For the past month, I’ve been using TrackYourHappiness.org – created as part of Matt Killingsworth’s doctoral research at Harvard University – with the goal of learning more about what impacts my happiness, and to what degree.

TrackYourHappiness is free to use, but fairly intense. You fill out an intense survey at the beginning, and then the experiment begins. For the next few weeks, you’re texted randomly, multiple times throughout the day, with questions you need to answer. Your mission is to respond as quickly as possible with how you’re feeling at that exact moment (the experiential sampling method).

In the name of worthwhile data, I stuck through the few weeks of random interruptions, being sure to diligently fill out the survey as soon as I received it. Three weeks later, the report was ready.

I found some correlations that surprised me, and some that didn’t. Below is a summary of what I’ve learned from my happiness report. If you find these takeaways interesting and/or are interested in learning more about when you’re happiest, I’d highly recommend trying it. Note: You’ll need a smartphone to take the surveys if you’re frequently on the go.

What I Kind-of Already Knew

Here are a few quick learnings that simply verified a lot of what I already knew

• I’m at my happiest when working in coffee shops, or being out and about. Staying at home tends to make me irritable (perhaps it’s FOMO?).
• The top three activities that make me happy: conversation, listening to music, and working on passion projects. This is not a surprise, but cool to see graphed out on a chart. And considering that people typically do these activities in coffee shops, this may help explain the point above.
• Outdoor or indoors – neither seems to have a major influence on happiness. Although outdoors had a slightly higher happiness rating, this is likely due to the fact that long work days, mundane chores, and time spent sick – unpleasant activities usually spent indoors – can skew the data.

Some Interesting Graphs

My happiness by day of the week really surprised me (see below). Why am I so happy on Thursdays? Might be a fluke in the data, or maybe not. This definitely requires more investigation, since I don’t do anything particularly unique on Thursdays, to my knowledge.

Next, I noticed a very clear correlation between focus and happiness. I don’t want to jump the gun and say that being focused causes happiness, or vice versa – it’s simply a correlation for now. If I had to take a guess, I’m probably more focused on projects that I find interesting and challenging (better stated as flow). And as I learned above, passion projects are a key contributor to my happiness. Hypothesis: Passion projects keep me focused and happy, resulting in this correlation.

Similarly, there’s a correlation between my level of productivity and my happiness. I doubt productivity is the cause here either. For example, a full day of errands and laundry doesn’t make me happy. The correlation here is a little weaker, so I think the happiness is, again, tied to making progress on passion projects, rather than mundane chores.

This next graph charts out my happiness, based on how many people I’m interacting with. It seems that I enjoy one-on-one conversations more than larger group conversations. It might be because I usually interact with larger groups at loud, crowded bars. Or perhaps I truly do enjoy one-on-one conversation because of the level of depth the conversation can reach.

Conclusion

Some of this information is very handy as a troubleshooter. For example, let’s say I’m feeling particularly gloomy this week. I now know the questions to ask myself:

• Have I been able to work on interesting projects, or engage in one-on-one conversations with people I enjoy being around?
• Is it Wednesday? If so, it seems pretty normal to be a bit gloomier.
• Have I had a chance to be productive and focus on work I find interesting?
• …and so on.

By taking note of which factor is likely at play each time I’m feeling particularly great or awful, I can pay attention to longer term trends, and adjust my lifestyle accordingly.

For example, I’ve recently realized I’ve spent way too much time on work and side projects, to the detriment of my social life (especially the one-on-one conversations over lunch, coffee, etc.). This lack of balance started interrupting my focus, and significantly impacting my happiness. I’ve started making necessary adjustments to fix this problem before it snowballs.

By having a model to work with (even if it’s not completely accurate to reality – it’s only three week’s worth of data, after all), it puts you in a better position to troubleshoot your mood and take action.

I’d love to hear what you all think about this. Have you ever self-tracked before? Did you glean any insights from it?

“A rejection is nothing more than a necessary step in the pursuit of success.”

-Bo Bennett

Learning to handle rejection (and fail gracefully) is one of the most valuable skills for succeeding in almost every endeavor in life. Why? Because the only thing worse than a half-assed attempt at success is not even trying at all. And someone who cannot tolerate rejection will likely give up before he even tries.

I’m not the only one to recognize the importance of embracing rejection. Jason Shen started Rejection Therapy as a means to push his limits and step outside of his comfort zone. The more you step out of your comfort zone, the thinking goes, the better you will be in uncomfortable situations that really matter (think job interview, first date, approaching an influential individual, and so on).

The more I pay attention to this topic as plays out in everyday life, the more obvious it becomes that there is a significant correlation between your ability to handle rejection and your ability to get what you want in life.

My New Approach to Rejection

I’ve written about embracing rejection and failure before, but I never really lived true to it. Like many, I feel the sting of rejection quite strongly, and a particularly harsh rejection can impact my mood for weeks. So in typical Jon format, I’ve decided to start tracking rejections (on post-it notes, of course), and rewarding myself for reaching my rejection goal. Ultimately, I want to gamify the receipt of rejections so that I welcome them, rather than deplore them.

A few examples:

• If I put my all into applying for a spot on a project at work, and am turned down, that counts as a rejection.
• If I go on a date, and I’m interested in a second date and she isn’t – that’s a rejection.
• If I put myself out on a limb, and am turned down in any way that leaves an emotional sting, +1 rejection.

The way I see it, if I receive a particularly brutal rejection, perfect! I took a calculated risk that gave me an opportunity to move a step forward in life. Although it didn’t work out this time, it still brought me one step closer to reaching my rejection goal.

Adding In Some Gamification (Just For Fun)

As I started paying more attention to rejection, and how consistently I had been avoiding it to my own detriment, I started gamifying certain elements of it, to see if it would allow me to better handle rejection.

If you want to see how the system came into being, I recently guest-posted on Jason Shen’s blog, describing the system.

So has the gamification and tracking helped turn me into a fearless rejection machine? So far, the answer is a resounding “sort of.” Like most gamification efforts, it doesn’t completely change behavior. It simply guides in the right direction. So, while this system hasn’t given me fearless super powers, it has given me the incentive to take on additional actions with a risk of rejection, simply for the sense of progress and rewards it provides for doing so.

It will be a long time before the fear of rejection no longer impacts me as much as it does now, but this system is helping me take baby steps towards progress on something that has been holding me back for as long as I can remember. Cheers to progress.

Conclusion: It’s A Numbers Game

The reason I’m embracing this system is because many things in life are a numbers game, based on probability and randomness. Focusing on the actual probability of success can be healthy in moderation, but unhealthy when obsessed about (as I’ve written about here). Nevertheless, randomness and probability play a large role in success in life, so it’s important to be aware of them.

An example: The average Joe, who spends plenty of time out and about meeting new people, is more likely to meet his special someone versus, for example, the award-winning musician/novelist who spends his weeknights and weekends at home, never leaving the couch. (I’m not sure why I used award-winning musician / novelist as an example, but doesn’t that person sound interesting?)

Even though an award-winning musician/novelist is likely a very interesting, intelligent person, if he never leaves the couch (an inferior strategy for meeting people), his odds of success plummet compared to the average Joe who’s out and about talking to people.

Another example: If you apply to enough jobs, and your resume is solid, you’ll eventually find an opportunity worth pursuing. For example, as a senior in college, I spent a lot of time sending out applications (dozens of them), only to hear nothing in return. What’s more, I had to apply to Google 3 times before I finally received an offer from them. Despite being a qualified candidate, I still had to play the numbers game and face a series of rejections.

A final example: If you write enough blog posts, and you’re a decent writer, you’re very likely to eventually write something people resonate with – but you’ll likely have to write in obscurity for years before that happens. In my case, this blog had a very, very small readership until I started writing about goal gamification.

This is why handling rejection (and any sort of failure) like a champ is so important. People who quit too early into the numbers game don’t get to reap the benefits. Any numbers game requires a certain amount of attempts before the odds begin to make themselves obvious (in statistics, this is the statistically significant sample size). When you’re playing the odds, you have to keep trying as often as you reasonably can.

It’s one thing for me to sit here and write about how you should embrace your failures and learn to handle rejection. At this point, I’m sure many of you already know that. I’m writing this post as a call to action to find your own unique way of handling rejection. Being the gamification nerd that I am, started tracking my rejections and attaching rewards for hitting certain rejection milestones. Would that work for you? Maybe, maybe not.

Maybe you’ll resonate with the idea of a group of friends who are willing to take on rejection challenges with you. Maybe you’ll enjoy starting a blog to track your adventures as you push yourself outside of your comfort zone. Maybe you’ll resonate most with the idea of taking one small action with a risk of rejection each day, and ramping up the difficulty as you feel ready.

There’s a way out there for everybody; find yours.

I’m happy to admit that after 10 weeks of intensive coding (well, as intense as a beginner can get), I’ve finished my first app. I’ll discuss it in a future blog post, but needless to say, I’m very happy with it. I even have a second and third app that were completed as offshoots of the first (I repurposed a lot of the code).

However, I’ve noticed that, while I was caught in a storm of coding these past few months, I’ve sorely neglected this blog. Both my social life and time in the gym have suffered as well. While upsetting, I’m beginning to wonder if this might actually be a good thing. In other words, when a passion consumes every free moment of time – even to the point where other areas of your life temporarily cease to develop – is this something worth embracing? As of now, I’m leaning towards yes. And I’ll explain why.

Just as valuable as time: Energy and motivation

To help us answer this question, let’s take a step back and look at productivity. Typically, when people focus on being more productive, they think about time. Scheduling, deadlines, efficiency. But time isn’t the whole picture. If I had to choose between 4 hours of free time during a low energy, low motivation state, versus 2 hours of free time during a high energy, high motivation state, I’d immediately choose the latter, as I’m sure you would too.

People who understand this are those that end up paying very close attention to what motivates and energizes them. For example, here are some things I’ve learned about myself over the last few years:

• Certain types of game mechanics (progress bars, quantification of effort, variable rewards, etc.) really motivate me.
• Coffee gives me about 45 minutes of a productivity spike, but then results in a crash that lasts for 2-3 hours, bringing my energy and motivation way down.
• Green tea gives me a mild energy boost, with little to no crash, making it the superior option.
• Sleeping between 8 and 9 hours is the ideal amount of sleep for me.
• And most recently learned, if I feel the natural urge to work on a passion project, I need to do whatever I can to start as soon as possible, because that motivation is short-lived.

That last bullet point is what inspired this blog post. Understanding the factors that can trigger states of high motivation is incredibly valuable. To that point, I can sometimes get more done in 30 minutes of high energy, high motivation, than 3 hours of mediocre energy and motivation. And I’d argue that when you start a project that really interests you, you’re in an excellent position to reap the super-productive rewards of a high motivation, high energy state.

Take advantage while you can

While I was coding the app I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I was also preparing a short speech for a conference. If I had postponed work on the app in order to focus exclusively on the speech, I’m confident it would’ve taken me 5x longer to finish coding that. Why? Because the powerful motivation to keep making progress on the app would’ve faded by the time I was ready to work on it.

Of course, it’s not always possible to take advantage of spikes in energy and motivation. You could be at work, have a tight deadline on another project, etc. However, I’d recommend doing whatever you can to take advantage of such states. I’ve been known to write blog posts on my lunch break if the inspiration strikes. And on days when I don’t have the luxury to do that? To be honest, many of the blog posts that need to wait never get written.

To keep this approach sustainable, it’s important to keep your other projects in maintenance mode while capitalizing on any natural spikes in motivation. While in hardcore coding mode, I still went to the gym 1-2 times per week (rather than 2-3 times), and I made sure to post a blog post every few weeks. Not my best performance in either area, but enough to keep me afloat. And now that I’ve let my motivation run it’s course with the completion of my first app, I can now resume working out and blogging more aggressively.

Conclusion

“Everything in moderation, including moderation”

-Oscar Wilde

Living a life of moderation is a solid default strategy, but when your energies and passions are calling you in a particular direction, I’ve found that it’s very worthwhile to take the plunge and temporarily explore a more extreme state. As long as you keep the other areas of your life in a healthy state of maintenance, you should be fine.

When I developed an interest in coding my first app, I went full out. However, I made sure to take just enough time away from this to maintain my other passions (blogging, gym routine, etc.). But to take any more time would be failing to take full advantage of the natural spike in curiosity and drive that was available to me.

So the next time you feel an inclination to explore a new hobby or interesting project, see if you can leverage that motivation to make more progress than you thought possible. You’d be surprised at how much you can get done when you act in accordance to the ebb and flow of your motivation. Carpe diem.

Why am I taking on so much when I’m normally such a big fan of simplification and prioritization?

One reason: Diminishing time requirements.

In other words, as each of these projects progresses forward, they require significantly less time from me. This gives me a hectic schedule in the short term, but clear benefits in the long run.

For example, once that speech is given, it will be on the internet for all to view, with no additional effort ever required on my part. The marginal time requirement for a new person to see my speech is zero, whereas the speech continues to build my personal brand.

Once I learn to code, apps will be written more quickly. If those apps are good enough, I’ll earn an opportunity to code as part of my job, which will allow me to get paid to get better at coding. The time requirement in my personal life will diminish significantly from there.

Once I redesign my blog, it will (hopefully) convert visitors into steady readers more effectively. A one-off project that will yield steady returns from the day it’s completed with no additional effort required until the next re-design.

So while my schedule is hectic right now, in a few months (or even weeks), these projects will be humming along comfortably, with significantly less time investment required. Not recommended as a long-term solution for getting things done, but a great idea for short periods in time when you have the bandwidth to challenge yourself with multiple projects.

Hey everyone! As you may (or may not) know, I had a fantastic opportunity to speak about goals and gamification last year at GSummit 2012. It was a great experience, and they’ve even invited me to do a quick follow-up talk this year.

As GSummit 2013 rapidly approaches, I was asked if I’d want to speak about gamifying your goals on Gamification.co’s live webshow. I said yes, and you can see the result below!

If you’ve resonated with anything I’ve written about goals and gamification, it’s definitely worth your time to check it out! If the embedded video below doesn’t work for you, check it out on Gamification.co here.

Some of the things I talk about include:

• Why I started  to gamify my goals
• How to properly choose motivating rewards for your goals
• How to avoid temptation to cheat your own system
• What kind of people this system is appropriate for
• And more!

Hope you enjoy!
-Jon

I firmly believe that people should take their lives into their own hands in any way that they reasonably can. Rather than let arbitrary circumstances dictate how they live, people who adopt this approach to life are those who begin exercising regularly, eating the right foods, working hard to build a thriving career, searching for the right life partner, and so on. They don’t make excuses; they take control. I cannot recommend this approach to life highly enough.

But I’m beginning to learn that taking control is not the whole picture. There’s another side to the coin: letting go. The act of letting go is what completes the cycle as you progress through your goals and grow as a person. In fact, letting go is just as important as taking control.

Why do I believe this? Over and over again, I’ve noticed that as I start experiencing success with a particular long-term goal, it becomes increasingly more important to let go of certain mentalities, desires, and habits that are no longer applicable or useful. This especially applies to habits that were once helpful when I was starting out, but have since morphed into wasteful, or even harmful.

The inability to let go of these outdated habits, desires, and mentalities is a major reason why people burn out, flounder, or stop making progress on a particular goal. On a personal level, one great example of this in action can be found in my first three years of weightlifting.

A Personal Example: Working Out

When I first started resistance training workouts in order to build muscle, I did what many guys do: I started taking protein shakes, pre-workout formulas, creatine, and various vitamin supplements along with my brand new weight training routine. While I was getting started, this supplementation regimen had a series of benefits:

• Surrounding my workout routine with pre-workout cocktails and post-workout protein shakes built a routine, which helped me adhere to my workouts.
• Other guys who lifted weights often had a similar supplementation strategy. And discussing this was a way to bond with people I met at the gym and get to know them better. And as I discuss frequently on this blog, strong social ties around a goal can significantly improve your success rate.
• Anyone who has used supplements like pre-workouts can tell you how your mind focuses in on your workout as a result of the caffeine, and how your strength jumps as a result of creatine.

However, as I broke past the barrier of beginner status, I never stopped to re-evaluate my reliance on these supplements as a mental and physical crutch. As a result, the years of heavy caffeine consumption caught up with me, and I felt exhausted all of the time. And I’m pretty sure prolonged intake of creatine isn’t the best thing in the world for you either.

These same supplements, which are relatively safe to use short-term (and were crucial to helping me adhere to my new workout program when it was uncomfortable, unfamiliar, and overwhelming), were progressively becoming less useful, and increasingly harmful to my well-being. I never stopped to let go these crutches, and the habits that kept them a part of my daily routine.

I eventually caught on to the increasingly negative side effects of these supplementation habits, and I went through a difficult process of removing them from my workout routine. I’ve been much better off ever since (more energy, and less reliance on stimulants being the major two benefits).

Letting Go Applies to Most Goals

Let’s use another example: the recent college graduate who wants to build a successful career. This goal usually starts out with a strong desire to work hard, receive a promotion, and rise the corporate ladder. This desire drives a newly-minted college grad to work harder and more intently than she otherwise might – not to mention building a strong work ethic early in life – improving her odds of success.

But once she’s broken past the initial hump and is well into a fantastic career, what then? Should she keep her nose to the grindstone and continue to put in those long hours? Even though that’s what she’s trained herself to do since graduating school, that’s a dangerous strategy.

Blogger Cal Newport refers to this as the competence trap. In the words of Newport:

This is the competence trap: when you amass enough career capital to exert meaningful control over your life and career, the only investment presented as reasonable will be to further maximize your competence at the expense of the other areas of your life.

For example:

• The Ivy League student who graduates with honors is attracted to law school because it’s the next rung on a competitive competence-growing ladder.
• The ambitious med student turns to a demanding specialty because it’s presented as the domain for hot shots.
• The young corporate star enrolls in an MBA program so she can return to the management fast track at the company, as that’s the prize stand outs are supposed to chase.
• And so on…

[Living a remarkable life] requires a cautious awareness of the competence traps that will litter your path as you become better and better at what you do.

If you don’t stop, reevaluate, and let go of what’s unnecessary in your career, your career momentum will carry you to a position with more compensation and responsibility, which usually results in longer hours and higher stakes. Are the costs to your personal life worth it? It’s important to stop and reflect before you reach that point. If it isn’t worth it, start letting go of your desire to climb the corporate ladder, and build desires and habits that will give you a better life outside of the office.

Conclusion

Those who don’t stop, re-evaluate, and let go of desires and habits that are no longer beneficial will find themselves deviating from the right track. As we progress through life, our priorities change. What if our family becomes increasingly more important? What if we now have the career capital to make the jump to a more fulfilling career path? In almost all cases, significant changes to habits, beliefs and thought processes will be required at key points in life. When such circumstances present themselves, it’s time to let go of the old, and bring in the new.

When you get started in anything, whether learning a new skill, launching a new career, or building a business, become obsessive. Learn everything you can. Build the desires and habits that will push you in the right direction. Take control.

But once you’ve successfully built the momentum that will keep you moving forward at a rapid pace, be sure to periodically pause and reflect. Let go of the mentalities and habits that are no longer productive. The obsession that once helped you lift off the ground may be what causes you to burn out if you’re not careful. As your circumstances change, so must you.

I’ve attempted the plunge into the coding world for years now. I’d get my feet wet in something like Javascript, Python, or Ruby, but then throw it to the wayside in favor of higher priority projects. In retrospect, learning to code was a lower priority for me because I didn’t have anything I actually wanted to build to give coding a sense of purpose. Well, no longer is that the case. With a project in mind, and a seemingly limitless amount of free resources on the Internet, I felt it was time to get serious with learning to code. Thus far, my overall experience seems to be progressing from fun to frustrating to fruitful.

Fun

In my opinion, learning a new language is incredibly fun. Codecademy is a blast. It feels good to write your first function that can process logic and spit out the answer you were looking for. Telling all of your tech-savvy friends that you’re learning to code to make [insert cool idea here] is very gratifying as well. My first few weeks learning code was a blast, and I really enjoyed it.

Frustrating

But then comes the frustrating part. This is the phase where you know enough to start coding, but not nearly enough to make your idea functional. Your code consistently breaks, you can’t figure out how to fix it, and you’re still clueless after reading through 20+ StackOverflow threads.

David Bauer, in his blog post on learning to code in under a year, makes a great point about why it can be so frustrating to learn to code:

The weeks after my initial euphoria turned out to be a nasty endurance probe. It feels like you make hardly any progress and it freaks you out when almost perfectly written code simply fails. Like ordering a full three course menu at the restaurant and not getting anything just because you pronounced the name of the wine slightly wrong …

I feel the same way now. I spent two hours this morning trying (and failing) to have a block of text update when a checked box is unchecked. So easy in theory; much more difficult in practice.

Fruitful

Although I’m currently stuck in the frustrated phase discussed above, I’m eagerly awaiting the fruitful phase. In this phase, you’ve finally created something that adds real value to one or more people’s lives. This is when you can sit back and enjoy the fruits of your labor. This is when you rejuvenate and wait for the inspiration that will carry you towards your next project.

I can’t comment too much on this phase, since I’m not here yet. But I know it exists, and I’m definitely looking forward to it.

Conclusion

If you’re learning to code – much like any skill – it’s usually fun at first, but quickly becomes frustrating as you realize how little you know, and how much you’ll need to learn to reach your end goal. As Seth Godin wrote in The Dip:

“Never Quit.”  What a spectacularly bad piece of advice. I think the advice giver meant to say “Never quit something with great long-term potential just because you can’t deal with the stress of the moment”. Now that’s good advice.

That’s exactly how I feel now, despite immense levels of frustration. Knowing how to code is simply too valuable to quit simply because I’m frustrated and stressed out by my lack of progress in the short term.

Now, back to figuring out why those damned checkboxes aren’t functioning properly!

Below is the most recent iteration, which I put into action soon after moving to San Francisco:

• Blogging
• Learning to code
• Proactively reaching out to fading contacts
• Cooking a new dish
• Experimenting with new gamified goal systems

After each work session, take note of how long you worked for, and mark it on one post-it note (in the image above, it’s the one on the right). Each row on the post-it note should include the time spent on that session (i.e. 1.4 hours), and a running total of how many hours you’ve accumulated since beginning (i.e. 26.2 hours).

As your running total surpasses the 1st hour, 2nd hour, etc., circle off that respective hour on the other post-it note. Once you’ve circled off the last hour on the post-it (in the post-it note above my goal is 15 hours), you earn a reward (in the image above, listed on the bottom of the left-hand post-it note).

After about one month of tracking my weekend work ethic with this system, I noticed much less resistance when it was time to buckle down and get things done on the weekend. That urge to procrastinate slowly vanished. And at this point, two years later, it feels completely natural to spend a few hours in a coffee shop every Saturday working on personal projects.

Ready to get started? I recommend using post-it notes, but that’s a personal preference. If your work involves something you’d do on a computer, I recommend keeping Timer Tab pinned in your browser. It will even show you the time in the favicon area for quick reference.

Happy gamifying!

I recently heard some fantastic advice on this topic that I’d recommend to all people in their youth. Set up a countdown timer on your phone/computer/device of choice and start counting down the days until you turn 30. I installed an extension in my Chrome browser which is now a permanently pinned tab in my browser. It looks like this:

This isn’t advice exclusively for people in their 20s. If you’re in your 30s, count down the days until you turn 40. You get the idea.

The point is that every decade of our lives is, for most people, ideal for a particular set of activities. Take risks while you’re young; seek deeper meaning as you mature; leave an impact on the world as you progress through live.

Having a countdown timer quantify exactly how many days, hours, minutes, and seconds you have until you enter a new decade of your life has a powerful way of motivating you to make the most of your time.

I’m so glad I heard this advice through a co-worker, and I won’t soon forget it.

Recognizing this, I realized I had a problem. I don’t invest in meeting new people. Sure, I can work on my blog in a coffee shop next to other people on their laptops, but that hardly creates serendipitous encounters. Reading The Startup of You by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha only made this point more obvious. I don’t network nearly enough.

The Startup of You had many fantastic suggestions for managing your career, but one of my favorite ideas was that of the “Interesting People Fund.” This is a portion of your savings dedicated to meeting new, interesting people. For example, did you take someone in your field out to lunch to pick their brain? Take the cost out of your Interesting People Fund. Is there an interesting networking event a few towns over next week? Use your Interesting People Fund to pay for transportation and event costs.

Surprisingly, the biggest benefit of this kind of fund isn’t the financial resource. Something clicks in your mind when you start dedicating your resources towards the explicit goal of meeting interesting people. You begin to take networking more seriously. And when you do that, you begin to see the true value in it.

Meeting more interesting people is a win-win. The ROI on your Interesting Person Fund will likely be through the roof compared to that 7% return you saw on your stock portfolio last year. If even one of these interesting people points you towards a career-altering opportunity, it will have been worth all of the money you invested.

Homework? Create an Interesting People Fund, and start using it.