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Our guest on today's show is Tyler Sellhorn. Tyler is a remote work advocate who is very active on LinkedIn and Twitter where he shares ideas, concepts, and learnings around remote work. He was also the Director of Customer Experience at Hubstaff, which helps organizations manage projects and teams profitably.
This episode is a trial and introduction to the podcast for Tyler, as he will be helping us out with "The Remote Show" moving forward as a host. Please enjoy.
Start #LearningOutLoud with Tyler on LinkedIn, Twitter, and at https://www.tylersellhorn.tech/
This episode is a trial and introduction to the podcast for Tyler, as he will be helping us out with "The Remote Show" moving forward as a host. Please enjoy.
Start #LearningOutLoud with Tyler on LinkedIn, Twitter, and at https://www.tylersellhorn.tech/
Transcript:
Matt Hollingsworth (00:58):
Tyler, thanks so much for coming on the show. We really appreciate it.
Tyler Sellhorn (01:01):
Oh, it's my pleasure, Matt. Really a big fan of We Work Remotely, the Remote Show, the whole nine yards. I'm a huge fan, so it's truly my pleasure to be here with you today.
Matt Hollingsworth (01:10):
Oh, it's exciting. That doesn't happen often to me where I get to talk to fans of the show. I know that some people listen to it, but that's always nice to hear so I appreciate that. So the first question as you, I'm sure, have heard is what is the thing that you've done, accomplished or otherwise over the past 12 months that you're most proud of?
Tyler Sellhorn (01:28):
Well, my boss is not quick to offer praise, and over the past, I'd say six months, we've been working towards building up some organizational software updates, some different things have happened inside of the officer level of our company and we've added a sales team, I lead the customer experience team, and so one of the things that was said to me just yesterday was, "Impressed and trying to find how do we keep you around forever?" Those are the types of things that you always hope to hear from your boss. What am I most proud of? I'm proud of the influence that I've been able to have, both inside and outside of Hubstaff, and especially with my relationship with my direct manager.
Matt Hollingsworth (02:13):
That's great. Yeah. That is definitely a high praise, especially for somebody who doesn't necessarily give up praise very often, so it's extra special. So we will get into all of this stuff related to Hubstaff and your role there and your remote experience with that company. They're longstanding We Work Remotely users, and we're big fans of what you and the team has built there. So we'll get into that, but I wanted to start off by just talking about why we're having this podcast specifically, why were recording this and outside of just wanting to talk to you about remote related things. This could be a regular occurrence.
Matt Hollingsworth (02:47):
Just so everybody knows who's listening, there's a good chance that Tyler will be helping us out on the podcasting side over the next... I don't want to give a timeline here because there's lots of things going, but there's a good chance that Tyler will be helping us out with this. And so what we're doing here today is we're just giving Tyler a chance to introduce himself, getting into the things that we would like to do with the podcast when it comes to the content and the guests and all that kind of stuff, so that was the goal of this show. And this is more of a welcome for Tyler and to get to know him better. So on that note, Tyler, do you want to give us a bit about your background, where you started your career and anything else that you think is relevant for this conversation and by way of intro?
Tyler Sellhorn (03:29):
Well, just to give a little background about me professionally, I started out as a professional educator for 13 years, mostly in mathematics education and the secondary schools. I'd always been a technology-oriented educator. I automated lots and lots of things that teachers often take home on the weekend, a stack of papers and all that sort of thing. I did my best to try and digitize and make those things automated and build processes around and iterate systems, thinking about how I did my job. And so I really saw an opportunity when I was studying for an ed leadership master's to kind of transition into teaching other teachers how to use technology well. I was starting to do some networking in that space and doors kept shutting my face. So I said, "Okay, I'm going to stop asking those people for permission to do the next thing," and I said, "Okay, if I used to be a technology-oriented educator, I'd like to be an education oriented technologist."
Tyler Sellhorn (04:23):
And so what's really cool is that that turned out to be a much better remunerated position than the technology educator, so I'm really excited about the opportunity that remote working has provided me and my family. My spouse is a therapist, and I've learned how to have a great helping relationship through her. And it's been a really awesome opportunity for me to experience using some skills that I had developed in other places as an educator in kind of leaning into how that might become a thing for me inside of a technology company. So some of the things that I've really learned outside of this job, now I've become a remote leader, a leader in a fully distributed team that spans from Seattle to Melbourne, how do you make it as a leader in a space where you're talking about leading teams in a cross-cultural global fashion, I've leaned on the lessons that I've learned as a dad and as a sports coach.
Tyler Sellhorn (05:21):
One of the things that we always joke about in our family, that I ended up doing a thing where I was long distance with my wife while she was in graduate school, and so we kind of joked that I earned an associates degree in clinical psychology with her. And so one of my favorite things that I learned from that experience was Carl Rogers. He's a titan of 20th century psychology. One of his concepts is unconditional positive regard. So what does that mean? Well, it means that, okay, we're going to have the opportunity to say okay to this other person. I'm here to help you, right? I'm here to help you hold the space for you to become your best self, right? And that's one of the things that I'm really, really excited about doing here inside of this space is the potential for the opportunity to meet lots of people and hold space for them to present themselves as their very best selves, and for us to learn from one another in that space.
Matt Hollingsworth (06:12):
Yeah. And that's one of the things that I think ends up working very well in the podcasting space, and what makes for a good show, I think is when we have somebody who's leading the show and interviewing people who is clearly interested in what they do and learning from them. I always find that with podcasts that I listen... I'm a podcast fan, very much more than I am a podcast to myself. And what I always find is I love shows that are run by people who clearly are just curious people and want to learn for themselves, but also want to teach others in the process of them learning through whoever they're interviewing. So I get that very much from you.
Matt Hollingsworth (06:52):
And I think that's why we are pursuing this, and we're going to be pursuing this in a more intentional and sequenced ways, especially the context we're in now, where we have lots of people. We have lots of companies that are looking to learn how to do this remote thing and do it well. We are now settling into this normalcy of being distributed, whatever that means for everybody. It means different things for different people, but I think we are uniquely positioned to teach and hopefully learn ourselves. So that is why I'm really excited to talk to you and learn from you and have you learned from others through the show.
Tyler Sellhorn (07:29):
Yeah. I mean, that's one of the big things that I've learned as a father. There's a lot of mistakes being made out there in the world of distributed work right now, and we don't want to put people in their place and point fingers. The thing that we want to do is we want to choose curiosity over judgment. We want to lean into... My little phrase that I put out there on the internet is learning out loud. And that's exactly what we're doing on podcast is we're taking the time to be thinking and talking and doing that metacognitive, not just thinking of inside of what we're doing, but also thinking about what we're doing, thinking at that level where we're thinking, is this serving us still? Or should we put it down and pick something else up? What are the things that we want to be able to do?
Tyler Sellhorn (08:12):
I like to kind of joke, because of my background in team sports, that I'd like to be known as the Ted Lasso of remote work, that I'm kind of that enthusiastic air horns guy of saying, "Okay, let's lean into the we, us, ours of..." That's one of the things I'm really grateful to have learned from the Snyder Football is where I am still the technology coordinator here in Fort Wayne, Indiana. It's really, really cool to take lessons from other parts of life and apply them and bring them back to here. I'm so excited to have the opportunity to potentially be learning from the very best minds who've spent lots of time thinking about remote work, as well as the people that are just now engaging with it and figuring things out for themselves and learning from best practices but also learning from new perspectives as they come in to this way of working.
Matt Hollingsworth (09:01):
Yeah. And especially now where-
Tyler Sellhorn (09:03):
To this way of working.
Matt Hollingsworth (09:03):
Yeah. And especially now where it's going to become a popular space, but I think we are, like I said before, uniquely positioned to help people as they move and transition into more of a consistently remote work environment. So, that is something that we've thought a lot about as well. And we're, like I said, we're excited to talk to you more and have you on the show more and let you lead this thing if all the stars align. I would like to just get into, now that we've learned a little bit about you, I would love to know, you mentioned before some of the issues that are happening right now with remote work and some of the problems that have come up that you've seen recently, and maybe not recently, but just in general, can you speak to one in particular that you are seeing quite often with remote teams?
Tyler Sellhorn (09:47):
I think the big thing is that I see a lack of intentionality, right? And what are some of the things that are the knock on effects of not doing things on purpose, right? The one that's sort of been talked about by a lot of people, but I want to highlight as well is the idea that instead of being in five, six hours of a conference room meeting space in a co-located environment, we're going to be in five, six hours of a Zoom meeting in a distributed environment, right? That type of on-camera expectation of being seen, being visible is really not leveraging the power of distributed work, right? Just to drop some names here, I really, really appreciate Matt Mullenweg's levels of remote working and taking steps towards asynchronous work.
Tyler Sellhorn (10:37):
Because when we say, "Okay, we must be in the same space for eight and a half, nine hours plus a day." Right? And now we're not in the same space, eight and a half, nine hours a day, what are we going to do instead? What is that time going to be filled with instead? And what it should be filled with is the opportunity to execute on goals, right? Execute towards completing tasks that really do move the needle in a asynchronous, quiet in your own space, and then be able to then take that back to the team and then iterate together of, "Okay, here's this things that I've thought about and worked on."
Tyler Sellhorn (11:17):
And there might be short bursts of synchronous activity, or there might be short bursts of activity that's happening with people that you may not even share very much overlap at all with. Our Asia Pacific team, inside of our team, we work on process documents at completely different times, but we are able to collaborate in a way that's really, really effective and aligned because we're working in the same spaces, asynchronously. We're working on the same documents, we're working on the same processes. They might be answering the requests of customers that are in their time zones, but we're all doing the same things because we have leaned into the fact that the sun does not revolve around Eastern Standard Time, right? That's not the way it works in physics nor the way it works in remote work.
Matt Hollingsworth (11:59):
Yeah. Well, we'll get into that other Hubstaff piece. I think you have a skillset here with your team and you can speak from personal experience, which I think is a really important thing for something like this as well. One thing I was curious to hear your thoughts on, and this is throwing you into the deep end just a little bit, but it's fun for me to do that because I'm interviewing you, so.
Tyler Sellhorn (12:19):
I'm here for it, Matt.
Matt Hollingsworth (12:20):
All right. So, what do you think are the potential, unforeseen, knock on effects of remote and the speed that it's happened over the past year? So, I'll expand on that a little bit by way of saying there's a lot of conversation around what this means for work, what this means for locations of people and where they choose to live. Is there anything that you think of that might be against the grain in this capacity, or anything uniquely that's maybe a bit different that you can speak to, or opinions you have about what this means for work in general?
Tyler Sellhorn (12:56):
Well, I think work from home is the responsible thing to do for companies right now during the midst of a global pandemic. That's the responsible thing to do right now. But the thing that's responsible going forward in 2021 and beyond, post vaccine, is going to be working from anywhere. And I don't think that there's going to be a lot of benefit to people saying, "I just want to be in the office two days, three days a week." Because there's all of that commute time. There's all of that wasted effort of being in the same space. And I mean that when I say wasted, because when you really lean into setting your team up to be a remote first company, there are benefits that exceed the collaboration benefits that might occur in a co-located environment. And I think people have started to embrace the idea of working remotely because they've seen their teams be productive in a distributed fashion.
Tyler Sellhorn (13:53):
But the problem is that we're shifting our mindset towards work from home and we don't want to do that anymore. We don't want to be stuck in one spot or inside of one building that's where we also live. Well, that's not remote working was before. What remote working was before was, in my life, I had the opportunity to take calls from the gym lobby or to meet a friend for lunch and then work from that cafe for the rest of the afternoon. I think it's really important that we not assume that the experience of 2020's work from home should be our experience going forward. So we shouldn't reject the aspects of working from home that are not so great because those are going to go away by being able to leave your house and the things that you want to get back to are giving a hug or traveling.
Tyler Sellhorn (14:42):
It's not either/or. This remote working thing is not either/or. It is both/and. And when we say work from anywhere, we are saying, you can be co-located, but do it like so many other remote companies have done before where we say, "Okay, we're going to have quarterly on-sites at the headquarters. And everybody's going to fly in from wherever and we're going to do our kickoff. And then annually, we're going to have automatic calls at a grand meetup. We're going to have an opportunity for us to all be together. And we're all going to have a shared space." Those things are important, but at what cost, right? Should they be every day? Should they even be at all in an office co-located environment? I think it's really important for us to not assume that the experience of 2020 is the experience of remote working past a vaccine being broadly distributed.
Matt Hollingsworth (15:37):
Yeah. And I think that's a good point. I would like to also add to that, and you spoke a bit about this, but remote working can be done successfully for long periods of time and it's sustainable and you can grow companies. People have done it, right? There's the Jason [inaudible 00:15:55] of the world that have built very large businesses and from a remote first standpoint. So it's not like everybody -
Tyler Sellhorn (16:02):
The Zapier guys. The Zapier guys this week, they got an injection of capital because I'm guessing that they're de-risking or paying off some debt at some point, but they're an example of another, quote unquote unicorn company that started and stayed remote for their entire existence.
Matt Hollingsworth (16:19):
Yeah, totally. And that's what I think what the show can be and what we're hoping to do it, we work remotely more generally for our content and our positioning is just to speak to that and say, " Hey, I know this is an anxious time and people are scrambling a bit." And I don't want to diminish that because that is the experience of a lot of people.
Tyler Sellhorn (16:36):
Of course.
Matt Hollingsworth (16:37):
But there are ways of doing this successfully, for a long period of time, that you can do it and enjoy your work, and probably enjoy your work more than you did before. And for those people who are curious about, I was fortunate enough to talk to Wade actually on the podcast a while back. So you can go back and listen to that one because that's a good conversation as well. But that's what I'm hoping to get out of this show, is talking to those people who have done this successfully, to give people a bit of a framework for being successful longterm in a remote capacity.
Tyler Sellhorn (17:05):
For sure. I think it's really, really important for us to continue to bring forward the voices of those who have done it successfully and those that are learning from those people and finding success again. We need to find the social proof. We need to find the repeatability of these learnings that have occurred. I think it's really important for us to kind of say, this isn't the first era of remote work ever. It just happens to be that the internet has really made it a lot easier for a lot more people to do it. My favorite metaphor for remote working is a Naval Captain. My home office is kind of a nautical themed set up here. And I really lean into that idea because when you think about, okay, you're going to go off on a mission and you have to have really clear parameters around what you're going to be going to accomplish because there's asynchronous communication. You're not going to be able to stay in direct contact all the time. You're going to have to do some dead reckoning based upon the stars and celestial bodies.
Tyler Sellhorn (18:03):
To do some dead reckoning based upon the stars and celestial bodies to be able to find out, "Okay, where are we at in this thing?" You're going to have to stay connected with routines and procedure and all of those sorts of things that you would say, "Okay, we're going to have a first watch, second watch on the bells." There's silly when you start doing the metaphor thing, you extended too far, but that's a really great place for us to say, "You know what? Remote working has been a part of our world for much longer than today. It's been a part of our world for much longer than that. And we need to recognize that we don't have to have all of the answers. We can pay attention to those that have already figured out so many things and learn from their experience."
Tyler Sellhorn (18:40):
That's been my experience, right? I learned how to be a successful remote worker and got promoted inside of six months because of the learning out loud that you and the We Work Remotely community has been doing. I connected to Laurel Farrar, Lisette Sutherland, Tammy Bellen, and the Darren's, Buckner and Murph, Matt Mullenweg. You've mentioned the base camp guys. I learned how to do customer experience things from the podcast and resources that are already out there. Today, in the information age, we don't have a limit on the amount of information that's out there. We just need to be smart about who we're listening to that have already curated that information to help us be successful. And work remotely as one of those sources that says, "Okay, I'm going to pivot my stuff off of We Work Remotely because they've figured it out. And they're helping companies that are doing it well. And I'm going to align myself with brands like that so that I am successful doing the same things because of the benefits it brings.
Matt Hollingsworth (19:35):
Yeah. And for us too, it's great because obviously our business is dependent on the remote nature of work and the growth of that. But we also are remote workers. We're trying to figure it out alongside everybody else. And what's so interesting, and this comes up a lot too, because I have a small team that I manage and I help with the business. And it's always funny to me when I think about my day to day. And I think, "Oh, I just had this conversation about over communication or writing more clearly or not having to ping somebody when they're in their deep work." And all this kind of stuff where I talk about it all the time.
Matt Hollingsworth (20:11):
And yet I still find myself having to stop myself from doing those things. Because to your point about intentionality, even for myself, who should be a very good remote worker and hopefully I'm better than what I was and still is hard. And that's something I think is important is remote working is hard. I think the benefits vastly outweigh the negatives, but it's something you need to be on a daily basis thinking about getting better at. And so I actually, this is a good segue to my next question for you is what has been the biggest challenge for you? You've got a lot of resources and you're great at what you do and you've been promoted, but what is the biggest challenge that you're finding for remote distributed teams?
Tyler Sellhorn (20:47):
I think the things that are hardest are the things that have always been hard about global teams. It's time zones. How to manage the fact that we don't all work at the same time, more so than we don't all work in the same office. Right? The big thing that's really difficult about small companies like ours, that we are distributing our software worldwide and supporting it worldwide. How do you stay connected with people? Our hardest time zone we have inside of our team, we have four people that are plus 12 from EST, that's as hard as it gets. Right? So one of the things that I really see a lot of benefit from it, I've had to work hard to solve is that I am a dad, so I work 90 minutes before my children eat breakfast. And this is the beauty of remote work is being able to fit the things that you need to do into your life rather than the other way around, where it was so much more of, here is this chunk of time.
Tyler Sellhorn (21:49):
You're commuting, all of that, and it just owns you for the vast majority of your day. Instead of for me, compared to teaching school, working remotely is like taking a day off of school every day. Because I'm able to organize my working time around my responsibilities as a father, responsibilities as a husband, other things that I do in my life, like coaching team sports. Those are things that I have an opportunity to put as the priority in my calendar day. And then, you know what? If I work those 90 minutes before breakfast, now I've got 90 minutes where I do overlap the working time of the people that are 12 hours ahead of me in the day. And now I can space out what I'm doing and have the space to be able to exercise and to take time for my mental health in the middle of my day.
Tyler Sellhorn (22:36):
And that I can go and meet a friend for lunch and not feel like I'm rushed or that I've got to get back to the office because we've got this coat hanger accountability that like I'm back. I've heard jokes about people that would get a relationship with the morning janitor to turn on their computer and their lights so that it appeared that they arrived first. And then they strolled in later in the day at their first meeting. Games like that, that get played in a co-located environment don't do that. Sharing the power of when you do your work with the people that are doing the work is an absolute cheat code and why more people aren't grabbing onto that as an idea, and I think more and more are, but I think that that's really, really key for us to have that understanding that it's possible for us to be even better than we were by doing it in this new way.
Matt Hollingsworth (23:28):
There's a lot there that we can pick apart, but the one piece, and it just reminds me of Jason Freed, who my listeners will know I'm a big fan of, and I was able to talk to you on the show too, but he has this quote. It's not going to be verbatim, but "The company isn't a family, but the company supports families."
Tyler Sellhorn (23:43):
Yes.
Matt Hollingsworth (23:43):
Which is your point where it's like, I think that structuring and framing the company as a family is not the right mentality because you make sacrifices that you wouldn't have otherwise made for those people that are your family and what a company should be is as you have structured your life around your priorities, which are your family, it should be the company supports you in doing so. And then you work there to be able to support your family. So that's something that sticks out to me as a really underappreciated component of remote work and what that does for people.
Tyler Sellhorn (24:13):
Yeah. I am incredibly grateful for those that have gone before me and my experience with remote working and the ways that they've been intentional and on purpose about things. We are supporting the opportunity for people to choose their best lives when they work remotely. You were mentioning earlier, just what's going to happen. What are some of the knock on effects of more and more people working in a distributed fashion? Well, it means that people are going to live close to family. So often I'm here in the post-industrial Midwest, and there's so many of our university graduates that go to find work on the coast here in the United States.
Tyler Sellhorn (24:53):
And it's really hard for all of the best and brightest to just depart from their home as soon as they get to adulthood. I think you're going to see a transformation of those home districts that we think of going back home or having grown up in a place. Those places are going to be transformed. It's already happening here in Fort Wayne because of our history in the railroad industry. The internet pipes go right past our homes. And so I think small and medium-sized cities like Fort Wayne are going to have a boom because the cost of living is low and the quality of life is high and we have great internet. So even just the defaults of what is happening, shifting even a little bit is going to completely transform communities, like the one I live in.
Matt Hollingsworth (25:44):
Yeah. Yeah. And what's so cool is that what we're seeing among some of the more, I don't want to pass judgment here, but some of the more thoughtful companies is that equal pay no matter where you are. So, to me, it makes total sense if the output is the same, it shouldn't really matter where you are and in terms of your pay. And then all of a sudden places like yours, where I am in Victoria and BC, Canada is a small city, but also fairly tech heavy.
Matt Hollingsworth (26:12):
So I don't think it's going to be affected as much, but you can imagine the knock on effects of what this does for small towns that have a lot to offer. And the quality of life is so high, as you said, that all of a sudden people from home can make the same salaries as if they were on the coast. And that's going to see, I think, a complete resurgence of small towns, what that does for the infrastructure there and just the appeal of these places that just offer a quieter, maybe more sane existence. And I don't know, I think that we're seeing that play out and it'll be interesting to continue to see how that goes both in the US and across the world.
Tyler Sellhorn (26:50):
I agree. I'm really excited to see the knock on effects that they're there. And obviously we need to be considered and thoughtful about the negative effects they're going to happen too. I was reading this week, what's going to happen to some of those places that ...
Tyler Sellhorn (27:03):
... This week, what's going to happen to some of those places that... Commercial real estate, I wouldn't want to be long on that right now. That's going to be a hard transition. But even those spaces in a post pandemic world, we're going to have to refit. So what are you going to refit with? Well, we've got a housing crisis in so many of those major metros that have a bunch of office space standing empty. Well, what are you going to do about it? I think the companies that have leaned into that, there is going to be an adjustment. There is something to adapt to here. The ones that do that and find a way to leverage the new environment in a way that serves everyone are going to be successful no matter what, but the ones that want to hold on to a way of doing things that was pre-2020, this is an epoch change. There is going to be a before and after of this moment. And what are we going to do inside of this transition? But also we can't hold onto what was before, unless it is still serving us. We've got to be smart about that. We've got to take stock of how things are going and how things will be going here soon. And we need to adjust.
Matt Hollingsworth (28:03):
Yeah. And we'll be there for the ride as it comes. And hopefully we can continue to have these kinds of conversations. I will be cognizant of your time here, Tyler, and appreciate you coming on to do this with us. A couple more closing questions here. I could talk to you for hours and hours, but we'll save that for a different time. One question for you specifically, because there's a good chance here that you're going to be leading these conversations and having guests on through this feed, what is your dream guest, if you had to choose one? And why is that the case?
Tyler Sellhorn (28:35):
Okay. If you make me choose one, my heroine is Brené Brown. And she's obviously popping here in the podcast space here. Recently, she launched Unlocking Us, I highly recommend her podcast, and she's also got Dare to Lead on the Spotify deal. I'm not as much of a fan of the whole inside the split... But that's too much inside baseball for podcast stuff. But if I was to say who do I want to talk to most, it'd be Brené Brown. I lead our customer experience team at Hubstaff using her principles. I've mentioned it before about holding space for others to become their best selves. She does a lot of rhyming with Carol Dweck and growth mindset and really thinking about okay, how do we share power in this environment? And that's really, I think, a big part of what remote working is about, is that there is a shift towards the end user and their power to decide and to be in control of their work environment, of their home environment, of their working conditions, because we can do it virtually inside of the device.
Tyler Sellhorn (29:46):
The work that we're doing is not tied to a specific location anymore and that's the right thing to do. And so I would be really excited to talk to Brené Brown in the context of thinking about the ways that she has noticed societal changes and the ways that we approach one another in relationships inside of work, outside of work, and being able to say, "Okay, let's dare to lead the next decade, next century of working in a way that respects the power that should be shared and can grow when we share amongst one another."
Matt Hollingsworth (30:17):
Yeah. That's awesome. It might be an opportunity for us to make that happen for both you and it would be great to have her on the show as well. So we will try to make that happen and listeners should stay tuned for that. Tyler, so I have one more closing question for you, as always, maybe you've had a chance to think about that and maybe you haven't, what is the best advice you've ever been given?
Tyler Sellhorn (30:40):
So the best advice that I was given was by my former principal who had moved on to another job and I was in the midst of that space where I was studying for an ed leadership master's and finishing up and trying to network to the next thing. And she was recognizing that she'd had a similar experience with the same people that I was running into of not really getting the yes from the people that I needed to get a yes from to do the next thing. And the thing that she said was you don't need their permission to do the next thing. And I think the thing that has really transformed my life here... I'm 38 years old now, back in 2019 I started scrolling the internet and found weworkremotely.com, that hey, I don't actually need their permission to do the next thing.
Tyler Sellhorn (31:32):
I really can become an education oriented technologist instead of a technology oriented educator, I can make that pivot, that there is an opportunity for me to choose to do something different and no one else has to say yes to that for that to happen for me. And I just want to encourage anybody else that's out there listening and thinking about can I make this change? Can I make this transition? Yes, you can. And I also want to encourage you to do it out loud. To do it in a way that other people can see and can be rooting you on. It's been my pleasure to meet and connect with people on the internet, people that are only internet acquaintances and encourage them to do the very same thing I did. The information is available. You can find it. Make a decision to go and seek it and then do the thing that you have always been wanting to do. It's possible for you too.
Matt Hollingsworth (32:24):
Yeah. That's a great message. And couldn't agree more with what you're saying. It was the same thing for me and I've told my origin story for remote work before. So I won't go into that too much, but there are so many amazing people out there that want to see you succeed and getting in touch with those people, Tyler being one of those people but there are many others, will help you and will encourage you to do those things that you want to do. And as Tyler mentioned, it's very much possible and it's out there and it's free to use and there's no limitations and nothing in your way. So I think that's a great way to end this conversation. Tyler, it's been an absolute pleasure and we'll let you all know about the next steps here and provide more information as it comes up. But Tyler, thank you so much for coming on the show and we look forward to working with you more.
Tyler Sellhorn (33:16):
It was a dream come true. Thank you, Matt. Appreciate the opportunity.
Matt Hollingsworth (33:21):
Thanks so much again for listening to the show. Be sure to check out weworkremotely.com for the latest remote jobs. And if you're looking to hire a remote worker, We Work Remotely is the fastest and easiest way to do so. As always, if you have someone we should talk to, any advice you have, or if you'd like to advertise on the podcast, please reach out to us at podcast@weworkremotely.com, that's podcast@weworkremotely.com. Thanks so much again for listening and we'll talk to you next time.
Tyler, thanks so much for coming on the show. We really appreciate it.
Tyler Sellhorn (01:01):
Oh, it's my pleasure, Matt. Really a big fan of We Work Remotely, the Remote Show, the whole nine yards. I'm a huge fan, so it's truly my pleasure to be here with you today.
Matt Hollingsworth (01:10):
Oh, it's exciting. That doesn't happen often to me where I get to talk to fans of the show. I know that some people listen to it, but that's always nice to hear so I appreciate that. So the first question as you, I'm sure, have heard is what is the thing that you've done, accomplished or otherwise over the past 12 months that you're most proud of?
Tyler Sellhorn (01:28):
Well, my boss is not quick to offer praise, and over the past, I'd say six months, we've been working towards building up some organizational software updates, some different things have happened inside of the officer level of our company and we've added a sales team, I lead the customer experience team, and so one of the things that was said to me just yesterday was, "Impressed and trying to find how do we keep you around forever?" Those are the types of things that you always hope to hear from your boss. What am I most proud of? I'm proud of the influence that I've been able to have, both inside and outside of Hubstaff, and especially with my relationship with my direct manager.
Matt Hollingsworth (02:13):
That's great. Yeah. That is definitely a high praise, especially for somebody who doesn't necessarily give up praise very often, so it's extra special. So we will get into all of this stuff related to Hubstaff and your role there and your remote experience with that company. They're longstanding We Work Remotely users, and we're big fans of what you and the team has built there. So we'll get into that, but I wanted to start off by just talking about why we're having this podcast specifically, why were recording this and outside of just wanting to talk to you about remote related things. This could be a regular occurrence.
Matt Hollingsworth (02:47):
Just so everybody knows who's listening, there's a good chance that Tyler will be helping us out on the podcasting side over the next... I don't want to give a timeline here because there's lots of things going, but there's a good chance that Tyler will be helping us out with this. And so what we're doing here today is we're just giving Tyler a chance to introduce himself, getting into the things that we would like to do with the podcast when it comes to the content and the guests and all that kind of stuff, so that was the goal of this show. And this is more of a welcome for Tyler and to get to know him better. So on that note, Tyler, do you want to give us a bit about your background, where you started your career and anything else that you think is relevant for this conversation and by way of intro?
Tyler Sellhorn (03:29):
Well, just to give a little background about me professionally, I started out as a professional educator for 13 years, mostly in mathematics education and the secondary schools. I'd always been a technology-oriented educator. I automated lots and lots of things that teachers often take home on the weekend, a stack of papers and all that sort of thing. I did my best to try and digitize and make those things automated and build processes around and iterate systems, thinking about how I did my job. And so I really saw an opportunity when I was studying for an ed leadership master's to kind of transition into teaching other teachers how to use technology well. I was starting to do some networking in that space and doors kept shutting my face. So I said, "Okay, I'm going to stop asking those people for permission to do the next thing," and I said, "Okay, if I used to be a technology-oriented educator, I'd like to be an education oriented technologist."
Tyler Sellhorn (04:23):
And so what's really cool is that that turned out to be a much better remunerated position than the technology educator, so I'm really excited about the opportunity that remote working has provided me and my family. My spouse is a therapist, and I've learned how to have a great helping relationship through her. And it's been a really awesome opportunity for me to experience using some skills that I had developed in other places as an educator in kind of leaning into how that might become a thing for me inside of a technology company. So some of the things that I've really learned outside of this job, now I've become a remote leader, a leader in a fully distributed team that spans from Seattle to Melbourne, how do you make it as a leader in a space where you're talking about leading teams in a cross-cultural global fashion, I've leaned on the lessons that I've learned as a dad and as a sports coach.
Tyler Sellhorn (05:21):
One of the things that we always joke about in our family, that I ended up doing a thing where I was long distance with my wife while she was in graduate school, and so we kind of joked that I earned an associates degree in clinical psychology with her. And so one of my favorite things that I learned from that experience was Carl Rogers. He's a titan of 20th century psychology. One of his concepts is unconditional positive regard. So what does that mean? Well, it means that, okay, we're going to have the opportunity to say okay to this other person. I'm here to help you, right? I'm here to help you hold the space for you to become your best self, right? And that's one of the things that I'm really, really excited about doing here inside of this space is the potential for the opportunity to meet lots of people and hold space for them to present themselves as their very best selves, and for us to learn from one another in that space.
Matt Hollingsworth (06:12):
Yeah. And that's one of the things that I think ends up working very well in the podcasting space, and what makes for a good show, I think is when we have somebody who's leading the show and interviewing people who is clearly interested in what they do and learning from them. I always find that with podcasts that I listen... I'm a podcast fan, very much more than I am a podcast to myself. And what I always find is I love shows that are run by people who clearly are just curious people and want to learn for themselves, but also want to teach others in the process of them learning through whoever they're interviewing. So I get that very much from you.
Matt Hollingsworth (06:52):
And I think that's why we are pursuing this, and we're going to be pursuing this in a more intentional and sequenced ways, especially the context we're in now, where we have lots of people. We have lots of companies that are looking to learn how to do this remote thing and do it well. We are now settling into this normalcy of being distributed, whatever that means for everybody. It means different things for different people, but I think we are uniquely positioned to teach and hopefully learn ourselves. So that is why I'm really excited to talk to you and learn from you and have you learned from others through the show.
Tyler Sellhorn (07:29):
Yeah. I mean, that's one of the big things that I've learned as a father. There's a lot of mistakes being made out there in the world of distributed work right now, and we don't want to put people in their place and point fingers. The thing that we want to do is we want to choose curiosity over judgment. We want to lean into... My little phrase that I put out there on the internet is learning out loud. And that's exactly what we're doing on podcast is we're taking the time to be thinking and talking and doing that metacognitive, not just thinking of inside of what we're doing, but also thinking about what we're doing, thinking at that level where we're thinking, is this serving us still? Or should we put it down and pick something else up? What are the things that we want to be able to do?
Tyler Sellhorn (08:12):
I like to kind of joke, because of my background in team sports, that I'd like to be known as the Ted Lasso of remote work, that I'm kind of that enthusiastic air horns guy of saying, "Okay, let's lean into the we, us, ours of..." That's one of the things I'm really grateful to have learned from the Snyder Football is where I am still the technology coordinator here in Fort Wayne, Indiana. It's really, really cool to take lessons from other parts of life and apply them and bring them back to here. I'm so excited to have the opportunity to potentially be learning from the very best minds who've spent lots of time thinking about remote work, as well as the people that are just now engaging with it and figuring things out for themselves and learning from best practices but also learning from new perspectives as they come in to this way of working.
Matt Hollingsworth (09:01):
Yeah. And especially now where-
Tyler Sellhorn (09:03):
To this way of working.
Matt Hollingsworth (09:03):
Yeah. And especially now where it's going to become a popular space, but I think we are, like I said before, uniquely positioned to help people as they move and transition into more of a consistently remote work environment. So, that is something that we've thought a lot about as well. And we're, like I said, we're excited to talk to you more and have you on the show more and let you lead this thing if all the stars align. I would like to just get into, now that we've learned a little bit about you, I would love to know, you mentioned before some of the issues that are happening right now with remote work and some of the problems that have come up that you've seen recently, and maybe not recently, but just in general, can you speak to one in particular that you are seeing quite often with remote teams?
Tyler Sellhorn (09:47):
I think the big thing is that I see a lack of intentionality, right? And what are some of the things that are the knock on effects of not doing things on purpose, right? The one that's sort of been talked about by a lot of people, but I want to highlight as well is the idea that instead of being in five, six hours of a conference room meeting space in a co-located environment, we're going to be in five, six hours of a Zoom meeting in a distributed environment, right? That type of on-camera expectation of being seen, being visible is really not leveraging the power of distributed work, right? Just to drop some names here, I really, really appreciate Matt Mullenweg's levels of remote working and taking steps towards asynchronous work.
Tyler Sellhorn (10:37):
Because when we say, "Okay, we must be in the same space for eight and a half, nine hours plus a day." Right? And now we're not in the same space, eight and a half, nine hours a day, what are we going to do instead? What is that time going to be filled with instead? And what it should be filled with is the opportunity to execute on goals, right? Execute towards completing tasks that really do move the needle in a asynchronous, quiet in your own space, and then be able to then take that back to the team and then iterate together of, "Okay, here's this things that I've thought about and worked on."
Tyler Sellhorn (11:17):
And there might be short bursts of synchronous activity, or there might be short bursts of activity that's happening with people that you may not even share very much overlap at all with. Our Asia Pacific team, inside of our team, we work on process documents at completely different times, but we are able to collaborate in a way that's really, really effective and aligned because we're working in the same spaces, asynchronously. We're working on the same documents, we're working on the same processes. They might be answering the requests of customers that are in their time zones, but we're all doing the same things because we have leaned into the fact that the sun does not revolve around Eastern Standard Time, right? That's not the way it works in physics nor the way it works in remote work.
Matt Hollingsworth (11:59):
Yeah. Well, we'll get into that other Hubstaff piece. I think you have a skillset here with your team and you can speak from personal experience, which I think is a really important thing for something like this as well. One thing I was curious to hear your thoughts on, and this is throwing you into the deep end just a little bit, but it's fun for me to do that because I'm interviewing you, so.
Tyler Sellhorn (12:19):
I'm here for it, Matt.
Matt Hollingsworth (12:20):
All right. So, what do you think are the potential, unforeseen, knock on effects of remote and the speed that it's happened over the past year? So, I'll expand on that a little bit by way of saying there's a lot of conversation around what this means for work, what this means for locations of people and where they choose to live. Is there anything that you think of that might be against the grain in this capacity, or anything uniquely that's maybe a bit different that you can speak to, or opinions you have about what this means for work in general?
Tyler Sellhorn (12:56):
Well, I think work from home is the responsible thing to do for companies right now during the midst of a global pandemic. That's the responsible thing to do right now. But the thing that's responsible going forward in 2021 and beyond, post vaccine, is going to be working from anywhere. And I don't think that there's going to be a lot of benefit to people saying, "I just want to be in the office two days, three days a week." Because there's all of that commute time. There's all of that wasted effort of being in the same space. And I mean that when I say wasted, because when you really lean into setting your team up to be a remote first company, there are benefits that exceed the collaboration benefits that might occur in a co-located environment. And I think people have started to embrace the idea of working remotely because they've seen their teams be productive in a distributed fashion.
Tyler Sellhorn (13:53):
But the problem is that we're shifting our mindset towards work from home and we don't want to do that anymore. We don't want to be stuck in one spot or inside of one building that's where we also live. Well, that's not remote working was before. What remote working was before was, in my life, I had the opportunity to take calls from the gym lobby or to meet a friend for lunch and then work from that cafe for the rest of the afternoon. I think it's really important that we not assume that the experience of 2020's work from home should be our experience going forward. So we shouldn't reject the aspects of working from home that are not so great because those are going to go away by being able to leave your house and the things that you want to get back to are giving a hug or traveling.
Tyler Sellhorn (14:42):
It's not either/or. This remote working thing is not either/or. It is both/and. And when we say work from anywhere, we are saying, you can be co-located, but do it like so many other remote companies have done before where we say, "Okay, we're going to have quarterly on-sites at the headquarters. And everybody's going to fly in from wherever and we're going to do our kickoff. And then annually, we're going to have automatic calls at a grand meetup. We're going to have an opportunity for us to all be together. And we're all going to have a shared space." Those things are important, but at what cost, right? Should they be every day? Should they even be at all in an office co-located environment? I think it's really important for us to not assume that the experience of 2020 is the experience of remote working past a vaccine being broadly distributed.
Matt Hollingsworth (15:37):
Yeah. And I think that's a good point. I would like to also add to that, and you spoke a bit about this, but remote working can be done successfully for long periods of time and it's sustainable and you can grow companies. People have done it, right? There's the Jason [inaudible 00:15:55] of the world that have built very large businesses and from a remote first standpoint. So it's not like everybody -
Tyler Sellhorn (16:02):
The Zapier guys. The Zapier guys this week, they got an injection of capital because I'm guessing that they're de-risking or paying off some debt at some point, but they're an example of another, quote unquote unicorn company that started and stayed remote for their entire existence.
Matt Hollingsworth (16:19):
Yeah, totally. And that's what I think what the show can be and what we're hoping to do it, we work remotely more generally for our content and our positioning is just to speak to that and say, " Hey, I know this is an anxious time and people are scrambling a bit." And I don't want to diminish that because that is the experience of a lot of people.
Tyler Sellhorn (16:36):
Of course.
Matt Hollingsworth (16:37):
But there are ways of doing this successfully, for a long period of time, that you can do it and enjoy your work, and probably enjoy your work more than you did before. And for those people who are curious about, I was fortunate enough to talk to Wade actually on the podcast a while back. So you can go back and listen to that one because that's a good conversation as well. But that's what I'm hoping to get out of this show, is talking to those people who have done this successfully, to give people a bit of a framework for being successful longterm in a remote capacity.
Tyler Sellhorn (17:05):
For sure. I think it's really, really important for us to continue to bring forward the voices of those who have done it successfully and those that are learning from those people and finding success again. We need to find the social proof. We need to find the repeatability of these learnings that have occurred. I think it's really important for us to kind of say, this isn't the first era of remote work ever. It just happens to be that the internet has really made it a lot easier for a lot more people to do it. My favorite metaphor for remote working is a Naval Captain. My home office is kind of a nautical themed set up here. And I really lean into that idea because when you think about, okay, you're going to go off on a mission and you have to have really clear parameters around what you're going to be going to accomplish because there's asynchronous communication. You're not going to be able to stay in direct contact all the time. You're going to have to do some dead reckoning based upon the stars and celestial bodies.
Tyler Sellhorn (18:03):
To do some dead reckoning based upon the stars and celestial bodies to be able to find out, "Okay, where are we at in this thing?" You're going to have to stay connected with routines and procedure and all of those sorts of things that you would say, "Okay, we're going to have a first watch, second watch on the bells." There's silly when you start doing the metaphor thing, you extended too far, but that's a really great place for us to say, "You know what? Remote working has been a part of our world for much longer than today. It's been a part of our world for much longer than that. And we need to recognize that we don't have to have all of the answers. We can pay attention to those that have already figured out so many things and learn from their experience."
Tyler Sellhorn (18:40):
That's been my experience, right? I learned how to be a successful remote worker and got promoted inside of six months because of the learning out loud that you and the We Work Remotely community has been doing. I connected to Laurel Farrar, Lisette Sutherland, Tammy Bellen, and the Darren's, Buckner and Murph, Matt Mullenweg. You've mentioned the base camp guys. I learned how to do customer experience things from the podcast and resources that are already out there. Today, in the information age, we don't have a limit on the amount of information that's out there. We just need to be smart about who we're listening to that have already curated that information to help us be successful. And work remotely as one of those sources that says, "Okay, I'm going to pivot my stuff off of We Work Remotely because they've figured it out. And they're helping companies that are doing it well. And I'm going to align myself with brands like that so that I am successful doing the same things because of the benefits it brings.
Matt Hollingsworth (19:35):
Yeah. And for us too, it's great because obviously our business is dependent on the remote nature of work and the growth of that. But we also are remote workers. We're trying to figure it out alongside everybody else. And what's so interesting, and this comes up a lot too, because I have a small team that I manage and I help with the business. And it's always funny to me when I think about my day to day. And I think, "Oh, I just had this conversation about over communication or writing more clearly or not having to ping somebody when they're in their deep work." And all this kind of stuff where I talk about it all the time.
Matt Hollingsworth (20:11):
And yet I still find myself having to stop myself from doing those things. Because to your point about intentionality, even for myself, who should be a very good remote worker and hopefully I'm better than what I was and still is hard. And that's something I think is important is remote working is hard. I think the benefits vastly outweigh the negatives, but it's something you need to be on a daily basis thinking about getting better at. And so I actually, this is a good segue to my next question for you is what has been the biggest challenge for you? You've got a lot of resources and you're great at what you do and you've been promoted, but what is the biggest challenge that you're finding for remote distributed teams?
Tyler Sellhorn (20:47):
I think the things that are hardest are the things that have always been hard about global teams. It's time zones. How to manage the fact that we don't all work at the same time, more so than we don't all work in the same office. Right? The big thing that's really difficult about small companies like ours, that we are distributing our software worldwide and supporting it worldwide. How do you stay connected with people? Our hardest time zone we have inside of our team, we have four people that are plus 12 from EST, that's as hard as it gets. Right? So one of the things that I really see a lot of benefit from it, I've had to work hard to solve is that I am a dad, so I work 90 minutes before my children eat breakfast. And this is the beauty of remote work is being able to fit the things that you need to do into your life rather than the other way around, where it was so much more of, here is this chunk of time.
Tyler Sellhorn (21:49):
You're commuting, all of that, and it just owns you for the vast majority of your day. Instead of for me, compared to teaching school, working remotely is like taking a day off of school every day. Because I'm able to organize my working time around my responsibilities as a father, responsibilities as a husband, other things that I do in my life, like coaching team sports. Those are things that I have an opportunity to put as the priority in my calendar day. And then, you know what? If I work those 90 minutes before breakfast, now I've got 90 minutes where I do overlap the working time of the people that are 12 hours ahead of me in the day. And now I can space out what I'm doing and have the space to be able to exercise and to take time for my mental health in the middle of my day.
Tyler Sellhorn (22:36):
And that I can go and meet a friend for lunch and not feel like I'm rushed or that I've got to get back to the office because we've got this coat hanger accountability that like I'm back. I've heard jokes about people that would get a relationship with the morning janitor to turn on their computer and their lights so that it appeared that they arrived first. And then they strolled in later in the day at their first meeting. Games like that, that get played in a co-located environment don't do that. Sharing the power of when you do your work with the people that are doing the work is an absolute cheat code and why more people aren't grabbing onto that as an idea, and I think more and more are, but I think that that's really, really key for us to have that understanding that it's possible for us to be even better than we were by doing it in this new way.
Matt Hollingsworth (23:28):
There's a lot there that we can pick apart, but the one piece, and it just reminds me of Jason Freed, who my listeners will know I'm a big fan of, and I was able to talk to you on the show too, but he has this quote. It's not going to be verbatim, but "The company isn't a family, but the company supports families."
Tyler Sellhorn (23:43):
Yes.
Matt Hollingsworth (23:43):
Which is your point where it's like, I think that structuring and framing the company as a family is not the right mentality because you make sacrifices that you wouldn't have otherwise made for those people that are your family and what a company should be is as you have structured your life around your priorities, which are your family, it should be the company supports you in doing so. And then you work there to be able to support your family. So that's something that sticks out to me as a really underappreciated component of remote work and what that does for people.
Tyler Sellhorn (24:13):
Yeah. I am incredibly grateful for those that have gone before me and my experience with remote working and the ways that they've been intentional and on purpose about things. We are supporting the opportunity for people to choose their best lives when they work remotely. You were mentioning earlier, just what's going to happen. What are some of the knock on effects of more and more people working in a distributed fashion? Well, it means that people are going to live close to family. So often I'm here in the post-industrial Midwest, and there's so many of our university graduates that go to find work on the coast here in the United States.
Tyler Sellhorn (24:53):
And it's really hard for all of the best and brightest to just depart from their home as soon as they get to adulthood. I think you're going to see a transformation of those home districts that we think of going back home or having grown up in a place. Those places are going to be transformed. It's already happening here in Fort Wayne because of our history in the railroad industry. The internet pipes go right past our homes. And so I think small and medium-sized cities like Fort Wayne are going to have a boom because the cost of living is low and the quality of life is high and we have great internet. So even just the defaults of what is happening, shifting even a little bit is going to completely transform communities, like the one I live in.
Matt Hollingsworth (25:44):
Yeah. Yeah. And what's so cool is that what we're seeing among some of the more, I don't want to pass judgment here, but some of the more thoughtful companies is that equal pay no matter where you are. So, to me, it makes total sense if the output is the same, it shouldn't really matter where you are and in terms of your pay. And then all of a sudden places like yours, where I am in Victoria and BC, Canada is a small city, but also fairly tech heavy.
Matt Hollingsworth (26:12):
So I don't think it's going to be affected as much, but you can imagine the knock on effects of what this does for small towns that have a lot to offer. And the quality of life is so high, as you said, that all of a sudden people from home can make the same salaries as if they were on the coast. And that's going to see, I think, a complete resurgence of small towns, what that does for the infrastructure there and just the appeal of these places that just offer a quieter, maybe more sane existence. And I don't know, I think that we're seeing that play out and it'll be interesting to continue to see how that goes both in the US and across the world.
Tyler Sellhorn (26:50):
I agree. I'm really excited to see the knock on effects that they're there. And obviously we need to be considered and thoughtful about the negative effects they're going to happen too. I was reading this week, what's going to happen to some of those places that ...
Tyler Sellhorn (27:03):
... This week, what's going to happen to some of those places that... Commercial real estate, I wouldn't want to be long on that right now. That's going to be a hard transition. But even those spaces in a post pandemic world, we're going to have to refit. So what are you going to refit with? Well, we've got a housing crisis in so many of those major metros that have a bunch of office space standing empty. Well, what are you going to do about it? I think the companies that have leaned into that, there is going to be an adjustment. There is something to adapt to here. The ones that do that and find a way to leverage the new environment in a way that serves everyone are going to be successful no matter what, but the ones that want to hold on to a way of doing things that was pre-2020, this is an epoch change. There is going to be a before and after of this moment. And what are we going to do inside of this transition? But also we can't hold onto what was before, unless it is still serving us. We've got to be smart about that. We've got to take stock of how things are going and how things will be going here soon. And we need to adjust.
Matt Hollingsworth (28:03):
Yeah. And we'll be there for the ride as it comes. And hopefully we can continue to have these kinds of conversations. I will be cognizant of your time here, Tyler, and appreciate you coming on to do this with us. A couple more closing questions here. I could talk to you for hours and hours, but we'll save that for a different time. One question for you specifically, because there's a good chance here that you're going to be leading these conversations and having guests on through this feed, what is your dream guest, if you had to choose one? And why is that the case?
Tyler Sellhorn (28:35):
Okay. If you make me choose one, my heroine is Brené Brown. And she's obviously popping here in the podcast space here. Recently, she launched Unlocking Us, I highly recommend her podcast, and she's also got Dare to Lead on the Spotify deal. I'm not as much of a fan of the whole inside the split... But that's too much inside baseball for podcast stuff. But if I was to say who do I want to talk to most, it'd be Brené Brown. I lead our customer experience team at Hubstaff using her principles. I've mentioned it before about holding space for others to become their best selves. She does a lot of rhyming with Carol Dweck and growth mindset and really thinking about okay, how do we share power in this environment? And that's really, I think, a big part of what remote working is about, is that there is a shift towards the end user and their power to decide and to be in control of their work environment, of their home environment, of their working conditions, because we can do it virtually inside of the device.
Tyler Sellhorn (29:46):
The work that we're doing is not tied to a specific location anymore and that's the right thing to do. And so I would be really excited to talk to Brené Brown in the context of thinking about the ways that she has noticed societal changes and the ways that we approach one another in relationships inside of work, outside of work, and being able to say, "Okay, let's dare to lead the next decade, next century of working in a way that respects the power that should be shared and can grow when we share amongst one another."
Matt Hollingsworth (30:17):
Yeah. That's awesome. It might be an opportunity for us to make that happen for both you and it would be great to have her on the show as well. So we will try to make that happen and listeners should stay tuned for that. Tyler, so I have one more closing question for you, as always, maybe you've had a chance to think about that and maybe you haven't, what is the best advice you've ever been given?
Tyler Sellhorn (30:40):
So the best advice that I was given was by my former principal who had moved on to another job and I was in the midst of that space where I was studying for an ed leadership master's and finishing up and trying to network to the next thing. And she was recognizing that she'd had a similar experience with the same people that I was running into of not really getting the yes from the people that I needed to get a yes from to do the next thing. And the thing that she said was you don't need their permission to do the next thing. And I think the thing that has really transformed my life here... I'm 38 years old now, back in 2019 I started scrolling the internet and found weworkremotely.com, that hey, I don't actually need their permission to do the next thing.
Tyler Sellhorn (31:32):
I really can become an education oriented technologist instead of a technology oriented educator, I can make that pivot, that there is an opportunity for me to choose to do something different and no one else has to say yes to that for that to happen for me. And I just want to encourage anybody else that's out there listening and thinking about can I make this change? Can I make this transition? Yes, you can. And I also want to encourage you to do it out loud. To do it in a way that other people can see and can be rooting you on. It's been my pleasure to meet and connect with people on the internet, people that are only internet acquaintances and encourage them to do the very same thing I did. The information is available. You can find it. Make a decision to go and seek it and then do the thing that you have always been wanting to do. It's possible for you too.
Matt Hollingsworth (32:24):
Yeah. That's a great message. And couldn't agree more with what you're saying. It was the same thing for me and I've told my origin story for remote work before. So I won't go into that too much, but there are so many amazing people out there that want to see you succeed and getting in touch with those people, Tyler being one of those people but there are many others, will help you and will encourage you to do those things that you want to do. And as Tyler mentioned, it's very much possible and it's out there and it's free to use and there's no limitations and nothing in your way. So I think that's a great way to end this conversation. Tyler, it's been an absolute pleasure and we'll let you all know about the next steps here and provide more information as it comes up. But Tyler, thank you so much for coming on the show and we look forward to working with you more.
Tyler Sellhorn (33:16):
It was a dream come true. Thank you, Matt. Appreciate the opportunity.
Matt Hollingsworth (33:21):
Thanks so much again for listening to the show. Be sure to check out weworkremotely.com for the latest remote jobs. And if you're looking to hire a remote worker, We Work Remotely is the fastest and easiest way to do so. As always, if you have someone we should talk to, any advice you have, or if you'd like to advertise on the podcast, please reach out to us at podcast@weworkremotely.com, that's podcast@weworkremotely.com. Thanks so much again for listening and we'll talk to you next time.
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