Ep #_ Emotional Cycle Of Change 5 Stages
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Ep #_ Emotional Cycle Of Change 5 Stages: [00:00:00] Hey guys, and welcome to this episode of easier said than done and how to do it.
Today I'm going to talk to you about something that's an open secret. Okay. It's the one factor, the one factor that contributes to excellence,
whether it's code or something else. And it's the one factor you all know about.
You all think about, you've been told about it since childhood. It's an open secret. It's the world's worst kept secret, but even though you understand what it means in practice, when it comes time to actually apply it, your emotions get involved, and therefore it's hard to actually apply it.
And that factor is time.
Now, like I said, it's not an earth shattering secret, but it is an open secret that everybody knows. And what do I mean by time? Look, when it comes to, playing the guitar, getting really good at some sort of craftsmanship, or getting really good at code, being a really great writer, being an athlete.
There is a level of persistent, consistent effort that is required. And broadly, it takes three things. It takes
practice, REPETITIVE practice, over a [00:01:00] sustained period of time. Okay, so it's practice that is repetitive over a very sustained period of time.
Now, all of these things means that you have to stick with something for much longer than you hope.
Most of us secretly kind of hope it's going to take less practice, Less repetition and certainly less time to get to the level we want. We sort of want to skip these steps. Unfortunately, that doesn't work. Now, what ends up happening and I see very often is that people want to leap into something like software engineering and coding because they saw something glamorous on Netflix or Instagram or something like that.
And they feel it's a get rich quick scheme, or it seems so creative, it seems incredibly powerful, and these people whip up these things in a weekend. It's not how it is, right? It's, it's, it takes a lot of time and practice, and certain kinds of experiences give you that deeper practice at the workplace than you otherwise would have in other places.
So it's quite variable,
Intro
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Welcome to Easier Said Than Done with me, Zubin Pratap, where I share with you the tens of [00:02:00] thousands of dollars worth of self development that I did on my journey from 37 year old lawyer to professional software engineer. The goal of this podcast is to show you how to actually do those things that are easier said than done.
Ep #_ Emotional Cycle Of Change 5 Stages: but when it comes to learning how to code and getting your foot in the door, trust me, it's going to take a lot of time, practice, and practice. Persistence, right? And specific effort. You have to be practicing repetitively on the same concepts, the same principles over and over and over again.
This is not unique to software engineering. I can promise you that
if you ever watch me practice the guitar, sometimes you'd be like, you spend five hours doing this. Boring stuff and it's true.
I remember my Ex wife and my current partner for example, they will Ask me to play my guitar quietly in another room or you know wearing headphones because i'm practicing the same five notes For example over and over again and sometimes it sounds okay Sometimes it doesn't .
You'd be surprised how long it takes to get things done Down right to get get it to where you [00:03:00] want
and then when you get good it gets faster and faster and faster But sometimes the next level always takes more practice
so the reason why human beings jump and leap into these fad sort of moments where You know If you're finding that you were really hot about coding for about two months and then you lost motivation And then you try it again and then you lost motivation or you jumped around and switched around is because your expectations are Are completely far away from the reality of craftsmanship or excellence, right?
So your expectations are misaligned with reality and that constant misalignment is causing you to lose motivation So it's not really your fault But it is an opportunity for you to fix your expectations align them with reality which will make you make a better plan.
SCREENSHARE
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Ep #_ Emotional Cycle Of Change 5 Stages: Now I want to share with you something which is called the emotional cycle of change and i've forgotten the name of the authors Who i'm sure it's here somewhere Right.
It is a scientific paper that came out, I think, in the eighties that really beautifully summarized the five stages off of change. And I'm going to try and zoom in here for you a little bit. So [00:04:00] the emotional cycle of change. basically talks about the five stages that people go when it comes to Going from something they're not successful at to something they get successful at.
So on the y axis the vertical axis, it's the emotional stage It's the level of emotional intensity and the x axis the horizontal flat axis is time Okay, so from left to right is more time. So stage one This is where we all jump in super excited people, you know, decide they want to become a coder, decide they're going to learn how to do a UX design thing.
Oh, you know, they're going to leap into some YouTube course or they buy a guitar on a whim and decide they're going to sort of be rock stars. Right. So stage one is called uninformed optimism. And it's not a bad thing. These are not criticisms. Okay. These are formal language given to these different emotional stages. Uninformed optimism is the stage where you're super enthusiastic You're emotionally completely charged up about something You don't know what you don't know And you don't realize how much harder it's going to be than it actually is you're only thinking about the end [00:05:00] result the glamour The the success the happiness the feeling that feeling of satisfaction and progress and and success.
That's what you're thinking about and there's a giant Ocean filled with sharks between where you are now and where that is, but you're not thinking about it You don't even see the ocean. So that's stage one uninformed optimism.
Stage 2
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Ep #_ Emotional Cycle Of Change 5 Stages: second stage, stage two, is informed pessimism.
Now you'll see on the graph, those of you who are watching on YouTube, that the line has curved downwards. From stage one to stage two, it's a decline.
USING SEQUENCE
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Ep #_ Emotional Cycle Of Change 5 Stages: It's a slope down, right? And you've passed this threshold where you're no longer optimistic, but you're actually pessimistic. And this is because you're also now informed.
You've done things, you've tried things, you've attempted things, you've lost motivation because you suddenly realize, That's it. Holy shoot. This is a lot harder than I thought. This is, this mountain is way steeper than I realized it was going to be. And it's rocky and it's snowing and I'm wearing a pair of shorts and I've got no warm clothes, right?
It starts to feel like that. And so emotionally you start to subdue, you drop a bit [00:06:00] you're less optimistic, you're more pessimistic. And therefore you're in the situation where, the information and data that you're getting from the real world is starting to affect your beliefs about what's possible for you.
And so that starts to flatten out your mood a little bit, right?
STAGE 3
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Ep #_ Emotional Cycle Of Change 5 Stages: And as you keep going down that curve, you hit stage three, which is known as the Valley of Despair,
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Ep #_ Emotional Cycle Of Change 5 Stages: as you keep going down that curve, you hit stage three, which is known as the Valley of Despair,
which a lot of people who come to me to join my Inner Circle program are very deep in this point of their progress because they've done a boot camp.
They've done all kinds of other things They've realized just how much effort has gone in and they're still not close to getting a job, right? And it's not necessarily that the effort always Produces a result. We know that just because you put in lift extra weights doesn't mean you're going to get more fit So Sometimes you're just wasting your effort.
So the effort has to be correctly calibrated to your goal and has to be the right direction. But the example I give my students is it doesn't matter how fast you go. If you want to go from New York to Los Angeles and you head east, straight east, you will never get to Los Angeles. You need to go south and west.
You need to go in the direction of Los Angeles. It doesn't matter how fast you go. It doesn't matter whether you fly or take a car. If you go east from New York City, you're never going to get To Los Angeles, you're going in the wrong direction and in the wrong direction. [00:08:00] It doesn't matter how much effort you put in, which means directions more important than speed.
So when people have been working a lot, spinning their wheels, jumping around from tutorial to tutorial, maybe enrolling in some certification program or some small bootcamp online or a proper bootcamp, what I truly consider to be a bootcamp. They've done three, six months full time, given up their job, gone in there.
But it's been effort in the wrong direction. It's not aligning with their goals. It's not aligning with their target market It's not aligning with that with their skills and capabilities and then they hit stage three the valley of despair Now your emotional state is even lower than it was when you were in informed pessimism stage So it's even lower down on the graph and quite a bit of time has gone by right?
You're about halfway through the cycle. Now, most people will quit at this point So for those of you who've lost motivation and quit early Gotten stuck in tutorial hell and then quit, said I'm not going to code for another few months, just give up because it's just emotionally too unrewarding and then you come back in two months or six months or seven months or one year or two years and then you try again.
You quit in the valley of despair and then you [00:09:00] start again somewhere between stage one and stage two because when you start again and be honest with me guys because i've done this i did This for four and a half years I repeat as stage one stage two and stage three and every time i'd quit in the valley of despair And then i'd go back to stage one.
It wasn't quite as crazy as last time but time and distance from the Emotional despair stage made me feel. Oh, maybe this time I'll do better this time I'll know better right and I will try again and this time i'll be smarter about it, right? You know, i've got better ideas about it.
And so you go back to uninformed optimism, maybe not as high as the first time, because you're not entirely naive, but it's pretty high.
And then very quickly again you struggle, and all the memories come back to you as to why this is not working out for you the first time, and this time it's even worse, oh my god, the technology has changed, the world is moving faster, is AI going to change everything, is it not going to change everything, things have gone from Ruby to React to whatever it is, so much has changed between the time that you were, You last quit and you're now resuming the journey and so very quickly you go down into informed [00:10:00] pessimism again And the sad thing guys at this point of time is that a lot of people end up thinking they're not smart enough or thinking there's something wrong with them and it really affects their confidence when it's It's really a pity because if you head in the wrong direction, even if you're driving the perfect car and unlimited fuel, you're not going to get to your destination.
It's not the car's fault. It's not your fault either. You're going in the wrong direction, right? There's certain physics that can't be avoided about this. So unfortunately, a lot of people start to blame themselves when all that happened was they didn't have the right plan for them. Right? Anyway, they go down the informed pessimism path, then they hit the valley of despair, and again, they may quit, or they repeat again.
So these are the two things that happen very often. Now, with the right help, people can push through the valley of despair in the right direction, with the right tools, learning the right things, managing their emotional state correctly. Understanding the reality and realigning their expectations to match that reality.
If you do all these things, and it's kind of an alignment of your [00:11:00] mind, your emotions, your energy, your body, and your time. Okay, these are the five things that need to line up. Mind, energy, emotion, body, and time. And remember when I started this episode, I said time is the key secret magic ingredient that is not secret and it's not magic.
So if you put the right amount of time on the right things, then it becomes a question of, Oh, well, when's this going to happen? It's going to happen. It's not a question of if anymore, right? But it doesn't matter if you do the right things, but you don't do it for enough time. If you're baking a cake, it doesn't matter how perfect your recipe is.
If you pull that cake out half an hour too early, it's not going to be cooked. Likewise, if you put it in too long, you're going to burn it. Likewise, you may put it in for the perfect time. But if you have rubbish Recipe like, you know, you put spinach and grass in it and nothing else. You're not gonna get a cake, right?
It doesn't matter how much how many times you turn the oven on. It doesn't matter how what fancy utensils you buy It's not gonna work.
Recipe and time have to go together time is part of the recipe, right? So for those people who put Push through stage three through, through the valley of despair.
Stage 4 & 5
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Ep #_ Emotional Cycle Of Change 5 Stages: [00:12:00] They then start to go to informed optimism, which is now they've got the benefit of experience, a solid plan, self mastery, alignment of expectation of the reality and the right habits to understand, okay, now I get it.
Now I get it. Now I get what this is going to take. And now my expectations are properly aligned to this. And so they're able to continue. They're able to sustain themselves. And when they sustain themselves, what do you think is going to happen? That's right. They hit stage five, which is success and fulfillment.
Okay. Now my job as a coach is to accelerate this process because it took me four and a half years, almost five years to do this. And I lost hundreds of thousands of dollars doing it the wrong way. Then I got a coach, not a technical coach, and she helped me. Really fixed a lot of these parts and then I got in I got all four of my coding offers within eight months, right?
This is what I now do for students except that i'm also technical So the the idea the goal here is to make sure that you manage all your emotional states Understand which part of the journey you're in have the right road map Have the right structure and plan but most importantly guys Have the right expectations of yourself [00:13:00] of your circumstances of the geography around you of the economics around you There is no Miracle that's going to happen if you're in a low economic opportunity area.
Ep #_ Emotional Cycle Of Change 5 Stages: You're going to get fewer economic opportunities If you're in the middle of Silicon Valley, you're going to have more opportunities. There's nothing you can do about that So have the right expectations What you can do something is no matter where in the world you are is develop the right plan.
Even if you have the right plan remember I said this if you have the right recipe doesn't mean you're going to do the right amount of time Put the right amount of persistence into it You may leave the recipe in your cupboard and never do anything about it.
The cake's not going to bake itself So Back to that magic and secret ingredient. That's not magical and not secret: Time.
You have to put in the time You have to put in the time Practicing the right things and you have to be repetitive in the way you do it It needs to be like a routine you just do it like going to the gym You don't go to the gym lift weights three times and then go home Well, I've done that a few times, and I can tell you it doesn't do anything for you.
If you go in, you gotta do what? You gotta do the reps. of doing the put in the of [00:14:00] putting in the You gotta of burn. Then, over time, of doing the reps, of putting in the time, of feeling the burn, you're eventually gonna see the results. Right? But it's going to take more time than you secretly hope, right? How many of you guys have looked in the mirror after three days of trying to change your diet and doing some intense exercise and just wondered, Hey, maybe, can I see a pec?
Can I see a pec? I've done this. Every time. I still do it. I just never learn. And I know deep inside it's never going to happen in three days. It's not going to happen in three weeks. Okay? In fact, so far it's never happened because by week three I will quit my program. And I will go need some chocolate and then need some ice cream.
Okay, so
work It's because I did
that's because I'm not putting in the time It's not something's wrong with my body. It's not because the plan doesn't work It's because I did not follow the plan long enough to get the results. I did not take the hits.
So when it comes to putting in time to coding, especially when you're starting out you are going to be Overwhelmed you're entering this giant ocean with massive waves
and you don't really have a flotation device.
That's what it's going to feel [00:15:00] like. Do not think that's because you are stupid or incapable or you're doing it wrong. That is just normal That is just normal. You are entering a whole different universe Okay? Of terms of things of concepts and all these terms are going to have special meanings They may look like they're in english words or whatever words you use but they're going to have special meanings and even coders sometimes get confused between them and then It's not just about Writing code guys.
Let me make this very, very clear to you in software engineering. It's about building systems that includes writing code. It includes reading code, includes a lot of research. It includes a ton of thinking in abstract concepts about, well, there are five ways I could solve this problem. How am I going to solve it?
And if I solve it in has this trade off, That give me whole but when method five gives me some other benefits and method three has this trade off, That whole process is software engineering, and there are so many things to keep in mind. And this is not just true of software engineering. This is true of any [00:16:00] fairly advanced skill in the world.
The more you do it, the more you realize you have to keep things in mind. Music is a great example. Most people, when they start off, music Whether it's the piano, the guitar, or something else, what do they do? Ding, ding, one note at a time, right? Or pling, pling on the piano, on the, on the guitar, or whatever.
One note at a time. Then what do they do? They try and play multiple notes at a time. Maybe they'll try and play a whole tune, but still one note at a time, right? And it's hard to coordinate. On the guitar, for example, it's hard to coordinate your left hand. It's hard to coordinate your right hand.
You know, same thing on the piano. On the drums, it's hard to coordinate your legs and your hands and the correct tone to hit the drum with and so on and so forth. And over time you coordinate your fingers, you coordinate your hands, then you start to sing along with it. Then you have more complex patterns, but it takes years to build up all those little skills that make the music sound whole and proper and recognizable.
Okay, it's the same thing with software engineering. In fact, I had a post on LinkedIn that went viral just two days ago, , where I pointed out that so many coders [00:17:00] are musicians and vice versa. And I thought it was really obvious, but like 300 or 400 people commented saying they never noticed it before.
But it's true because They were all engineers and they were all musicians. So obviously I was selecting for that crowd, but people hadn't noticed the connection, but there's a strong connection and this massive discussion of why that could be, I think it's because of this habit of wanting to practice of needing to figure things out.
You're sort of tinkering with something, you know, you're trying to compose something, writing code is part of it.
Reading code is another part of it. Research is another part of it.
Now, Speaking of research, what I want you guys to do is take a look at some of these documentations. Now I'm just pulling up some random docs on documentation on the internet, right? Because I want you to know that even after you learn how to write code, most of your time will be spending reading stuff like this, trying to figure it out.
For example, right now, I'm on the Lang chain, which is a tool, a framework to help you work with AI large language models and build apps and that this is the Python version. They have a JavaScript version. Once you know a language, it's kind of pretty similar across the board. You get the feel of it.
[00:18:00] But really, if I wanted to use Lang chain and I did look into it a bit this weekend, I reckon it'll take me a few weeks to even start to get the whole picture of how this whole thing works. Now, I don't need to get the whole picture. I just need to figure out what my use case is and start somewhere. But still.
If I'm doing it, you know, an hour a day or something, it's going to take me weeks, weeks to really get a hang of what Lang chain is. That's just one thing. What if I wanted to do an app that had Lang chain and took payments? Well, I may want to use Stripe. Now I come to Stripe. Okay. Here's Stripe. Look at all the documentation, by the way, Stripe documentation is world class.
Okay. It's world class. I really think that documentation is great. And at the company I work in Chainlink, we, you know, consider Stripe and others to be sort of the benchmark. And so when you look at the Stripe hard is actually really I'll tell you as an engineer This is really good documentation and documentation guys is all the words necessary necessary to so hard It's so much easier for me to show you how to code something than for me to write all the words necessary necessary to explain What's your environment needs to look like?
What's [00:19:00] your coding setup look like? What kind of variables you need? Like, it's so hard to express this in words, especially in a way that other people can understand, because I spend a lot of my time teaching and writing educational content for engineers in as part of my role as a developer relations engineer now, and I can tell you.
Thinking about people who are not English native thinking about how other people can interpret the same word of the same sentence How it's cognitively heavy. It's really hard to do it, right? So stripe Very good documents and it's very hard to maintain documents when products are moving really fast.
So Documents are usually wrong. I can't remember who it was I think it may have been one of the co founders of stack overflow who I think he commented. I could be wrong. Someone, some very well known technical blogger commented on how most documentation will probably have some amount of errors because it's terribly hard to maintain.
And that's true. That's absolutely true, right? If, if code can have bugs, it's fair to expect that documentation can have bugs and lots of them, right? But the point is, this is what good documentation looks like [00:20:00] and just see how much there is, right?
Here's all the stuff. If you want to migrate your payment data, well, what is payment data? And then you got to look around for what's payment data. And then for developers, you're like, okay, here we start here. And then, you know, you can send your first test request and then you have some sample projects to refer to, and then you have a bunch of the APIs and you can tour the API.
And then within the API, you see all the different things you can access. And you've got to spend some time learning about this stuff, guys. That's just kind of how it works, right? And reading this can take time. Again, there's that ingredient, time. So if you have unreasonable expectations of, well, I'll be able to wire this up in two days.
And you may think, hey, you know, I've done this kind of stuff before. Don't be surprised if you get badly stuck and it takes you three weeks. Like that can happen. So so these are some examples like chainlink is a company I work at again really really great documentation and I can tell you so much work and craftsmanship goes into Describing how to do things and you will spend a ton of time here.
Take a look at python I'm, not much of a python developer. I I don't write that much python.
and LangChain and Chainlink
This is just for the language This is [00:21:00] just how to use Python. Just Python, right? There's the library. There's tutorials. There's language references, which is understanding how the language is designed.
Then there's the library references, which is the okay. We were all there that come with the Python language. For those of you who don't understand what that means, don't worry. That means you're very early in your journey. That's okay. We were all there at one point. There's a ton of documentation here. Right. And you may land into a problem and you have to figure out, well, where in this documentation, am I going to find the solution to this problem?
How do I learn more about the background? And so you may have to go and figure out, well, you know, how does intertools work or how does the os dot path, which is a very commonly used library in most programming languages. How do you use it? You know, what are all the arguments that need to be passed?
What what are the actual functionality that that comes up? What is this common prefix? What is the dir name? What are these things? Why would I need them? This stuff takes time guys It takes time and then you you think you understand you apply it and something breaks in your app or it doesn't quite work As expected and then you have to figure that out.
So this process of constant trial and error is unavoidable.
What you can do though Is make it strategic trial and error. [00:22:00] So every bit of trial and error you do is not coming from pure guesswork. It's coming from the process of Like I said, playing those notes on the guitar over and over again, getting better each time.
That's what trial and error is. However, if you're guessing what stuff you need to learn, do I need to learn this language, that framework, this library, that tool,
if you're guessing that you're going to get stuck in trial and error, that may not be directionally useful. And if it's not directionally useful, you are going to very quickly land up in the valley of despair and landing there quickly is a good outcome because if you land up in the valley of despair slowly
that just means you've lost a ton of time only to give up after wasting a ton of time. So, you want to get into the valley of despair as fast as you can, and then if you're going to loop back, you've got to do things very differently, or get help to get out of the valley of despair, because time is money, time is success, and the longer you spend getting stuck, the more damage you're doing to your confidence, and the more effort you're going to spend trying to convince yourself that you're not entirely incompetent and all of that, and then you may just get discouraged and quit.
And all [00:23:00] it meant was that you were moving in the wrong direction. You're perfectly capable of moving in the right direction if someone just gave you that little bit of a turn and a nudge. Okay, that's what I do. So feel free to check out my coaching program, the Future Coders Inner Circle program. It's not for everybody.
I work with very few people for 12 months at a time. And that's because I work full time. I love my job. And I only But because I love teaching. I'm a teacher at heart. But maybe that's the right thing for you.
Maybe it's not. Maybe you need to go join a bootcamp. Now I may have my personal views about bootcamps, but Hey, maybe it's right for you. You've got to figure it out. The thing that you don't want to do is waste five years like I did idiotically because I, I gave up so many times because of this valley of despair thing and not knowing what it takes to get out of it.
Right. Eventually when I figured it out and I got my coach, I very quickly got out of it. So. Again, you have to figure out what is the most efficient way for you to get to your destination. Okay. If you fly, it's going to cost you more money. If you walk, it's going to save you money, but it's going to cost you so much time and you may never get there.
Okay. That's life. [00:24:00] That's the same thing with learning a complex skill, whether it's coding or guitar or something. I've been playing the guitar for 20 years and I've just signed up for guitar coaching to get to the next level. Right? Because I could try and figure it out on my own. I could watch endless YouTube videos on it.
A lot of stuff is free on YouTube, but which stuff is useful for me? Which stuff is correct for my level? Which stuff is the stuff that's going to get me to my goals? The YouTube algorithm can't tell you that. You probably don't know that. I probably don't know that. I'll sit with my guitar coach and say, well, this is the level I'm at.
This is the kind of music I want to be able to play. These are the kind of things I want to be able to do. I'm not formally trained in music, so I can't read music. But this is the skill I want to try and achieve. This is the kind of music I want to play. Here's what I can do right now. What should I do next?
That's not something you can ask Google or even ChatGPT. ChatGPT doesn't know you. It's not going to spend time with you figuring it out. So, to get out of the Valley of Despair, in fact, you can even avoid the Valley of Despair by going straight and getting some help. But, I think most people don't appreciate how important it is to go through the Valley of Despair [00:25:00] and they're not going to appreciate how valuable getting help is until they go through the Valley of Despair.
So, if If you're in that situation in that cycle of change and you're truly committed to becoming a software engineer and you're willing to practice
repetitively over a long period of time i'm talking six months to a year consistently Even if you're working full time and have family, you just got to put in the time.
There's no shortcuts to this Then maybe I'm the right person to help you, and maybe not, that's okay too. Just know that everything you're going through is normal and unavoidable.
But you can lessen the negative impacts of it, and save time, which to me is a huge advantage.
It's why I would not take a bus to most places if I could fly there. This time matters to me. So with that said guys, remember things are hard, especially in the coding world . You're not going to be writing code all the time you're going to be spending a lot of time reading through documentation and figuring out how things work and how systems work and Each company will have its own different systems And engineers don't document things regularly .
It's fairly infrequent that you'll have great documentation internally So when you're in a new company for the first several months, You'll be spending time reading code And then when [00:26:00] something comes to you that you've never done before you'll be spending a lot of time Just trying to understand how to start or where to start.
That's the joy of engineering There's a lot of thinking involved. There's a lot of research and analysis involved and it's very creative Once you get the hang of it, but it's also extremely frustrating and it takes a lot more time than you realize So there's the missing ingredient. There's the magic ingredient.
There's the big secret
time on consistent steady practice That is slightly repetitive in nature so that you're getting better and better and better guys You can't you can't not do the reps. Okay, you have to do the reps. I hope that helped Thanks for listening this long and i'll see you next time.
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