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How I defined success in my 20s and how I define it now in my mid 50s, totally different, and that’s okay, but what I will tell you is that with every layer of success that you achieve, it opens up another level for you to aim for, to strive for, and so just because you think you’re successful at one point in your career, more than likely there’s a lot more things that you can achieve, but you’ve got to be able to know what you’re looking for. You’ve got to have some kind of an idea of what kind of a path you want to take, and so you’ve got to ask yourself some questions, and some of the questions are things like, what does truly matters to you? What do you think about? What do you want to achieve with your life, with your career? And how can professional pet grooming get you to that point?

And then the next thing is to be passionate about whatever you’re doing. Now, obviously if you are in the world of professional pet grooming, I’m certainly hoping that you’re already passionate about pets, but even within that passion, find your own personal superpower. Some folks love to do just the small dogs, others love the big furries that they make huge transformations in what they look like, others love to do just low maintenance, every day salon trims, making their customers happy as they walk out the door, other people love to do the show dogs or the more fancy trims, while still others maybe don’t want to do dogs at all. Maybe they just want to do cats. Maybe they want to be a feline exclusive.

Whatever your superpower is, whatever breed, haircut, type of animal you like to work on, all of those are fine. Find your superpower and work to be the best that you can be, and the one thing that I find with success is that normally it doesn’t come with just fall in your lap. You generally have to be really focused, really dedicated, and you’ve got to work at it and you’ve got to build your knowledge base because if you don’t have the knowledge, then you’re not going to have the confidence to be able to communicate with your clients, to be able to execute the skills with ease, with safely and to do it efficiently, and so you’ve got to build up that knowledge base.

You’ve got to be really focused and really diligent about learning, and then stop and think about things like, where do you want to be a year from now, 5 years from now, 10 years from now? Don’t just think about tomorrow or next week. Take it out further than that. Where do you want to be and how can the career take you there? Think about, what does success look like? Do you want to spend more time with your family doing what you love or doing things that you love to do? Or do you want to build … have a wealth play going on? What does it look like and what is it going to take to achieve that success? Write it down, think about it and make a plan to get there, and how are you going to achieve it?

And like I said, success looks different to everybody and not only does it look different to everybody, it’s going to change as you change with your own life and your own career. So the one thing I will tell you is that for those of us that have achieved some success, most of the time, especially in our field, we love to help others achieve their own personal success, and so we’re going to reach out and I don’t care whether you reach out to myself or my team or the companies that we have, but what I will tell you is that people that have succeeded love to help others also achieve success.

So reach out, look for that knowledge, figure out how to gain the confidence so that you can have your own success, and if we can help you in any way on your own personal journey, we would love to help you out.

When I say six or eight dogs a day, I’m not talking about the big, giant furries, the big doodles that are going to take two, two and a half hours to do. I’m talking more about the low maintenance, small to medium sized dogs, kind of no nonsense kind of haircuts. With that type of a trim, that type of a job, you should be looking at being able to turn a dog a minimum an hour. Anywhere between 45 minutes and 60 minutes to do a low maintenance, smaller type haircut. When I say that, I’m talking about the bath, the dry, and the haircut itself. That is the whole enchilada to be able to do under an hour.

If you’re not hitting that mark, you might want to really look at what your skillset is and look at ways that you can start shaving off some time. But bottom line, as an employer looking to hire somebody, that’s what I’m going to expect. If somebody is fresh out of grooming school, you know what? They’re not going to have the confidence to be able to do those numbers right out of the gate. But that’s definitely a target that they should shoot for, whether it be straight out of grooming school, or they’re just learning in an apprenticeship program, or they’re teaching themselves. Don’t beat yourself up.

First you’ve got to master the core skills before you can speed them up. Give yourself a little bit of grace, but work hard and focus on those core skills. That is, how do you bathe effectively? How do you blow dry effectively? How do you get a dog brushed out, combed out so that it’s totally mat-free? How do you clipper efficiently? What type of tools and skills do you need to master to be able to be efficient with what you’re doing?

I have a saying that I want to see a dog be absolutely super smooth in three passes of the clipper or less. If you’re having to go over, and over, and over, and you’re not getting a smooth finish, then you need to look at your technique when you’re dealing with clipper work. If you’re not being able to brush a dog out efficiently, and when I say efficiently, there’s no hardcore rule of how long does it take to brush a dog out, especially if it’s got mats and tangles in it, because every dog is different. Every dog has got a different tolerance level of what they will accept in the brushing department and how tight are those mats and tangles.

You’ve got to take a number of things into consideration, but there’s still shortcuts that you can do. If you’re not letting the products like the shampoo do a lot of the work for you or your high velocity dryer to loosen those mats up, to blow those mats and dead coat out of a dog, there’s a time saving area that you can really focus on. Even though a dog might be super, super matted, it still shouldn’t take that long to get it brushed out. Even if you’re doing a salvage type job where you still have got to trim the dog down, but you’re trying to keep maybe an inch of coat, there’s tricks and techniques like cutting some of that coat off so you’re not having to bathe all of it, or blow all of it out, or to de-mat all of it. There’s a lot of different things that you can do to help really speed up the process.

But when you start looking at enhancing your speed, you don’t want to sacrifice quality. You’ve always got to keep compassion for the pet absolutely at the forefront of everything that you’re doing and to keep the quality so that that client is going to come back and have you work with them again. Because the whole key with professional grooming is building that repeat clientele base. You can work on your speed, you can work on maintaining quality so that those clients come back, and building up a strong client base so that you have a solid foundation to work from. But when I’m looking at people that are really, really productive…

Shoot, we just had a record day at one of my companies, I want to say, just before Thanksgiving. One of the stylists, and she’s a certified master groomer and she’s been doing this for a lot of years, but she did 16 or 17 dogs by herself. Now, I will say she had an assistant, so she had a bather and somebody was helping her get those dogs prepped. But still, to be able to do those types of numbers, you have to be so focused on what you’re doing. You are not looking away from your table. You are not talking to your fellow groomer. You’re not checking your phones. You are absolutely on task, on focus. That dog on your table is what you’re looking at. If you really stay focused, you’re going to be able to build up your speed. Again, you’re not looking to do it overnight. This is a small, incremental, stay focused, stay on task. If right now you’re struggling to get through four dogs, your target should be to get to five dogs. If you’re being able to do five, then look to move to six.

Just take it one dog at a time, one day at a time, but stay focused and help to master those skills so that you, too, are going to be able to comfortably do six or eight or more dogs a day, every single day that you are grooming and you are at your grooming table. That’s going to make you be a really valuable team member if you’re working in a salon situation. Or if you’re are solo flyer, it’s going to help build your business and make sure that you’re going to have the revenues at the end of the week or the end of the month to pay your bills. That’s what professional pet grooming is all about; being able to love what you do and make a living at it.

Obviously I’m in the educational field, so I’ve got a lot of different materials with notes from the grooming table, theory of five, learntogroomdogs.com in the core skills or the just getting started videos at the Paragon school. We also have a home study program which a lot of salon owners are working with right now to help them get assistance trained rapidly and utilizing quality techniques to get that end result. But whatever you program or however you go ahead and teach, I want you to think about teaching in incremental steps. You’ve got to start at the very bottom and then work up and work up and work up. And you need to paint a picture for the new learner of what does it look like when it’s done correctly? And then show them samples of what you would accept or what are you looking for when it’s done correctly so that they have a very clear picture in their mind of something to aim for.

So make sure you give them lots of examples and the examples aren’t just a challenging dog. What does a lab look like when it’s done correctly? What does a golden retriever look like when it’s done correctly? What does a bichon or a lhasa or a shih tzu or any of the mixed breeds, the doodles, what does it look when it’s done correctly? And focus more on coat type more than breeds because we’re only going to see a couple different coat types and you can train and break that down a lot easier for the individual so that they can get it done correctly. And then once they are in the learning process, whether they’ve read a book or watched a video or you’ve demonstrated something, I can’t stress how important it is to have them do it immediately. The studies show over and over again it is amazing how rapidly somebody loses the detail of what they’ve just been taught if they don’t apply it immediately.

So it’s really important to have them do some type of training, educating, learning how to do it and then have them demonstrate it immediately. And then once you get them to the point that they’re working and they’re starting to provide dogs and going through the bathing and drying process, when they’re bringing dogs out to you, make sure that you give immediate feedback because you can’t fix what you don’t know. And some of the most effective learning comes from making mistakes. So if you don’t point out what was done well and what could be an opportunity area to be done better, they’re not going to know to fix something.

And here’s an idea that seems to work really well for a lot of folks and I love using number systems. It just really helps simplify what we’re trying to achieve. And sometimes it can take a little bit of the sting out of, if somebody isn’t working quite up to snuff by giving a number system to it. And maybe you’re going from one to 10 and one to three would be, you know what, the work just isn’t acceptable. It’s got to be done again. Or maybe you go up to a four to six, it still needs some work. Maybe a seven an eight would be it’s acceptable, still room for improvement but it’s acceptable and then a nine or a 10 would be absolutely knocking it out of the park.

This is exactly what you want to see every single time. And you know, even on one particular dog, they might have absolutely nailed it, knocked it out of the park in one area but there’s another area on the dog that still really needs work or shoot, maybe it needs to be done again. You’ve got to give that feedback and if it needs to be done again, don’t you do it, have them go back and do it correctly. Because if you’re not holding them accountable, they’re just going to start giving you subpar work and that’s not what you’re looking for.

So, is training tough? Yeah, it can be challenging because you’re having to normally teach on the fly. Normally you’ve got a full load already. You’re trying to do all the finish work on the dogs and at the same token you’re trying to train an assistant. And that can be frustrating, but I’m going to tell you when you do it, when you take the time and do it right and you’ve got a willing learner who strives to do it correctly, there is nothing better. And honestly it shouldn’t take that long to get a bather up to the point that they can really be an asset to you maybe doing 80 or 90% of the dogs that they’re working on for you and doing them well and helping you move through your roster a lot more effectively. And really focus on those 80% of typical dogs that you see every single day.

And then as they build skill and confidence, you can start adding little more challenging. Maybe it’s a little different coat type. Maybe the personality of the dog is a little more challenging or maybe you are leaning on them to get some of the mats and the tangles and the dead coat out more and more and more for you so that you can focus more on the finish work. But just start again, just break it into small steps. Allow that learner to feel success, to get the praise that they need that they’ve done a good job, and I’m going to tell you, most of them will really strive to continue to make those dogs look better and better and better for you ultimately making the entire salon run much more smoothly.

Back in the day I worked with the plastic attach on combs, but still the principle is the same. They’ve just made a lot of adjustments and there’s a lot of different brands out there today. This happens to be the Wall brand that I’ve got. It’s an older set that belongs to my husband Mark, but what I learned with these is, you can mimic almost hand scissoring but it gives you a depth to go to because each one, if you look at these, basically they’re going to cut about the length that is here and so you can get consistent length over a dog depending on which guard comb you’re using. This one happens to be the blue one or this one is cutting a little bit longer. It’s a little hard to see in here but I think you can see the little bit of the difference.

This one happens to be peach or the yellow one would be a real, those the three that I just showed you would be kind of my go to ones every single day, but these are so great because today they come even in a wider variety of lengths than what I was accustomed to working with. This one is like a light blue and if you look at this side by side and again where you’re looking at your cutting distance is going to be basically right from here to here and they allow you to get consistent over the entire body of the dog.

The other thing that I love about this particular style of guard comb, and again many different manufacturers out there, but one of the things that I look at is number one, it’s metal, so it’s going to give you durability. I’m going to pop over to this yellow one just it’s a little easier to handle, so the metal gives you the durability, the teeth when it plastic, they have a tendency to get worn right here and it’ll catch hair where the metal guard combs don’t have that problem, they hook on with, this one happens to be a spring, but they also come magnetic where they just fit right over the blade and again, you can use them depending on which guard combs you’re working with.

You can work with the smaller clippers, the more detailed little ones or the larger, more powerful clippers. These will fit depending again which brand you’re working with. They come so that they fit over those blades. And again, I love him for the durability and if you stop and think about it, if you’re working with a big doodle, you’re going to want possibly a little bit more coat left over that dog to give that client, that kind of fluffy kind of look, if the dog’s in decent shape because you are not going to get this particular blade, any of these attachments through a very matted dog. They can handle a little light tangle but they can’t power through a matted dog.

But if you have a client that’s taking care of their dog, you can get a really long, fluffy trim utilizing this particular tool and it’s going to mimic the hand scissor look and hand scissoring, I love to hand scissor. That was one of my specialties and I still, there’s nothing that matches a beautifully done hand scissored dog. But when we’re dealing with production grooming, which is our everyday salon styles, sometimes hand scissoring just isn’t the most efficient way to go about getting a job done in a timely manner and that’s where these little guys are really going to come in and save the day for you and they take away the thought process. Scissoring, hand scissoring and to do it well takes an awful lot of skill and what I have found that with the guard combs you can mimic the look of hand scissoring and still get a really, really nice job.

Now sometimes you’ll get some tracking left over in the coat. Again, it depends on how that coat, the texture of the coat and especially how the dog was prepared. The better prepared it is in the bath and the drying process, the better the finished trim. But still even with an absolutely, spectacularly prepared dog, you might get some bumps and some ridges in the coat and then you just follow up with a pair of thinners or chunkers and those are kind of your, the groomers, erasers and they’re going to take out those marks. But when you’re working with a guard combs, you could set the length, you can communicate that length to other stylists so that you can duplicate the work in your salon so your clients are getting consistency every single time. And I learned this back in the day when I was hand scissoring a lot of dogs because I was working at becoming one of the top stylists in the country and the way that you do that to get to be really good is you practice.

And so I was hand scissoring everything that I could, every single day in my mobile vans. All the poodles, the Bichons, the mixed breeds, anything that I could scissor, I did. But what would happen when I would go away or another one of my stylists had to follow my work, they were terrified. They didn’t know how much coat to leave because I had written hand scissor all. What is that? And so they would get really tentative about what to do. And bottom line, they would basically do a bath and brush and maybe tip the coat. They just didn’t know how much length to take off because I was training myself to groom, to breed profile and to groom to structure. And I understood that. But the rest of my team, they didn’t understand it the way that I did and so it was really, really hard for them to follow my work and to do the same type of job.

And when all of a sudden I got taken out with an injury to my right hand and I couldn’t groom for a while, my team had to mimic what I was doing with my clients cause they had to take my clients over for a while. And I finally realized that the guard combs gave them the guideline that they needed to be able to do a better job mimicking the work that I was doing and down the road I just really found out how much consistency these particular little tools brought to my entire team. It was just, it was like night and day. Once we really started working with these and then we started to, as we wrote down what we did on the pet record, we would say, maybe a bichon with a number one guard comb. Well, today we might say a bichon modified show trim with a yellow guard comb.

Or maybe we do it with a peach guard comb. That’s how we would write it down. And once you are able to set the body length with one of these particular tools and be able to set the length based on which one you’re using, it made everything else come in so much easier and they could get the balance on the legs and they could cut in the angles on the dog simply by using these guard combs, where if they were hand scissoring it, they’d never be able to get that same look, nor could they get the quality. Because again, hand scissoring, it takes a long time to master that skill. And let’s face it, you’re dealing possibly with an eight inch blade out in front of you. You’ve got a lot of really sharp metal that you’re opening and closing and we’re working on live animals. Accidents happen.

So the guard combs really help with the safety aspect of what we do every single day as well as bringing in the quality and the third thing that I really love is, you just don’t have to think about it. You don’t have to wonder what’s underneath that coat. The guard comb is setting the length for you. And so you can just go ahead and focus on other parts of the groom to bring that quality in alignment. Where are you setting the pattern? What angles are you trying to accentuate? How are you trying to make that dog look the best that it can look without having to worry about the depth of coat that you’re leaving. Because the guard comb is really, it’s doing it for you. And if you get your hands on that dog beforehand or maybe when you are bathing and drying the dog, you’re taking a look and you’re catching a feel of those dogs, you know there’s a dip in the top line.

Okay. So as you’re gliding over that with one of these guard combs, maybe you don’t press hard on that area. Maybe you float over it a little bit. So now you can start doing corrective grooming as well, all in the ways that you work with these guard combs. So they’re a very time effective, time saving tool that can really enhance your quality. And the more that you learn about bone structure and body structure, and corrective grooming, you can really work with this tool as well to accentuate it. And again, like I said, you’ve got such a variety of the depth of coat that you can leave whether you’re dealing with a super short, I mean, this is almost the same length as what your normal clipper blades are going to leave versus going all the way up to the really long ones.

And again, the bigger the dog, sometimes the longer the coat that needs to be left. Now I will say with any of the guard combs, most of the time you need to have a dog that’s in relatively good shape in order to do these longer haircuts. And that wouldn’t matter whether you’re hand scissoring or using a guard comb, you still need to have those dogs coming in on a four to maximum six week rotation so that you can keep that coat well-maintained and relatively mat free.

So if you haven’t worked with these a lot or you haven’t mastered the technique, take the time to master the technique with these guard combs because they’re absolutely amazing to work with. And again, your thinning shears are your erasers. So if you’re getting bumps in the coat, you’re getting tracking that you’re not happy with, just after the final sweep over that dog hit it lightly with a pair of chunkers or with a pair of thinners to take those marks out and your dogs are going to look great. Every single time they walk out of the salon and ultimately your customers are going to know exactly what they’re going to get every single time. And that’s one of the things that really brings customers back to you. And that’s your consistency.

There’s so many new breeds that are being introduced to the American Kennel Club, and sometimes I don’t always know what that dog should look like, what nice specimens are. As long as I know what the dog should look like, more than not, I can make that dog, if I were to have a pet one walk into the salon, I would have the resources and knowledge to know how to make that dog look like it should. Every single year, I always love watching Westminster. I can’t remember when I’ve ever missed one in the last almost 30 years.

But while I was sitting there watching the show, it’s a long show and it goes over two nights. We had had dinner my husband and I, and I had that inkling for something sweet. I really wanted something, but at the same token, I eat keto. And keto is a pretty strict diet plan that eliminates a lot of different things. What I wanted to have and what I could have were two totally different things. I wanted brownies so badly, but I couldn’t. That just wasn’t in my eating plan, and I didn’t want to break.

So I went upstairs and I was kind of rummaging around and I thought, “I’m going to make some fat bombs.” I love chocolate chip cookies, so I thought, “I’ll make some chocolate chip fat bombs.” So I pulled everything out, I was mixing it up, but I didn’t have any soft butter. What I ended up doing was throwing the small bowl in the microwave, melting the butter, and then I added the rest of my ingredients. When I got done with it and I’m starting to mix it up, it was just runny. It wasn’t like a normal cookie dough-type fat bomb. So I thought, “Hmm, this isn’t going to work. This isn’t coming out the way that I really wanted it to.”

Then I took a piece of knowledge that I had from another source. My good friend Judy Hudson showed me how to make keto mug bread. I thought, “I wonder if I were to add an egg to this little mix that I’ve got going on and toss it in the microwave for 90 seconds, I wonder if I’d end up with something like a chocolate chip cookie. That would work.” So I did it, and I got to say, I don’t have one to show you right here. But last night during the dog show, I had my little bowl of chocolate chip, kind of like a cookie brownie. It absolutely did the trick. It got me over that craving of those brownies, something sweet that I wanted to just sit there and slowly eat.

As I was sitting there watching this show and enjoying my little treat that I had made for myself, I realized that I was still being true to my diet plan, but it also related to what I was doing as a career move as well. I think it would apply to you guys, too.

When you first start learning, I’ve always compared a brand new learner to a dry sponge, and there is so much to learn with professional pet grooming. You’re just soaking it up, soaking it up, soaking it up. With the Paragon training programs, one of the things that I’ve always tried to relate it to is, we take in a 600 clock hour program and compact what it took me three years to gather on my own and push it down into just 600 hours. So it makes the learning a lot more concise and a lot more pointed. I mean, we know exactly where the learner needs to go. But I look at those new learners as dry sponges and how much information they need to absorb until that sponge is pretty moist. You could wring it out, and then it would absorb a little bit more, and it would wring out and absorb a little bit more. When I think about learning, I think about that brand new beginner being that dry sponge.

Then you’ve got that intermediate phase. That phase can go for a really, really long time. Sometimes it never goes away. But I call that the intermediate level. That’s where you’ve got enough knowledge, you’re not learning like a dry sponge anymore. But all of a sudden, you’re going to hear something, and you’re going to go, “Hmm, I wonder if that would work.” You start putting things together. But there’s always another something you can learn, and there’s something else that you can put together to make your job be faster, be more effective, be more rewarding. It really helps minimize the burnout if you keep realizing that you’re not going to come to an end of your learning.

Even when you hit that top level, which I would consider mastery, the learning really starts to continue forward, and that’s where you start putting new things together and making it work for you, kind of like what I did with those brownies last night. Or not the brownies, that’s what I wanted, but those little chocolate chip keto-type cookies. I thought, I have been dealing with my diet since my late 20s, and I’m approaching the late 50s now. I didn’t just flip over to keto and flip a switch and knew how to eat this way. It’s been a really long journey, and I’ve learned and I’ve learned and I’ve learned how to tweak my diet to make myself feel better. I’m constantly making adjustments and changes to it based on more information that I learn.

But bottom line is, now I can take something, I can look at a recipe and adapt it to what I need it to be. I can look at grooming, I can look at business, and I can pull, and I can model, and I can get ideas and inspirations from other areas and pull it into my businesses. Or for you guys, you might be able to pull some new something that you’ve heard, that you’ve read, that you’ve seen, that somebody told you, and apply it to your everyday grooming. That’s going to make your day go so much easier.

It’s just the little things. No longer are you making these big leaps in knowledge, but you’re making these little fine adjustments to get to that mastery stage where you’re just getting better and better and better. You’re really being able to put together a lot of different things together to make it work for you.

That’s what’s so cool about professional pet grooming is that there’s no absolute black and white. There’s no point where you get where you don’t know everything. There’s always more to learn. There’s always more things that you can change, that you can adjust, that you can apply to make your day just go a little bit easier and to get that satisfaction, that reward that it worked. Or even if it didn’t work, kind of like my cookies. I mean, I want to make a little changes in that recipe that I did last night, but you got to start somewhere. Then it’s just a matter of tweaking it and tweaking it and tweaking it until you can get it absolutely perfect.

That’s what I challenge you guys to do, is to stay on that quest for information, to gain that knowledge. It just really helps make your day be more interesting and for your career to be more satisfying.

And so I want you to think about how can you be more effective, not only being efficient because being efficient just means yes, you’re doing something quickly, but are you doing it effectively? Are you doing it the easiest way you possibly can while getting the best results? And so a couple of the things that I really thought about was, are you pre-clipping a dog when it really doesn’t need to be pre-clipped? For me, I would always make sure that anything that came in every six weeks or less, it went directly to the tub. There was no passing go. I didn’t even do basics. I didn’t do sanitary, I didn’t do nails, I don’t do ears. I do everything afterwards. I get that dog clean first. So six weeks or less, it goes directly into the bathtub, gets bath, gets dried and then I do all the work at one time. So that is a difference between being effective versus being efficient.

Another one would be, are you pre-brushing a dog? I always say if water can penetrate the coat, get it into the tub before you start brushing. Who wants to brush a dirty, grimy, nasty dog? On top of which that oil in that dirt and the debris that’s in the coat holds those maps together. So if you can get that dog clean before you put a brush on it, it’s going to go so much easier. It’s going to be easier on you, it’s going to be easier on the dog. And if you are really being effective, you are actually taking that dog, sedating it up in the tub, if it’s really a tangled mess and maybe you’re pulling in the high velocity dryer into the bathing area and literally blowing the shampoo out of the coat just like if you’ve got a ring on that’s too tight, how do you get that ring off? You soap it up, right? Well, same thing as going to work with a dog’s coat.

So my general rule of thumb is, if the water will penetrate the coat and get through those mats, those tangles, that crud that’s there, get him in the tub first, let the water, let the shampoo, let the conditioner, and let your high velocity dryer do the bulk of the work for you. Again, the difference between being efficient versus being effective. If you are effective, you’re getting it done in the least amount of time possible while yielding the best result.

Another one is are you pre-wetting a dog? With all of the shampoo systems that are out there, a lot of folks don’t pre-wet any more. You just go ahead and start working the shampoo and the water together. But even if you’re doing it more the old-fashioned way by hand, most of the time we are pre-mixing our shampoo in water. So maybe you do out your dilution ratio a little higher and all of a sudden you can wet the dog down and apply the shampoo at the same time. It doesn’t make a lot of difference in the time as it takes to wet a dog down, but it’s still seconds and minutes add up to hours.

So think about how you can be effective versus just efficient. Efficient means you’re working quickly, you’re hustling, you’re gunning, you are so busy. But if you can be more effective, not only will you be busy, but you’re going to be able to get something done more rapidly in a shorter amount of time. It’s going to be easier for you, it’s going to be easier for the pet and bottom line, everybody’s going to be happy in the long run. So give it a go. Think about the difference between those two words. Are you effective or are you just being efficient?