Episode 17: Zim Flores
Taking Time Away from Creating with Zim Flores
From cloning a gene to investigate cardiovascular genetic disorders to becoming the youngest precinct judge for the state of North Carolina to founding a massively successful boutique travel company, Zim Flores (nee Ugochukwu) is a force to be reckoned with! Join us today as we dive into Zim’s past, present and future. We start the discussion with the achievement that she feels most proud of (the answer will surprise you!), and the breakthrough that she had when she sold Travel Noire. We dive into the challenge of separating yourself from your business as an entrepreneur, and why the Travel Noire experience was founded on the idea of creating tension. Zim also tells us how she came to appreciate tension during travel, and she shares some of the successes and failures in her career. As a woman of God, we learn how His Plan saved Zim in terms of timing, and how she is incorporating her faith in her next venture. We wrap up with why it's so key to take a break from creating, and how Zim is using this time to be present. So, for all this and so much more, press "Play" now!
Key Points From This Episode:
• Why cloning a gene is the achievement Zim is most proud of!
• The breakthrough that selling Travel Noire lead Zim to.
• How Zim came to terms with letting go of a company that she founded her identity on.
• Why tension is something to strive for.
• What led Zim to appreciate tension, and how she engineered it as part of the Travel Noire experience.
• A few examples of tension successes and failures.
• Letting go of your company: why leaving was a blessing in disguise.
• How Zim came to terms with God’s plan for her, and the wonder of the timing.
• Taking time out from creating, and Zim’s advice on being present.
• Zim’s latest adventures: from Glory Road to Morning Assembly, and what’s to come!
Tweetables:
“I’ve always been a curious kid, but this was almost on another level. To be able to [clone a gene], and to be able to have this kind of impact as somebody that was considerably young meant a lot to me.” — @zimism [0:03:50]
“For travel, the things that we remember most are often the things that are tied to the hard things. I knew that when we started with travel experiences, it wasn't just about taking people to another country and just celebrating life. I guess it was a part of the experience, but it wasn't the full experience.” — @zimism [0:13:52]
“I took the time that I needed to not create, which I think is important for creators because if you don't take time away from creating, I don't know if there's such thing as a creator's burnout.” — @zimism [0:24:06]
“The reality is, is that everywhere we go, everywhere we've gone has always been to me, a display of God's glory.” — @zimism [0:33:51]
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
[Episode 17 TRANSCRIPT]
“ZF: It kind of felt a little hard to catch my breath, but at the same time, I knew that God had me in this particular place for a reason and I wasn’t trying to rush the process. I took the time that I needed to not create, which I think is important for creators. Because if you if you don’t take time away from creating, I don’t know if there’s a such thing as like a creators burnout. But I knew very, very well that all the work and all the things that I had done over the years, I just needed some time to reset, to really discover who I was in God again and then begin again. That’s kind of what that process look like for me.”
[INTRODUCTION]
[00:00:50] JU: Welcome to The Paint & Pipette Podcast. My name is Jeremy Utley, and it’s my job to illuminate the tactics of world-class performers across domains. As a day job, I teach at the Stanford d.school, helping students learn what it takes to come up with ideas. But I’ve realized I need to stay in the classroom learning myself and this podcast is my classroom.
[00:01:14] MH: Hey! I’m Marcus Hollinger. I lead marketing and creative at Reach Records, an Atlanta-based independent record label. I’m also co-founder for Portrait Coffee, where we are seeking to reimagine the picture that comes to mind for folks in specialty coffee. I’m so excited to pull up my desk alongside my good friend and fellow learner, Jeremy, and I think y’all are going to love what we have for you this season.
[00:01:45] JU: We’ve got some amazing stories on deck, and we can’t wait to dive in and learn alongside you.
[00:01:49] MH: So grab your pipette and your paintbrush, and let’s make something beautiful together.
[00:01:58] JU: One of my favorite things to learn about a new friend, which I consider you now to be a new friend is what’s the creative achievement you’re most proud of?
[00:02:09] ZF: That is a great question. The creative achievement that I am the most proud of? Hmm. Okay, I cloned a gene when I was 19 years old. That is a creative achievement that I’m really, really proud of.
[00:02:28] JU: That’ll do.
[00:02:29] MH: Oh, wow!
[00:02:29] JU: First time I’ve heard that by the way. Tell us more about that.
[00:02:35] ZF: So, 19-year-old freshman college student, just trying to find her way. I stumbled across a flyer in my building for a lab. I’m a bio major, not doing anything with biology currently. But back then, I wanted to be a doctor. I stumbled across this lab, and there was this kind of mad scientist of a guy, Dr. Lajeunesse, who had a lab full of fruit flies. He was trying to figure out ways where we could connect what was happening inside of the fruit fly with cardiac muscles in the human heart. Here I was, 19 years old, not really knowing that much about biology, not knowing that much about research, and he took me under his wing. For the next four years, I spent almost all of my free time in this lab, crashing fruit flies, sequencing the genome, naming this gene, doing research and traveling across the country sharing my work.
That kind of started — I’ve always been a curious kid, but this was almost on another level. To be able to do that, and to be able to have this kind of impact as somebody that was considerably young meant a lot to me.
[00:04:07] JU: I’m going to confess my ignorance here. I don’t even know the impact of cloning a gene. Tell me, like scientifically, what is the accomplishment or help me quantify it. Talk to me like I’m a kindergartener or why is it a big deal.
[00:04:22] ZF: It was a big deal for a number of reasons. I used to be much more well versed back then, since I don’t do biology anymore. I don’t have all of the terminology that I would have. But the muscles that we were sequencing out of the fruit fly had similarities to the cardiac muscle in the heart. If we could find what we were looking for out of sequencing the genome of this fruit fly, we could find the similarities to this cardiac muscle. There’s a lot of research if you go on look at this particular fruit fly that ties the work, not only that we did, but a lot of other researchers did with the fruit fly to the human heart. Because obviously, you can’t take the human heart out of the body. I mean, you could but the person would have to be dead. To offset that, we try and find similarities in other creatures that could kind of parallel with the work that somebody would be doing within the human body.
[00:05:29] JU: That’s incredible. Then, okay. Just to kind of give us a book ends perspective here just for fun. I asked your greatest creative achievement. You went to 19 years old. Tell us about your last breakthrough, the most recent breakthrough. It doesn’t have anything to do with the genome. You mentioned, you’ve kind of left biology so I’m assuming not, but I just want to get a range of your creative expression.
[00:05:52] ZF: Yeah, yeah. Gosh, I feel like there’s always so many breakthroughs. I sold my company, my first company, Travel Noire, a few years ago, but I did it because I felt the Lord leading me to sell it. Here was this company, super successful, everybody wanted us to grow. There were things that I did not want specifically for the company. It was this moment, where God and I, we had a little moment. I realized that I no longer wanted to be known as the travel girl, which is what I had become known for. I wanted to be known as God’s girl.
There was this season, right after I sold Travel Noire, where I had my identity wrapped up in this business. If you’ve ever created something from scratch, it’s your world, it’s your baby. I went from being the owner of this company to selling it and having zero control over it. It was the hardest thing that I’d ever had to do. It was my “creative genius” to build this thing and then all of a sudden have to let it go. It was this identity crisis. It was this period of time where I wasn’t even sure of myself and my own contributions in this world.
Right as I found out that I was going to be let go from Travel Noire, my husband and I bought our first company in South Korea. We bought this company in South Korea, we close the deal on the day that I found out that I was being let go. It was almost like this full circle moment where — a pastor had said this to me once, he said, “You gave up a business and God gave you an empire.” Out of that sacrifice came something so beautiful, that had I not made that sacrifice, I don’t know where I would be. I’m sure, there will be many other breakthroughs, but that was one really, really big turning point for me.
[00:08:09] MH: One thing I want to kind of touch on, it sounds a little — it can be jarring at first to hear this. One thing you said was, you built this company from scratch and at this point, it was your creative genius. For those that don’t know, Travel Noire is a really, really big deal. I mean, I was encouraged years ago to leave the country for the first time, from seeing Travel Noire, the travel packages in black people, being black outside of America, which was what the company was all about. I’m a living testament, and here I am talking to the founder of this company saying that somewhere in the midst of this, you questioned your contribution to the space. Maybe could you tell us a little more about that.
[00:08:58] ZF: Yeah. I think that there are times where you feel like you could have done so much more, right? I could have done so much more with this business. We could have gone in so many different directions. We could have did this. We could have done that. To know that that is no longer a possibility anymore in that form, for me was really hard. One of our flagship products, Travel Noire experiences, we had the small group experiences that we hosted. We hosted about 50 trips a year across five continents, and we took 12 strangers who didn’t know each other to a foreign country. What we did was, we tried to figure out how to engineer tension into a travel experience. We all know that tension looks like a lot of different things. It can look like losing your luggage. It can look like missing the train. It can look like all of the things that go wrong with travel. But we tried to figure out how to engineer that into a travel experience where the customer didn’t feel like they were being hazed, because they’re paying for this trip, but we wanted them to leave that particular trip transformed.
A lot of those conversations, for example, in Cape Town, we would take them to this region outside of Cape Town called Stellenbosch. They would be in this beautiful place, and they would learn that if you were a black, South African, you could not own land without having a white South African as a partner. There was that tension of that experience that we were able to bring into the experience. It was a lot deeper than I think a lot of people realize, but those who went on the trip, it changed their perspective of travel forever. To have something like that, that we spent a lot of time building. I mean, after the trips that we sold before the acquisition ended, there were no more trips. The trips, were not — they didn’t start the trips again.
For me, being an entrepreneur who with my team created this thing, only to see it kind of fizzle out, that was really hard. When I think about the contributions that we made to the space, they will forever, I think be there, but not in a sense where people can experience it now. At this point, people just have their memories.
[00:11:34] MH: I’m really curious about that. Thank you for sharing that bit of vulnerability. Jeremy and I have a shared interest and we coach executives in design thinking at Stanford d.school. Where one of the key components of what we teach executives is this concept of designing one key function for users to be able to have a realistic experience in order to find out if your business solution or your creative solution is actually the right solution to the right problem. When I hear you say that you all were building these travel packages, and it’s so funny, being on the other side, as a consumer, as a traveler or consumer, your one key function was creating tension in the travel experience. How did you and your team arrive at deciding or what hypothesis were you working off of that led you to say the one key function we need is to create tension for folks on these travel experiences?
[00:12:44] ZF: Yeah. Prior to starting Travel Noire, I lived in India for some time. It was my first time living outside of the country. My family is from Nigeria, so I had visited with my family. But after I graduated college, I was like, “All right, Mom. I’m selling everything. I’m moving to India.” She was like, “Oh, okay.” Sold everything, moved to India and I was working there. My time in India was transformative. It completely changed my life. It is a reason that Travel Noire exists.
Here I was, this young 20 something graduate, living in a foreign country, speaking Hindi and there were so many moments of my time there that were full of tension. We got evicted out of our apartment. I mean, there are all kinds of things that happened for me that year. I realized looking back on my time in India that had none of those things happen, I would not have had the transformative experience that I had. I knew that for travel, the things that we remember most are often the things that are tied to the hard things. I knew that when we started with travel experiences, it wasn’t just about taking people into another country and just celebrating life. I guess it was a part of the experience, but it wasn’t the full experience.
One of our success markers for a successful experience was how many people cried at the final dinner. That was one of our real success metrics. At the end of every experience, we would ask our experienced designers who were on the ground and we hired local teams, because it was important for us to be able to establish roots in these communities with people who actually lived and worked there. One of those markers at the end of the trip, we’d say, “Hey! Who cried? How many people cried out of this experience? What did they share? What did they talk about?” It was always a point of pride for us. We wanted people to feel so deeply rooted, even though they were only there for seven days. We wanted them to feel so deeply rooted within the experience with each other, that they left not thinking about travel in the same way.
[00:15:16] MH: Wow! That’s awesome.
[00:15:18] JU: I’d love to hear. I mean, when you say that you tried to engineer tension, can you give us a few examples of engineered tension? How did you do it? Maybe what’s something that didn’t work or that didn’t yield the tears at the final dinner. I don’t know if that’s how you measure tension necessarily, but I’d love to hear about maybe a failed attempt and a successful attempt.
[00:15:39] ZF: When we think about engineered tension, we think a lot about the hard thing. For example, in Cape Town, we had them hike from the bottom of Table Mountain to the top. Now, if you’ve ever been on a hike before, really challenging hike with a stranger that you are encouraging that person to continue all the way up to the top. We did this closer to the beginning of the experience, so that if people were shy, if they had trouble getting out of their shell, being able to encourage somebody on the way — I don’t know how tall Table Mountain is, it was like 3000 feet/ I don’t know how tall it is, but it’s very tall and very daunting. To be able to leave that experience and say, “Hey! Thanks for encouraging me all the way up to the top. I got to the top and I don’t think I would have made it up here without your support or without your encouragement.”
Another example of a point of tension. This is a different point of tension. When we traveled with our groups, we did not go and see sights. For example, if we had a trip in Rome, we weren’t going to the Colosseum. What I was more interested in and what our teams were more interested in, was embedding people inside of culture. There was a trip that we had in Italy, where we went inside of a home of a grandmother who had been in that area for hundreds of years. Her family had lived there for hundreds of years and she taught them her secret pasta recipe. It’s a form of tension that’s not necessarily hard. What it did was it made our consumers; our clients realize that there is a life that is a little bit different. This woman’s house was on the side of a cliff. When you walk into her home, you could see the Amalfi Coast, you could see the beaches, you can see the water for as far as the eye could see. To be in her kitchen, in her home, cooking her pasta with her and her daughters, that was a form of tension that wasn’t necessarily physical, but it was more of a, “Wow! This type of thing is possible.” A failed attempt at…
[00:18:091] JU: Okay. I was going to come back to it if you weren’t.
[00:18:13] ZF: I’m like trying to think of what a failed attempt would be. Well, I would say that a failed attempt was one where maybe we didn’t completely think through all of the elements of the type of tension. This is something that we didn’t necessarily codify, right? We knew that something had to — there had to be a perception shift of some sort. We knew that can happen physically, like if you’re hiking. That can happen relationally through conversation. It was hard to do it in some places, though we tried to.
I don’t remember any specific examples, though, I am sure that there are many. But that those were kind of how we thought about introducing that kind of tension into the experience and the failed attempts happen when we didn’t necessarily think through that process. Because every destination is different, right? We can’t go into a grandmother’s house to learn how to cook pasta in Brazil. It’s just a completely different type of experience, so we had to think. It was like not a cookie cutter thing for any of these experiences at all.
[00:19:35] MH: Yeah. I’m really fascinated by this process to know that there’s just like scientific experimentation going on. When you look at the Travel Noire socials, the photos are some of the biggest and most compelling marketing. To know that there’s this approach on the other side is super fascinating. You said something else that I really wanted to touch on. You built this company and you were very, very methodical in what were — the experiences engineered for folks. You sold it and you even talked about sort of being let go from the company on the other side and this identity shift.
I know you’re in the middle of launching a new venture. But before we get there, I imagine kind of Tiger Woods. He’s famous for being at the top of his career, and the top of his accomplishments and sort of breaking down his swing and almost having to relearn and re-engineer his swing to be able to re approach the game. He’s done that a number of times. I’d like to ask you, in terms of breaking down your swing, or to use your word, your identity, what was that process like to sort of rebuild after this massive success?
[00:20:52] ZF: Yeah, it was…
[00:20:54] JU: Maybe also just by way of transition? Did you know you’re going to be let go when you sold the company? Because that wasn’t clear to me.
[00:21:00] ZF: No. Normally, like in an M&A or merger and acquisition, what happens is that the acquiring company will keep a part of the team on for a certain period of time. I didn’t know that I would be let go, but I imagined that as an entrepreneur, you could only stay under somebody for so long. That’s what a lot of entrepreneurs — if they go, if they sell their business, and they work for that particular business, at a certain point, they’re like, “I need to do something new again.” It always happens in that way. I didn’t think that I would be there forever, but I also didn’t think that I would be let go either.
[00:21:42] JU: Stuff. Okay. Yeah, that was just kind of context. I think Marcus’ question is great, getting to the breaking down of the identity and the shift.
[00:21:50] ZF: Yeah. It was interesting. It was interesting to have to build — I’ll tell you what. The day that I sold Travel Noire, the day that the papers were signed, you would get — I got all these congratulations, but I didn’t feel great. I think on the other side of the acquisition, or any acquisition now, I always think about the founders. Because they might not have sold under the set of circumstances that they wanted to. They might have another story that they can’t really tell, because a lot of people don’t relate. They’re like, “Oh, you sold a company. What do you have to worry about? This should be the highlight of your career.”
For me, I was very cognizant about what it was that I was giving up. My team left before we signed the deal. There were all of these things that happened before the acquisition that broke me. I mean, that whole process was very, very, very tough. To go from that, and to leave — I think I stayed for 18 months, so for a year and a half. If you’ve ever had something that has had to change, you recognize if you’re tied to that thing, it’s really hard to change.
From leaving there, and rebuilding again, it was new, it was different. The year that I left, I was also getting married. We got engaged and married in the same year in a different country. It was a lot of new beginnings that were happening at that time.
[00:23:36] JU: No kidding.
[00:23:39] ZF: I took about a year off. My husband and I got married in November, took an eight-week honeymoon, and came back and then the pandemic hit. Here you have — it’s like thing, after thing, after new thing, after new thing. It kind of felt a little hard to catch my breath. But at the same time, I knew that God had me in this particular place for a reason and I wasn’t trying to rush the process. I took the time that I needed to not create, which I think is important for creators, because if you don’t take time away from creating, I don’t know if there’s a such thing as like a creator’s burnout. But I knew very, very well that the work and all the things that I had done over the years, I just needed some time to reset, to really discover who I was in God again and then begin again. That’s kind of what that process looked like for me.
[00:24:41] MH: I’m fascinated about the timing. You sold a travel company, for all intents and purposes before a global pandemic. Had you ever wrestled with that thought or thought about that? I’m sure you did, but…
[00:24:59] ZF: Listen, God is a very good God. I cannot imagine having a travel company where the majority — I mean, can you imagine, 50 trips a year. We probably would have scaled that up. We would have been running all of those trips into the pandemic, only to have to shut all of those trips down.
[00:25:19] JU: The thing just came to my mind. You said, we will be running those trips into the pandemic, is like an airplane just flying into the side of the mountain. It was just like, “Oh!”
[00:25:29] ZF: Basically. I sold the business in 2017, left in 2019, middle of 2019 in April. Bought our first business in April, got married, got engaged and married that year. Then the next year was the pandemic. It was, gosh, so many things have happened in the last five years, it’s just hard to wrestle and grapple with some times, but there is nothing but the grace of God that that is the time when I sold the business.
[00:26:04] JU: I was really curious about this statement that you made, you had to take time to not create. I feel like that is, it’s almost on the other end of the spectrum, from where — Marcus was saying, how we interact with a lot of professionals who are trying to learn creative problem-solving tools. For them, they’re almost on the other side of not creating. They need to take time to create. They need a lot of practice. They need a lot of discipline. I’m kind of fascinated by this paradox in a way, and I’d love to have you describe, why was it necessary for you to not create? What did not creating enable for you? Then, how did you know when you needed to create again. Because I think for a lot of people, in a way, they’re sitting on the sidelines, thinking, “Creating is not for me” and we’re saying, “No, no. Just try something. Get started. Do it again. Do it again tomorrow, just like your piano scales. Do it every day.” To hear somebody, a world class creator say, “Yeah, and take a break.” I’d love to hear you talk about that.
[00:27:06] ZF: Yeah. I mean, listen, the process of being there was, my heart was broken. I was grieving through that process. After I left, we had bought this company that we needed to learn how to run. I was learning how to run that particular thing, but I wasn’t creating anything new of my own. For me, it was almost like a forced rest. I’m a creative at heart. It’s what I do. It’s a gift that God has given me. I knew that it was time. Well, I mean, I look at the way that we look at the world is very different. You can’t escape, it’s like you can’t escape it. Can you turn your mind off of being creative? No, right?
There were ways that I was creative, but not in the same sense. I might have been creative in going for daily walks, or learning how to garden or just things that were very different. I cut my teeth online. It was just me and my computer. That’s how I made a living. If I wanted to take a step back from that, what is something that I could do that’s different. It’s a different type of creating, very different, but still creative in a sense. In my mind, like not being creative, and not creating is impossible to an extent, but I did try and find ways to do things that were slower, that were different. If I stopped creating, I just probably be looking at a wall all day, to be honest. I’d be facing a wall with like a straitjacket and that’d be it.
I tried to find ways to explore, to travel, and not feel the need to have to share it, not feel the need to have to talk about the five places you should go in Italy when you blah, blah, blah. I didn’t feel that need to do that anymore, so I could be more present. My mom told me after I sold my company, I came home, she was in California at the time, and I said, “What’s up, mom? I’m here to hangout.” She’s like, “You’re really here?” I was like, “I’m always here. Whenever I come, I’m here.” She’s like, “No, you’re here. Like you’re present. You’re not on your computer, you’re not on your phone, you’re not checking emails, you’re not trying to figure out what’s going on in a different part of the world. You’re actually here.” That meant a lot to me because as an entrepreneur, as a creative, we can get so lost in the work that we do, that we’re not actually with the people that we love. We’re not actually present. I think that that was really big lesson for me during that time.
[00:30:00] MH: Yeah. That’s powerful. Thank you for, again, that that honesty and really kind of keeping it real with this right there. I’m curious, because one thing you mentioned was that you recently bought this new business and you’re actually learning how to run it. Another thing that I know through some of our mutual friends is that you are starting a new thing, Morning Assembly. I’d love to hear about Morning Assembly, and maybe if you can talk to us about that, and how some of those new behaviors that you found and taking that break or fleshing themselves out in this new season.
[00:30:41] ZF: Yeah. Before I talk about Morning Assembly. I actually want to talk about something called Glory Road. I had known that I would always come back to the travel space in some shape or form, but I wasn’t exactly sure how. That gave me this idea for Glory Road, and it’s a similar concept to the experiences that we had, but exploring biblical concepts. We would go to, for example, Portugal, which is one of the — has one of the largest exports of olive oil. I’m really fascinated about all that the Bible has to say about olives, all that it has to say about olive oil, all that it has to say about harvesting. What does that look like for us to go to a region of the world and study this biblical concept while being surrounded by this thing? Same thing with salt, what does the Bible have to say while being the salt of the earth? What does the Bible have to say about those things and how can we discover that in real life in Greece? Which has one of the largest exports of salt.
Different concepts within these different regions of the world are important for us to understand. When I was driving with my husband in Israel, we have this map, this Google map on our phone, and we look at our phone. Everywhere we passed, there was a biblical remnant, there was a story there, there was, “Oh, this field that we’re passing by on the highway, this is where David fought Goliath” or “This is where this happened” or “This is where that happened.” It made everything so real. I thought about what ways we could do something similar, but in a different concept. Not necessarily just go to Israel, but there are biblical applications in a lot of different countries. I’m excited about starting that up again. That is something that is near and very, very dear to my heart.
[00:32:57] JU: Can you talk about how you go? First of all, I love that. I’ve thought about that with a number of kinds of pictures. I’ve had the opportunity to be in Israel for work and got to see some sights and things like that. I agree, there’s a profound kind of connection that’s really special. How do you go from the personal, “I had this experience, wow, this is really meaningful” to “We should craft these experiences for others”? Because I would say, there’s like — I mean, there’s a whole tourism industry around touring Israel, for example. Lots of people go to Israel and have biblical experiences, and don’t think “We should start a travel company”. I realized you have like a unique background. But just talk about how you go from “This is an amazing experience my husband and I have had” to “What if we do that?” How does that gel together for you?
[00:33:51] ZF: Yeah. The reality is, is that everywhere we go, everywhere we’ve gone has always been to me a display of God’s glory. I was in Italy, for example, and I was wandering through this castle. Psalm 91 just came to my head, and you have all of these scriptures in the Bible that talk about the Lord being our refuge. You have scriptures that talk about where David hid. You have all of these concepts in Scripture around fortresses, around refuge. I think that in this day and age, it’s important for us to be able to see and understand that no matter where we are. But if I like remove Israel out of the equation, and think about some of these other nations, for example, cinnamon. Cinnamon in the Bible was imported from the east, so around like the Sri Lanka area over there. In order to harvest cinnamon, there’s a very specific process, right? There’s a very specific process to harvest Cinnamon. Cinnamon is a is not the first ingredient of anointing oil, but it is one of — I don’t know which number it is specifically, but why is it that particular number? What is it about cinnamon? Why is it harvested in the way that it’s harvested? What can we learn about that?
It’s taking a deeper look at some of these concepts that people don’t necessarily think about. When people travel, they just travel, they eat, they look at the sites and then they go home. But there’s, I believe, always something deeper and there’s always a biblical application. It’s not necessarily just about our experience in Israel, but I believe that there is an experience everywhere we go, that can connect us to God in a deeper way.
[00:35:55] MH: That’s super profound, and it’s so fascinating to hear how you go from experiencing something yourself to then kind of how Jeremy frames the question saying, “Oh, this is something that I can use as a meaningful experience to heighten the awareness of others.” That’s so dope. Man, I feel like there’s so much more that we could get to in this conversation, which I feel like this is a good cliffhanger to prompt, maybe a part two, where we can hear more about some of the other things that you got going on. I’m actually really excited about Morning Assembly. Maybe we could hop back on the schedule sometime soon for a part. Zim, this has been great. The time really flew by this. This is so great. You’re such a unique and creative thinker and it’s so cool to meet you.
[00:36:50] ZF: Likewise. This is a lot of fun, a really great conversation. Thank you so much.
[00:36:55] JU: Zim, I admire your vision, your present-mindedness and your — I admire how you see the Lord everywhere. Blessed are the pure in heart for they will see God. There’s a teacher whom I really admire who has said, “If you’re not seeing God in every circumstance, is because you’re not pure in heart. You should be seeing God, his hand, his work everywhere.” I mean, that’s a deeply convicting statement for me, especially when I…
[00:37:27] ZF: For us all.
[00:37:28] JU: Even down to the point where Judas comes to betray Jesus in the garden. You know what Jesus says? He says “Friend. The cup which my father has sent, shall I not drink it?” There’s a depth there that we can’t, by the help of the Holy Spirit, the Lord willing, we may be able to fathom some bit of that. I appreciate your desire to see the Lord in different things. It’s a wonderful blessing to be in touch with people who really want to see the Lord, seek to see him.
Aside from, I mean, the kind of the scope of this podcast is primarily about creative practice, showcasing amazing stories of founders, and what does it look like to launch things into the world. But I’m also tremendously blessed just to hear of your faith and to see it in these practical ways, so thanks for sharing.
[00:38:22] ZF: Of course. Yeah, I wanted the stories and open and honest. I’m an open book. I’m an open book. I appreciate that you guys lead with that and it allowed me to share my story. I’m always open to how the Lord will use this story for his purposes. Who knows? There might be somebody who listens to this, and they are inspired to just do something different or think differently. Thank you all so much. I really appreciate. This conversation was good. It was thought provoking. I’ve never heard the word fascinating so many times. I was like, “That is really interesting.” I love the d.school, guys. If I had to — back in the day when I was, I think when I had first — I don’t know when it was, but I’ve been obsessed with the d.school ever since. Are you guys in Cali?
[00:39:18] JU: I am.
[00:39:19] ZF: Okay. I’m in California.
[00:39:20] MH: I’m in Atlanta.
[00:39:21] ZF: Okay. Well, one of these days, I’ll make it out to the d.school and I’ll make it out to Atlanta. Fun fact, Marcus. My husband and I were at the roaster — oh man. Maybe this was a couple months ago. Who’s the guy that packages all the stuff for shipping it out?
[00:39:42] MH: Kali.
[00:39:43] ZF: Yeah. We met him and we saw the roaster. That was really cool. I’m so excited what y’all are doing.
[00:39:50] MH: Thank you. Thank you. Love it. Love it. Zim, this is great. I’m sure we’ll be in contact in the future and we’ll get you back here for part two.
[00:40:00] ZF: Part two, don’t forget. Okay.
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