Tag: challenge

Here’s What We’ve Done in the First Three Years of Praxis

In just two weeks it will mark three years from the day the first Praxis website went live and the first person applied for the program.  It seemed a good time to give a longish recap on what we’re all about, what we’ve been building, and what it’s resulted in so far.

This includes bits of blog posts and updates written over the past few years that reflect the deepest, most important and enduring reasons why we do what we do.

We started with nothing but an idea so powerful it demanded action.  Action is scary.  Action is unknown.  Action is prone to failure and accountable to results.  Action can be nitpicked and potshotted.  Action is also the only way to turn ideas into a powerful force for change.

We didn’t start with a pristine plan or perfect path to execution.  We started with a dogged, enthusiastic commitment to create something new and bold and big to change lives and life itself.

We didn’t start Praxis because we think college is bad, or because we want to convince people it is.  We didn’t start it to be hip and trendy and “disruptive”.  We didn’t start it because we want to point out problems with the world.  We started it because we want to create value for individuals.

There are a lot of young people hungry for valuable experiences and not finding them.  There are a lot of young people unhappy with the education, career, and life options they see before them, searching for something more.  Praxis exists for you.

Praxis is more than a program or a company to me.  It’s the embodiment of a mindset and a way of life.  It is a tangible way to help people live free, self-directed lives.  It’s a community and a set of resources and ideas and businesses and participants built around the understanding that no conveyor belt can lead you to the life you want, and no structure you don’t choose and create yourself will bring you fulfillment.

Praxis is a concrete opportunity, not a vague notion.  It offers an interesting, challenging, amazing job and an interesting, challenging, amazing self-guided educational experience, all with a relentless focus on deliverable results.  It’s a recognition that your life will be determined by the quality of your product more than the pedigree of your paper.  It’s a way to remove the fear and doubt and strictures of the linear ladder to imagined success.  It’s a way to reveal and fan into flame the deep human love of adventure, play, possibility, and experimentation.

I don’t believe doing things you don’t like and hoping it leads to unspecified things you do like is a recipe for success.  Praxis pushes you to define what you don’t like and what you do, to learn what you’re good at and what you’re not, to identify definite outcomes you wish to achieve and definite causality between those outcomes and your desired next step.  Praxis does not ask you to learn things or perform tasks in the hope that it will get you work experience, we give you that work experience from the start.  You cannot separate learning from doing.

Praxis is a recognition that, wherever you get your paycheck, you are your own firm.  The future does not belong to those who follow orders, but those who solve problems with creativity.  The future belongs to entrepreneurs, whether founders or builders within firms.  Entrepreneurial thinking and acting cannot be learned from study, but must be practiced.  Praxis exists to put those eager to learn it into environments right now – not tomorrow, not after more study and certification – where they can be around and become entrepreneurs.

Praxis exists to offer a valuable service to young people who are searching for a way to build their confidence, skills, experience, network, and knowledge.  Praxis is built upon questions like, “Why not now?”, and “Why not me?”

Praxis is about that powerful combination of big picture dreamers and blue-collar doers.  It’s all the imagination of Silicon Valley startups with all the work-ethic of Midwestern small businesses.  It’s grit plus grind plus greatness.  Praxis is the realization that the most radical thing you can do is often the most practical, and that the most practical thing you can do is sometimes be radical.

Praxis is an idea.  The idea is simple.  Find the best way to get from where you are to where you want to be.  If we can help you do that better and faster with a great job that comes with a great education and community, jump in.  If not, we’ll still be rooting for you every step of the way.

We didn’t start Praxis to make enemies or to make friends.  We started it to create value.  We started it because the idea was so powerful we had no choice but to bring it into the world.  We started it because theorizing about ways young people could build their lives wasn’t enough.  We started it because it’s fun, fulfilling, and harder than anything I’ve ever done.  I wouldn’t have it any other way.

When we created Praxis we did it to fill a large and growing gap in the option set facing young people.  So many smart, ambitious, curious individuals are languishing in fluorescently-lit cinder-block classrooms.  Bored.  Racking up debt.  For no clear purpose.

The myth they are steeped in is that they have to do this.  There is no choice.  The options are presented: Be a loser, or sit around for 4-6 years at a cost of tens of thousands.

But the myth goes deeper.

The myth is that learning itself, and by extension self-improvement, are terrible, boring, passionless and must necessarily be enforced by bureaucrats and self-proclaimed authorities.  Your job, if you want to succeed in life (by who’s definition anyway?) is to follow the rules, memorize the disconnected facts, take the tests, pad the resume, apply for the jobs, and wait for the conveyor belt to drop you off at ‘normal’.

How depressing and frustrating this is to so many of the best and brightest.

We set out to cut through the crap.  We wanted these talented young people to stop waiting for real life and to jump into amazing work experiences at amazing companies eager for their help.  We wanted them to shatter the old paradigm of education and start fresh, like newborns do, exploring questions that matter to them, creating their own challenges and structure, diving into a rigorous self-improvement project.

The mindset is simple and powerful.  Awaken your inner entrepreneur.  You own your life.  You own your education.  You own your career.  You are the driving force in your own process of creation.  Do things for the results you value, not the hoops arbitrarily placed before you.

We wanted this entire life-shifting experience to take place in the span of a single year and for a net cost of zero.

I received this email from current Praxis participant Mitchell Earl.  It beautifully illustrates the mindset shift.

“If I had to estimate, I’d say I skipped class 2/3 of the time in college. I don’t sit still well. I couldn’t learn in that type of environment. I need to be stimulated. When I did go to class, I used to take the daily puzzles; either crosswords or sudokus because I needed something to direct my nervous energy toward if I was going to be forced to sit and listen to someone talk at me. I can’t even count the number of times I had a professor yank my newspaper away from me IN COLLEGE.

In my web design class, the syllabus alone put a burr under my saddle reading, “One absence is considered excessive for the course.” I redefined excessive. I turned in my work on time, but I refused to go sit in a classroom and be told how or what to code, design, or write. That’s not how I learn.

I didn’t and don’t want my work to be like grocery store milk, micro-filtered, ultra-pasteurized, standardized, and homogenized. For me to do my best work, I need to have the freedom to explore my creativity. Praxis has shown me that. It’s given me the freedom to explore my own needs as a learner. No one is yanking my puzzle away telling me to pay attention. No one is telling me how to learn. No one is shaming my individuality. With Praxis, I’m free to be me.”

Yes.  That’s exactly it Mitchell.  We set out to create more freedom.  To help you carve out a space, to break the other-imposed mold, and plot your own path to fulfillment as you define it.

Freedom isn’t easy.  It’s much harder work than just doing what everyone else wants and expects.  It takes a lot of deep, philosophical thinking.  It takes self-knowledge and self-honesty.  It takes discipline and hard work.  It takes tolerance of failure and the courage to put yourself in new situations, often over your head, and learn on the fly.  It takes the humility to be in environments where you’re not the smartest person in the room.  Your desire for personal growth must be strong enough to sustain these challenges.

Mitchell is tasting it.  So are our other participants and grads.  This is what we set out to do.  And we’re doing it.  One life at a time.

If you know anyone who sounds a lot like Mitchell was in school, give ’em a little nudge of encouragement to be free.  Remind them the dominant path isn’t the only one, and the best paths are the ones they’ll blaze themselves.  You can even send them my way and I’ll gladly talk with them about taking creative control of their education, career, and life, with or without Praxis.

Let’s awaken people’s dreams and increase the number of those who are truly living free.

Here’s the cool thing.  Praxis grads are kicking ass.  We have story after story of 17, 18, 20, 22, 25 year olds creating amazing results getting awesome jobs and blowing away their classroom bound peers.

What kind of results?

  • Praxis grads are all employed.
  • Their average salary is $50,287.
  • 100% said Praxis helped them achieve a better career and life.

Now entering our third year, we’ve taken an even more dramatic and direct approach to creating value.  We guarantee our graduates job offers at the startup where they get paid to apprentice.

We’re growing every month in applications, participants, business partners, graduates, and most of all young people with an unleashed approach to life.

It’s about individuals, not aggregates and average data.  Still, if you want numbers, put it side by side with the typical path taken by most young people, pressured by parents and teachers who don’t bear the burden themselves:

Praxis

  • Length: 9 months
  • Cost: $12k tuition – $14,400 earnings during the program = ($2,400)
  • Debt: $0
  • Job after graduation: 100%
  • Min. starting salary: $40k ($50k is the average)
  • Net benefit over 5 years: $2,400 (in program) + $170,000 (min. pay, no raises for 4.25 years after graduation) = $172,400

College

  • Length: 5+ years on average
  • Cost: $100k (minimum)
  • Debt: $37k average
  • Job after graduation: ??? (82% of grads do not have a job lined up. 62% of degree holders have no job or a job that does not require a degree)
  • Opportunity cost: $172,400 (assuming you had done Praxis instead)
  • Net benefit over 5 years: -$37k debt -$172,400 opportunity cost = ($209,400)

We’re not done but just getting started.  We are relentlessly committed to creating value for our young customers.  We have to.  We are directly, immediately accountable to them.  That’s what the market does.  We wouldn’t want to be shielded from it.

You can love us or hate us or ignore us or join us.  It doesn’t really matter.  What matters and what will always matter to us is helping those who want to act on their dreams and gain a massive head start on building a life they love.

That’s why we took this risk and created Praxis nearly three years ago.  That’s why we’ve weathered the storms and criticism and risk and pain.  That’s why we get excited about every amazing story and accomplishment by our participants and alumni.

Break the mold.

Isaac

Take the ‘Cut it in Half’ Challenge and Improve Your Writing

…and your verbal communication, and time management, and thinking.

Good writing styles may be as unique as people but when it comes to bad writing there’s one nearly universal mistake.

Too many words.

Everyone begins their writing endeavors (whether emails or books) using too many words, too long sentences, and too bulky paragraphs.  It’s hard to economize on words.  The better your language skills and vocabulary, the harder it is.  You want to flex those wordiness muscles!

But good writing is clear and to the point.  Removing needless words makes what’s left more, not less important.  Words are too precious to be drowned in a sea of superfluity.

Here’s a challenge to quickly and dramatically improve your writing:

Cut everything you write in half.

I suggest doing this for at least two weeks.  It will hurt.  It will take a lot of time at first.  But compare results after the experiment.  You will be better.

Every Facebook post, email, essay, blog post, or memo (heck, you can try it with texts and tweets too, but that might be tough) should be halved.  After you write what you want to say, just before you click “send”,  “publish”, “post”, or “save”, go back and cut it in half.  Count words, divide by two and edit down.

I’ve done this and found almost no paragraph I write gets worse as a result.

Give it a shot and see for yourself.

Praxis and the PDP

One of the core building blocks of the Praxis educational experience is the Personal Development Project, or “PDP“.  A PDP is simple: a self-chosen 30-day challenge with tangible benchmarks and outcomes, documented and demonstrated.

Project based learning – tackling a challenge that the learner has individual, intrinsic motivation to tackle – is the most valuable method for transforming your mind and habits and building your personal capital.  It bypasses dichotomies between theory and practice by focusing instead on desired outcomes.  It’s about who you want to become, and what in your unique situation is most likely to help you get there.  This is the way most people approach physical health and fitness, but it’s surprisingly rare when it comes to mental and emotional intelligence, character, and skills.  It shouldn’t be.  It works.

So how do our participants get started with a PDP?  My favorite method is to let your obstacles take the lead.  Obstacles often hide or disguise themselves, so first you have to find them.

Jot down some bigger picture outcomes or goals or descriptions of the kind of person you want to be.  Maybe, “I want to be a published writer”, or, “I want to travel 6 months out of the year”, or, “I want to earn a living as a freelance designer”, or, “I want to be a go-to expert on nanotechnology that people interview”.  Think in terms of who you want to be and what kind of experiences and outcomes you want to have, not in terms of titles or labels.

Now that you have a handful of these big picture goals listed, pick one and ask yourself what is keeping you from doing or being that right now.  Maybe you’re writing isn’t sharp enough, or you are too insecure to submit to a publication.  Maybe you can’t afford the travel, or your design skills aren’t hireable, or you know nothing about nanotech.  Try to get specific in terms of what’s keeping from these goals.  “I’m not organized enough to handle multiple clients”, or, “I procrastinate too much” are good examples.

Now you have your obstacles.

Your obstacles are invaluable because they inform you as to what kind of activities are going to be valuable to you.  If procrastination is one of your major obstacles you could build a very basic yet incredibly powerful PDP where you, for example, read one chapter from “The War of Art” and write and publish a blog post every day for 30-days.  The mental tools in the book combined with the no-escape activity of daily blogging will absolutely and dramatically improve you ability to create even when the mood isn’t right.  You will become a better person in that 30 days and you will chip away at one of those obstacles – maybe even obliterate it altogther.

This is just one example.  Maybe you commit to reading five books on a topic in a month.  If you read five books on any topic you will immediately be in the top 5% of people with knowledge on the topic.  It’s surprisingly easy to make huge gains.

Whatever goals, obstacles, and activities you identify, the most important thing is doing it.  You must make progress on it every single day.  The beauty is, anyone can do something for 30 days.  It’s hard, but not so hard that you have any excuses.  You must make the activities measurable and demonstrable.  You must setup an accountability method.  At Praxis we do this by asking participants to build a personal website and publicly share their PDP activities and then document them as they complete it.  Thier advisors are there to coach and challenge them as they craft and complete the PDP’s.

In the end they have tangible evidence of how they increased their value that month – based on their own goals, not anyone else’s.  More importantly, they become more of who they want to be.  The principle of compound interest is powerful and it applies to more than money.  Improve yourself by 1% every day and soon nothing will be out of reach.

Whether a hard skill, soft skill, body of knowledge, a network, a mindset, or a habit: if you want growth and transformation – what real education is – I cannot recommend a PDP enough.

Try building your own.  If you have a hard time getting started, try one that we created at Praxis as an excellent entry point.  See if you can stick to it, making progress every day.  It’s a lot harder than you think, and far more rewarding than you can imagine.

[optinform]

Some Great Bucket List Items

Last week I asked for people to send me some bucket list items – things they want to do before they die.

I got some great stuff in response.  Matthew Hartill won the books via the random selection process (my ten-year-old kid picking a number).

Thanks to everyone who played!  Here’s a compilation of submissions.  I’ve anonymizes, slightly edited, and combined similar items.  Maybe you can take inspiration from a few of these…

  • Become fluent in one romance language, and one language with a (very) different alphabet
  • Live in 4 foreign countries for a period of 6 months or more
  • Create, launch, and flip a business from start to finish
  • Create, launch, and maintain a business from start to finish
  • Hike sections of the Appalachian Trail, Pacific Crest Trail, and Continental Divide Trail
  • Vastly improve my skills and be a ____ bum for my three favorite extreme sports (rock climbing, surfing, and skiing)
  • Get good enough at code and computer programming to keep up with my imagination
  • Make a crucial impact in one or more charitable organizations that I admire
  • Reach a place of spiritual comfort; whether that be through meditation, religious practice, or anything else
  • Travel
  • Fall in love
  • Create a successful business that changes the world.
  • Have a child, and/or adopt a child
  • Meet Bob Dylan
  • Meet Mike Rowe
  • Live in the house of my dreams
  • Be a pilot
  • Participate in Praxis
  • Graduate high school a year early
  • Stay frugal, stay giving, despite income growth
  • Reach 50,000 hits on an article
  • Drop acid with Tim Ferriss
  • Legitimately learn Spanish and maintain fluency
  • Finally write my stand-up comedy sketch and prove to myself that girls can be funny
  • Do a scorpion shot a la James Bond in Skyfall
  • Deadlift twice my body weight
  • Climb Mount Kilimanjaro (and post-Kilimanjaro, complete a Bang Bang Bang in the style of Louis C.K. — three consecutive full meals, consumed all in the same timeframe)
  • Visit Meteora Monasteries
  • Start a ministry in a city that has never heard the Gospel before
  • Visit a country currently listed as “3rd world”, then visit it when it becomes 1st world
  • Write a novel
  • Give a sermon
  • Be a part of a metal band’s album or tour
  • Buy something for my child, in cryptocurrency, from a major department store
  • Win a baking competition
  • Travel to space in a commercial flight
  • Slam dunk a basketball while in my 30s
  • Watch the University of Minnesota Golden Gophers football team win the Rose Bowl

 

 

 

 

Help Me Publish A New Book!

book-shadows

Support the KickStarter campaign to get this book printed and claim your copy!

I’m so excited about this book.  The basic idea has been one that infected me about five years ago and I haven’t been able to ignore it.

It’s simple.  Instead of demanding elaborate justifications for doing some big, crazy, out of the norm thing, demand reasons why not.  In other words, flip the burden of proof so that the status quo demands damn good reasons and that wild dream of yours is assumed to be a good idea until proven otherwise.

The project has been a blast to work on.  The book is made up of 10 chapters written by 11 different people, all of whom stopped assuming their dream was too impractical and just went for it.  It’s part personal story, part inspiration, part information, and part how-to.

Drop out of school?  Move to a new city?  Write a book?  Quit your job?  Start a business?  Travel the world?  Audition for American Idol?  Have a bunch of kids?  Fly first class?  Climb a mountain?

Why not?

This book is very personal for me because this question is the breakthrough that led me and my wife to move away from a place we didn’t realize how much we hated until we left to a place we love.  People would ask us, “Why would you move to a city where you know no one?  Why would you leave your roots?”  Our answer became simple and immediate.  “Why not?”

We realized that if we demanded perfection from any change we’d never make one.  If you need a long list of guarantees before you make a move, you’ll probably never do it.  Instead of demanding good reasons to move to a specific city, we started demanding good reasons to stay.  When we scrutinized the status quo we realized it didn’t have much going for it.  Why not leave?

I’m excited to get the eBook, paperback, and hardcover finished product on the shelves and in your hands.  But I need your help!

There is a KickStarter campaign live now to raise the funds to pay for turning the draft into a beautiful book.  We’ve got everything lined up and we want to do it right.  I hope you’ll be a part of bringing this book to life!

Check out the campaign to pledge your support and claim your reward – from copies of the book to having an author come speak to your event.

Why not?

Sometimes Creating Stuff Sucks

I love podcasting.  It’s been a blast.  But it’s a huge pain sometimes.

Today I interviewed Penelope Trunk, and it was brutal.  She was wonderful.  The interview itself was great.  But my technology threw every wrench at me imaginable.  It was stressful and annoying to duct tape together an episode with all the fragmented sections.

She was cool about it, thankfully, and even gave me twice as much time as originally promised.  But it threw my whole day off.

Five minutes before we began I realized I’d never called someone’s phone via Skype, so I did a Google search and downloaded an app on my phone that records phone calls, just in case.  I barely had time to enter my info and set it up as a backup.

Then I go to dial her and realize Skype charges for calls to a phone.  I had to scramble to enter payment info (thank you Dashlane for quick form completion!).  We got started two minutes late, which already had me frustrated.  I hate tardiness.

Things were going great for 12 minutes, then the call dropped.  We dialed again.  It went well for about three or four minutes and then she couldn’t hear me anymore, though I could hear her.  Drop.  I dialed again and she still couldn’t hear me.  Drop.

I frantically grabbed my cell and called her.  We proceeded for another 18 minutes on the phone when I realized the app only allowed 20 minutes free and I never put in billing info to go longer.  She had to go anyway, so it wasn’t too bad, but still rushed at the end.

I just finished editing four clips into one and adding an intro and outro.  It got done, though the sound quality for the second half of the interview was pretty rough, even though that’s where the conversation was best.

In addition to the sound there were several points where I interrupted her in a pretty bad way.  It’s one of those things I sometimes do as a host and with some people it happens more than others.  She’s confident and straightforward so we kept plugging along, but man, I finished the interview pretty annoyed at the quality of the whole experience I created.

My goal is to make my show really fun and easy for guests.  I want them to shine.  I want them to come back on the show.  I want them to love it so much they forget the time.

Oh well.

I cranked it out anyway and it will go live Monday.  The content is great, even if the process wasn’t.

Sometimes I really get in a groove where my daily writing and weekly podcasting and everything else just clicks.  I really like what I’m producing and the process.  Days like today are a great reminder that, when what Steven Pressfield calls “Resistance” crops up, you’ve got to do your work anyway.

Once it’s done, you can’t look back.  Ship it.  Then put your head down and start working on the next thing.

Thanks Penelope for your patience!

Tiny, Ridiculous Daily Challenges Work Better for Me Than Big Goals

I’m not big on goals and goal-setting.  I’ve done it at various points, and it’s had a few positive effects and can be somewhat fun, or at least useful in challenging me to think bigger.  Still, I find that I’m more of an opportunist than a planner.  I prefer to keep building things – myself, my project, social capital, etc. – and be aware and alert to opportunities to leverage those things.

This means creating and succeeding and finishing things in general is more important much of the time than any perfectly plotted sequence of what it is I’m doing.  I try to cultivate creativity as a discipline, while what I use my creative energies for remains flexible to seize opportunities.  I want to also cultivate opportunity spotting abilities and the willpower to act on them and see it through to completion.  “Be ready in season and out of season.”

What this translates into practically for me is a series of very small, daily (sometimes weekly) challenges.  Things that are a little difficult, but simple enough that I have no excuse for missing them.  My typical set of challenges is this:

  • Blog every day
  • Do one form of exercise every day
  • Walk outside every day
  • Consume ideas every day
  • Do one thing to add value to Praxis every day (in the areas of money, talent, and vision specifically)

Many days I do more than this.  I might write a blog post and a newsletter or book chapter.  I might go for a swim and ride my bike.  I might read several articles and listen to a podcast.  I typically do many things to add value to Praxis in a day.  The trick is, doing at least one form of each of these in a day, every single day rain or shine seven days a week.  The fact that they’re so easy is what makes it so hard.

If I had “Run five miles every day”, or, “Train for a marathon” on the list, I wouldn’t feel bad about myself if I missed a day or two.  You wouldn’t look down on me either.  It’s a tough goal, and you might be impressed that I even tried.  But doing one form of exercise every day is so damn easy – some days I literally do a handful of pushups and that’s it – if I miss a few days I feel like a loser, and you’d be a little confused as to how I was unable to complete something so easy.

For me, a big, grandiose, far-off goal like, “Be in peak physical shape”, or, “Make $X by 2017” doesn’t do a lot to help me optimize my days.  It’s too easy to slack and think you can make it up later.  It’s too easy to not push because no one will look down on you for missing your goal.  But blogging every day is totally visible to all and totally doable.  It might suck, but it can be done if you really want to.  I’ve even written some posts on tough days that were nothing more than a haiku about how hard daily blogging is (Salvation by Haiku!).  One day I wrote a post that was a single word.

But I did it.

By showing up and completing it every day, I learn to succeed.  I learn to create as a discipline, not in response to a mood.  I also add value to myself every single day by this practice.  Maybe only a fraction of a percent, but if you know the power of compound interest, you can see how much this can add up when you show up daily.

I recently tried a 30 day experiment going a little more abstract with my daily challenges.  I switched it up so I had to do one thing each day for my…

  • Body
  • Mind
  • Spirit
  • Company

It didn’t go well.  It was too easy to begin to define things in weird ways so that I could check the spreadsheet off (I love checking items off).  I mean, I walked outside, so that’s good for my body, and my spirit, and I thought about stuff with my mind, so I hit them all, right?  But it wasn’t a challenge and I never felt that pride for completing it.  I needed to go back to my tiny, silly, well-defined challenges.

Maybe you work well with bigger, longer term goals and plans.  But if they don’t work for you, try a 30 day challenge of a few small things that you have no excuse for skipping.  You might be amazed at how good it makes you feel to deliver, especially on the really hard days.

The added benefit of doing something creative like writing is that creativity begets creativity, and you’ll become a font of ideas for business, personal, and even other people’s use.  Give them away.  Act on them.  Ideas are infinite and the more you create the more you get.

The Pursuit

This was written in response to a challenge issued among myself and some good freinds.  We wanted to see who could write the best short story using only 200 words.  My attempt clocks in at 200 words exactly.

_____________________________________

The crinkling of the paper bag brought hope and tension…thankfully there was life inside.  Shep did not hesitate to pull out the store-bought mini pie, half eaten though it was.   They split it.  Any sustenance the two could get was welcome, especially in weather like this.

Until tonight Tad had enjoyed the thrill of the chase.  An outlaw.  Free, yet a slave to stealth.   Their faces were posted everywhere, they were wanted, and for no small reward.  Many days practicing the art of evasion were catching up to the old friends, and they felt it in their lungs and stomachs.  Both had thoughts of turning themselves in and ending the whole thing…not after coming so far.

Neither spoke; neither rested well, both constantly wondered when the other would suggest they continue on.  Both knew they soon must.  It was difficult to think of trading the shelter of the highway bridge for the cold rain.  A moment of daydreaming was broken…Tad’s muscles tensed as he saw light not fifty yards away…

As they fled their shelter the sound of voices echoed behind them, reminding them how close they were to caught:

“Tad! Tad! Shep!”

“C’mon boys, c’mon…”

“Good hunting dogs indeed!”