016 - EQ vs IQ with Jason Alba

Succeeding in your career isn’t tied only to what you know, but also your ability to communicate. Pluralsight author Jason Alba explains why technologists should prioritize developing soft skills like emotional intelligence and public speaking.

• Jason’s Pluralsight author page
• @jasonalba on Twitter
• Mark LeBlanc
• The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs
• JibberJobber.com
• Pluralsight course: Leading with emotional intelligence
• Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ by Daniel Goleman

If you enjoy this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.

Please send any questions or comments to podcast@pluralsight.com.

Jeremy Morgan:
Hello and welcome to All Hands on Tech, where today's leaders talk tomorrow's technology. I'm Jeremy Morgan.

Jeremy Morgan:
Soft skills are important and crucial to your success as a technologist. In this episode I sit down with Jason Alba and we talk about soft skills, emotional intelligence, and getting along in the workplace. So let's welcome Jason Alba.

Jeremy Morgan:
Tell me about what you do for Pluralsight and what you do for your business.

Jason Alba:
Yeah, sure. It's actually interesting because I get this question a lot from people who I've known for years and years, like my family. They have no idea what I do and it's almost hard to explain because I do so many different things. I started with Pluralsight I think in 2012, so I'm coming up on eight years. I did a course on LinkedIn that was when there were very few soft skill courses in the library. And my contact at Pluralsight said, "Hey, everybody needs LinkedIn stuff. This is so applicable to everybody." Anyways, long story short, I am working on my 36th course in a month or two and it's been an honor to be able to create soft skill and professional development courses for a very smart audience.

Jeremy Morgan:
How did you first become interested in soft skills?

Jason Alba:
I think I've always been interested in soft skills. When I was a kid I was interested in how people made money and how people had a career, how they paid for their lifestyle and stuff like that. I was always very career oriented, but I wasn't sure what I was going to do for a living. I thought I was going to go into business and my career has been weird. I was a developer for a while. I loved databases, that's where I spent most of my passion, in databases. But I also managed teams and stuff like that. I am an observer of people, I've always loved watching people. I love watching presentations and thinking, "Man, never do that from stage." Or speakers or people who persuade; salespeople, people in a meeting. I've always been really intrigued at the success that people have based on their personalities. I've just been aware of that really my whole life.

Jeremy Morgan:
Awesome. Who would you say is your favorite public speaker?

Jason Alba:
Wow, that's really hard. Most of the time I will, I mean, this is going to sound really bad, but I usually take notes on what not to do. When a professional speaker will come into town and do something from stage and I'll be like, "Oh, the story was too mushy or something like that." I don't know, I don't know. I watch a lot of Ted talks. There's a professional speaker out there in Minneapolis, his name is Mark Leblanc and he was actually president of the USA, not chapter, but USA National Speakers Association. I've heard him a number of times and he's wonderful.

Jason Alba:
I love how he has motivational stories, which are always interesting, but he doesn't overdo it on the stories. He gives you tactical things to sink your teeth into and that's one of my favorite things. Is I want to walk away thinking, "Oh, here's stuff to do and I can actually do it." Those are two different things. And when I listen to Mark Leblanc, I usually walk away with the confidence that I can do the things that he says to do. He's definitely one of my favorites.

Jeremy Morgan:
Nice. Yeah, I'll have to check out some of his stuff. I've been interested in public speaking as well, and I do a little bit of speaking. I don't consider myself a great speaker, but I want to become a great speaker. I do the exact same thing. I analyze everything, whether it's just a formal dinner between people and someone talks or tech presentations. And one of the things that helped me a lot was a book called The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs.

Jason Alba:
Oh yeah, I have that. I have that. Actually, it's on my nightstand right now.

Jeremy Morgan:
Yeah, that's an amazing book. And it's something I never thought about before. I thought about looking inside myself to be a public speaker. I never thought about some of the techniques and the things that he did during those presentations. I remember watching them just as an eager customer and thinking, "Well that's great and that's awesome." But then now going back and reading that book and then studying and then you go back and look at some of his talks and it's amazingly methodical and there's a whole bunch of things going on there that's really interesting I think.

Jason Alba:
Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean one thing I learned, and I've learned this over the courses that I've done with Pluralsight is it's not like you wake up one day and you do something really good. There is an immense amount of work and thought and strategy and even tactics. And a lot of times I can pick out speaker tactics, but sometimes I can't. And those are the excellent ones. I think having a master like Steve Jobs get up and do a presentation and have everybody wrapped around his pinky, I mean that is just fascinating to watch.

Jeremy Morgan:
Do you think public speaking and presentation skills are one of the biggest skills towards personal success or career success?

Jason Alba:
That's a great question. I mean, because I do soft skills, I should be biased and say yes, of course. But I mean, first of all, you have to really go dig down and figure out what personal success means to you. I'm thinking right now about a kid that I went to school with in college. I think I was a junior or a sophomore and I took my first programming class, Visual Basic 3.0. And this kid was the best in the class. There's always that one person who just is amazing. He also had been in a house fire and his face was disfigured, completely disfigured and he couldn't talk well. For him, he would never excel on stage because you couldn't understand him. But he was brilliant. So for him, success was being able to have an amazing career where he was still able to impact people and he was able to make a difference. But it didn't have anything to do with being able to be on stage or even be a successful presenter in a meeting.

Jason Alba:
So I want to say that yes, definitely everybody should increase their presentation skills. But at the same time, there's just going to be people who are amazing at what they do. I'm thinking about an architect that I worked with a couple of years ago. I never heard the guy utter a word. But he was an amazing architect and all the developers depended on what he did. But he was never the person who was going to get up in front of anybody and inspire anybody.

Jason Alba:
So let me rephrase your question. I think that to be successful in life or successful in a career, not necessarily. And if you're not the person who is excited or feels like they need to improve their presentation skills, then there's other ways that you can be successful. Now, having said that, I think as you figure out if you want to become an entrepreneur or if you want to get promotions or if you want to be more persuasive or have more "job security," which I'm not a real big believer in job security. If you want to do a lot of those things and not feel pigeonholed into just a technical role, if you want to be more of a team leader or something like that, then absolutely. Figure out how to be more persuasive, figure out how to communicate better.

Jason Alba:
And whether that's through written or through verbal or through visual presentations or whatever it is. Our ability to communicate what we really want and what other people should want and persuade people and change the way people think could be a huge factor in our careers.

Jeremy Morgan:
According to the story that you just told me, it sounds like possibly his communication skills were what were superior and so maybe that matters more than anything else. Which is another thing that of course people say to work on as far as those top primary things to work on.

Jason Alba:
Absolutely. And there's a lot of different ways you can communicate. I mean I was actually just talking about this guy with my wife a few weeks ago and how amazing he was born in today's world with the technology. Whereas a hundred years ago, if he couldn't communicate and his looks were a concern, what kind of career and future would he have? Whereas today, I don't know what people look like that I deal with online and I'm mostly dealing with people who are typing or somehow getting information into the... I mean, they can do voice to text or whatever. But the barriers for our ability to be successful and be fulfilled and to change the world and impact the world, they don't rely on us looking good and being physically capable anymore.

Jeremy Morgan:
What role have you had that you think would prepare you best for what you're doing now?

Jason Alba:
Let me just back up a little bit and tell you what I do. I do Pluralsight courses and I love teaching and training and sharing what I've learned. But I also own a software company. It's a CRM for job seekers. It's called JibberJobber. And I've run that for about 14 years. And I manage a team of technologists. We just started with some biz dev people. In July, I made my first angel investment into a SAS company that does B2B software in the employee performance and employee incentive and speech analytics space.

Jason Alba:
So I wear a lot of varied hats. When I do training for Pluralsight, when I create my courses, I mean I'm everywhere from left brain to right brain to in between like a ping pong ball, I'm bouncing all over. Whether it's getting technical into the video producing software or it's researching, or it's just self motivation because I have some pretty light deadlines so I could really goof off a lot. But I have to hold myself accountable.

Jason Alba:
On the software company side, I've learned a lot from other roles that I've had to help me understand how to run and manage software teams for example. Well, basically it's a product management function that I've had through most of my career. I think that learning how to do software and figure out what market needs are and being responsive to customers, working with developers, working to make sure that QA was happening appropriately before it gets to the customer. I worked in environments where the QA was the customer, which is very sloppy and messy. Fortunately, we've moved away from that model.

Jason Alba:
So a lot of those years spent doing that helped me be able to be an entrepreneur and create JibberJobber. I would not have been ready to be in a board position on this other company, the performance management company, without having been in another role a couple of years ago where I really watched the sales and marketing side.

Jason Alba:
Basically, to answer your question, what role prepared me, I basically take things from every experience I have and use them as building blocks to help me be more of a holistic, more comprehensive offering to what I'm doing. Whether I'm focusing on product today or I'm focusing on something that has to do with something very technical or marketing or sales, closing deals, looking at contracts, coaching, any of those things. I mean, my career's been over 20 years and I think everything has added to help me add value to the businesses that I'm working in today.

Jeremy Morgan:
Nice. That sounds like a very fortunate position to be in.

Jason Alba:
Well, it's fun. I mean, it hasn't always been fun. I mean there was definitely hard times. There was times where I was grossly underpaid for a long time. What I didn't realize was the amount of stuff I was learning then helped me be a better entrepreneur. I went through my unemployment of course, and that wasn't fun at all. But yeah, I'm definitely having a lot of fun in my career right now.

Jeremy Morgan:
What can you tell us about emotional intelligence?

Jason Alba:
I love emotional intelligence. I used to not love emotional intelligence. I thought it was froufrou and fluffy and really meaningless. But I was asked to do a course on emotional intelligence for Pluralsight and it's in the library right now. I said when I was done, I think I said on Twitter that this is the course that will have the most impact on people. And the reason why is as I was creating the course, I thought, "If everybody could just increase or work on their emotional intelligence, whether they're executives, owners, managers, supervisors, or the newest hire in the company. But if everybody could work on their emotional intelligence, we would live in a completely different world."

Jason Alba:
There would be more kindness, there would be more optimism, there would be more forgiveness. There would be more of all of the good things that companies are trying to create in their culture. They're trying to create these awesome cultures where people want to come to work. And I am convinced that if we had a personal objective of being aware of and working on our emotional intelligence, we'd be in a different world and it'd be delightful.

Jeremy Morgan:
I would agree with that. I've researched a little bit about emotional intelligence and watched some of your briefings on that and realize that you had put it into a framework of things that I tried to figure out the hard way as I went. When I first started in my career, I had just gotten out of college and had one of my first real tech jobs and I was promoted to manager pretty much instantly. They said, "We want you to run this team." I was, I think 23 years old, 24 years old, knew nothing. And that was my response was like, "But I don't know anything. Why?" It took me a little while to realize one of the reasons I was in charge was not that I knew so much or that I was so great or anything like that, but I was communicating with people outside of the team in a better way than the people that were on the team.

Jeremy Morgan:
I don't want to disparage them, but they were the typical tech workers who didn't really want to communicate with people. They didn't want to talk with others, they didn't want to be social. The stereotypical. Yeah, because I mean this is 20 years ago and I think it was a lot more prevalent then. But it took me a little while to realize and so that's when I stepped back and said, "Okay, maybe these are some skills that I need to work on as well." Communication and empathy for others and things like that because I think it'll help me separate from people who don't want to communicate, don't want to deal with others.

Jeremy Morgan:
It brought all that back as I was going through one of your courses, it brought it all back. I'm like, "Okay yeah, this makes sense." Because I of course, later started to use that when I'm mentoring others. I would tell them, "Your tech skills are very important. You have to be able to do what you're being paid to do. You have to be able to do that well, but you cannot ignore this other side of it, which is communicating with others and dealing with other people. You don't want people to avoid talking to you or dread talking to you as a developer or an IT person."

Jason Alba:
Yeah, and you can still have a great career as a technologist with low EQ. But when you have EQ or emotional intelligence, there's other opportunities that open up. For example, your story of being a 23 year old kid who I'm sure there were people on your team were better at technology than you were because they'd been around longer. But they tapped into your communication.

Jason Alba:
I remember I was actually just a few nights ago, I was at dinner with some friends and they were talking about a college professor and they were telling a lot of funny stories about this college professor. They said, "Yeah, he was all IQ and no EQ." It's interesting, people pay attention to that. We can be technically proficient, we can be the best programmer in town or in our company or whatever. But not having some of these emotional intelligence skills or aptitudes can have an impact on our brand. And the way I define brand is how people perceive us. Maybe we're super nice people but if people think that we're that person in the room and don't ever talk to them and they won't ever say anything to you. They're really good at what they do like I was describing the architect. They're really good at what they do, but they won't ever communicate to you. Well, if I ever have a problem, I'm probably not going to go to the person that doesn't communicate well.

Jason Alba:
All of that has an impact on the opportunities that you have. Maybe you have some friends that are going off and starting a really cool company and they get funding and everything's just wonderful about it and they didn't invite you, well why? Maybe they should have invited you for your technical abilities, but maybe they didn't want just technical abilities, they wanted more of a whole team member.

Jeremy Morgan:
You mentioned IQ. What would you say is the difference between IQ and EQ?

Jason Alba:
IQ is your smarts, how intelligent are you and if you have a certain IQ, then you can be a member of Mensa, which is the genius club. I'm sorry, I'm just remembering a guy that I used to work for who was probably the smartest person that I've ever worked with and maybe that I've ever known. I mean, you could sit down with this guy and talk about anything in depth with no end. He just knew everything about everything. But his emotional intelligence, his ability to communicate, to care about or be aware of others, really his honesty and how aware of himself was off. His ability to be in a meeting and let me just say behave properly, which is one of the five elements of emotional intelligence is self management or self regulation.

Jason Alba:
His ability to self regulate was o... He was really smart at what he did, but he was just walking around burning bridges and making people upset with him. If you could take your smarts, if you could take your IQ and you can tap into your EQ and not be such a dork or a jerk or however you want to describe it, you're unlimited, your potential is unlimited. But his EQ, his lack of EQ really tempered his smarts.

Jeremy Morgan:
Where could someone learn more about EQ or emotional intelligence in general?

Jason Alba:
There is a great course on Pluralsight called Leading with Emotional Intelligence. Actually, I think there's three courses on Pluralsight that go into emotional intelligence. I'll tell you what, there are so many articles now. I didn't notice them before, but now I see a lot of articles that are talking about emotional intelligence. The grandfather, if you will, I think the person who really made emotional intelligence or put emotional intelligence on the map was Daniel Goldman with the book called Emotional Intelligence. It's a fun book, there's a lot of little stories and examples that support the pillars or the ideas of emotional intelligence. Anyways, I mean if you go Google something on emotional intelligence, you will get a lot of information.

Jeremy Morgan:
In your opinion, what are three elements of social skills that we should keep in mind?

Jason Alba:
When I think about social skills, I think about inbound and outbound. What's coming into my brain and how do I process that and then what's coming out. Whether it's through body language or verbally or written or whatever. On the outbound side, any way that you can improve your communication. When I'm in a meeting I look mad or very, very serious. But that's my thinking face and I've had that my whole life. I feel like I'm a good communicator verbally, but I might be off putting physically. One of the things that I think is really critical is we figure out how we're communicating.

Jason Alba:
Here's an example. Some people say honesty is the best policy. Well, sometimes it's not a good policy at all. And I'm not saying that you should lie, but maybe you shouldn't say everything that you're thinking. Because you might just be wrong or what you think you should be honest about has no relevance but could definitely hurt the situation. So outbound communication, whether it's written or speaking on stage or your phone skills or whatever. Everybody's going to have their own thing that they know they need to work on.

Jason Alba:
Inbound communication is, I'm going to say, when you process information, how do you do that? Do you take this information and immediately react? Does it trigger emotions and feelings that get out of control? And do you let those things get out of control?

Jason Alba:
The first two pillars of emotional intelligence are self awareness, being aware of how you act and react and who you are, and self regulation or self management. Which is okay, let's say that I get some bad information and I feel crossed. I'm in a meeting at work and somebody says something and it makes me really upset. How do I react to that? Do I spout off, do I tell the person off? Do I put them in their place? And some people do, some people feel like it's their job to correct any wrong. There's a time and a place for that, but it could be really bad to correct any wrong in every situation. So self awareness and just understanding yourself and what sets you off, what your triggers are, why you think certain ways, why you behave certain ways is just absolutely critical.

Jeremy Morgan:
Yeah, and that makes sense what you just said about self regulation. It sounds like that comes in right there at that second point where something happens and then you're choosing how you react to that. Do you use your emotions or your feelings or think it out? That sounds like a very big challenging skill in itself.

Jason Alba:
Well, it is for a lot of people. I mean, and really when I was doing my course, I spend a lot of time thinking through my core structure and what I really want to say and what I don't want to say. So as I was thinking about self regulation, I mean people should know this. People should know to calm down, take a second and not be a jerk and stuff like that. But the reality is a lot of times the self regulation issues happen because we have conditioned ourselves to act or react a certain way. That's just the way I am. That's just how I am. I'm blunt. That might be something that you'd say.

Jason Alba:
Well, what I learned as I was preparing this course was that first of all, if I'm self aware and realize that I'm hotheaded, then I can work on that. If I'm self aware and recognize and realize that it's something that I don't want to be that way. But let's take it to another level. If I'm going into a meeting and I know there's going to be stressors or triggers that I would normally react to, I can prepare myself before that meeting. I can sit down before the meeting and make a plan and say, "Okay, if this person who is usually a jerk and says something rude, if they do that, what are my options? How can I react to that?"

Jason Alba:
And just going through that exercise of pre-planning, how I will manage or regulate myself in a stressful situation, I think that's a key to increase emotional intelligence. Because I'll tell you what, I was in a meeting once were when I walked out, my coworker said, "Hey I want to play poker with you because you have no poker face. It was very clear that you are getting upset." And I felt justified in being upset but I did not like that I was out of control enough that other people recognized that I was upset. If I would have taken the time and thought, "Okay I'm going into this stressful meeting, I know some stuff's going to happen, I am going to make a choice right now on how I'm going to act," and maybe I'll even practice that. That's self regulation in practice and that's increasing your emotional intelligence.

Jeremy Morgan:
Yeah and that sounds like a really good approach. A couple of things that have helped me over the years are a couple of tools. One of the things, my wife says it all the time, and I'm not really sure where it came from. Where she says, "Seek first to understand." Before reacting, figure things out. I've thought about that a lot over the years. And then my fire chief always likes to say, "Inquiry before advocacy." He'll always say, "Before you get upset, before you start advocating for a position, make enough inquiry to understand all of the context and everything that's going on." Those are the two phrases that come into my head constantly when I'm dealing with others.

Jason Alba:
You're in good company because the seek first to understand probably wasn't coined by Steven Covey, but it's in the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. If I remember correctly right now, it is one of the habits. We have to gather information and really understand perspectives and understand truth and reality. Man, I tell you what, let me give you a contrast of a meeting example. There was one meeting where I walked out and then my coworker wanted to play poker with me because he could read my face so easily. Well, let's say we go into another meeting where I'm much more prepared and I'm more self managed and self regulated. I'm in a situation now where I'm showing my emotional intelligence and my maturity and that might open up some opportunities where people say, "We want Jason on our team." Or, "Jason's getting closer to being ready for that management role." I mean, this stuff can have a real impact on our careers and on our success.

Jeremy Morgan:
Yeah, sounds like it. And at the very least, it sounds like it can have an impact on not messing up as much. If I'm being honest, I've messed up a lot of times by jumping to react to something and jumping to conclusions too quick. It seems like at the very least it can be a safety net from messing up too much in social professional situations.

Jeremy Morgan:
What kind of trends are you seeing in this area? In the area of emotional intelligence, things like that. You mentioned a lot of the resources that you're going to and things like that. Are you seeing any kinds of trends?

Jason Alba:
I am seeing a lot more stuff where people are talking about the importance of EQ over IQ. Because I mean a couple of decades ago I heard somebody say, "Well, I can train you to do the technical part, but if you're a jerk I can't train the jerk out of you." And they're basically back then were saying, "I can teach you how to do the processes and procedures, but I don't want to spend the time or invest in training you how to be emotionally intelligent." Now, I mean I'm hearing the same message. They're just using the words emotional intelligence.

Jason Alba:
I remember I met with a CLO, a chief learning officer, a few years ago and we were talking about Pluralsight courses. I walked into that meeting advocating for the phrase soft skills. Which I was one of the soft skill pioneers at Pluralsight. That's all that my courses were on because I was so far removed from actually doing current technology and that's all I could do, so soft skills. We go into this meeting and she never said soft skills once, not one time. It was really fascinating. The entire meeting she said professional development. Multiple times, professional. We are looking at professional development. We want to train our young managers and grow their professional development. Never once did she say soft skills.

Jason Alba:
The principles and the concepts from a couple decades ago are the same. We want you to be better and nicer and help create a culture that people want to come work at. Nowadays we're saying those things out loud and it's in your face. The last company that I worked at, they were all about culture. They talked about how we had the best culture around. Nobody can top our culture. Well, the culture comes from hiring people who have a cultural fit. And generally they're not saying that we hired the best developers or the best accountants or the best salespeople. What they were saying was the best sales people, accountants and developers fit into our culture, which was a high emotional intelligence environment and they brought their technical skills with them.

Jason Alba:
I mean, I've been in the HR space for a long time. It seems like the companies that are really moving and wheeling and dealing are talking about their culture. And at an executive level, they can do things like incentives and performance and all the things that come with policies and procedures and stuff like that. But at the hiring level you are hiring for EQ, you are hiring for that cultural fit. And that's become I think a much bigger deal over the last five or 10 years than it was before.

Jeremy Morgan:
I've heard a lot about culture also. My career is probably roughly the same size as yours, about 20 years or so in tech. And nobody talked about culture in the beginning that I can remember. And then it just started becoming more and more top of mind for people and not so much even culture fit. I'd say probably the first time I really heard that was maybe 10 years ago or so. Now it seems to be a lot bigger part of it where people have to be able to work together to be good at what they do. It's similar to an orchestra. You're the greatest trumpet player in the world, but you can't keep up with everybody else or you're going ahead of everybody else or it all has to work together.

Jason Alba:
I remember in school 20 years ago it was all about teamwork, team, team, team. You got to work on a team and now it's all about culture. And the cool thing is culture is partially from the company and partially from the employees. It's everybody working together to create this environment.

Jeremy Morgan:
What are you working on right now? Do you have any cool projects or anything you could tell us about?

Jason Alba:
I have too many cool projects. I need three more of me. I am cleaning up a couple of Pluralsight courses. I actually am cleaning up my third course that I did back in I think 2012 or 2013. They asked me to redo the slides and maybe look at the audio. And once I went into it I couldn't believe it. I was like, "No, no, no, this doesn't work." So I've rewritten the entire thing and then I'm going to do that to another course. Then I got another course that I know I'm going to work on. I hope to be busy doing Pluralsight courses all year.

Jason Alba:
In July of last year, 2019 I launched a new product for my JibberJobber business, it's called the Job Search Program, jobsearchprogram.com and it's all about how to network into a job using informational interviews. I'm fascinated with informational interviews. I think they're the most powerful networking tactic that anybody could use, especially job seekers. So I created a six week program where you can actually say, "Hey, here's what you do today." My users, they'll wake up and open up the app and then they'll hear me say, "All right, here's the three things that you're going to do today." And over the course of six weeks they get closer and closer to hiring managers, which is really cool.

Jason Alba:
On the other business that I'm working on where I'm a board member, I'm working with the sales and marketing mostly and the CEO. We're actually working on a lot of expansion and growth. It's very exciting for me to have started in technology but really be able to make an impact in marketing and sales and help create, if you will, the culture and the processes and policies for a company that's starting to go into a hyper growth mode. So it's going to be a really fun year.

Jeremy Morgan:
Yeah, it sounds like it. Sounds like you're really busy. I do have one final question for you. And I actually asked this to my last podcast guest, but that hasn't been published yet so I know you haven't heard it. And it's an oddball question. If someone gave you an elephant and you couldn't sell it or give it away to anybody else, what would you do with that elephant?

Jason Alba:
Well, I actually live on almost an acre and a half and I have 20 something chickens and I honestly, right now I'd stick it out in my backyard. I don't think it'd do very well because we live in Utah and they don't do winter. But I would keep it. I think it would be a fascinating animal to watch. Is that weird? I can't wait to hear what your other person said.

Jeremy Morgan:
What's the biggest challenge with raising chickens?

Jason Alba:
I don't have a good feeding system right now, so I got to go out about every three days. But yeah, I made a good watering system, so I take care of that every three months or so. But I got to get a good feeding system. Going out every three days in the winter is no fun.

Jeremy Morgan:
Oh yeah.

Jason Alba:
That's probably my biggest challenge. I've had various challenges. We had fence issues, so we'd chase chickens around the yard. Chasing them around an acre is pretty difficult. Right now it's feeding them.

Jeremy Morgan:
Awesome. Well, thank you very much for talking with me today.

Jason Alba:
Yeah, my pleasure, Jeremy. Thank you.

Jeremy Morgan:
Jason Alba has authored 34 courses for Pluralsight around emotional intelligence, career success and more. He also runs jibberjobber.com. Thank you for listening to All Hands on Tech. If you like it, please rate us. You can see episode transcripts and more info at pluralsight.com/podcast.