The Psychology of Authenticity | Seth Godin - From The Vault

20:11Dr. Michael Gervais:And there's the highs and the lows and all of that stuff that I say, well done in title and well done in approach to life. if you can live with some song in your life. Now, mastery has that similar feel and contour. Okay, that being said, is authenticity for me, let's make sure we're saying the same thing. Authenticity, it's not saying what I feel I should say. Authenticity is the ability to declare the values and virtues that are most important to me and be consistent with those across conditions. So that, we're actually saying something very similar here. Yes. Yes. I'm totally, totally across conditions.

20:52Yeah.

20:52Dr. Michael Gervais:And so where things break down, leadership breaks down is if somebody says, look, I'm about compassion and kindness and that, that, that, that, that, that, right. And then you steal$5 from their pocket and they, they berate you in front of in public and they make you feel small and stupid. That's not authenticity. That's actually some sort of shadow game that they're playing. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. I wonder if we are saying something similar and I think we're totally,

21:16Seth Godin:We're totally aligned. I am challenging the way people might interpret what they could hear when they hear authenticity. That I think that you're highlighting something important when you talk about mastery. Because again, the words matter here. Mastery sort of implies that you've learned what you need to learn and you're as good at it as one can be. You've mastered it. But in fact, Miles Davis and 5 ,000 other people we could mention were always learning, exploring around the edges. But those people had what you're talking about, which is the confidence to change the promise from the standard promise of a professional to one that goes beyond that.

21:59Seth Godin:To say, I'm going to be consistently a version of this that is very hard for other people to replicate because I've paid these dues, because I care enough, because I have the domain knowledge, because I'm willing to sacrifice the short term. If I had written the sequel to this as marketing instead of Song of Significance, it would have sold 20 times as many copies. But I'm not willing to trade to go do that. That is something that I think you're trying to capture in this narrative. 100%. Yeah.

22:30Dr. Michael Gervais:So selling out for something is not the way of mastery, certainly not the way of the artist. So that selling out is, I hear you loud and clear and I go, oh, that's cool. That's cool that you even recognize that. But I love that phrasing that you just shared about how the promise that you're making and authenticity, let's go back to that word one more time. It gets really confusing. So it was in the subtitle of one of my first audio books or my first audio book, Living and Leading Authentically. And it makes me cringe at one level. And the reason, and you say, why'd you choose that word then? Because I really wanted to unpack what authenticity is.

23:08Dr. Michael Gervais:So I thought, you and I both thought a lot about this. And because it gets thrown around so easily, but authenticity is not making somebody feel bad because that's, you needed to be authentic in your expression of discontent or whatever it might be. That's not what authenticity allows. It doesn't permit for that. Authenticity requires discipline. And with that discipline to either stay on the edge when it's uncomfortable for you, but you're still taking in other people's experience into account for it, or discipline to stay true to the first principles that matter to you. Right.

23:42Seth Godin:And you become the kind of person you seek to become, and then it becomes authentic to you, but it's not the way you were born.

23:51Dr. Michael Gervais:So I'm remembering years and years ago when I was

23:56Seth Godin:a book packager, I did 120 books in 10 years with a team. And so I was constantly in book publishers' offices pitching one idea or another. And I remember one, there's this person and they're like this, they refuse to make eye contact. It was just like a body language lesson in how to get as little as possible out of a meeting. And an hour later, I had a meeting with a different person who was also skeptical. But they projected this openness and this curiosity and asked provocative questions that would get the best out of me. So here were two people both doing their job. One was doing it poorly because they were being authentically skeptical in the way that they had evolved it to be because they thought they had power.

24:41Seth Godin:And there was the other person being of service to me and to them and to the institution by using the same amount of time to create the conditions to get more out of me, right? Well, that second person would say they were being authentic too. Well, somewhere years before, there was a fork in the road between these two people. And one person said, how am I going to spend this meeting to soothe my boredom? And And one person said, how am I going to spend this meeting to be of service? And you had hinted on that earlier when you said the best version of me is to do that internal work to understand what is the best version of me.

25:22Dr. Michael Gervais:And I didn't think we'd spend this long on authenticity. Sorry. But I think it's really good. No, I think it's really good. Because I do want to understand how you get to that felt sense and how you articulate that best version. but let's pause here for a moment and say, the best version of me is speaking truth to power, and I'm sorry it came out edgy. The other best version of me could be, you know, I just let it go. It was, I just need to be a little bit more kind of accepting of what other people are doing, and I just needed to let it go. In the same circumstance, somebody trips and spills, you know, coffee all over your brand new dress or whatever it is, right?

26:02Dr. Michael Gervais:And one part of me says, Hey, be more careful now. This is dangerous. And you just ruined a shirt. So I'm speaking truth to power, if you will, if that person's a supervisor. And then the other is, in this weird example, is like, it's okay. No big deal. The point is, you have to really be aligned to it. That's where I go. It was authentic. You have to be aligned to it.

26:24Seth Godin:It's okay. Where did the alignment come from? Because in both cases, I think what we're asking is how long is the timeframe? frame. You speak truth to power in the moment because it lets you feel good, or you speak truth to power over time and you're changing the system in a way that you're proud of. Because the person who's doing it in the short run doesn't cause the change to happen.

26:48Dr. Michael Gervais:I love what you just did. I love what you just did. Okay, so that's how you're thinking about consistency. Consistency in that way. I love that. Not consistency in the high performer way that I was really thinking about it earlier. That's really cool, Seth. I like that a lot. Okay. And then the other piece on the way that you know your best self, I think I heard you say my best self in a relationship, and maybe I'll add it, like the best self of me in work. And I can't remember the exact example there, but that idea that I'm different across different conditions, it made my eyebrows go up like, wait, what does that mean?

27:27Dr. Michael Gervais:I want to be the best version of myself independent of the external conditions. I want to bring myself, the best of me forward consistently. And so how do you help me understand that piece?

27:42Seth Godin:Okay, so there are two ways that I can help you unpack it. I'm one of the world's best style canoeists. I learned from Chuck, who learned from Omer. Omer invented the sport in 1924. for. If I am in a Cedar Strip canoe in Algonquin Park, Canada, doing my fancy day on canoeing, I am not speaking on stage the way Seth Godin speaks on stage. I'm in a totally different context. And I am not Seth Godin, the author in that canoe. I'm Seth Godin, the paddler or the canoeing instructor in that canoe. That's a different context. If my wife and I are having a conversation about something, I should not be talking to her the way I would talk to Fred Wilson when he was on the board of my company.

28:24Seth Godin:It's a totally different context. So what is the best version of you as a dad? It's almost certainly not the best version of you as a canoeist. Why would they be at all related?

28:37Dr. Michael Gervais:Because virtues and values are consistent across conditions. However, skills and capabilities for success in each one are unique.

28:48Seth Godin:Could be, but what if I play poker? If I play poker, I better be good at lying because in that context, that's how you win. Yeah.

28:56Dr. Michael Gervais:Yeah. Okay. So yeah, maybe poker and other forms of deception are super tricky. Or surgery.

29:07Seth Godin:That was very fast. If I'm a surgeon and a four-year-old dies on the table and I feel it the same way a neighbor's kid dies at four, I can't be a surgeon for very long, that what they teach you in medical school is to find some professional distance because when you're doing surgery, you cannot be present with that four-year-old the same way you would with the kid down the street, or you will not be able to do surgery ever again.

29:34Dr. Michael Gervais:I mean, at least that's how 200 years of surgery has taught us that they're being like, and listen, my surgeon friends are going to like give me a ton of shit right now, but orthopedic surgeons are still using hammers and nails and screws. And, you know, like, so, I mean, there's, I think there's room to grow is my point. A neurosurgeon, dear friend of mine, he's a healer and a surgeon. And so, I'm not saying he's the model for modern surgery.

30:09Seth Godin:No, just to be clear. And again, I don't need to have the last word every time, but he's not in tears every time because you just can't bring that personal trauma to the front line. If you're a trauma worker, it's just, you can't be a professional. Yeah.

30:25Dr. Michael Gervais:Yeah. Because the, the, the requirements of that environment, to your point, necessitate of, I wouldn't say a different version. I think we're going to have semantics here on this one. I require different capabilities for you to be able to meet that moment watch this in an authentic way okay great yeah anyway yeah okay so so the point i think the point here seth for both of us is like who are you and how do you want to show up in this world and if we can get um any movement towards that as a consistent um practice for people it'd be pretty damn cool. Those are the people I want to be around.

31:10Seth Godin:Yeah. This is at the heart of your contribution and you've made a big difference for a lot of people. And I just reconstructed because I don't know why, maybe a course I took when I was 20. I'm not sure. I reconstructed as what is the change you seek to make? This interaction, the reason you showed up today, what is the change you seek to make? It might be something as simple as I would like my manager at McDonald's to not fire me and make sure I get paid. That is the only change I'm trying to make, to change my manager from someone who's going to fire me to someone who isn't. But at a very big level, Nelson Mandela had a much bigger change in mind.

31:49Seth Godin:And if we can be in service of the change we seek to make, the coherent response is to be authentically consistent or consistently authentic, because that is the single best way to make the change we seek to make. And for me, that is where meaning lies, is to be a meaningful specific, to show up with a reputation that gives us the benefit of the doubt, that gives us leverage, so that we can cause whatever change we're seeking to have happen. And there are plenty of people where that change is, let's make the stock price go up. And there are other people who say, I want to make someone who's lonely feel a little bit less lonely right now.

32:30Dr. Michael Gervais:You know what I love about that framing? that you're doing is it puts the person asking the question in the driver's seat of not necessarily the change happening, but the actions that are aligned for. So now you're actually in that simple little framing, instilling agency and efficacy and, you know, that kind of internal volition to make a difference in the external world. And so like, I love that framing that is so well grounded in good research. Was that cleverness by you or was that, do you go and search and research, I'm sorry, like Ben Dora's theory on efficacy and self-determination theory?

33:09Dr. Michael Gervais:How do you go to come up with that very powerful framing?

33:14Seth Godin:I believe where it started for me was my first year as an independent. I got 800 rejections in a row. Does that mean an independent writer? Yeah. Well, I was a book packager. So my name isn't on the cover of many of the books that I did, but I caused them to occur like a movie producer does for movies. Chip Conley and I did our first book together in 1986. I sold it for$5 ,000. And then I got 800 rejection letters in a row. And what I was doing in the books I was pitching publishers is I was saying, this is a book I would like to read. This is a book I would like to make. This is a book that shows that I am particularly clever and insightful.

33:58Seth Godin:And I met this guy, John Boswell. And Boswell shifted completely my thinking in one afternoon. And he said, look, no one wants to buy a book that you want to write. They want to buy a book they want to publish. And I was like, oh, yeah, that's right. And so the shift was, how do I produce a book that matches what a book publisher and a reader want, not what I want. And if I can embrace that and realize that my best version of me as a book packager, I make books that I am proud of, that other people want to publish and other people want to read, suddenly it became profitable, but it also became useful because I wasn't demanding that the world give me a standing ovation.

34:49Seth Godin:What I was saying is, how could I be of service here?

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37:14Dr. Michael Gervais:Says it, they're waking up more rested than they have in years. Right now, go to Lisa.com for 25 % off select mattresses. Plus, you get an extra$50 off when you use the promo code mastery. That's exclusive for our listeners. That's Lisa, L-E-E-S-A.com, promo code mastery for the 25 % off select mattresses, plus the extra$50 off when you use the code mastery. I love that. And it's a little bit like you're getting your cake and eating it to as an artist somebody might be how would this be on a commissioned piece like you're lining up the commission the person who's paying for the piece and the things that you want to create right and so you're lining those two worlds up as opposed to the you know the rogue artist that is only creating what they want and damn to those who don't find it interesting and i'm going to eat out of my you know i don't know right and you need you need both yeah right so herbie

38:09Seth Godin:Hancock's autobiography is fantastic. And if you look at Herbie's career, Herbie did not chase electronic music when it was popular. He did not chase the thing that led to Rocket. He pioneered those things. He has in four different categories, just triumphed, always surrounded by some people who said he was crazy, who said, you should just do more of what you did yesterday. So he's leading. He's not asking people for directions. He's saying, I'm going over there. Who wants to come? But he had enough empathy to say, if no one wants to come, I'm feeding the wrong voice in my head. Let's listen to a different place I might want to go that other people actually might want to come to.

38:56Dr. Michael Gervais:That's really cool.

39:00Dr. Michael Gervais:There's so much power in that. And that seems to kind of not square with how I think about the true innovators that I know is that they're nearly obsessed with the way that they're seeing a future state or a future product or something. And it feels like they're constantly trying that out. Most of them don't work in a solitary environment. environment. They're trying it out and iterating quickly based on the way it comes out of their mouth or the way it feels as it comes out of their mouth, if it's like creating a future state versus a product necessarily. And to me, it feels like those innovators are committed to something, adjusting as they go, but not saying, if no one's listening, maybe I should pivot.

39:50Seth Godin:There's so many juicy ways to decode this. Okay. So here's the first one. Vincent van Gogh was not born to paint in oil paint. If he had been born 200 years earlier or later, he would have done something totally different. What he did was he saw things around him in France in the 1800s and then came to what felt like a natural conclusion that this is what he was born to do. That Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are almost exactly the same age. Not a coincidence, because they came of age when those wordless emotions they had inside of them were best expressed by hitching themselves up to the fast-moving wagon train of Moore's Law and what computers could do.

40:34Seth Godin:So then Steve gets, you know, quote, obsessed with pushing something, pushing something in a different direction. But it's not, think about it, nowhere. It came out of the world he was being marinated in. So that's the first part. The second part is there are tons of people who are innovators who are in love with a version of the future, and you've never heard of them and neither have I, because they're just wrong. And the ones that you and I bump into were right enough that we noticed them. And so it's easy to imagine that the symptom of being an innovator is to be sure of yourself. but in fact no most innovators who assure themselves we've never heard of it's just sometimes there's someone who assure themselves and their innate perception of the world happened to line up and someone was ready for what they had to say so like i invented email marketing i built some of the first online games those things didn't come out of nowhere i there was stuff around me that made me feel like i could survive the critics and the people who said i was crazy because I was context aware enough to know that there were some threads there that I had a decent shot at weaving together.

41:49Seth Godin:But there was also stuff I invented that was wrong. And if I was still sticking with it, you and I wouldn't be talking right now.

41:56Dr. Michael Gervais:Yeah. So is this why you wrote the book, The Dip, to help people understand how to get out of it? Yes.

42:05Seth Godin:So The Dip was the first book about quitting, which is astonishing because we all quit. And we don't talk about it. We don't think about it. But the fact is, unless you're wearing a tutu or still playing ice hockey at the age of 40, you quit things your whole life. And we need to get better at it. And we need to be clear about the difference between quitting a dead end and quitting in the dip. And the dip is that moment when it feels so hard and so unlikely that you should quit because that's when everyone quits. and sticking through that dip is how we get to the other side. Organic chemistry is one of the biggest dips.

42:46Seth Godin:Every doctor has to take it. They don't use organic chemistry when they become doctors, but they have to take it because it's a filter. It's a dip. And if you can't make it through this, you're probably not going to be able to make it through your residency either. Yeah.

43:00Dr. Michael Gervais:SEALs training in the old gymnastics program, just to make it easy to understand, it was like level seven or eight when they had to do a double back on the on the beam for for a female gymnast it was like that was the place that you see the exodus yeah right so and this is i was always i gave your book out a lot when i was working like with a high volume one-on-one with athletes at that phase of my life and i gave it out a lot and i was always very nervous to give it to folks, but I thought they needed the ones I gave it to, they needed a way to discern the mechanisms that sit underneath stopping, quitting, as opposed to like helping them recommit to going forward.

43:45Dr. Michael Gervais:Exactly. And yeah, and it's not, your book does not say you ought to quit. You know, it's basically, it's saying, understand the difference between stopping and quitting. And, you know, yeah, I think. Yeah.

43:58Seth Godin:And I think Pete talked about that a little bit with you. Coach Carroll. Yeah. And I think that his retiring or however his exit is occurring, that's what grownups do, right? You're not going to be 80 years old and playing or coaching in a major sports league. So there's a day between now and then when you're going to quit. Why don't you do it on purpose? Why don't you do it with your eyes open? Why don't you do it so that you can re-enroll on the days you don't quit, knowing that you are going to quit one day, but it's not today.

44:30Dr. Michael Gervais:Yeah, right. And that reaffirms that it's not today. I ought to give this the right attention to detail and to love or whatever it might be, because I am now making a choice. Yes. And again, back to the word agency, like I choose how I'm going to experience life. Even if the external conditions are not what I hope them to be, I'm still going to choose the way I do it, which is a radical way to go through life. You know, so we had Chip Conley on, which I know that you've mentioned, and you've got a long history with him. And we titled his podcast, Overcoming Limiting Beliefs. And here we are talking about, you know, the human condition.

45:09Dr. Michael Gervais:So you've been thinking about this stuff for a long time, influencing Chip or Chip influencing you in probably both directional ways. but I'm there's this conversation that's brewing right underneath the surface for me at least which is about something I've been really interested in on limiting beliefs which is the this over index on paying attention to what other people think about me and when I'm very sloppy with my life and I don't know who I am and how I feel and I'm not quite sure and I'm more interested in looking good and performing well to be part of the tribe or the community, I outsource my sense of being okay to other people.

45:49Dr. Michael Gervais:And we had fun. We named it FOPO, fear of people's opinions, being one of the great, great constrictors of potential. All that being said is, how do you think about that modern day experience where we're constantly looking outside of ourselves to see and gauge if we're okay? How do you speak to that phenomena?

46:08Seth Godin:Yeah, no, I saw your riff about it and I think it's really important. Oh, thank you. I gave a thousand speeches around the world when I was flying. I never, you're not, you're not flying. I haven't been on a plane for two and a half years because of the climate.

46:23Dr. Michael Gervais:Because, Oh wait, hold on, hold on. I want to get to the FOPO bit, but I think I read this and I clocked it, but you're not flying because your commitment to the, the environmental conditions of the climate. Is that. Yeah.

46:37Seth Godin:It makes me feel like it makes me feel like a cannibal. Also, I believe that I have just enough leverage that if I say, can I do a virtual talk instead, some places will say yes. And if more places do virtual talks, then the number of people who aren't flying goes down even more. And eventually, we're going to have to change the culture somehow. And that's a little tiny piece of it. The other part is, after getting sick during COVID and stuff, I'm like, life's too short for me to go racing around on airplanes. The technology exists for me to be talking to Michael right here, right now, better than we might be talking in person.

47:13Seth Godin:Let's just do, let's commit. So I never liked doing talks with simultaneous translation because everyone in the audience hears what you had to say about six seconds later. So the feedback is weird. And number two, I really don't like talking in convention centers because the acoustics are terrible. So I'm giving this talk in Mexico City in a convention center. Double whammy. And in the third row, there's a woman talking on her cell phone. Now, she's not listening on her cell phone while I'm talking. She's talking on her cell phone while I'm talking.

47:49Dr. Michael Gervais:Oh, my God.

47:50Seth Godin:I'm on stage and I decide that this means I am failing. So I aim all of my energy. And I don't have a memorized talk. So I'm actually talking to her about distraction and digital devices and looking right at her. And after about, felt like 10 minutes, it was probably 90 seconds, I realized there are 3 ,000 people in that room who came to hear me. And there's one person in that room who didn't. Why am I sacrificing my contribution to 2 ,999 people? And so in my mind, she disappeared. She just vanished from the room. And I could go back to being judged by the people I want to be judged. That is the key work.

48:40Seth Godin:So like when you tell a certain kind of friend that you have a new idea or that you're thinking of getting a new job or whatever, they will try to talk you out of it. They will try to talk you out of it because they care about you. They will do things that feel like they are judging you in the way they roll their eyes or whatever, because they are afraid for you. and part of the reason they're afraid for you is they're afraid for themselves because they don't want to look into the void. Don't ask those people for advice. Don't tell those people about your new idea. But that does not mean you should ignore everyone because that ends up with trolls and narcissists.

49:18Seth Godin:What we need to do is figure out who are those small group of people that when we are judged by them, they make us a better version of ourselves. Finding those people, treasuring those people, honoring those people, that is hard work that's worth doing.

49:34Dr. Michael Gervais:I offer this to you and see if you've got a different lever that there's a round table that I have eight chairs on it and it's a sacred seat in my life. And there's two criteria to make it onto this table. One is you've demonstrated time under tension with me. You understand my scars, my ambitions, my hopes, my dreams. And so when you have an opinion, it's in context. And so there's a caring that has endured over tension in time that I go, yeah, we have care in place. So that's one criteria. But the second criteria is that that person needs to have done something, like really been in the arena and gone for it in their life because I value that information from the frontier in that way.

50:23Dr. Michael Gervais:And so that means there doesn't mean that they're world known. It just means they've really made the changes in their life and gone for it to be about those changes. And so those are my criteria. What if you were to quickly think about criteria for you, for those folks, what are though? What are they?

50:41Seth Godin:Well, I hack the problem a different way. There are two hats. There are some people who I want to wear a reassurance hat. The only reason I'm telling you something is that you should tell me that it's a thing that's worth doing. And if anyone can do it, it's me. Reassure me. And there's a second hat. If you only have people with the first hat, you're a comedian who's surrounded himself with seven yes men who makes bad movies, right? You have to have a second hat people. The second hat people have insight. Second hat people are going to ask you hard questions. The second hat people are going to say, yeah, but what's the hard part?

51:16Seth Godin:And what are you going to to do after that? What are you going to do after that? So it's very hard to find someone who's going to wear both hats. Cool. And I am comfortable in the list of people I have on both teams. And as I've moved through my career, I don't call the people on the first team too often because if they reassure me too much, I'm going to do something scarier than I'm ready for. But I love talking to people on the second team because that's an interesting problem worth solving. And I do the same for them, which is let's dissect this. Let's think about this. And you can talk to the reassurance people later.

51:51Seth Godin:I'm not here to reassure you. And I have many colleagues and friends who know that I am not the reassurance person. They don't come to me for reassurance because I think reassurance is mostly futile. It runs out too fast. And I don't want to be on the hook for telling them it was a great idea when I didn't think it was.

52:08Dr. Michael Gervais:Insight and discernment, those two, it's a really important skill. And I love that you whether you explicitly know or intuitively know, I bet most of us intuitively know who to go to, to get a, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And who to go to if they're like, well, hold on, you want to talk about this for real? Yeah. And so if you, if the reflex is to go to the first and not the second, we probably have problems, but the second versus the first is really cool. Thank you for the clarity there. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Magic Mind. Something that I come back to often is the power of principled mornings.

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55:21Seth Godin:Almost every day. Oh my goodness. Really, Seth? Yeah. I mean, I grew up with undiagnosed ADHD and I would often say something that might be right or smart that was inappropriate and was not, I was the nerdy kid, not the popular kid. And when that is your high school experience, you wear that scar for a really, really long time, maybe forever. And so I feel it and then I do the thing anyway, right? I realize that I'm going to stand up and give a TED talk. I've been lucky enough to do it five times. And some people in the audience aren't going to get it. And I have to work hard to pretend I'm ignoring the people who don't get it.

56:05Seth Godin:That's okay. They're there. They don't get it. If everyone got it, I didn't give a good enough talk. I wasn't far enough ahead of the cycle, but I had to stop going to Ted in person because I just didn't like the way it made me feel when someone whose work I respected turned their back on me and walked away because I was being judged in a way that wasn't helpful.

56:31Dr. Michael Gervais:Wow. That honesty is, I can't tell you how reassuring it is for folks to go, oh, even Seth has it? Like I've seen his TED Talks, by the way, you've crushed them. You know, I don't know if I just found myself in hat one or table one with you, but like, um so like i think it's really an amazing gift you just gave a whole new community of people uh the finding mastery community like oh yeah seth has it too you know and so obviously i talk about it in my book that that's it's something i struggled with as well and so how do you how do you work it of course you cannot go back to ted but when you're on stage like the way that i work it is that i have to be my tuning fork for choosing the shape and contour and feel of the right words i don't shape my talks either i've got like a couple slides and then a couple words to each slide and that's kind of i i leave the rest up to risk which is fun you know but how do you how do you do it if you're managing like uh-oh that person i really need to get their approval or i really hope they like what i'm saying oh shit they're walking are they walking out no they can't be walking out oh they must be going to the bathroom they'll be right back

57:44Seth Godin:Okay, so there are two stacks to my answer. The biggest stack is this. Pick your customers, pick your future. If you pick customers in any sense of the word customer, if you pick customers that have the power to make you unhappy and do, you have made a bad choice. So I could imagine being a veterinarian who worked on small and friendly dogs, but I could not imagine being a veterinarian who worked on big, angry dogs. Because if I was spending my day with big, angry dogs, my day wouldn't be that good. So we all get to pick our projects. We get to pick our bosses. We get to pick our careers. We get to pick our relationships.

58:25Seth Godin:Don't pick someone who can stop an important project dead. Find a different place to bring these ideas that's more resilient, right? So when you pick your audience, you pick your future. And then the second thing I did as a speaker is I had the same first section, 40 seconds long of my talk for a long time. And almost all of it was in the slide, not in me. And I structured it that way on purpose because I could see the reaction of the room. If the room didn't like it, that wasn't my performance of the day because I had exactly the same thing I could test over and over and over again. So now I could grade the audience on the curve.

59:07Seth Godin:So I did a talk to 3 ,000 Goodyear tire and rubber car maintenance franchisees. And they had been up till 3 o 'clock in the morning drinking the night before. I know because I didn't get to sleep that night because they were making so much noise in the hall. And so I'm the 8.30. I wasn't with them. I was not with them. So it's 8.30 in the morning. I'm the first talk. There's people in the room, but they're not really in the room. and I do my open and it burns. It just dies. And I'm like, I'm not going to talk faster. I'm not going to put more energy into this. I'm not going to try to get something out of these people.

59:47Seth Godin:They've announced where they are on the curve. I will be here for them. I will do a job I am proud of, but I will not judge myself by the way they are judging me because they are not the people they would have been if they had risen to the occasion. That doesn't mean I dislike them. It just means I'm being clear with myself. The same way, if you're a stand-up comic and everyone in the audience only speaks Italian, don't beat yourself up for bombing. They only speak Italian. So figuring out how to put people on a curve so that you're not amplifying imaginary criticism helps you figure out what needs to happen and what doesn't need to happen next.

1:00:30Seth Godin:this usually happens to most people in a negotiation because if you are negotiating with someone and they're good at it they are making you feel like the price is way too high and you are morally wrong they're doing that in simple ways like not speaking well understanding what's the meta of what's going on is what a professional does what an amateur does it just keeps lowering their price to make the other person happy

1:00:57Dr. Michael Gervais:You just dropped so many gems in like a 90 second. I'm not going to judge myself the way they're judging me. Might be the quote, might be just the quote of the day, maybe, you know, certainly in January for the podcast series. Like that is great, Seth. But the clarity that you have and the conviction that you have to not do that probably does set you up to be more consistent or consistently authentic. Or is it authentically consistent?

1:01:33Dr. Michael Gervais:That discernment there that, whoa, I'm going to give them a test. I've got lots of base. It's a reference test, your first 90 seconds. Is it a slide, a video slide or something that you work on?

1:01:44Seth Godin:It was a joke, but the punchline was on the slide. not from me.

1:01:50Dr. Michael Gervais:And if they go, ha, ha, ha, you go, oh, I get it. Because this thing has killed in most, killed, it sounds like a, not the language I want to use. This thing has done really well in most rooms. So I know that this is more about them and not me.

1:02:05Seth Godin:Yeah.

1:02:06Dr. Michael Gervais:Oh, that is really good. You might not know this, but in football. So I spent nine seasons with the Seattle Seahawks, as you referenced, Pete Carroll. And one of the things that we would do is the team would spend a lot of time figuring out what the right plays are. And there's two ways that you, the right plays for the game. And you think about them, then you practice them, you know, on Wednesday and Thursday and you go, well, those didn't work and those did work. And, oh, maybe we try a couple different ones for Friday and Saturday to see how they work. And then you script the first 15 or that's what we did at least.

1:02:45Dr. Michael Gervais:And then there was this thing, which was gts go to school and you're the world doesn't know it but you're if you get three yards on the play that's great on a gts a go to school you're seeing how they lined up you're seeing how they played this look and football as many people understand is like a game of deception so you're testing the defense you're gathering information you're seeing you know how they're playing and responding. And that whole thing, that whole thing sounds like what you're doing in the first 90 seconds is to gather reference points about how they are going to show up. So I say that because I've never talked about it out loud.

1:03:29Seth Godin:Yeah, no, I think that you and Coach Carroll were doing something where the game theory was much more pronounced because you are actually seeking vulnerabilities, et cetera, what I was doing was telling myself a story. And I needed to tell myself a story to do my work. Yeah.

1:03:48Dr. Michael Gervais:So that's the different part, right? The GTS was about game theory to your point. And what you're saying is like, it's a way for me to tell a story. You probably don't need that rubric anymore, but it's because you don't need to say to yourself based on how they respond that I'm okay. You could probably do away with the rubric, but it's still a good reference point to see how they're showing up.

1:04:09Seth Godin:Yeah, and to figure out which people are there for the journey you wanna go on because you can give a talk or make a pitch to a company or whatever it is with a different sort of momentum and energy based on where people are willing to go. So a quick aside, back when we were inventing email marketing, we could get a meeting with any marketer in the world, in New York anyway, because it was new media. It was 1996. And you say, we're on the web. Will you meet with us? And they had a guy whose only job was to meet with you. So we're at one of these meetings, David Simon, my head of sales and I. And for the first seven minutes, everything we said, not assertions, but truths about things that had worked in the past, was met with just straight up skepticism, just a huge amount of pushback, not the objection of somebody who was eager to be persuaded, but just intransigence.

1:05:07Seth Godin:And we had an hour meeting and it's seven minute seven. And I hadn't talked this over with David first. So I hoped he would follow my lead. I closed my laptop. I put it in my briefcase. I shut my briefcase and I said, we don't want to waste any of your time. Thank you for having us. And the two of us stood up and we made it one step over the threshold and they ran after us and said, no, no, no, come back. We're sorry. And the rest of the meeting went great. because what I did was instead of constantly pushing against them, I said, if you're not enrolled in the journey, don't come. And it's an exchange of status roles.

1:05:44Seth Godin:It was an understanding of professionals talking to one another. If you're not in, that's fine. We'll go. But we don't need to play this particular game. I would never have done that in a meeting where the other side was cheering me on to go ever further and faster because they were already enrolled. So figuring out the level of emotional enrollment you have in the room. That's part of why you're such a great podcaster. Because I feel comfortable talking to you about these ideas. Whereas somebody who's just got a list of questions, they're not really involved.

1:06:16Dr. Michael Gervais:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. How did you do that? How did you get me engaged? You talked about the meta awareness earlier, which I want to come back to, which is the game of all games, if there's such a thing, a game of life, which I'm not sure it is a game but like this meta that you can see how it goes you're watching how it's happening and as a as a trained psychologist like it is the best part of the experience is like oh i i see me i see this person i see the space between us i get the context and i'm in myself and i'm also observing like it is the best part and i try to do that in all of my relationships the best I can, but how did you do that here between us?

1:06:59Seth Godin:Well, I listened to enough of your stuff to understand that you're here not to gratify your ego and just get people to buy your course, but that you're actually truly interested in the work. And the first two things we talked about were things I disagreed with you about. Did you do that? Wait, did you do that on purpose? Yeah. Yeah. Come on, man. That's great. And then what were you testing? Well, I was disagreeing with you because I've been on 500 podcasts. I don't need to do any more podcasts. So what's going to make this worthwhile for me? I'm not going to show up and say, I agree with this person on everything, blah, blah, blah.

1:07:36Seth Godin:Please buy my book. I'm not here to promote my book. I'm here to have a good conversation with someone I had never met before. Well, you gave enough signals that what makes it something an interesting conversation for you is when there's points of agreement and disagreement. And if I just showed up and said, oh, everything you do is really cool. What do you want to talk about? I don't know where we would have gone from there.

1:08:01Dr. Michael Gervais:Yeah. I love that because that was a moment. This is a public forum, of course, but it feels intimate because it's just the two of us. And that's a moment where I could have swallowed all of it. Like, oh, shit, the expert on this is saying that. Okay. Or like, and you saw both of us. I think both of us tested, like, are we okay? Are we okay to keep doing this? Which was cool. I really appreciate that about you, Seth. So thank you for that. And then the second part of the question, which is about the meta piece, is like, how do you enhance your ability to observe without attachment? To observe and see and feel what's happening without being sucked into the first person drama of the experience?

1:08:45All right.

1:08:45Seth Godin:Well, so let's talk about attachment. I wrote about it in the practice. It's a Buddhist term, but a lot of people have trouble with it in the West. So here's the way I describe it. If you and I are going to swim across Canoe Lake in Algonquin Park and we don't have proper safety equipment, one reasonably safe thing for us to do is to stay about eight feet apart from each other and be aware of each other. The other way we could do it is we could actually take four ropes and tie them hand to hand and leg to leg and be attached to each other. And if we did that, one of us would drown or maybe both of us would.

1:09:18Seth Godin:that attachment is being emotionally connected to the output, the outcome, even though we don't have control over the outcome. And so I'll write a blog post and I wrote the blog post. I don't get to rewrite the blog post. It's in the world. I need it to be the best blog post I can make, but I'm not attached to the outcome. If it didn't resonate with you, my day will go on. I will learn something about how to do a better blog post tomorrow, but I'm not attached to that outcome. And what has happened in traditional corporate culture is we've pushed people to become attached to the outcome. We think that if you win the lottery, you have some sort of skill.

1:10:01Seth Godin:If you lose the lottery, you did something wrong. The outcome of the lottery is totally different than the lottery. Your mistake you made with buying the ticket in the first place, but whether or not you won is irrelevant right winning the lottery you still did a stupid thing you bought a lottery ticket so the the thing that i am trying to do when i'm doing my work is say this probably won't work but it might be worth trying and if it doesn't work would the journey have been a good decision anyway? That's different than saying, this is only a good decision if it works because that's not the case.

1:10:44Dr. Michael Gervais:So we're talking about the work, right? And I think what I hear you talking about is like making the decision to not attach to the outcome, but to make the decision because you believe with the best available information that you have and the ability to have some insight and discern and maybe even calibrate that amongst other people. Like, you know, what do you think? You know, the eight, in my case, the eight people on the table to be able to move forward with a decision. But what I'm trying to understand is how do you get the meta awareness of what's happening in a present moment? And you went to attachment, which I'm down with.

1:11:25Dr. Michael Gervais:And what I hear you saying is like, just if you practice non-attachment, If you practice letting go of the article that you wrote, once it's in the wild, it's a reflection of your ideas at that time. And it might not be for anybody, or it might be, you know, catch on fire. Like if you practice non-attachment, you will be more available and more free to be able to have a meta-awareness. Is that right? Is that?

1:11:50Seth Godin:Well, I think that, yes, that gets us to there. And then the second half is, what do almost all people have in common?

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1:13:55Seth Godin:And I would argue once our basic needs for food and shelter and healthcare are met, what we have in common is we either seek status or affiliation. Affiliation is dignity, is being part of something, is being respected. Status is who's up and who's down. is my leader beating your leader? Did my team beat your team? Why on earth do people wear$150 professional sporting jerseys to hockey games? They're not playing, right? It's status and affiliation. So if you are at a circle of people and the dinner check comes, the person who grabs for it might be looking for status. The person who grabs for it might just be nervous about affiliation and remembers that they didn't pay last time.

1:14:42Seth Godin:When you see two people who are bickering about something, they're almost certainly not bickering around the thing they're bickering about. They're bickering about status or affiliation. Where is the fear? Where are the dreams? Who has been stripped of dignity and who needs more respect? And if we can find those where we started this conversation, those colors, those flashing lights, then we have a chance to help someone adjust. So one of the people, when I first became a teacher in 1977, this young woman, she was 12, was six inches taller than all of her friends. And if you disagreed with her about something, she would punch you in the face hard.

1:15:27Seth Godin:That was her method. And the two of us got in a canoe and I taught her a few things, some of which had to do with paddling a canoe, but most of which had to do with focusing energy on a different kind of control. Now I have words for it, which is I helped her reconfigure status and affiliation in her head. I helped her get to where the fear was and she never punched anybody ever again. and that's not because i'm some sort of gifted psychologist it's because i was in the right place at the right time and i saw the thing to show her a different path down the road most people it's baked in so deeply by parenting by caste by indoctrination and by chemistry that you're not going to fix it in one canoe lesson but it's still what's informing the meta of what's going on what I definitely know is nobody knows anything.

1:16:25Seth Godin:You know, like in my industry, this book, which saved my career, I had no publisher when this book came out. That's why it's in a milk carton because I published it myself. And the person who's been my publisher ever since turned it down because he said, you're washed up. I don't get it. And after the book sold a quarter of a million or whatever it was, he changed his mind. And it was -

1:16:49Dr. Michael Gervais:For folks that are on audio, reference the title, please. Yeah, yeah.

1:16:53Seth Godin:It's a book called Purple Cow. You know, the fact is, Adrian's not an idiot. He's way smarter than me. But in that moment, based on what was happening for him, around him, the crazy bald guy who had yet another crazy book, this one named after a cow, it was too much, too soon. No, not interested. And then the world changed. But it wasn't about me. And it wasn't about my book. It was about status and affiliation and opportunity and fear and connection and all of the other things. And discerning the difference between someone who actually realizes it's a bad idea and someone who is having their own thing going on in their head, that's an art form.

1:17:38Seth Godin:That's not easy to do. Okay.

1:17:40Dr. Michael Gervais:A bad idea versus somebody that's got something going on in their head. Meaning that when you truly calibrate, you can discern if that's their stuff versus your stuff.

1:17:51Seth Godin:Right. And if 10 people in a row who have good taste, if 10 people in a row say, I don't think that's a good idea, you have to make a new decision. So J.K. Rowling stuck it out longer than 10. But 10 really good publishers turned down Harry Potter. But she was never going to make it to 40 because there weren't 40 good publishers. She got lucky toward the end. and it was lucky. But most of the time, for most of us, our work doesn't need to get past person number 10. If 10 people in a row that you respect that have insight, who are all coming from different places of status and affiliation, look at a thing and say, based on my professional insight, this isn't going to work, you might want to try something else.

1:18:34Dr. Michael Gervais:I love this conversation. I love how you've co-created or created your life. I really have respect and regard for that. Seth, what do you really, really, really, really want?

1:18:55Seth Godin:I want people to realize what a miracle this moment in time is and to stop squabbling. To stop squabbling with each other and to stop squabbling with themselves. I want them to fix problems before they become too big to fix. and I want us to stop being toddlers and start being grownups.

1:19:18Dr. Michael Gervais:If we're in person, I'd want to kind of give you a big hug and say, damn, that's good.

1:19:26Yeah.

1:19:26Dr. Michael Gervais:And where does that come from for you? That to me is what the song of significance is about. Your newest book, right? Where does that come from? But I just, I'm sure you just felt it. I felt it in this conversation, the way that you just contoured your language and the way that you emoted that. Where's this coming from that it's so important to you?

1:19:51Seth Godin:My parents, I miss them every day. It's what they would want me to talk about. That's so beautiful.

1:20:03Dr. Michael Gervais:I feel that in a way that, of course, you just elicited my relationship with my parents. Thank you for that.

1:20:17Dr. Michael Gervais:How long have they passed? How long ago did they pass?

1:20:21Seth Godin:My mom was probably 20 something years ago. My dad was more recent than that. They were extraordinary human beings. They taught me through example. I grew up in Buffalo, New York, which is not a very big place. And we regularly had strangers at the Thanksgiving table. My dad sponsored dozens of refugees. He helped run United Way as a volunteer. My mom ran part of the art museum. It was just, I thought that was normal. I thought it was normal to be in community. That's really cool.

1:20:53Dr. Michael Gervais:One thing that mom taught you was? about giving people the benefit of the doubt and it started by teaching me to give other people

1:21:03Seth Godin:the benefit of the doubt and then inevitably i started giving myself the benefit of the doubt

1:21:09Dr. Michael Gervais:oh geez that bit of kindness that you're advocating for is needed it sounds like tier zero for mom was like let's just kind of do it this way and it came full circle to you how about for dad

1:21:24Seth Godin:My dad was an engineer and an entrepreneur, and he loved solving interesting problems. He was my hockey coach, and he saw that the other teams, we were 10 years old. The other teams had one puck for 18 kids, and he saw how cheap pucks were. So he just went out and bought 20 pucks. But then he discovered that carrying 20 pucks is awkward. You got to put them in the bag and everything else. so he got out a drill and he drilled a hole through the center of each puck and then just got one big shoelace and he had an easy way to carry 20 pucks my dad was solving problems giant and small on a regular basis also absorbing my mom's lesson of like he was on the board of the black baptist church in buffalo just because someone he worked with asked him to do yeah look

1:22:13Dr. Michael Gervais:at dad look at both your parents pretty radical in that yeah i see why you're feeling what you're feeling and i don't know if you want to i'm going to ask you a question i don't know if we keep this in the podcast or not if it's too sensitive but like how were you as a son obviously you performed and you're world renowned and and and you've got all of that i'm wondering if i'm wondering why you've gone to those lengths to be so extraordinary in anything and then i'm also wondering how that squares with how you how you were as a son with them i don't think there's much i want to do over

1:22:51Seth Godin:about the relationship i have with my parents and i'm super lucky in that respect wow and there was enough communication and enough clarity around that we all make mistakes i have made plenty and being a teenager is always really hard. I don't think it's useful or particularly accurate to say that I've achieved an extraordinary amount. I started on the 99 and a half yard line and the world lined up for someone with my skills. It lined up for someone with my attention span. And I don't, you know, I look back at 9 ,000 blog posts and all the books and everything else. I said, yeah, that was pretty cool, but it took me a long time to do those things too.

1:23:37Seth Godin:And doors were open for me that weren't open for enough people. And there are all these things, not only that I did that I would probably do better if I did them again, but there's so many things that I didn't do. So many people I didn't notice or see or help. So many doors I didn't open for other people. And so I'm not ready to pat myself on the back anytime soon.

1:24:02Dr. Michael Gervais:So refreshing to hear that answer. Born on third base, think you hit a triple, that idea. That's really refreshing to hear. And the fact that you're like, I'm not done, there's still more for me to give, it sounds like.

1:24:19Seth Godin:yeah giving is an interesting term um you know generosity is not about lowering your price generosity is not about giving things away it's about doing the emotional labor to make things better for somebody else and that might mean if you're a luxury goods provider raising your price it might mean you know showing up in the surgical theater confronting that thing that you're afraid to do because a patient needs you to do it. And, you know, Atul Gawande, I hope you have him as a guest one day, Atul Gawande's book, The Checklist Manifesto. Brilliant. And it's fascinating because all the data shows that if you just put a simple one-page checklist in the operating room, millions of people are not harmed or dead versus not doing it.

1:25:08Seth Godin:And getting surgeons to say yes is really hard because they have to confront their status fear. They have to confront all of the things that are part of their identity. And so for me, the best work I do, the work that helps me achieve the goals I have feels like a gift to me and to them, but it doesn't cost me the things that most people associate with a gift costing someone.

1:25:40Dr. Michael Gervais:Very cool. That's really cool. Seth, do you, this is maybe we're going to round, keep the analogy, we're round home base here. Do you work this porous between your thoughts and your feelings? Do you work well with your emotions on a regular basis or is this refreshingly new to you?

1:26:03Okay.

1:26:04Seth Godin:So Sapolsky's new book about free will and determinism is absolutely fantastic. And emotions are just chemicals. We have lots of emotions available to us. There are ones we try to wall ourselves off from. So when I was in Kibira with the Kibira book club years ago with Jacqueline talking to some of the poorest people on the planet about a book I wrote, which they had read more carefully and closely than any reader I have ever met, there was a wellspring of emotion that I had been isolating myself from because it's easier to live a life in New York if you don't realize that every single day there are people living in Kibera, right?

1:26:44Seth Godin:That we intentionally focus on certain things to get through our day. There is a wellspring of emotion that I tap into in order to do my best work. But it is not necessarily the emotion of mortality or grief. There are other people who can find that fuel. I don't find it fuel. The emotions course through all of us. And if we ignore all of them all the time, it's corrosive. If we embrace all of them all the time, we're paralyzed. And I think part of the work is to realize that we have agency, even if we don't have free will, and that agency can be put to good use. And if I can look something squarely in the eye and have it be productive, then you should sign me up.

1:27:35Dr. Michael Gervais:Seth Godin, you are singing the song of significance. I hope I'm not the only person that's ever said that to you. What a beautiful emblem you are for the work that you've done. the well is deep and the articulation is crisp and the contour is warm and i want to say thank you for the way that you brought the best version of you into this conversation and so i'm looking forward at some point at some point to be able to meet you in person and maybe have a glass of tea or something so seth thank you for the work you've contributed and i'm excited about the work you're continuing i want to encourage people to go check out song of significance well thank you

1:28:11Seth Godin:This was time well spent. You're on an important path. And I'm glad I could join you for a little bit.

1:28:19Dr. Michael Gervais:Appreciate you, Seth. I loved this conversation, brother. I loved it. And so thank you again. Next time on Finding Mastery, John Gordon is one of the world's leading voices on leadership, positivity, and high performance. He's the bestselling author of more than 30 books and has spent decades helping elite teams, organizations, and individuals build better habits. But in this conversation with Dr. Michael Gervais, John reveals something much more personal. Together, they explore why the patterns that keep showing up in our relationships often point back to our own unhealed wounds, why the habit holding us back is sometimes the one we can't see, and how one simple daily practice changed the entire course of John's life.

1:28:59Dr. Michael Gervais:So join us Wednesday, August 19th at 9 a.m. Pacific, only on Finding Mastery. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you. We really appreciate you being part of this community. And if you're enjoying the show, the easiest no-cost way to support is to hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you're listening. Also, if you haven't already, please consider dropping us a review on Apple or Spotify. We are incredibly grateful for the support and feedback. If you're looking for even more insights, we have a newsletter we send out every Wednesday.

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1:30:13Dr. Michael Gervais:So join our community, share your favorite episode with a friend, and let us know how we can continue to show up for you. Lastly, as a quick reminder, information in this podcast and from any material on the Finding Mastery website and social channels is for information purposes only. If you're looking for meaningful support, which we all need, one of the best things you can do is to talk to a licensed professional. So seek assistance from your healthcare providers. Again, a sincere thank you for listening. Until next episode, be well, think well, keep exploring.