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I would say that I used to be before I started on this big research project about saying no and really realized how much of it was about me trying to make sure other people liked me. And so once I started on this journey, on this project, I really learned if I was going to make any progress, I was going to have to stop doing that. Hey, it's Adam Grant. We're doing something different this season of Work Life, my podcast with Tedd.
I'm still an organizational psychologist, and I still study how to make work not suck. But this season, we're pairing each of our regular episodes with a companion interview. It might be with an expert, a practitioner, or someone unexpected who can add a different perspective to our episode and build on and challenge what we said. Today is our companion interview for the episode on how to say no. And who better to call on than Linda Babcock, Professor Emerita of Economics at Carnegie Mellon and co-author of The No Club.
It's a club of people who help each other say no. So one day I was in my office at Carnegie Mellon and I looked at my schedule for the day and what I saw is it was full of meetings. And none of these meetings were about research, which is the way I'm
were assessed and evaluated in my job. They were all meeting with students, going to a faculty meeting, talking to a reporter. And I went across the hall to my friend George, who has the same job as I do. And I said, hey, George, let me look at your schedule today. And he showed it to me. And of course, it was filled with research meetings all day.
And what I realized is that I needed an intervention because I wasn't getting time to do my work. And so I reached out to a bunch of my friends in a panicked email saying, hey, I need an intervention. My guess is you all have the same problem I do. Do you want to get together for drinks? And the no club was born. And we've been meeting for the last 15 years, just about every month to talk about the things that we've agreed to that we probably shouldn't have. Did this look different for your male colleagues?
Well, interestingly, the group that I reached out to was all women. And, you know, when I would tell male colleagues about the club, sometimes they'd just say, look at me like I was crazy. Like, why don't you just say no to these things since it's not obvious?
And what we realized is that women have a harder time saying no. And some of that is because there can be backlash when they do say no. That is, we have society's expectations that women are helpful. They're happy to help. And so when you say no, it's really counter-normative and people can begin to form negative impressions of you. And so there is a ton of pressure on women to say yes. Linda's experienced that pressure firsthand, but she's also studied it.
She's done experiments on non-promotable tasks, the type of work that helps organizations run but isn't seen as strategic. Tasks like taking notes in meetings, planning social events, onboarding new hires, and volunteering for extra responsibilities. You know when you're in a meeting and the person leading the meeting says, hey, who would like to do blah, blah, blah, whatever task? And they're sitting around waiting for volunteers.
And of course, everyone is like looking away, you know, packing up their stuff to go. No one wants to be the one to volunteer. And the question is, who is the one after a very long period of silence, you know, breaks down and says, oh my goodness, okay, I'll do it when they clearly don't want to. So what we wanted to do is design an experiment that was like that situation. Linda and her colleagues put people in groups to play a game. If anyone in the group pressed a button within two minutes, the whole group would earn money.
Easy, right? Only one person has to press a button and everyone wins. The catch? The person who actually presses the button, the hero of the group, earns less than everyone else. And we look at who presses the button. Specifically, is it men or is it women that press the button? And what we find that over 10 rounds, women on average press the button 50% more times than men do.
And so what's happening is that the men are just waiting around for someone else. There's probably a woman in my group, right? She's going to press the button. The women are thinking, oh, someone else isn't going to press it. I'm going to press it. And so it's not that women are good at pressing the button, right? Because some people say, well, women do non-promotable tasks because they're good at them. Well, this is not one of those situations. Like everybody is equally good at pressing the button. No one really wants to. And so women press the button more.
Linda, that dynamic sounds like every group project ever. Yeah, exactly. No, that's right. You want it to all get done, but you're hoping someone else takes one for the team. And it was very robust finding that women are just much more likely to do that taking for the team. And what's interesting about this research is that if you put women in all women groups and they see who presses the button,
And you put men in all men groups and see who presses the button. Women and men on average press the button about the same amount. It isn't that all the women groups are always succeeding and the men are just free riding. Men, when they're with other men and they know it, they look around and they say, oh my goodness, I'm with other men. There's no woman here to press the button. I'm going to have to do it. And women are relieved. They look around, they see other women and they say, oh, like someone else is going to press the button. They don't have to do it as much.
much. And so these differences that we find in these experiments are not coming from people's preferences or how good they are at doing the task, but it's the expectations that others will fill in and do it. Frustrating. Now, you also added a manager to allocate these kinds of tasks. What happened then?
Well, they were much more likely to ask the woman than the man in their group to press the button. And then again, we don't think she's better at pressing the button or that she likes to press the button, but we ask women because we think they will. And they were right. They did.
I have to say, when I first read your research on non-promotable tasks, I shouldn't have been, but I was surprised that this was still so common. I'm like, what century is this? Why is this still happening? Can you quantify the problem for us? How much time are women spending on these non-promotable tasks where they're helping but not getting any credit for it?
Yeah, absolutely. I'll tell you about a study of this wonderful data that we got access to. I was working for a consulting company doing some talks, and they told me that they had data on how people spent their time at work. Because, of course, consultants have to keep meticulous track of their time because they're billing clients. And so the firm set up a system where every 15 minutes you have to account for
with a code about what you were doing those 15 minutes.
And before we looked at the data, I had the company managers go through and classify what is promotable and what is non-promotable. And then we looked at how men and women in the same jobs spent their time. And what we found is that the women spent more than 200 hours more than men did per year doing work that the firm themselves had classified as non-promotable. I'm sorry, that was 200 hours per woman? Yes.
Yes, 200 hours a year per woman on average more than the men. And so it's like men have an extra month or women have one fewer month to be productive. And so you can imagine how that it's going to affect your performance because either you have to stop doing so much promotable work or you have to work extra hours and neither is a good option. So I want to talk about what we can do about that.
When I see just how systematic the problem is, the scale of it, I think this is actually a problem for organizations to solve, not just individuals. And we ought to have systems for allocating these non-promotable tasks equitably as opposed to dumping them on the people who seem most willing to volunteer or are least likely to say no. How do you think about that?
Yeah, I absolutely agree with you, Adam, because suppose everyone listening to your podcast decided they were going to start saying no to everything. Well, organizations would be in a very difficult bind then because this is work that's important for them and it wouldn't be getting done. And so organizations have to figure out a way to make this more fair. And so you can think about rotating these tasks. Random assignment.
You know, drawing the name of the hat for who's going to plan the social events, you know, the golf event this year. So that means we have to take a few steps. The first one is to identify all these non-promotable tasks. The second is to put someone in charge of allocating them. And then a third is to make sure that that allocation is fair and even. And, you know, that might not be an easy task. You think about sometimes how these tasks are allocated, and often it's for asking for volunteers.
Well, that's probably the worst way to ask because the people that are the people pleasers, of course, are going to be the ones that are going to volunteer. They're going to get behind in their promotable work. And then you're going to lose those as resources to your organization. I was thinking on a similar note that if a task needs to be done, we shouldn't be leaning on volunteers in the first place. It should be in someone's job description.
That's exactly right. And that's kind of the big point that we try to make in our work. And that is maybe some of these tasks ought to be promotable. That is, if a task is so important that we're asking people to do it, maybe we should include that in our performance evaluation. And so one of the organizations I was working for, they were redoing their performance evaluation system when I came to give a talk about this work. And what they decided to do is make helping
And so they set up a system where if someone gave you some great help, you could put a little note in the file saying, hey, this person spent a lot of time really helped me out with this work. And then that was accounted for when that person's performance was being evaluated. And so it makes what was non-promotable, promotable. That makes so much sense. I've seen some companies do this to you. I've studied...
peer bonus programs in tech companies, for example, where people can allocate a certain amount of money to somebody who's gone above and beyond to help them out. And importantly, they have to explain why they've earned the bonus. So they're not just being nice. They're actually helping to solve a problem or advance a goal. Let's recognize and reward those people. Why do you think it's so rare for organizations to build these systems? Well, I think some of these non-promotable tasks are
are not that quantifiable. When I think about the consultants that I studied, how many hours you spent billing a client is very objective, okay? Versus...
What's the quality of the work that you did on putting together a report for the organization? Maybe that you won't be evaluated on, but the organization needed. Or how do you account for time spent on a governance committee or time helping others? And so I think we just haven't been as mindful to these other tasks that actually really do help the organization thrive that we might want to then reconsider for adding to performance. Okay, so...
Given that not all of our listeners are in a position to build the kinds of systems that you were talking about, we also want to equip people with individual strategies to join your no club. Absolutely. There are some situations that are just make it difficult for us to make good decisions. So what are those situations? The first one is called the planning fallacy.
We say yes to things because we're really underestimating how long something's going to take. Adam, when you ask me to be on this podcast, I have to think about, well, I'm going to be on for an hour talking to him. So it takes an hour. Okay, of course I can do that. But then I wrote a bunch of notes. I have my talking points. Ended up spending a number of hours on it, which was much more than the hour that I agreed to, which of course I was happy to. Um,
But our rule for this is whenever you make an estimate about how long something's actually going to take, multiply by four, and then you're going to be in the ballpark more. If you think about the future, when someone asks you to do something, and maybe it's next month,
Well, future you is maybe not as busy as current you. And so you look at your calendar and you say, oh, yeah, I've got some time I can do that. But what you don't recognize is that that day a month from now is going to look just like today. You're going to be just as busy then. And so that can be a trap because you think you're going to not be busy in the future. So the fix for that is just imagine the request was for today or tomorrow.
Would you still be as excited to do it? And you'll be able to see, no, actually, I really can't do that. You know, Linda, as you describe this temporal discounting problem, I think future me is always busier than current me. Like, not just as busy, busier. Oh, really? Future you? Well, I just think opportunities and tasks only accumulate over time. Yeah. And unless I'm getting better at saying no at a faster rate,
than that accumulation. Future me is actually in a worse position than present me. Yeah. Well, I think you have a lot of self-awareness. You realize that future you is going to be busy. Whereas many people, when they look, think about their calendar, they just look at it now and feel like they're not going to be busy. And so that's a real problem. Some other problems that you can face is feeling pressure to decide immediately. When someone asks you to do something,
You can get a little panicked and just agree in the moment without really thinking it through. And so I have a 24-hour rule. That is, I can say no immediately, but if I think I might say yes, I have to wait 24 hours. And that will give me time to more calmly think about, is this really a good decision? I love that one. The 24-hour rule is really powerful, and it's definitely helped me avoid some yeses that I would have regretted later.
I've also learned over time that, I guess, is that I've gained power and status, and I might be putting pressure on other people. I often give people a 48-hour rule before they're allowed to say yes to an invitation or an opportunity because I don't want them to be tempted in the moment and then kick themselves afterward. Do you know anything about the ideal amount of time? Do we have any data on that?
We don't have any data. I think the point in general is don't decide right away. Give yourself however amount of time feels right to get back to them in a timely way, but have some time to think through it calmly. I like it. Okay, what is the next trap? Failing to think about your opportunity costs.
then this is a little bit like the future you. But realize that I can't just add one more thing to my plate. You know, I know, Adam, you're really busy. If you add one thing, you need to take off something else. You just can't pile it on. And so really thinking carefully about what is that thing that I'm not going to do. And one of my book co-authors, Lisa Westerlund, what she realized is the thing she was always taking off was time with her kids.
And so she had a rule that when she was going to agree to do something, she had to pick up the picture of her two children and say to their faces, yes, Jake and Laura, I'm going to be commenting on this paper over the weekend for someone I don't even know. And I'm not going to be taking you to the park.
And so she would, yes, ouch. And that really made clear for her what the opportunity cost of what it is she would be giving up by agreeing to do this one thing. And that really helped her to reprioritize her time.
This is like the mirror image of what I've done in my research for a long time, which is, in my case, helping people see the meaning of their jobs by coming face-to-face with the clients or customers or end users who benefit from their work. In this case, you're coming face-to-face with the most important victim of your bad decisions. Exactly. That's incredibly clever. The other thing that's really interesting about this is
When I think about this particular trap, it reminds me of one of our past guests, Ladi Klotz, who was studying addition bias and said, every time you're going to make an additive change, you should commit to a subtractive one. And sometimes I've even formalized this and said, I'm in subtraction mode. I will not add anything else to my calendar unless I can subtract something equal or greater. I think it's a great strategy. And it's one we think about when you need help saying no.
For example, let's say at work, you're getting a lot of these requests to do non-promotable tasks. You might engage your supervisor and have a discussion with that person saying, I'm
I can do this additional thing if this is really important, but what are the things that I can stop doing that maybe are less important for me to do? And so to work with another person, probably your supervisor or manager, to do that, if you're going to add something, you've got to subtract something because you just can't keep piling on. And that actually provides a nice opportunity for you to work with someone else and
to help you better think about how to prioritize your time because your incentives are completely aligned, you and your supervisor here. You want to do the things that are going to be best for the organization. That's exactly what Sherry Liu did in our recent episode. And I love your framing of it to say, can you help me with the math here? I'm being asked to add a lot, but I don't see any subtraction. Yeah. I guess the final one, the decision trap we've thought about was what we call the diva moment.
And that is someone asks you to do something and you feel so honored that you were asked. And so you feel so great about yourself. And so then, of course, you're going to say yes, because you have this really positive feeling now. And it may be something you actually don't want to do. It's just that you were honored to be asked.
And our fix for that is that you can still be a diva because you were asked. You can still bask in that glow, but you can still say no. And that may be just the best of both worlds. That's my favorite moment for the referral to say, wow, I'm really honored and flattered. And now let me think about someone else who would be even more excited to bask in that glow and create this opportunity for them. This episode is brought to you by Human Intelligence from WorkHuman.
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Thank you.
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Our world is marked by divisions, and we're not sure how to engage neighbors across differences. I'm Nicole Argo, the founder and executive director at the Together Up Institute. And I'm Scott Hutchison, the executive director of E Pluribus Uno. On Reimagining Us, we'll be talking to behavioral scientists, changemakers, and educators to hear true stories of people bridging divides and finding common ground. Learn more at togetherup.org slash reimaginingus.
Linda, I'm hoping that you can help me resolve a debate with a couple of colleagues. A couple of very smart women that I work with said, I don't want to stop taking notes in meetings because I like having the power of the pen. The person who creates the record also shapes the record. And it did dawn on me then that there are sometimes hidden benefits of taking on these roles. How do you know where to draw the line?
Well, that's when a careful reflection of what it is you do is so important. And so if you keep track of how you spend your time at work, you have a list of all the things that you do, right? You have some promotable work, you have some work that's maybe somewhere in between and some that's clearly non-promotable. And everybody has to do some non-promotable work.
So the question is, are you doing the right non-promotable work? All right. And so for me, for example, I find great gratification in mentoring other people. And so that's the non-promotable work that I want to do. And so looking at the things that you enjoy, the things that, you know, are personally meaningful to you, or maybe the things that bring your unique skills to bear.
So for example, at the university, you're asked to do a lot of different kinds of tasks, being on a lot of different kinds of committees. And I won't just be on one where I'm just a random body, right? They just need somebody. But if there's a committee that is developing issues about equity and fairness in personnel policies on campus, that's something I have some expertise in and that I'm going to be one of the few people qualified to be on that. That's something I'll say yes to.
And so if your colleague finds that that's something that they find useful is to take the notes so that they can shape the discussion, then that's one of the things they should be doing and taking other things off the list that do not check that box.
That tracks very nicely with, I guess, with the advice that I've given over the years when people ask, how do I become a giver without burning out or getting burned? Exactly. My guidance is usually, it pretty much boils down to be thoughtful about who you help, when you help, and how you help. Don't make yourself crazy helping takers.
Don't compromise your own goals and make sure you're helping in ways that add unique value as opposed to just indiscriminately saying yes. No, that's right. And, you know, the characteristic of many of these non-promotable tasks are that they just need a body. They don't need you in particular. Okay. I also wanted to ask you about situations where people can't say no.
Certain non-promotable tasks that may not be in your job description, but there's already an expectation that you'll do them. Many people work in organizations where their bosses are just not amenable to trying to think about how to allocate these more fairly. What do you do in those moments? Yeah, that's a great question because, you know, we've been talking about this as you have the ability to say no, but you're absolutely right that sometimes we just don't
must say yes. And so how to do that in a way that's going to be best for us. One thing to do is agree to do part of it. So if the task can be broken up into several components, say, yeah, I'll do this part. And then who could I pass it on to when I'm finished with this part and they can carry it to the finish line. And that way you're setting yourself up for a smaller task than if you agreed to do the whole thing.
Another thing to do is, of course, we talked about this earlier, and that is get something else taken off your plate. So yes, I can see this is really important. I need to do this right now. Can you help me think about what I should stop doing so that I can free some of my time up to really focus on this important issue? The other thing you can think about is try to get some additional resources. So if I'm asked to plan a big event,
Is there some staff support that I could have to help me with this? I can kind of formulate it and reach some decisions and then having someone else implement it. You've used the term negotiate the boundaries of yes. Absolutely. So I'm not saying yes to the whole thing. I'm going to do part of it. Who else can help me with it? What are the resources I can have?
what is the length of time I'll do the task? If I'm going to agree to take notes in meetings, I'll do it for the next month. And then who are we going to rotate it to? So because you get a task, it's not yours forever. And to negotiate the boundary of that when it is, I'm going to be handing that off. One of the other things that you could think about doing is
I don't know how you're going to feel about this one. And that is sometimes a B plus job is good enough.
So it might take you 10 hours to do an A+, but only five to do a B+. And so that's a decision, how intensive of an effort do I want to make on this and to decide, is a B plus good enough? And people might not be expecting an A+, that is, they might be thrilled with a B+. And so it's not that I'm going to look incompetent, it's that they're still going to be pleased. I'm not going to kill myself doing this task. And it's a win-win.
Well, that's the ideal situation. I was thinking about the more problematic and for me more common, sort of no good deed goes unpunished, where somebody hands you a task you don't want to do, you crush it. And then guess what? You've now invited yourself to get nine more. It's yours forever. Yes, exactly. It's yours forever. Oh, Adam, but you're the best person to do this. And my response to that is, I'm sure that if
ex other person worked really hard on it, they could also do this task. And so just because you crushed it doesn't mean it's yours forever.
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Because when your operations are smooth, your impact can be bigger. Visit business.walmart.com to get started. Let's go back to the collective level for a second. I think we all know individual people pleasers. I've also worked with organizations that have cultures of people pleasing, where there's a norm, an expectation, maybe even pressure to say yes to everything. How do you think about that problem and beginning to solve it?
Well, I think that that is maybe an organization who is not prioritizing people's time very well. And so it really takes top leadership to be thinking, what are the things that are really strategic for us? What are the things that really need to be done? And finding a way to align your culture with how to incentivize those things.
I like that. I think it applies actually to maybe both of the flavors that I've seen. So when I think about people-pleasing cultures, one version is organizations with extreme norms of politeness, where no one ever wants to refuse a meeting invitation, for example, and then you end up with meetings with 28 people in them when only four of them are really actively participating.
The other is customer obsession organizations, where you can never say no to the client. You can never turn the customer down. The customer is always right. Good service means always saying yes. And that, I think, actually allows a lot of abusive client-customer behavior. You know, the organizations that we've worked with tend to be ones that are coming to us because they're having a problem with this behavior.
allocation of these non-promotable tasks. So it is that some people are free-riding and others are doing too much of this work. And that imbalance is also not good for an organization because it breeds
resentment among coworkers. You know, why am I having to do all these things? And my colleague is saying no, and then they're getting promoted because they're spending their time a different way. And so at some point, the people-pleasing yesers are going to start saying no, and then you won't have any of this work getting done. And so
Finding a balance where everyone is doing a little bit. And you can think about setting organizational norms. So everyone needs to sit on one governance committee. Everybody needs to do five hours a week of mentoring others in the organization. Whatever it is that kind of makes sense. What are the non-promotable work that you value that you're trying to incentivize?
That also makes me think about another type of norm, which is we talked in the last episode about personal policies and having a set of heuristics or rules for things that I just don't say yes to. I wonder if teams or organizations should have these too. If I'm a manager, I should have a list of things that you should never do for a client or that you should not agree to for a colleague. What do you think of that?
Oh, absolutely. I mean, I'm sure that you've mentored enough junior colleagues in your life that you have those lists of things. Never agree to be on the faculty senate. Don't referee too many papers. You know, whatever it is, you have that list in your head about all the things that you ought to say no to. And that's actually...
What a no club, I think, can really do for you. And that is a group of like-minded people or people that understand your work setting and you understand theirs. You can get together and talk about these things to try to develop your personal policies. Because I really like that about, you know, what you said on the episode, Adam, about having those policies. I just wonder, like, how did you arrive at those?
You know, and I think it takes a lot of work to think about what are the things I value most and then the other things I can just let go. Yeah, I think for me, regret is my best teacher. So I repeatedly said yes to certain kinds of requests. It's like, should not have done that. OK, that's going on the on the on the no list. But speaking of the episode, I want to give you a chance to say no to something that that we recommended. What did what did you hear that you disagreed with or wanted to debate or complicate? Yeah.
It wasn't so much disagreed with, but as we were talking earlier, taking such a micro perspective misses out on the bigger point of what should organizations be doing? You know, we can all start saying no and find ways to better spend our time, but eventually this work that is important needs to get done. You know, organizations need to have people help each other, fill in while each other's at work. We need to recruit people. We need to mentor. We need to
train. You know, we need to prove someone's PowerPoint presentation. We need to plan outings. Do we really? Yeah, maybe, maybe not.
We need to plan outings to build culture. And so maybe those should be somebody's jobs. And so I think if I were to critique anything, it would be taking too small of a perspective and only trying to change yourself in the system, not thinking about how to work through the system to change it so that we're all happier, healthier, and more productive.
That's a valid critique as far as I'm concerned. And it's often where I feel I'm a little bit outside my expertise as a psychologist. And this is one of the reasons I called an economist. So, okay, Linda, last question for you. How has the no club affected your life both at and outside work?
Well, profoundly in so many ways. I mean, professionally, this club that we started just because I needed an intervention led to some rewards and maybe turned out to be promotable in the end because of the work that I did. I would say personally, I felt like it really helped me to make better use of my time, to really be more purposeful about the things I was agreeing to and why.
You know, like you have your personal policies. I developed some too that helped me guide my decision making. And I think that that made me a lot happier, a lot less stressed out. Do you have a favorite example from your personal life of how you've put this into practice?
Um, I guess one of the things that the club really did for me, and I talk about this example in the book we wrote, and that is I had a request come in, which is just one of the toughest ones for me to say no to. And that is a student that I had had, I had them in my negotiation class. They learned about my research. They're now in a company. They invite me to give a seminar at the company. And I just always feel so compelled to do that.
Part of it is the diva a little bit. I feel like, oh, they invited me, you know, such a great honor. But it's also a student who I had a connection with and want to help. And in this particular situation, I reached out to my club and I emailed them. We usually met face to face, but in emergencies, we'd email each other. And I emailed them, help, help, help. Like, what do I do? And within about 20 minutes, I had 10 different responses immediately.
And someone at the end had formalized the exact script that I should write saying no and why.
And it was, I would have never thought of it myself. You know, it basically said, you know, I'm afraid I can't do that. But, you know, you were such a good student in my class. You learned so many negotiation skills. I think you would be able to give a negotiation seminar yourself. And I'm happy to provide some materials for you if you want to give a talk. And I felt good about the request. She felt good about me having confidence in her. It all kind of worked out. And my club was there to really, you know, back me up on this.
What a fantastic example. I love that example, not only because it was meaningful for you and for the student, and it sounds like for the organization, but also it makes me think that, and I've experienced this personally, that joining someone else's no club and helping them figure out how to say no is actually the training that you need to build the skills yourself.
Absolutely, because you can see other people's lives so objectively when it's really hard for you to take that, you know, magnifying glass inside. And you're right. It does give you the training to think about, OK, what are my triggers? Linda, this has been wonderful. Thank you. I'm so glad you said yes to it. Well, I'm glad I said yes to it. And what I loved about your request is that you gave me full license to say no. And I appreciated that.
This episode was produced by Daphne Chen. Our team includes Brittany Cronin, Constanza Gallardo, Greta Cohn, Grace Rubinstein, Daniela Balarezo, Banban Cheng, Alejandra Salazar, and Roxanne Heilash. Our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Our show is mixed by Sarah Bruguere. Original music by Hans Dale Sue and Alison Leighton Brown.
I just have to warn you, there could be like a shipboard announcement that comes on. And if so, we'll just have to pause. But I can't control that because sometimes the captain gets on and says something. You know what? I think that would be one of the more entertaining disruptions we've had in the history of this show. Okay, good.
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