Lazy but Smart: How Kira Shishkin Creates Freedom Through Systems

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Highlights

Before informed.now, Kira built a book publishing business, Ethereum infrastructure, and TurboTax Verified Pro inside Intuit. Kristy Yoder gets the habits that free his time: Hire only for tasks he's already mastered, rank every to-do list, interview 10 experts before picking 1, and skip annual contracts with untested vendors. His dream dinner guest is his 13-year-old self.

Top Quotes

"I try to give away tasks that I've already mastered to a team member. Where I think a lot of people fall short is that they try to hire for jobs they don't understand yet themselves." (Kira Shishkin)

"You can't give feedback on something that you don't know how to do. If you don't know what good looks like, how do you give constructive guidance to your team?" (Kristy Yoder)

"The right goal of every hire you make and every process you orchestrate is to make you redundant." (Kira Shishkin)

Transcript

Kira Shishkin: How can I become redundant? How can I become unnecessary in this specific operation? And how can I build a system where my team is able to work on their own without needing my approval, without needing my review, without needing my involvement at all? And even a step further: How can I create a system where my team can teach new members of the team to do the same thing without me having to step back in and retrain and reteach the process?

Kristy Yoder: Hello Kira, welcome to Lazy Entrepreneur Podcast. I'm glad that you're here with me today. I'm so excited to get to know more about you. Before hitting the record button on Zoom, I was asking you personal questions already, and so I decided to start recording because I asked too many questions and I want to make sure that I capture everything that you say.

So today we're going to be talking about basically your story and your business, how you became successful, and a lot of different things. But before we get started, why don't you introduce yourself to our audience?

Kira Shishkin: Kristy, thank you for welcoming me on, and it's a pleasure to be invited to join you on the show. I'm Kira Shishkin, and I am the CEO of informed.now, which is the news concierge for this age of misinformation overload that we live in. Our mission, this very public service mission, is to restore the dignity of being informed to people these days, as legacy news media to a great degree has really robbed people of the facts. We could obviously talk more about informed.now and the mission that we are on there.

But I've been an entrepreneur for a good part of my life, and this is my fourth company, but the first consumer company. So that's the whole entire beast. I have a pretty international upbringing. I was born and raised in Ukraine, I came of age in Israel, and then I moved to the east coast of the United States and now the west coast. So it's been a lot of different worlds along the way, and I'm super excited for this conversation. Thank you for having me.

Kristy Yoder: Wow. Yeah. I feel like you have a pretty interesting story. You grew up in Ukraine, moved to Israel, then moved to the east side of the States, and now you're on the west coast. How old were you when you moved to the US?

Kira Shishkin: I think I was in my 20s, mid 20s. It really felt like the east coast was a different country from the west coast. I want to say I've lived in four countries now, even though the US has been two of them, because the culture is so different. And actually, in between east and west, I also spent a couple of years in the Midwest, in Chicago, which is also its own planet.

Kristy Yoder: Yeah, and I totally agree with you, because I live in Ohio. I was a city girl when I was in the Philippines. Now I live in a subdivision out in the country. I still have neighbors, but our houses are not very tight together. We have our own land: front yard, backyard, side yard, whatever you want to call it.

And then when I went to California, like I mentioned to you before recording, it's different. California is a country of its own already. It's actually bigger than the Philippines, and it has mountains, deserts, and the beach. So I totally agree with you when you said you lived on the east coast first and now on the west coast, and that you feel like you've lived in different countries.

Cool. So currently you're running your fourth company. What were your first three businesses?

Kira Shishkin: They've been across industries, and they're not on the consumer side. They're very much on the business side. We built crypto infrastructure for Ethereum back in the day. That was one of the first big ventures. I also had a chance to build a book publishing business, a very real, physical product, which was really exciting. Putting it back in a timeline, that was actually my first.

The most recent one was an incubation within a large technology conglomerate. It was a two-sided expert marketplace for tax accountants and tax filers. I call it a conglomerate, but it was Intuit, which is where I spent the last couple of years before starting informed.now.

Kristy Yoder: Wow, that's awesome. So how did you leave those three businesses? Did you sell them, or did you have somebody take over them? I understand that most serial entrepreneurs don't just stick with one thing. They want to build and build and build. So how did you exit from those businesses?

Kira Shishkin: We're still active in the crypto infrastructure business. It's still a meaningful project that we run. We've definitely pivoted a bit recently as Ethereum changed from a proof of work to a proof of stake model, and so the way we operate has evolved. But that is still an active project.

The book publishing business was a much smaller venture. I started it when I was really young, and it made itself whole, but there wasn't a clear exit from that business. On the incubation side, that was incubated within the enterprise environment at Intuit. The founding team has generally stepped away from the birthing of the company, and it's now run by Intuit. It's a huge business and a huge marketplace already within the TurboTax portfolio. TurboTax Verified Pro is the name of the business, and it's public and fully operational all across America.

Kristy Yoder: Right. Cool. So you currently operate a few businesses: the crypto business and the news business. How do you manage your time?

Kira Shishkin: I think that's really important. A lot of folks who are starting out on the entrepreneurial path ask me how I juggle everything. I think it is impossible to juggle everything without help. Motivating and recruiting folks to join your mission is the most leveraged decision you can make as a builder. Hiring the right talent is the most leveraged decision you can make.

I have my own approach to hiring. I try to give away tasks that I have already mastered to a team member. Where I think a lot of people fall short is that they try to hire for jobs they don't understand yet themselves.

Everything goes through me first. We're starting a company, and the first thing is we need to build a product, so I need to do that first. As I get comfortable and good at doing it, that's when I start hiring somebody who can come in and lighten the load. At that point, I know how to evaluate their performance. I know what good looks like. I know how long the process takes and how long it should take. So I'm able to hand over something that I already understand to a new team member.

Where a lot of people fall flat is that they hire for something they don't understand yet, and they don't know how to evaluate the success. They don't know how long things should take just yet, and it sets you up for failure a little bit, because you need to understand what you're hiring for. So the big answer to your question is hiring and motivating the right type of talent on tasks that you understand how to evaluate.

Kristy Yoder: I love that, and that's a good approach, because I also believe that you can't give feedback on something that you don't know how to do. If you don't know what good looks like or what bad looks like, how do you manage or give guidance to your team member? But as someone who has this delegation approach, you already know how to do it, you know how long it takes, and you know the quality that you want.

What was your experience like when you first delegated to somebody? Did you have an experience where you thought you hired the right person for the task, but it turned out that this person could not deliver the kind of quality that you want, and it was taking them a long time? In your case it would probably only take 30 minutes, and for them it takes two hours. Did you have any experience with that?

Kira Shishkin: A lot of the hiring that I do across multiple ventures is international. I really believe in international hiring. I don't think that all the talent I would like to access lives in San Francisco, or in California, or in the United States. With how international our team is, there is a really huge emphasis on communication, and that's something I look for very attentively from the very beginning.

If the person is going to struggle to communicate with me, whether it's talking about progress or talking about feedback (because feedback should always go both ways), that's a problem. If there's a struggle to communicate clearly about where you have questions, where you have doubts, where you don't understand something, and where you want to push back on something, that winds up being an early signal for me that this is not the right hire. Even if they have the right skills, if they don't have the right communication mentality and skill set, then I know early on that it might not work out.

To give you a more specific example, we've had experiences where we hired someone and they weren't able to deliver. The biggest decision I have to make at that point is that I want to let them go as quickly as possible, because it's a sign that most likely it's not the right fit, and I don't want to waste their time or hours any longer. But I think it goes both ways.

The second thing is whether there is another job on my team that I may have for them that is a better fit for their skill set. Is this just the wrong kind of task or workflow fit? That's very frequent and very possible. We might have a great person, and we initially asked them to do data analysis, but they're incredible at communications and they really want to do marketing. Instead of losing that talent and that person, there may be an opportunity to rethink: This is the wrong task, but it's not the wrong person. So that's another thing that comes to my mind. I don't know if that answers your question, though.

Kristy Yoder: Yes, totally. That makes sense, and I love it. If they're not the right fit for a specific task, maybe they're a fit for another task or another role, especially if the person shares the same values as your company. If this person fits all the boxes except for the task that they're doing, it's important to re-evaluate their skill set and see if you can give them another chance by putting them into a different role.

I love what you said about communication as well, especially when you hire international members. There's always going to be a language barrier, with the accent, with the way they perceive things, and even sometimes with comprehension. Communication is not just about communicating verbally. It also has something to do with understanding what was said and communicating correctly the message that you want to communicate.

So would you be able to give me examples of communication problems that you've experienced? And what is something non-negotiable to you when it comes to communication, where you see it and you're like, "Oh, let go of that person"?

Kira Shishkin: You're super on point with the idea that there are sometimes language barriers. For us, English is table stakes. Because of the line of work that we do, which is very content, news, and media heavy, I think of ourselves as a tech company with a media product. It's not possible for us to hire somebody who doesn't speak English extremely well. That's a nonstarter.

But you're right to point out that it's not just about the language. It's about the broader, holistic sense of communication, because you can know the language, but your communication style may come from one culture. Maybe you're from Japan or the Philippines, and that is very different from someone who is from the Midwest or the Middle East. They're very different styles. So what's really important is not just the language itself, which is table stakes, but an open, proactive communication culture. That's super important to align on.

We've been able to find people with really strong communication styles that we care about and value, in cultures where they're very rare. They're definitely findable. Just because you are from Japan doesn't mean you're going to have that style of communication.

To answer your question more directly, a non-negotiable communication practice is speaking your mind immediately when something doesn't make sense to you. A lot of cultures in Southeast Asia (maybe the Philippines is one we can pick on, because we've both been in touch with Filipino culture) have a bit of a tendency, and I'm curious what your thoughts are on this, to keep an issue to yourself a little longer than you should and be shy about bringing it up. If something is wrong, the culture we want to espouse is to say it right away. Text me, call me right away. Escalate it. If there's an issue that you think is going to slow you down, or an issue that you think is important for the team to know about, don't keep it a secret. Don't feel shy about it. Speak up as soon as you can. So timeliness with proactive communication is really important.

Kristy Yoder: Right. I love that, and that's on point. I'm from the Philippines, and I work with many Filipinos as well. Not to generalize about everybody, but I think it also depends on the level of experience the team member has had in the past. If they have experience working for corporate companies or working with leaders, most of the time those team members were already trained on how to communicate proactively.

But I would say the majority of Filipinos, it's not that they don't want to communicate. It's just that they don't want to bother somebody. We're such people pleasers. This was also a struggle that I had before, when I used to freelance and handle clients. I would do everything in my power to solve a problem first, and I would tell you what the problem was only when I already had a solution for it or had already fixed it. That comes from the mentality, or culture, of pleasing people, because we don't want to disturb them or bother them. That's one consideration to have. The second thing is that some people are just shy. They don't know how to communicate something to somebody.

I love that you brought that up. As a leader, when we meet team members like that, it's also an opportunity for us to step up our leadership, help them out, and coach them. We can tell them, "Hey, this is the culture in the Philippines, I know it's like that, but here in the States we're straightforward, so tell us what you need and we'll give it to you straight. It's a fast-paced kind of business."

Kira Shishkin: US people tend to be loud, and a lot of Filipino folks tend to be quiet, more reserved. I think the best performance is somewhere in the middle, where there's a lot of autonomy and agency, and solution-driven thinking: "I want to solve this. I feel my self-worth is attached to being able to solve it." But also a balance of: "Hey, this has been taking me too long. Something is wrong. There's probably an easier way to do this. Let me mention this to my team."

I think the optimal is somewhere in between. There is so much to learn when you have an international team. We are proud to have a pretty sizable chunk of our team in the Philippines as well, and we're very happy to have so much cross-cultural learning. It's always really enriching.

Kristy Yoder: Yeah, I love that. Most of my team members are from the Philippines as well, because I know the culture and I know how to talk to them. But in 2023, we started hiring people from Venezuela and Africa. Sometimes we want to work with the best of the best talents, but for some of them it's hard to understand their accent. Some people have a very thick, heavy accent. I have an accent as well. Some applicants pronounce words in a way where it slides and slurs. I know you're fluent in English, but if I cannot understand you, and I really want to hire you, it comes down to what's really important to you.

We ended up still hiring the person, because the person is awesome. It's also not the person's fault for having that kind of accent. Maybe it's our responsibility, because our ears are not trained to hear those accents. If you show me somebody from the Philippines with a very thick accent, I would still be able to understand that person. But British people, for example: Their accent is lovely, but some words are hard to understand. And British people have different accents as well, depending on where they grew up.

Kira Shishkin: I think even though Irish people are native to the language, I'd have an easier time at this point understanding someone from the Philippines than someone from Ireland. How they speak is very hard for me. There's a delay: They say something and I have to think for a few seconds, and then I get what they said. There's a processing delay.

Kristy Yoder: It's like you have to interpret what they said based on the keywords that you heard. We went on a cruise two weeks ago, and when you go on a cruise there are a lot of people from different countries. Most of the staff are from different countries. One of the staff was from the UK, and he was giving us instructions. My husband, who is a native English speaker (he grew up here in the States), and I asked a question, and this staff member from the UK said, "Oh, do this, blah blah blah," with the UK accent.

I told my husband I would listen to him talk for hours because his accent is so good. But I did not understand what he said. My husband said, "Yeah, true. I think he's from this part of the UK, blah blah blah." And that's the beauty of working with international people. You get to experience that kind of stuff. Even though initially it may be hard to understand them, sometimes we just have to train our ears. It's not their fault for having heavy or thick accents. Sometimes our ears are just not trained.

Even with me, English is my second language. When I'm tired and sleepy, let's say I'm just waking up from bed, and my husband says something in English and I'm not giving him my full attention, I won't be able to understand him. But if you speak to me in my own language, just because my brain is already trained in that language, I can understand you even when I'm sleeping.

Well, thank you for hiring international team members. I believe it's a big help for them, because you grew up in Ukraine, and the living conditions there, and in Israel, are not as rich as in the US or other European or North American countries. I love that.

So since you have a few businesses, how do you make sure that you focus on the things that matter the most in your business, other than delegating? In terms of managing your time: We built our business to have freedom and flexibility, but at the beginning we may hustle and work more than 12 hours a day to achieve our goals. In your case, how do you make sure that you're giving your attention to the things that matter the most in business?

Kira Shishkin: You're asking about prioritization, and I don't really feel like I have it figured out. I don't know if anyone has prioritization figured out. But I personally always have a running to-do list, and I always rank it. I'm not sure how common or uncommon this practice is, but I think it's really important that every time you make a list of anything, it should be in order of priority. You don't just make a list that has no order. Anything that you make a list out of should be ordered intentionally, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, with the most important things at the top.

When you don't force an order onto the list, it makes it a little bit harder, things get away from you, and you wind up focusing on the wrong thing. I would say always order every single list. That should be a micro habit that is always part of your task management routine. I apply that to my to-do list too. I might not be able to get the whole to-do list done, because there are a lot of items on it, but I want to pick up one, two, or three from the very top today. I should find a way to almost penalize myself for doing the last item before doing the first. You need to keep your discipline on the first couple of items on the list.

I update that list daily so I don't let it go stale, because on an almost daily basis I need to reorder and rearrange what is the most important thing today.

I'm also always thinking about every process that I involve my team in, especially how I can become redundant. How can I become unnecessary in this specific operation? How can I build a system where my team is able to work on their own without needing my approval, without needing my review, without needing my involvement at all? And even a step further: How can I create a system where my team can teach new members of the team to do the same thing without me having to step back in and retrain and reteach the process?

So I'm trying to create fully autonomous systems for marketing, for operations, for support, for outreach, for all these different components. Not just so they run within the team without requiring my attendance, but so that even as new team members join, they're able to onboard entirely without me. That allows me to focus on my to-do list, because if I were still managing and babysitting the old processes, I would never get to my actual to-do list.

Kristy Yoder: Yeah, I definitely agree with that. Going back to what you said earlier, you master a task first and then delegate it to somebody, so that you know how to give feedback and you know when it's quality work. What about projects or tasks that are important in the business that you don't know how to do? Do you just hire an expert for that, or do you tend to learn it and try to do it on your own before delegating it?

Kira Shishkin: I think some level of learning is necessary. You don't have to become an expert in the new task, but you have to put a good, hard effort into trying to understand at least the basics. That will come as you work with an expert, whatever you're pursuing. But I don't recommend shying away from learning something new even if it's intimidating. You need to get a little bit involved.

A very live example from today, and from what we're currently going through in the business, is that we're trying to figure out social media. It's a really important channel for us to share our mission and our story with the rest of the world. Frankly, I don't know anything about it. I don't know the first thing. So I'm shopping around very actively for different experts, and people in my own community who have been successful in that specific kind of storytelling on social media across different platforms. In the process, I'm also keeping my own diary of the things I'm learning and figuring out.

I think hiring an expert is not a bad idea, but I wouldn't hire the first person who claims to be an expert. I would shop around very actively, and I would give myself the time to say: I'm not going to hire anybody until I talk to 10 experts. Have those introductory calls to figure out, at least from the surface level, who seems to be the most legitimate. You can get a lot from those introductory conversations. The way people communicate is a very strong signal of their actual quality and expertise. See if they set expectations realistically. If you talk to 10 people and two of them are being very dramatic, saying "We're going to solve all your problems, we're going to take care of everything," I would stay away from that.

Kristy Yoder: Overpromising.

Kira Shishkin: Overpromising, yeah. You can tell right away. Here's the average promise, and this person is promising a lot more. So just be attentive. A lot of people shy away from shopping around, but if you're entering an arena where you don't understand anything, try to learn by having a lot of calls. Before you settle on an advisor, expert, or partner, find a way to get some exposure to that category of person before you make a decision.

The other piece is trying to align incentives. When you're hiring a person for a task you already understand, you know how to incentivize them, because you know what good looks like. For a new task, you may not know how it all works just yet, how long it's going to take, or how long it should take. But you should be able to say: Here's my goal for social media marketing. Can you help me reach this goal? If you can, I want to reward you with a full incentive, whether that's equity compensation, financial compensation, or a commission. The compensation is attached to the output and the result. Maybe you get a little bit upfront, but we want to create an environment where we're both positioned to succeed. Our agreement says that very literally in financial terms: If we reach the goal that I'm trying to reach, that's when you, as the partner, advisor, or expert coming in, also get fully compensated and fully rewarded for the work.

Kristy Yoder: Right, yeah, exactly. So at what point in your business did you hire someone to help you? A lot of people always ask me, "Kristy, at what point should I hire? Is it when I achieve my financial goal, or at the beginning of my business, or when I'm stressed?" In your own opinion, or in your business, at what point did that happen?

Kira Shishkin: As soon as possible. This idea that hiring is the most leveraged decision you can make: the sooner you make a hire, granted it's someone that you're proud to hire, the better. Bad hires are bad at any point. If you make the wrong hire, it doesn't matter when you make it, it's going to hurt and slow you down. But with the right hire, the sooner the better, because as soon as you can get them onboarded and figuring things out, you get all that time back to focus on other things. And you're going to need that. I don't think I would wait to hire until you're successful, because you'll be successful faster if you're able to hire faster.

Kristy Yoder: Right. You can take things off your plate that you dread, the things you don't like. A lot of the admin stuff and a lot of the operations, you should take off your plate as soon as possible.

Kira Shishkin: You should hire and enrich your team as quickly as you can, because frankly I don't believe that you can get to success quickly enough before you burn out without strong support. So I would focus on that really early on and take the time, because it will take time to find the right person. It's not going to be immediate. You're going to have to shop around the same way that I was suggesting you should shop around if you're hiring a partner.

Kristy Yoder: Right, exactly. I love that. You also mentioned before we recorded this interview that you built your business in so many lazy ways. Can you tell us about that? What other lazy ways did you use to build your business, aside from hiring the right person and delegation? Did you use any automation tools, or what kind of help did you need to have in order to become successful?

Kira Shishkin: Being lazy in the spirit of the Lazy Entrepreneur is not really lazy. It's not literally lazy like a bum. It's very important, and I think part of the laziness that we speak of is a craving for efficiency. That's non-negotiable. You need to create efficiency. I don't think you can succeed with tedious, long, time-consuming tasks or processes. It's essential. It's not even optional. If you want to succeed, you're going to need to find ways to be extremely efficient.

For me, it's always been a combination of tech, talent, and systematic thinking. I mentioned a lot around the areas of being lazy: creating systems in the business that don't require you. That is the ultimate laziness, and it's ultimately necessary in order to free your hands to do more and to succeed. You're going to have to create systems that don't require you. That is absolutely essential.

But a big part of it is not just about people. It's about the technology. I would say shopping around for technology is even easier than shopping around for experts or when you're hiring, but people don't do it enough. They find the first tool that looks like it can do what they need, and they say, "Okay, perfect, this is it." Shop around for the tools. Maybe it's for LinkedIn automation, and I shopped around a lot before finding the tool that I really liked. Or maybe it's an AI tool for creative writing. Most of them are free or offer a free trial. Don't settle on the first tool that you find. Really find the best tool for the job, because there's a huge cost, timewise and stresswise and trustwise, to using the wrong tool.

Invest the time. If you're looking for a great tool for creative writing, don't just go to ChatGPT and say, "Okay, this is good enough." Dig around until you find Claude, which is much better at creative writing than other models. But you should try it and take the time. Maybe it's a weekend project, maybe it's a project you can give to one of your team members, but find the best software for the job.

For example, I recently went through a process of finding the best LinkedIn automation software, which is something I care about a lot. LinkedIn is a platform that's designed to be automated, and you should try to have a lot of that outreach done on autopilot. It took me a lot of calls with different companies, and a lot of free trials, to find a company that I admire, which is Dripify. It's actually a Ukrainian company. I have an affiliate partnership with them, and I think they're incredible, really best-in-class. It took months of softly playing around with different things to find the best. Now, looking back, the difference between the software I use with Dripify and the runner-up competitor is night and day. If I had gone with the other software, I would have given up, canceled it, and dropped the entire process. But now I'm able to run on autopilot and step away entirely from an entire system, and there are not even any people in there. It's fully just the right software configured in the right ways.

Kristy Yoder: Right.

Kira Shishkin: I'm talking a big game about Dripify. I should probably drop my referral link.

Kristy Yoder: Yeah, we'll put the link in the show notes. Wow. If there's something I'm getting from what you've shared so far, it's to shop around and not settle for anything less. However, of course, there are times that we need to act quickly. Has that ever happened to you, where you didn't have enough time to shop around because you needed it immediately? Or are you the type of person who anticipates that you'll need this in the next 3 months, and before that time comes you prepare in advance?

Kira Shishkin: It's definitely happened to me many times, where I need a solution running right now.

But sometimes, when you're in that situation, don't get into an annual contract. When we started our operations, we used a very cheap provider for SMS texting. We did that because we needed something cheap, easy, and straightforward to test with. But from the very beginning, we had a lot of doubts about whether this was the right software and the right partner for us. Over time, that understanding only strengthened: It was not the right fit. I think they had a great team, and they were a strong company. They were just not the right partner for what we were trying to do, partially because they didn't have enough automations, and that's what we care about quite a bit.

So I use that experience to say: Don't commit annually. Don't overpromise that partnership. Make sure that it's at arm's length. And as you go through that experience, write down what you wish was different. As you shop around, you realize: I like these things about the current partner, but here are 2 or 3 things that I need to change. These are table stakes changes. For us, the automations were one. Certain commerce features were really important for us as well.

As I was going through that relationship with our first initial partner, where I knew there wasn't perfect alignment between their service and our need, I was writing down what was good and what could make it perfect. Then you go into these new shopping conversations and you say: I already have a lot of these things. Can you offer this additional thing? That's really important, because you don't want to start from scratch when you go shopping.

Kristy Yoder: Right.

Kira Shishkin: You want to start from a reflection on where things have not worked so far.

Kristy Yoder: I love that. That's a pretty good insight. There's a balance in everything, right? If you don't have enough time to shop around for what you need immediately, then find the fastest and easiest way to solve a problem, but don't commit long term, especially if it's not something you've done your due diligence on.

All right, so as we wrap up, I normally ask my podcast guests to ask a question for my next guest, and you are that next guest. The question that my previous guest left for you is: If you could have dinner with someone, who would it be and why?

Kira Shishkin: I love that question. I would love to have dinner with my 13-year-old self. My 13-year-old self was going through a really rough time growing up.

Kristy Yoder: Were you in Ukraine or Israel during that time?

Kira Shishkin: I had just moved to Israel. That was a point of pivot, a point of a lot of change. I wish I could go back and comfort that kid and say: You're going to have it so figured out. You're going to be just fine. This experience, all the change and transition, is going to make you so much stronger than you realize, if you let it. So let it make you stronger. Don't let it get you down. I would love to have that conversation with myself.

Kristy Yoder: Wow. You're making me teary. It's like healing your inner child, right? I feel like that's another topic for another episode, just hearing that story from when you were 13 years old. Now I'm interested to know what happened. But thank you for that answer. I love that very personal answer.

So now it's your turn. What question do you want to ask my next guest?

Kira Shishkin: I love this practice. I think it's such a great idea. This is something I'm thinking a lot about these days because of building informed.now, and it's the spirit behind informed.now. I would encourage the next show guest to think about where the areas in their life are where their attention is being hijacked, because there's no shortage of them. In our modern culture, there's a lot of attention grabbing, attention hijacking, attention hostaging. What is an area in your life where your attention is being monopolized, held hostage, and how can you get it back for your own sake?

Kristy Yoder: I love that. That question is a topic on its own. So maybe for my next guest, that should be the topic that we talk about. I'm just kidding. But thank you for that wonderful question.

So, Kira, I love everything that you shared. Thank you for sharing some amazing insights and for adding value to our listeners. Where can people find you online?

Kira Shishkin: It's been such a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. I'm really easy and friendly to find on LinkedIn. I am the only Kira Shishkin in the world, so Kira Shishkin on LinkedIn is a great way to reach out if you have a question for me. If there's any way I can be helpful to you, I would love to be in touch, so shoot me a LinkedIn message directly. And the project that we're building right now, informed.now, is really easy to find at www.informed.now.

Kristy Yoder: I love it. Thank you so much for your time, Kira.