go that pain, is it tied to growth? If so, go for it. But if that's tied I mean, jump off a bridge. It's probably painful and no growth. Probably true. But Speak at the Rock Conference is probably painful and growth. High pain. And that would be one to avoid because it's public speaking, and it's I don't know everything, and somebody might ask me a question I can't answer, and things that. But that pushing into that pain, you will come out a different person on the other side in a good way. Exactly. Well, I guess that kind of wraps up the things we've been talking about. Join us in that conversation if you , pick up some information. Love to see the growth in the community. We know this is a community where a lot of people have pushed through a lot of pain. Yes. Learned fast and are still learning and are leaning into it. And it's exciting. There are not so many places you can go and see a group of people coming together that are all excited about experiencing that next level of pain where they can grow and share and they know the value in that is if I'm experiencing this pain and then I can put out something that's a wonderful tip for the next person, maybe the pain that they go on to feel doesn't have to be the same one I did. It can be something different and they can share with me. So, it's just a really cool collaboration when you get inside that community of growth. Definitely. Alright. Well, thank you so much for joining us for another Rockcast. We look forward to sharing with you again soon. Do a church that loves the idea of using Rock but hasn't taken that leap yet? With managed hosting, churches of any size can get access to Rock's amazing technology, hassle free. With just one click, Rock's managed hosting removes the roadblocks that might stop a church from switching to Rock by making the process simple. 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