How To Solve Problems Better Than 99% of People | Seth Godin

25:33And you have a quote that I love from your blog, which is, the industrial age brought compliance and compliance brought fear and fear brought us mediocrity. What do you mean by this? And what can we do about this? So what's the industrial system? If you have a car, the reason it doesn't cost$6 million is because it's not made by hand. It has interchangeable parts. It was made in a factory. and the fact is you can go get a little wireless lav now for$99 that should cost a million dollars, but it's made in a factory. Factories are about repetitiveness and they are about compliance. So we had to build a public school.

26:11You can look in the history of public school. Public school was built by factory owners to train people to do what they were told. And the way we get people to do that is we give them prizes, weekly salary, and then we threaten them with punishment, fear. do what I say or you're out the door. And so you're on the assembly line faster and faster and faster, repeating what you did yesterday. And the assembly line doesn't have to look like Charlie Chaplin putting together a car. If you're doing insurance claims, you're on the assembly line. And there's one reason why AI is freaking so many people out because AI is eager to go into the assembly line doing the same thing over and over again.

26:47So we've got factories that create value, and then we've got fear as the weapon that they use, which leads to compliance. And compliance is all about how do I fit in the middle so they don't notice me. And that cycle built our culture. It made us all the richest people in the history of the world. But it also created all sorts of pain and suffering because that's not what human beings were born to do. It's interesting. It makes me think of leaders versus managers. You know, I'm a leader at our company and I've been a manager at other people's company before. And it is actually quite hard even as a leader, I think, to not fall into the salary plus you could potentially get fired trap.

27:31It's not only like when you are subjugated to it, you're part of the system. You then become that type of leader and you almost have to fight, I feel like, your inherent desire to just be complied with and have people do what you want them to do as a leader. And so you draw really important distinctions between managers and leaders. What makes the difference between a manager and a leader? So you are the leader of your company, but lots of companies don't have a leader. They have a manager. They're not the same thing. Managers use power and authority to get people to do a job they know can be done.

28:08So we need managers at hotels, at fast food restaurants, someone to make sure that the subway is running on time. That's management. Leadership is voluntary. You can't require people to follow you as a leader because if you do, you're a manager. Leadership is, I'm going over there. Who wants to come? Leadership is, this might not work. So in your career as an independent thinker and writer and podcaster and investor, you have done many, many things that weren't in the playbook. And your value add is not that you are a boring manager who does, Goldman is filled with people like that. Your value add is you are willing to go to a frontier and do things that might not work.

28:51And so people choose to follow you. And so if you are running a business where management is important, you're going to have to figure out how to run an industrial business where you get people to comply. I'm glad the pacemaker company, if you have a pacemaker, has Six Sigma with compliance. It's not like, oh, we did our best, but it was Thursday. No, they really nailed it down. But if you want change to happen, you're going to need to lead. And you do that by creating the conditions for enrollment, creating the conditions for possibility so that people choose to go on this journey. And then when it's time for the business to be managed, you should probably sell it.

29:34Interesting. You have a saying, managers want authority, leaders want responsibility. My question is, what is the first step you can take to become a leader and not a manager? The most important thing is to lead yourself. And we have a lot of trouble with that. And what The Knot is about is, you know, many of my books have been how do you get other people to change their mind? This is about how do you get yourself to change your mind? And how do you figure out how to be more curious? How do you figure out how to be more resilient? How do you figure out how to measure what matters? Because once you start doing that, you will begin to move.

30:13And when you will begin to move, then people who want to move will begin to follow you. And I love the Main Street model of boring, small, recession-proof businesses. Most of what makes them boring is on the outside, they're not looking for innovation. If I need my lawn mowed, I just want it mowed. I don't need you to be innovative. But on the inside, there's huge value add if you can figure out how to innovate, how your employees engage with each other and with the customers. Those sorts of shifts are critical. And this is what it means to be a professional. What it meant to do hard work 100 years ago was you needed to change your clothes twice a day because you were digging ditches.

31:00We're so lucky we don't do that anymore. At least I am. Okay, so what's the hard work? And the hard work isn't like gritting your teeth and getting through it. The hard work is being clear with yourself and then your team about the change you seek to make. What is the purpose of what we're doing? So if you look at Will Gadara and Danny Meyer and talk about hospitality, hospitality doesn't come naturally at the end of a six-hour shift.

31:25Seth Godin:It's the work. That's what we're talking about. Where is the work? It's really underrated and hard too because I think in this day and age we use slack so much in my company for instance, which is a great way to remove all emotion and just have sort of compliance top-down leadership. And I always try to go back to the quote that's if you want to teach your people how to build a boat, don't teach them about nails and ropes and bindings. Teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea, which is some saint that I can never remember but I should remember because I quote it a lot. And I think your work does a really good job of that.

32:01It's like we want to inspire people and ourselves, not just mandate things. Like I know you famously don't like the word should too, which I think is probably important. I know you said optimism is a choice and a tool. I can sometimes be proud of the fact that I'm a realist and that could even border on a pessimist take. I'd be curious your stance. How do we switch to optimism? How do you have a choice to be optimistic? How could we do that if somebody's stuck being really pessimistic? Well, so Cody, this is the first thing you've ever said to me that wasn't true. You're an optimist and that's a key to what you've built.

32:47You're not a foolish optimist. You're not saying, I'm going to invest in this company and hope it's going to go well. What we want is when we're making a decision like, how do I invest$100 ,000, we want to put on a pessimist hat and say, in this moment, let me make a list of all the things that could go wrong. Let me be very clear about the possible failure points. But the only way you're going to go forward is once you've established a foundation is to say, now how do I act as if? How do I set this up in such a way that if things work, we're going to get even more of where we want to go. So the problem with doom scrolling, naysaying, and pessimism as a habit is you talk yourself into mediocrity again.

33:36You talk yourself into deniability. You talk yourself into a future that you don't want to end up with. And so when I say that optimism is a tool, it's simply to say, when I'm going to make a decision, the first thing I want to do is put my pessimist hat on to make sure I'm not going to be out of the game. But then my optimist hat says, where are the chances to lead? Where are the chances to create value here? But if you're fully a pessimist, you're never going to think through those things. Yeah. And I think if you're fully a pessimist, you're not going to ever get unstuck because you won't take action, which requires optimism.

34:13And I like the way you framed it in the knot about confusion is often in the way of moving forward. It's not just pessimism, but you talk about the conspiracy of stuck is built on basically three confusions, and the confusions being short-term conflict avoidance, unwillingness to create tension, misunderstanding of risk. What are those, and how do you fight these types of confusion? Yeah. Okay. So short-term conflict avoidance is something that I'm glad we have in our culture, right? Someone cuts you off in traffic, you don't ram their car. That we don't, we've been calloused recently with all the spam phone calls and all the people hustling us to be confronted all day long with this.

34:59But for 10 ,000 years, human beings were generally kind to each other. And so when we need to speak up to get unstuck, the easiest thing to do is not bring it up at the dinner table. not bring it up with your parents, something that's been going on for too long, not bringing it up because for one minute it will be awkward. So we just live with it for a very long time. So that's why the word short-term is there, that it's worth having a short-term conflict if it leads to long-term benefit to both sides. Just say it. The second one is about the unwillingness to create tension. Tension and stress are different.

35:39Stress is bad. Stress wears us out. It leads to trauma. Tension is pulling a rubber band back before you let go. If you don't pull it back, it's not going to fly across the room. So when Taylor Swift says, tickets are going to sell out in 20 minutes, she just created tension for everyone in the room. Because if you don't buy a ticket right now, you're going to get left out. So when we show up to lead, when we show up to create possibility, when we get unstuck, we're going to cause tension for other people. We inflict it on purpose. We willingly inflict tension. Your book comes out in September.

36:16When people know that, there's tension that exists until they pre-order it because you invented that tension, right?

36:24Seth Godin:And then what we know is we are terrible at being rational about risk. People still buy insurance before they get on an airplane. Airplanes never crash. It is way more dangerous to drive to the airport than to fly to wherever you're going. But it feels more dangerous to be on a plane. And we hesitate to ask our boss something that's mutually beneficial because it feels super risky. Even though in the history of this organization, not once has it ever led to someone's career ending. But it feels risky. So when people show up and they're making huge progress through an industry, it's usually not because they have more skill than you, but they're better at understanding what's actually risky versus what feels risky.

37:18Seth Godin:Public speaking is not risky. It just feels risky. So people like you and I can go on stage and give a speech because everyone else thinks it's too risky. No, it's risky to work in a coal mine. You know what's crazy too? I've been in a coal mine, oddly, and even that risk now has decreased so hugely, not to mention how much they get compensated for it. And I was worried about black lung and all of these things that kind of don't exist anymore. Now, granted, it's much riskier than me and my spreadsheets, you know, but there's even a perceived risk there that's huge that isn't real. I've been obsessed with this idea lately because I think you can't spell rich without risk.

37:57Like if you want to make money, I don't know anybody who can do that for you with no risk. And if they can, they probably keep that secret to themselves. But it seems like our entire society is set up to not have risk. You know, even now, you know, younger people getting married less, having sex less, some of that's good perhaps, but also it's just like tamping down our risk spectrum. So I wonder, for somebody who's sitting there and worried about taking on more risk and putting themselves out there, what do you say to them? Or what do you repeat to yourself when you're like, this feels risky, I'm going to do it anyways?

38:36The way you learned how to walk and the way you learned how to talk and almost everything that's important is you did it a little, you discovered what happened, and then you did it some more and you got good at it. Please don't quit your day job. Don't quit your day job. Go try to mortgage your house, risk your life savings. Don't do that, right?

38:56Seth Godin:But maybe on Saturday, go to a garage sale, buy$18 worth of stuff and see if you can sell it on eBay. Is that risky? I don't think it's risky. I think it's generous because there's somebody in Toledo who wants that thing you found and they're eager to pay for it and you're going to charge them less than it's worth. And there was someone in the garage who wanted to sell it to you and they're eager to sell it and you paid what they thought was, and you came out ahead by creating value for people. So when people talk to me about risk, I ask them things like this, like, when was the last time you did something generous that might not work, where if it didn't work, only three people would know?

39:39Seth Godin:And that's how I grew up. That's how I spent the formative years when my business was struggling. I was constantly doing things where if they didn't work, almost no one would notice. And you may have heard me tell the story about my mom, but I'll tell it again. My mom was one of the pioneers of museum stores. She co-founded the Museum Store Association and the museum at the Albright Knox in Buffalo is a great museum. It was her full-time gig. When I was a teenager, she came home one day on a Friday and she seemed a little down. I said, what's wrong? She said, well, we're doing this thing tomorrow where she had gotten two appraisers from Sotheby's to come to the museum because she wanted to get people who never came to the museum to come.

40:24Seth Godin:Buffalo's a working class town. Bring what, you know, your grandmother's candlesticks. We'll tell you if they're worth anything. She said, so I've made this commitment to these people and I'm worried because what if no one comes? And then she turned to me and she said, well, well, if no one comes, no one will know that no one came. God, that's such a good line. And it became a mantra for me. And the next morning we went to the museum and there were 5 ,000 people waiting in line. Because it was a generous thing to do. Everyone came out ahead. And if no one had come, no one would have known. Obviously, Seth talks a lot about getting unstuck.

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42:10So there's a famous artist. You tell the story about Jackson Pollock. And you have a story that I love. And it's in the knot, isn't it? Can you tell that story? So in the middle of the 1900s, Jackson Pollock was the most famous painter other than Picasso in the world. Certainly the most famous American painter. Cover of Life magazine.

42:28Seth Godin:He had three years in a row where every single thing he painted sold instantly. And today is worth tens of millions of dollars. and then he stopped and he went back to his studio in Long Island and started painting a totally different kind of work different scale, different look and his wife, Lee Krasnow, also an artist said that he had decided he had gone as far as he could with what he had done before, the drip paintings and he didn't want to be like a cover band doing rehashes of Jackson Pollock paintings he wanted to go back to being the artist and so with all that momentum with everything going for him and we've been talking this whole time about what do people do who don't have that right with all that momentum he brings the new workout big show and everyone hates it the critics hate it no one buys it you've probably never seen any of the paintings i had to look really hard to find them i don't like them either and it led to his drinking increasing, and he ended up dying in a drunken car crash taking someone with him.

43:38Seth Godin:Why? Because he wanted two things, not one. He wanted to be on the edge, to be on the frontier, to be an artist. And, but it's not and, it's but, but he also wanted to be successful, sold out and rich. And because the two things couldn't happen at the same time, he broke. And that and and but dichotomy completely changed my life. Once you understand that you're carrying all these buts around and that the buts are what are keeping you from doing the thing you say you want, now you can make a choice, which is stop saying you want it and live with the fact that the butt is there or get rid of the butts and turn them into ands.

44:24Seth Godin:I'm going to run the marathon and I'm going to get tired. Not I'm going to run the marathon, but I don't want to get tired. And once you add the and, right, I'm going to buy these sorts of Main Street businesses and my fancy lawyer friends aren't going to think I'm fancy. Great. That goes with it. Part of the deal. Yeah, it seems like you've got to do this too. Like the indoctrination to not ending up like Pollock is that you have to create things just for you, even if they tank. I mean we talk about that sometimes on this channel. My favorite videos that we ever do or my favorite pieces of content are the ones where I'm like, I don't care if anybody else – like I'm ramped up about this today.

45:06Or even sometimes I'll show them to my husband or friends and I'm like, this is so cringy. I'm like, I love it. I think it's so fun. I don't care. And I think if you don't have those every so often, then you end up like letting other people drive your life. And I see it a lot with the algorithms too. I was just at this like big YouTube creator thing and it was the biggest YouTube creators in the world. And I don't really label myself as a YouTuber or a podcaster or whatever. I just think I do stuff that I find interesting and I like business. Maybe I'm a business person. But it was fascinating because they all talked about how once you get boxed in as like one type of format, one type of video, it's really hard to break out of that.

45:49But then you start becoming sort of a mirror to everybody else's desires instead. And that seems super dangerous. Yes. But we got to be clear about the choices and the consequences. They called me up a bunch of years ago when it was first starting and they said, well, you auditioned for Shark Tank. We want you to be one of the judges on Shark Tank. And I said, well, what do you think? And they said, well, you would be the nasty judge. And they actually have a bald, nasty judge now, but you would be the nasty judge. It's Kevin, right? I'm not saying anything. I know Kevin, so I could give a crap.

46:22Seth Godin:And I said to myself, there's a real cost to that. If you want the prizes that come from that, you have to pay the price that comes from that. So in your case, there's an alignment. There are a few people who when you like it, they like it. And that's great. But if you want to be Oprah, you can't do that. Because Oprah has to do things that large numbers of people are going to like. So the thing you're not allowed to do is become entitled. When you're entitled, you've just added the but. I want to do exactly what I want to do, but I want lots of people to like it. No, can't have it both ways. How many of your books that you wrote were, I want to do this, don't care what anybody else thinks, as opposed to, I think this is a huge book, and so I'm going to do it?

47:14I've never written a book that was supposed to be a huge book. Never? I tried when I was a book packager. I did the Beards on Ladies Common Sense Investment Guides. Those were very, very big books. I had four of them on the New York Times, but I saw it at the same time. but that wasn't my book. I was helping somebody else make their book even though I touched all of it. Their name was on it. The thing is that it's very hard to make something knowing it's going to be big. Now, there is a book I wrote called Survival is Not Enough and Charles Darwin wrote the foreword which is not easy because he's dead and I was indulging myself with that book.

48:00I spent a full year, eight hours a day. I wrote 200 ,000 words because I could and the book didn't sell and I don't talk about the book on stage because every time I talk about it, people's eyes glaze over. Evolution is just not a good thing to talk about on stage because it confuses people. Okay, fine, right? But I didn't completely get kicked out of the industry either. I got mostly kicked out of the industry because that was the consequence of writing a book that I was just indulging myself. So when Purple Cow came out, I didn't have a publisher. And I published it myself in a milk carton for only 5 ,000 people because I was writing it for them.

48:42Seth Godin:I didn't write that book for me. I wrote that book for them. And so ever since then, I've never written a book for me. I try to imagine what's the minimum, smallest viable audience, that would be enough. Is that number commensurate with what I'm going to have to put into it, what my partners are going to have to do? Because if it doesn't match, then I'm being indulgent. But if it does match, if you can satisfy that smallest viable audience, and in the case of a landscaping business, it's six blocks in the suburbs. If those 500 people Think you're the best there ever was? It's enough. And that's the goal, is where can we find that smallest viable audience?

49:25There's a little shop in Brooklyn called 69 Atlantic and the Art of Play. It's smaller than this studio. And they sell little puzzles and things in the front. And then there's a secret door in the back. Don't tell anyone I told you. And two or three nights a week, they open a bookshelf and there's a little room behind it that has 24 seats. And the greatest magicians in the world come to this room with 24 people in it.

49:54Seth Godin:It's totally worth going. And if it was 240 seats, none of it would work. It's the right number of people in the right room for the right reason. That's enough. Just figure out what your enough is. It might be a million. If you're on YouTube and you don't have a million, you're not going to make a living. But there's 8 billion people in the world. A million is not that many. I know a guy who does, you know those reaction videos? He and his partner, who is a songwriter, both from the Midwest, do reaction videos to Filipino pop songs. And they did a couple at the first because it was funny because they don't understand the words or anything.

50:34Seth Godin:But the Filipino audience found them. And they make a full-time living doing this because they found their people. That's what the Internet's for. It's a terrible mass medium. It's a very good micro medium. It's really freeing when you think about it that way because you can make money doing just about anything. And there's a lot of downsides that come with really, really big. It's just increasing complexity. So I always think like what a beautiful thing it is. And you've talked about this in many ways. You've talked about this like minimally viable group of people often in your books, which is really freeing.

51:07And then Kevin Kelly's got his thousand true fans. And I think those two models can really help small businesses who can make millions or tens of millions off of a very small subset of people. You know, we have, you know, we get 130 million views a month, but the people that I actually sell anything to is probably 3 ,000 to 5 ,000 people a year. That's not very many people, actually. And they would all miss you if you were gone. Yeah. And that's the key. You don't want to hustle people who wouldn't miss you. But if you're offering something to people who would, they say thank you. That's so freeing because, you know, you want to like everybody to like you.

51:42It's that high school mentality. I think one other thing I want to talk about from you is you talk about – you have this line that I love. The stickiest entanglements don't feel like traps. They feel like facts. First, can you sort of define what is entanglements and then what do you mean by that? Right. So entanglements are at the heart of everything we've just talked about. They're invisible action at a distance. They are the magnetic forces that undermine what we're doing. They are the high school teacher who's still trying to prove was wrong in what they said about us. They're the old girlfriend who doesn't even know we exist anymore.

52:21They are the memory we have of getting scolded

52:24Seth Godin:when we were seven and we don't want to get scolded again. We are entangled with all of these feelings, spooky action at a distance. They're not in the room, but they are. We paid$300 ,000 to go to dental school. Our family supported us. We made it through. And 15 years later, we hate being a dentist. And so now we're going to spend the next 50 years drilling kids' teeth because we are entangled with a decision we made 15 years ago. We don't have to do that. We can say, it's true that happened. And I forgive myself or I forgive whatever else came along because these aren't facts. These are just things we are choosing to focus on.

53:09Seth Godin:And when we watch people who are excellent at what they do in any field, it's because they figured out as a professional how to get unentangled with that other thing that holds everybody else back. And my argument is the secret to dealing with it is three words. Tell the truth. If you tell me the truth about your entanglements, they wither in the sunlight because they're so absurd when we say them out loud. If we keep saying them out loud, oh, thanks for offering me to do that. But I remember when I was nine, this thing happened. So I'm afraid to go to this conference because it might happen. What?

53:53Seth Godin:Right? Tell the truth at work when we're entangled at work. Like why do we have this weekly meeting every Thursday? Well, we need to have a meeting. no, we don't have to have a meeting. We could just have a memo. Why do we have this meeting every Thursday? Well, oh, because the boss likes it if we all sit in a circle, shake our heads, and agree with her. Okay, now we're clear about why we're having the meeting. We can make a new decision based on that truth. Why is it so hard for people to tell the truth? And how do you tell yourself the truth about these situations? Entanglements are very good at preserving themselves.

54:31That's why they're still around. So they come up with an enormous number of reasons to keep us from doing it. My friend Steve Pressfield calls this resistance. Resistance is the invisible force that, for example, invents writer's block. No one has writer's block. Writer's block is a myth. You don't get talker's block.

54:52Seth Godin:So write down what you say. You're done. You wrote. Now, it might not be good, but you didn't say you have a shortage of good writing. You just said you can't write. So show me all your bad writing. And if you keep doing enough bad writing, something good is going to sneak in there. I'm sure of it. So resistance is everywhere you look. It's the parts inside of us, the tender parts, the scared parts, the little kids who are protecting themselves in a shell, who are hiding and fighting over time to force you to sabotage what you say you want to protect themselves. And if we can tell the truth about why you're going to a singles bar instead of building a real relationship, why you're eating that instead of going to go for a walk, whatever it is, if we can be clear about it, it will wither and die.

55:43Seth Godin:It will always be something we're aware of, but you can make a difference for people if you care enough to do this work. Every problem is solvable. So in practice, how would that work? Like I remember I sat with Tony Robbins and I was like, I was trying to, you know, with him, I'm like, I want to see him in action, you know? So I'm like, so I want to give him something that I'm bad at or struggling at and have him fix me, you know, like, is this what we do here? And he was so funny because at the time it was, I was trying to drink less wine. Like it doesn't make, I'm older, This is the lamest thing ever, but it's just what was on top of mind for me.

56:20I'm getting older. It doesn't sit that well with me. I love red wine, though. I love the whole thing about it. And so I just would end up drinking a glass or two every night. It was part of my process. And it was very funny because I told him that. He looks at me and we've talked about it. He's very intense. But in that moment, he's like, oh, honey, you just don't have a big enough why. And then he kind of carries on into the next thing. And I thought about that for a while. And I was like, I don't feel fixed. So I'm not sure what happened here. And then I thought about it later. And since then, my husband and I have been focusing on fertility, which is a big why.

56:51And lo and behold, I'm not drinking anymore and it's not even a problem. And so I was wondering in your take, like sometimes I hear these things like we need to find our truths, but they are hidden. They hide and they're really smooth talkers. Yeah. So let's say somebody right now is struggling with, I feel stuck in creating my thing, my art, my work, whatever. How would you poke them to get to the reason why they're – to the story that they're telling themselves basically? Yeah. Well, Tony is brilliant at this and I am not. I don't believe that. My take is you should poke yourself because I'm not going to be in the room for very long and you can have some things that you can approach.

57:38Seth Godin:So what we see when we get stuck is – stuck is another word for comfortable. and we build all sorts of habits to keep us stuck because we want to be stuck because it's comfortable. So if we want to undo habits, the best way to do it is not to constantly require willpower, but to build new habits. A blog post every day is a habit. So if you tell me that you want to do this and I'm going to take you at your word that you're serious about it, let's explore where the entanglements are. Well, I don't like criticism. I'm worried that I'll get fired from my job. I'm afraid that if I do this, no one will come.

58:19Okay, great. If you did it under another

58:21Seth Godin:name, how many of those problems go away? Because what you were saying is you want to do creative work and you want to get credit for it. Those are two different things. So the but was a problem because it wasn't really an and. If you were willing to not get credit for it, would it be easier for you to do creative work. So let's make a habit. There's going to be a blog post every single day for four weeks. It doesn't have your name on it. There's absolutely no downside. If you come back here in four weeks and you haven't done it, then you don't want to do the work. But if you do the work, a month from now, you're a blogger.

58:57Seth Godin:A month from now, you're a writer. A month from now, you're somebody who's written 3 ,000 words. And your next 3 ,000 are going to be better. But what you were really saying is that you want to be Cody and you want 130 million views without doing – yeah, of course you're not going to get that. But let's discover how do you become the kind of person who does this, the kind of person that when they look in the mirror sees someone who does things like this. When I am in public, I am playing the role of Seth Godin. I'm not really Seth Godin. I know what that role is like. I know how to act that role, but that's a choice.

59:39Seth Godin:So you become that by forgiving the entanglements, letting go of the person you've become habituated to be, and instead make one decision and turn it into a series of habits. And if you're willing to do this work, I've never once heard from someone who did the work and didn't get the output. But you might not be willing to do the work and that's fine. It's fine with me. Do you take off the yellow glasses when you're not Seth Godin? Like what's the one, what's the, what's the super man to, you know, Clark Kent? So one thing I found, I used to go to Ted a lot. People don't believe it, but most Ted speakers are introverts.

1:00:22That they don't walk into a cocktail party and shake hands with every single person. and so most of the time I'm sitting in a room by myself with my puppy and I'm writing or I'm thinking or I'm talking to Claude or whatever it is but I'm not like that. I mean I think Tony's like that all the time but most of the people who do what we do, we're not like that all the time. Yeah. No, I'm the same. It gives me anxiety although I'm very loud on the internet but my husband is actually the one. When we go out in public he's great. I call him my front man because he gets to go have all the action talk to everybody and I kind of chill.

1:00:56I like to think about things, which is probably why we app on the internet or write books. You know, I'm actually quite comfortable with that. I just feel like there's some sort of service that comes from sharing it with other people that I get those feedback loops. I want you to tell the story that goes with this quote that I got to put on the wall, which is, instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life that you don't escape from. Very poignant, especially today when for a lot of people that is possible, you know that especially in the U.S. it's pretty possible and you open up with a parable about a man named Alexander and the knot and I thought there was a lot of similarity between the two so would you mind telling that story so they call him Alexander the Great I think when he was 17 knowing he added the great part he was with Alexander and there was a legend in a small town in Turkey that there was an ox cart that was tied with a very complicated knot to the edge of town.

1:01:54And it was said that whoever could come and untie this knot would become the ruler of all of Europe. And Alexander showed up, and there's a myth about it that's not true, which is that he took out a sword, cut it in half, and said, there's no knot. That's not really what the story was. The story was this. He showed up, he heard the story, he saw the complicated knot, and he said, wait,

1:02:20Seth Godin:there's a wooden post in the middle of it. If I just pull this post out, the knot sort of takes care of itself because it had entwined itself and was concealing the real problem. Pull out the post and the knot gets fixed. That doesn't mean it's easy. It takes a lot of practice to realize where's the post? Where's the entanglement? Where's the thing I'm going to pull out? But we're surrounded by knots. There are all these people who want us to be mildly unhappy. There are all these people who want us to measure the wrong things and buy solace in the form of a bottle or a fast food or whatever it is.

1:02:55Seth Godin:That's good for them to make us reasonably unhappy all the time. But when you see where the post is and you see where the nod is, you can make different choices. Now, the quote you shared is from the beginning of my book, Linchpin, which I wrote 20 years ago, 15 years ago. And the world has changed since then. It has made it harder for freelancers and for people with a day job to find joy in their work because they basically have mechanized everything and turned us into keystroke counting cogs. But there's still an attitude shift that goes on. And it was, I'm not good at jet lag. It was four o 'clock in the morning.

1:03:39I'm sitting in the lobby of this hotel when I'm on vacation and my family's asleep. What am I going to do?

1:03:47Seth Godin:And I'm checking my email and I'm enjoying it because no one's telling me what to do. I get a chance to do it. And these two people walk by. I don't know why they were up at four o 'clock in the morning. And one turns to the other and says, look at that poor man working on vacation. And I said to myself, look at those poor schmoes. They're going to spend 51 weeks unhappy so they can come here for one week a year and escape. I said, wouldn't it make more sense to make difficult choices about why we're spending our time this way? What's important to us? Do I really want to be a millionaire or do I just want to tell people I'm a millionaire?

1:04:22Seth Godin:Right? Because what would make a good life? What is my purpose? What am I keeping track of? Because if you make$30 million and your family doesn't speak to you, I don't think you won. And I get that Goldman Sachs wants you to make$30 million because that's the only way they get clients. But that might not be what you want. So let's get unentangled and clear. Tell the truth about the change we seek to make. Who's it for and what's it for? Because when we bring this intent to the work, we might fail and we have to own that or we might succeed. but at least we're just not coasting along as a victim.

1:04:58So this book and this conversation that we've had today, what do you hope that people get when they read The Knot? Like when they're done, it's the last page, they've read through it, what will have changed in their life? I tell a bunch of stories in the book about tuberculosis and I tell stories about homelessness and mass transit, big, big, big problems. And I talk about little tiny annoying problems

1:05:22Seth Godin:like who loads the dishwasher and problems can be solved. Situations cannot. If you have a situation, accept it. Doesn't mean it's fair, doesn't mean it's right, but that's not worth your time. Gravity, you're not going to be able to do anything about gravity. But if it's a problem and you can solve it and make things better for yourself and other people, I hope you will. We're not going to run out of problems anytime soon. We are running out of optimism. We're running out of enthusiasm. other than we're running out of the ability to lean into the work. And I'm naive enough to think that maybe if I wrote a book about that, it would help.

1:06:03Well, it's a beautiful book. Seth Godin, thank you so much for being here today. Thanks.

1:06:14I'm not giving up. I am selling the building. The final season of FX is the bear. The restaurant is flooded Everything's either gonna be okay No! Or not We are outgunned And we are outmanned We have each other FX's The Bear The final season All episodes now streaming on Disney Plus