How to get motivated - by losing?! (with Monica Wadhwa)
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You're listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. Okay, here's a wild story for you. Several years ago, I was a contestant on the game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? And this was at a time when I was just starting out in my comedy career and money was really tight. And so when they asked the question, who wants to be a millionaire? My answer was, me please. I would really, really like that. I want that very much.

Now, I didn't win a million dollars on the show. I got knocked out very early because I didn't know what the acronym NASCAR stood for. To be honest, I didn't even know that NASCAR was an acronym. But now, till the day I die, I will never forget that it stands for National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing. Honestly, seems like there's too many words that mean car in there. Like that's a kind of a trick acronym, but it is what it stands for. I'm going to leave it behind.

And look, here's the weird thing about not winning on that game show for me. Okay, predictably, I did wake up in the middle of the night and I was like, why didn't I use my lifeline? I should have phoned my friend John. He 100% knew that answer. But then kind of unexpectedly...

There was this other side effect of losing on the game show, which is that when I thought about not winning, I found this new kind of motivation for succeeding in my career. Right. It was like if this money isn't just going to fall out of the sky and save my comedy career, then I'm going to have to work really hard and I'm going to make it happen anyway. Who needs that game show money?

Look, I fully recognize how ridiculous my personal example is, right? It's not like in any way I deserve to win on a game show. But on today's episode, we're going to be exploring the surprising benefits of not winning with an expert who studies exactly that. Whenever we set a goal, we always start that journey with a burst of inspiration and motivation. I'm going to get there. I'm going to do it.

But what happens when our enthusiasm starts to fade a little bit and we need an additional shot of motivation? Well, today's guest, Professor Monica Wadhwa, her research looks into goal setting and reward systems that can help us keep that motivation and momentum going, even and especially when we don't win at something that we thought we really wanted. Here's a clip from Monica's TEDx talk. I believe that winning is the best thing that could happen to them, that winning perpetuates winning.

I used to believe the same. I used to believe that winning is the best thing that could happen to me. But what if it is not? I spent the last eight years of my life researching this paradox that not winning is in fact more powerful than winning. How is that even possible? Well, we're going to find out by talking more with Monica Wadhwa after this break.

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I'm so excited to share the stage with all the amazing speakers of the TED Next conference, and I hope you'll come and experience it with me. Visit go.ted.com slash TED Next to get your pass today. And we are back. Today on the show, we're talking about the surprising benefits of not winning with Professor Monica Wadhwa.

I'm Monica Wadhwa. I'm a behavioral scientist and I'm also a professor in marketing at the Temple University. There isn't always like an origin story for a behavioral scientist. And yet you kind of have an origin story. Can you tell us about that? So a lot of my interest in studying motivation was literally like a result of my childhood experiences. Growing up, I really liked playing video games. My parents refused to get the TV console games at home for me. So I used to go out and I would play Super Mario a lot.

I also like the idea of playing lotteries. I grew up in India and winning numbers used to come in a small section in a newspaper. So you would pick up that newspaper the next morning and then take your lottery ticket and match the numbers. That was really exciting for me. And I distinctly remember this one time when I almost won. I missed a lottery by one or two digits.

I was really energized afterward. But it kind of made me wonder, like, what is it about video games and lotteries that I really enjoy? Why did I feel energized afterward when playing video games and lotteries is sometimes still there, the mobile games, but then more than...

More than a decade later, as a researcher, I kind of wanted to study this question in a more systematic manner. So that's how I started studying motivation. What was your answer as to why you really loved them? So I had this basic hunch, right? In both the lotteries and the video games, it was this anticipation of whether I'll win something. Am I going to cross that level?

And that gave me the motivation energy to keep going. Right. I wanted to find out if this bout of motivation energy I experienced while playing a lottery or game, was it all bad? Like we consider addictions bad. I mean, after all, people get addicted to gambling.

Or is it that we could use this motivational energy better and use it in appropriate ways? So when I started studying it with my own hunch and I came across this stream of research that seemed to suggest that addiction and motivation actually share commonalities.

Parts of brain that are involved in motivation and reward processing are the same that are activated by stuff that we get addicted to, like sex, curiosity, novelty, video games, drugs, etc. So addiction, in some sense, is a type of motivated behavior. And there's a possibility that behaviors associated with addiction could tell us more about motivation in general, right, and how we could channel this in the right direction.

We tend to think of motivation as like a specific reward or a goal, right? You're thirsty, you want to go get water, or you're hungry for chocolate.

But what my research found is it's a more general source of energy, which once it is activated, it can lead to a pursuit of broad range of rewards. So in some sense, motivation is like the accelerator in your car. It's the gas pedal. It provides energy and goals are like your steering wheel. Once your motivational energy is activated, your gas pedal is pressed. You could direct it in the right direction.

work on a goal that's close to your heart, or you could just get on Instagram and spend your energy there. So going back to my answer there, when I played video games, Super Mario, I always had it in front of me to play again. And until the money ran out, I had it. So the motivational energy was directed in the wrong direction of playing those video games. But when I played that lottery, that one-shot lottery, and I was only allowed to get one that time, and I had this math exam the next day.

So when I almost won, all of this energy was directed to the goal that was salient for me, my exam. So I put all of that energy there and started working on it. And this is what we've been testing in many different experiments. Can you tell us about what one of the ones that led to some of your key findings was? Let me get back to one of my earlier works, my first project, if you will, which I started as a PhD student.

So in this one, again, I wanted to test this whole hunch of motivational energy being more general. And what we did was we gave people a brief of a pleasurable, rewarding food or a drink item. In another study, we used a whiff of a pleasant odor. We've used romantic images.

just a small taste or a small whiff of an odor, which would make you want more. It doesn't satiate you, but it activates that motivational energy or drive to get more. The gas pedal is now pressed. And then we measured what do people do when this gas pedal is pressed?

So in the first series of studies, we exposed them to a lot of food and drinks. We had a buffet for them. And we said, there's all this food for you. There were chips and there were cookies, et cetera, in that buffet. And it turns out that once the gas pedal was pressed, when the anticipation for more was activated, this motivational energy was there, they ended up consuming more hedonic food and drink items.

I actually have a little secret. I used to keep small, very little like samples of food, like chocolates. I like the dark chocolate. I like when I was working on my dissertation. So once in a while, I'll just like kind of have that and it would just energize me. I made sure that I'm not surrounded by too many. But once in a while, I'll have just a small piece that doesn't satisfy me, but is enough to make me want more.

So this kind of led to a lot of my other work as well. It's interesting to me that in your experiments, you end up getting to do all sorts of fun things to mess with people in some ways, right? You give them fake lottery tickets. You create new signs in the dining hall. You have a spread of free snacks that are all secretly coordinated in different ways. It feels like there must be times in your personal life where you encounter a situation and you go like, ooh, this would be a fun experiment. Oh, man, I...

the time right so I was at Walmart and this was as a student we only shopped at Walmart or Trader Joe's the mecca of grocery shopping for students right I went to Walmart and I don't know if you've noticed they have these cages Walmart people call them dump cage or at least they used to and they'll dump all the DVDs or things there and people would hunt for those yes right I was like

What's happening here? You know, I started digging in and started talking to people. And they were like, oh, we're curious. This is the motivation energy they were getting from their curiosity. And we know curiosity activates the reward centers. Same reward centers that is activated by chocolate, that is activated by video games. So people were anticipating, like hunting. What am I going to get now? It's the energy. It's hooking onto their purchase.

I've actually done an experiment on a cruise where I asked the art dealer who was, you know, this is an auction. And I asked him, would he do a little experiment for me? This was an Italian guy and he just indulged me. He said, sure. I got like white bedsheet from my room. And I said, when the next time when you do auctions for this particular painter, can you hide the painting and only show a part of it? Don't show the entire painting. And he said, sure. I actually made him

money. He got more money for the same painter than when he had shown the paintings. And again, it was a curiosity and the anticipation, the little taste that got people excited. So, yeah, I've done a lot of these crazy things. Well, hearing hearing those examples, but also reading, reading your papers and listening to your talk, it almost feels like

there's this spectrum where on one end we have motivation and on the other end we have satiation. And I wouldn't have thought of those as opposites, but it seems like the more that we get what we want, the less we're motivated. Yes.

Right, right. In fact, in one of my really like older papers, instead of giving people a whiff of an odor, we gave them like 13 minutes of a pleasant odor. They were watching a documentary, but that room was like full of pleasant odor or no odor. And then we had the same buffet. And this was not a food odor. This was like a normal odor. People were exposed to the pleasant odor for 13 minutes. They ended up consuming less.

than who were exposed to whiff of an odor. And we ran multiple different experiments for this. We found the same finding again and again. You satiate people with a lot and you're literally like satisfying that motivation energy. So you found that near losses are very motivating. Why aren't all losses equally motivating?

It boils to your anticipation and the motivational energy, right? I do find that near losses, and this actually came from my lottery playing experience of like, I almost came close to winning. There's a very nice, really amazing work by a psychologist called Clark Hall. He worked in 1920s, 30s, and he had this cool theory, gold gradient. He ran this quirky study with rats.

What he found was rats, as they come closer to a reward, they start running faster. And video game developers know this really well. You normally have levels, right? You cross a level. For each level, you have to cross certain steps. They will make the last step difficult for you. The first few steps you can easily cross.

The last step is difficult. And it's the same thing with nearly winning versus clearly losing. If you make the first step difficult and somebody loses, that intensification of energy doesn't happen. We're like clock holds rats. So when we run toward a reward, that energy is getting intensified. When you're running and the first step, you're done.

That energy is not going to intensify. That's why clearly losing or not all losses are the same as nearly winning. In nearly winning, you're running toward the reward. Your motivational energy is getting intensified and intensified. But at the very last minute, that reward, you can't really get that reward. But now you have this intensified motivational drive that spills over to another task.

So the implications for that for personal goal setting, I sometimes hear people talk about like make a list and when you have a to do list, put some easy things on first. So you build some momentum. Does that line up with what you're saying right there?

It kind of does. In fact, if it's especially if it is a difficult goal, like you're starting a podcast and it's your very first podcast, you don't want to start with the difficult step. You want to get the momentum and start with like first divide your entire journey into small steps.

Right. And then focus on achieving that one step. Absolutely. You should start something with a step that is more familiar to you if it is a difficult goal. What do I do? I'm going to start with something familiar and that will energize me and that will make me go on. But I don't want to set something so easy as my primary goal that just says, OK, it doesn't motivate me again.

we have to pick up things from video game developers in terms of how they're doing it. They don't make the video game easy. They just make like

The first few steps to cross level easy. One of the most cliche things that people ever talk about with goals is shoot for the moon. And even if you miss, you'll be among the stars. It almost seems like this, your work is in some ways a validation of that. If you change stars to like trying harder in the future, right? It's like you shoot for this big goal. Maybe you'll achieve your goal. It's a little harder than you thought. Or if you don't achieve it, you'll then end up with this real kind of fire in your belly to do the rest, the next goals and to work harder on the other things that you're doing.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, winner doesn't take it all. I love Ava, but winner does not take it all. Right. It's almost like, but framing is important, actress. You could, the reason I got motivated after playing that lottery was because in my mind, I was not framing it as losing.

I framed it as nearly winning or almost getting there. Right. So that is the key here, how you frame it. Let's say if you were a leader in an organization and you have to give feedback to your employees or your team members, how do you do it? You could tell them that they did not make it or you could tell them that they almost made it. Both factually correct. One is demotivating and another one is just energizing.

So I think that is the key aspect here. And it has many other key implications from the perspective of goal setting and reward setting. But that's framing is absolutely key. Is there a different kind of satisfaction from succeeding on your first try versus having a big motivation period where you've been working really hard and trying many, many times, getting closer and closer and closer and then finally doing it without having done any research? It feels to me like it must be more satisfying to not get it right at first, but to have to work for it. But is that actually true?

I'm assuming, yes, there is a different kind of feeling, right? If you succeed, you feel really excited. Oh, I succeeded the first time. But I think what we need to be careful with that is that you could frame it as, oh, I am good at it, which is not really the best framing you could do for yourself.

Because if you think that you are good at it, somehow it is going to negatively impact your effort you're putting in. And this is based on a very famous theory, which talks about the implicit theory. Some people actually believe that mindsets are incremental, like you work hard and you get something. And some people have a fixed mindset. You believe you're good and you stop putting hard work. And I worry that if you easily succeed the first time, you shouldn't frame it as I'm good at it.

As much as you feel great, amazing, feel good about it, get all the excitement, but tell yourself, I still need to work hard. Okay, I'm going to keep telling myself that. But actually right now we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be right back with more. Don't go anywhere.

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We are back. Thank you so much for sticking with us. And here is your reward for being so motivated. It is another clip from Monica's TEDx talk where she's explaining how setting goals at the correct difficulty level can help give you the motivation you need to achieve not just that specific goal, but also other goals that you're working on as well. Here's Monica. When you're setting goals for yourself, set goals that are slightly beyond your reach. Goals that you can almost reach.

but not quite, they're slightly beyond your capacity. And this almost reaching your goal, this experience is going to give you the motivational juice, that fire in the belly that you need to succeed on your next goal. Keep in mind though, I'm going to put a caveat on this. I told you that motivation is like the gas pedal and steering wheel, goal is like the steering wheel, right? So where the steering wheel is moved is up to you.

you could actually use this motivation energy and apply it to that next big project you're working on or you could squander this away on another kind of reward, a night out at a club.

I'm just curious for people who are now trying to think about setting goals for themselves and trying to think about putting your work into practice. What are maybe three questions that people should ask themselves as they come up with a list of goals? So I think one of the things you want to ask yourself is the goal that I've set. Is it too easy for me or is it something so difficult that I cannot even achieve it? Either one of the two cases is not a good idea.

If it's easy, you can easily achieve it. You're going to get satiated very quick. If it's too difficult and you think like, oh, I did not even get like one tenth of the way, then you are going to basically just get demotivated. So that's one thing you want to ask yourself. The second thing you want to ask yourself is set deadlines that are realistic. OK, you don't want to miss a deadline. You might just not achieve your goal to exact level.

If you miss a deadline that you just kind of like, yeah, okay, now I'll do it when I want to do it. You sort of delay it further. So set difficult or slightly difficult, slightly beyond reach goals, but set realistic deadlines to achieve them. Another implication, not in terms of goal setting, but in terms of performance feedback is that when you're giving feedback to somebody you're working with or to your own self, frame your feedback as merely getting there.

rather than failing, because that failing feedback is something that can really demotivate you. Very important during difficult times. This is what I did during COVID time. It was a long journey. So setting goals into smaller steps, giving yourself the right kind of feedback and self-rewarding, it's extremely important.

I imagine that some of this feedback piece is we were so close, we can visualize a version of ourselves that's just a little bit better, that tried just a little bit harder, that makes it there. I can, of course, that's such a better way of thinking about yourself as opposed to being like, I'm just a little too bad to be like, oh, I could be just a little bit better. Absolutely. That visualization is the key. Visualization and anticipation. These are two that underlie actually the motivational energy.

These are actually two that underlie addictive behaviors. They share commonalities, right? I mean, addiction is, like I said, a form of motivated behavior. That is why it is important to divide the goal into steps because you are visualizing it, like grabbing it. Victory is so close or it was so close, I could have reached it. So that is absolutely the key here. There's all this motivational momentum, as you put it, right? How do you get good at directing that energy to goals that you care about?

One of the key things before I even get to that, make sure that you're not surrounded. This is a do not do thing in my list. I, for one, am not on social media. I'm not on Instagram. I mean, I have an account which I use for research when I have to sort of like

understand what people are doing, but I do not post anything. I do not look at it. I don't have any friends on it. Nothing. I'm not on Facebook, etc. Because keep in mind, today we have so many distractors. If you have this motivational energy and you have all of these distractors, if it gets hooked onto that, then you're wasting it. So be mindful of not surrounding yourself with all of these distractors.

When you have this motivational energy that is activated and reward systems surrounding yourself with right kind of rewards is going to play a great role in activating this energy source. I have a list to do with how I design my reward system. But once you have this motivational energy,

Goal setting, dividing your goal into smaller steps rather than trying to achieve this big goal at one go. That becomes really important in making sure that you're directing it in the right direction. Surrounding yourself with goals that are important to you, that becomes extremely important as well in terms of achieving that. And how do you avoid being manipulated?

by this kind of energy? Because, you know, one thing that you talk about is how if a store gives out these lottery in one of your studies, right, you're shopping and the store gives out lottery tickets and people almost win, but they don't. Then you found that those people did a lot more shopping. So how can we avoid being

being manipulated by these near misses and kind of use the energy for the ways that we want to use it as opposed to being pushed into things that we don't want to do. One thing that I do is whenever I'm going shopping, I go as a satisfied person having consumed a lot of what I enjoyed. So when I go, I'm already satiated. Again,

I have to say this. That doesn't mean that nearly winning wouldn't work in that case, but maybe the effect would be reduced if you already go as a satiated person inside the store. You are satisfied with that. It's a good question. Sometimes these manipulations are very difficult.

to avoid. And for yourself, if you're working on a paper, which I imagine happens all the time, you're working on a paper or you're grading or you're looking over one of your students work and you're trying to give notes, you must find moments where you're like, oh, I just am not motivated. I'm stressed.

I think a lot of people would like have a cup of strong coffee, have some tea. Do you instead look for a quick way to fail at something so that you can then use that for your energy? I play chess. Okay. A quick, speedy 10-minute chess. I'll have these 10-minute breaks which are interspersed in my journey to my daily goals with the computer. And typically, I'll play with a board that's really tough to play with.

Not too hard, but hard enough for me. So if I win, I feel good. It's actually gone in effort, but I've put a lot of effort into it. It's 10 minutes I'll spend, you know, I'll play those quick games. And if I do not win, I've at least played with a tough enough one for me.

or sometimes I'll have a mobile game, but that's risky because you can have a second shot and it's very quick. You know, it's just a one minute thing. If you're doing that sometimes now that I do it, I tell myself like one round and I'm leaving it. And if you really don't know when to stop, do not do this for yourself because then you are going to spend your motivational energy into playing that again and again,

which is not a good idea. Instead, give yourself rewards that are very quick rewards, or maybe you could give yourself a chocolate, just a small piece in between, highly energizing. So with this motivational energy,

How sustainable is it? Right. Like what's the connection, if any, between working extra hard because we almost got something and then burning out because now we're like working at the maximum capacity? You can go on for a very long time. Right. That's why I keep saying it's a big goal divided into steps, not the same length of steps.

Like some could be like a small step, some one could be a slightly bigger step and then give yourself a reward before a small one before you start working on the next step. Because you know if you don't do that you've used up this motivational energy and it's going to win. It's not like an ever-ending resource. You have to create this resource by giving yourself these smaller rewards and not in a fixed schedule. Give it to yourself in like a variable schedule. If you start predicting

this is what I'm going to get a reward, it loses its value. We've talked a lot about personal for ourselves and then also kind of professional. But I know you've also thought about some of this in terms of parenting and like what we how we communicate to kids and what we message to them around goals and dreaming. And one thing that I know you've spoken about is we often tell kids to dream big, but that's not

always exactly their best advice. Right. So I think in terms of kids, a lot of implications for designing a reward system that stems from this research. One of the things is obviously what we do is we want to reward our kids by sometimes consciously losing. I don't have kids, but I so I can take a neutral perspective because I watch parents do that with kids. They would sometimes intentionally lose.

Even as a grown-up, your parents would sometimes intentionally lose to you. Like it was back when I really wanted to learn playing chess. One time, my dad was an amazing chess player. He like intentionally lost to me. He was like, don't ever do that to me. So I think instead of making your child feel like winning is so important and intentionally losing, it's okay to let them lose sometimes. Yeah.

Your child does not need to be a star performer all the time. The second thing is design the rewards for your kids in a way that they can motivate your kids. Sometimes we'll tell our kids that if you get like an egg or something, you will get you this particular thing.

Instead of doing that, the one way of if you try really hard or you do this, you know, you will get something or but don't tell them what they will get. That unpredictability in rewards is way more energizing than you actually tell them. And they're just visualizing or they're going to get that. And that's an extrinsic thing. And it's just that energy wouldn't flow. And don't reward them every time. If I'm not wrong, Chris, you were you were also a fifth grade teacher. Yeah.

Yeah. So imagine like if your fifth graders got some reward after every three problems that they solved, would they be energized to work on the sixth? If they are predicting, oh, I'm going to get this. They probably won't be that. It loses its power so quickly. Exactly. But.

Now imagine if you give them a reward in an unpredictable fashion, like maybe a one in three puzzles that you solve, you'll probably get a reward or one in four, or maybe after two, you will get a reward. Sometimes after three, there's an unpredictability that's built in. And that is great for kids. You're saying that I can already hear kids walking into the classroom and being like, is today going to be a reward day? Maybe we're going to get extra recess today. And there's the whispering and the energy of that. Yeah.

Of course, the flip side is you have to make sure that they actually do get it sometimes so that they're not just like, it's all a scam. Yes.

Absolutely. If they think it is a scam, they've just lost their entire motivation. But you don't need to reward them on every trial. You just reward them sometimes. I did this study, not for a paper, but generally where we had puzzles and puzzles were either rewarded like every trial or some trials were rewarded. And then afterward, I was like, okay, this is one. The next particular task was not rewarded, but it was a similar task. And what I found was that the people who were rewarded for every single trial were

they actually were not as motivated to do that task again compared with people who were not rewarded every single time. There was a chance that they would be rewarded because unpredictability is very, very rewarding for the brain. There is actually a very cool experiment where they put people in a scanner and they gave them a little bit of juice or water. And what the researchers looked at was they looked at the

activation in the reward center. And what they found was when people didn't know what they were getting, juice or water, that unpredictability, that activated the reward center more than if they got this reward, which matched their taste. So unpredictability was more powerful than personal preference with that reward. And that's what my own research has shown, that unexpected benefits are really powerful, way more powerful than expected benefits.

Have you figured out any ways to make that kind of unpredictable reward for yourself? Because obviously, if I'm setting my own reward, I know what it's going to be. I wonder if there's a way that you could rig it up. Yeah. What I do is that when I'm traveling or when I'm imagining traveling, when I used to solo travel, I used to get this and I would do eeny, meeny, miny, moe.

And say, I'll go here. And I literally used to do that. Wow, okay. So there is that. You still did work a way of unpredictability into it. Yeah, a little bit. Yes. Yeah. Well, we always end our interviews with the same two questions. What is one thing, whether it's a book, a movie, a piece of music, an idea, a video game, could be anything. What's one thing that's helped you to be a better human? Shawshank Redemption. Because it is so much a struggle and it ended with a hope.

Right? Like that made me feel very optimistic and hopeful. So that definitely motivated me. Another one, and I think it's a book that I think everyone should read that, All the Light We Cannot See. And today,

is the right time to read it. Like these days when there's so much of lack of love in this world, if you will, I mean, or at least that's what we see. I think we should definitely read this and we'll realize that love is such a motivating force. And these are the two that kind of made me a better human being. I love those great, great answers.

Monica Vada, thank you so much for talking to us. It was a real pleasure. And I am excited to play a very difficult round of chess right after this and be extremely motivated for the rest of my day. Thank you so much, Chris. Wonderful talking. And thank you for inviting me. And thank you to your entire team who were amazing behind the back. I couldn't agree more.

That is our show for today. Thank you so much for listening to How to Be a Better Human. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and a huge thank you to today's guest, Monica Wadhwa. From TED, our show is brought to you by Sammy Case, Anna Phelan, and Julia Dickerson, none of whom could relate to today's episode because the three of them have never achieved anything less than 100% success. From Transmitter Media, we're brought to you by Greta Cohn and Farrah DeGrange, who are hard at work devising an audio-based motivation system.

And from PRX, Jocelyn Gonzalez and Patrick Grant, who managed to put this episode together by promising themselves a series of completely unpredictable and chaotic rewards. But thanks most of all to you for listening to our show. If you are feeling motivated, we would love for you to share this episode with someone who you think would enjoy it. And we will be back with more How to Be a Better Human next week.

Support for the show comes from Brooks Running. I'm so excited because I have been a runner, gosh, my entire adult life. And for as long as I can remember, I have run with Brooks Running shoes. Now I'm running with a pair of Ghost 16s from Brooks.

incredibly lightweight shoes that have really soft cushioning. It feels just right when I'm hitting my running trail that's just out behind my house. You now can take your daily run in the Better Than Ever Go 16. You can visit brookscrunning.com to learn more. PR.