605: Seth Godin - How To Be Remarkable, Create a Strategy, Build a Tribe, Develop Taste, Lead Others, & Leave a Dent in The World

26:43Your neighbor is a barefoot runner. You write that he glides without apparent effort. Elegance is simplicity, efficiency, and effectiveness. This is from riff number six. The elegant path is the most useful way forward. Can you share a little bit more about your neighbor and the importance of elegance and simplicity? Well, the physics of running are simple. You still have to put an enormous amount of effort to run a marathon. But all of us can visualize, I hope, the barefoot runner, whether the barefoot runner has shoes on or not, it doesn't matter. There's a style of running that puts your body to work in a way that isn't the style of running that, you know, Fred Munster from the Munsters might have cloppity cloppity cloppity clopp.

27:28So what's the difference, right? The difference is understanding flows, understanding the current, where the river is headed, understanding how your body is architected. And so if you are starting an enterprise where the wind is at your back because the culture wants you to succeed, because technology wants you to succeed, that is more elegant than building an enterprise that goes directly against the grain of what the culture wants, what technology wants. That doesn't mean you're going to fail. It just means it's a totally different kind of effort, right? And so what we seek to do when we find an elegant strategy, strategies, easy to describe and hard to stick with.

28:16It is not an elevator pitch. No one bought anything on an elevator. It is not a carefully constructed committee purpose statement that means nothing. It is very simple, direct, but scary arc that you are going on that you believe is going to be additive over time. So it's freshman year at Harvard or sophomore year, Mark Zuckerberg is working on this Facebook thing. What is Facebook strategy? Facebook strategy is many people, if you say to them, someone's talking about you behind your back, do you want to see what they're saying? We'll say, yes, I would. And build a platform for that. And relentlessly build a platform.

29:05First at Harvard, oh, everyone at Harvard cares about what everyone else at Harvard to say, now add Yale, then add the rest of the Ivy League, circle after circle after circle, the strategy is the same for a decade. Every time they do that, their business does better. That's a strategy. And I was at Yahoo when they had the chance to buy Google for$10 million. Not$10 billion,$10 million. I was not in the room, but they said, nah, we're just going to spend the money to make Yahoo Kids better. And the reason is Yahoo's strategy, which at the time had gotten them so far, was come to yahoo.com and we're going to do everything we can to keep you from leaving.

29:54So there was Yahoo Mail and there was Yahoo Kids and there was Yahoo Finance and Yahoo this. Google's strategy was come to Google and leave. We're going to do everything we can to have you go somewhere else. And we're going to make money doing that. Totally different strategies. And so at some level, Mallet was right in saying, we don't know what to do with this. At another level, it was a challenge because that was the turning point when Yahoo began to fade because their strategy didn't work in an open web. Looking back, it is obviously easier to know, oh, well, yeah, that makes so much sense.

30:31But at the time, so I guess my question is, how do you know in the moment when the wind's at your back? If you're going in a new industry or trying to start a new business or you have some ideas, looking back, it's always much easier. But in the moment, that's when it's really tough. How do we get better at making these decisions in the moment? Yeah. Well, the first thing is you can't make the decisions if you don't talk about them. We've been going at this for just a few minutes, but already the people who are listening understand they haven't been talking about it. They've been defending silently the strategy, the intuitive strategy they've always had.

31:11My dream is to have a bowling league, and I'm not going to talk about why that's my dream, but that's it. That's what I'm doing. As if that's some sort of, you get a macho prize for sticking with it without examining it. So the first step is examining it. Hold it up. Be willing to let someone who's qualified to give you feedback give you feedback. But then the second thing is to look for patterns and to match them. There's no prize for being completely original. In fact, if you're completely original, you're almost certainly going to lose. that there's a prize for rhyming with what came before in a way that lets people find the scaffolding to work with you.

31:58And so after Psy does his viral YouTube video, and two billion people have seen Gangnam Style, it's easy to assert that there is going to be a genre of videos worth sharing that you can make money from. The wind is at your back if you're doing that, right? Whereas there are no vibrant multi-city chains of jazz clubs. Like there's a couple, but they're not vibrant, right? So if you say, I'm going to start a jazz club and we're going to end up in 40 cities and blah, blah, blah. I say, you might succeed, but the wind is not at your back because that does not rhyme with what our culture is doing right now.

32:41And so let's just name it and then figure out if you're trying to do something that's going to change the system, please make sure you have enough money to change the system based on its scale because it doesn't pay to try to start a log when you don't have enough kindling. Seth, riff number 240, which is something you just kind of touched on a hint of that is titled cheerleaders and coaches. And you asked the question, who sits at your table? Who has permission to offer you criticism? Most people are bystanders. They're not the audience you set out to serve, nor are they trusted experts who have the insight and discernment to tell me what you need to hear.

33:18I think from a leadership perspective, this is huge, right? Who's your kitchen cabinet or your foxhole or who's your who, like whatever you want to call it. But having those core people that are willing and able to tell you the truth, cheerleaders and coaches you write about. This is a critical part of strategy. Can you talk more about cheerleaders and coaches and who are those people at your table? All right. So if we talk about those 800 rejection letters I got, they got better over time because I'm glad because I didn't want to be a spammer. But Steve Lors said, this isn't for me, but it sounds like you're doing interesting work.

33:56Let's have lunch and talk about it. And he checked in with me every few months and told me his problems. And I ended up doing the Information Please Business Almanac for him, the Information Please Celebrity Almanac, the Women's Almanac, and a whole bunch of other books. Because he wanted me to succeed. And he could say, I'm going to coach you and cheer you because I will win if you do that. We sold millions of books together, right? Whereas the other people were sitting there with their arms folded and say, prove it, prove it, prove it. I can't work with that audience. I don't know how to get in if they're not willing to help me.

34:38I don't read my Amazon reviews because all a one-star review tells me is this book wasn't for me, right? I don't speak this language, right? But how am I supposed to write a better book based on that? It's not helpful. So you're allowed to have your one-star review, but I don't have to read it. And so we need to figure out not who is it for and just that, but among the people who it's for, who has the empathy to describe to me, even though they don't like it, who might like it. And most of the feedback we get doesn't come from people who know how to do that. So the people who launched Legs Pantyhose, I am sure that there were only men in the boardroom at the beginning.

35:27And if a guy says, yeah, I would never wear those. Yeah. Well, of course you would never wear those. They're not for you, but useful feedback comes from someone who has empathy. So you don't have to be a cancer survivor to be an oncologist. You don't have to be a three-year-old to work at Fisher Price. You have to have empathy for the people you're trying to help. How did you know in the moment that Steve, in this case, was worthy of you taking that lunch or was his that he had the empathy or the knowledge base to be able to help you? Well, that one's an easy one because he published the American Heritage Dictionary.

36:02He was the biggest dictionary publisher in the world. So he was qualified. right? But I think what your question is really getting at is your easily excitable neighbor might have really bad taste. They might be fun to brainstorm with, but they might have really bad taste. So what is taste? Taste is knowing what the market wants just before it does. And so again, part of the conversations we're having with our kitchen cabinet, with our advisors and our coaches is, do you have good taste? Let me try to understand why. Right? So if you're a musician and Rick Rubin is your record producer, it is implied that Rick Rubin has good taste.

36:49That's what he does for a living. He has good taste. If you have a record producer who's never produced a successful record once in their life, they might not have good taste. They might be unlucky, but they might not have good taste. Rick Ruhm is an interesting one Seth I mean his book just came out and I think it it put him on a whole nother level from people outside of the music world and it came out in in the interviews like he doesn't know how to play any instruments or even like work the board right he doesn't have any of the technical skill that pretty much all of the other people in his industry does and yet he still just worked with the best of the best of the best over decades and and and been amazing What do you think it is about a guy like him?

37:29How does he develop that taste? And how much of that is just in him from birth versus developed and worked on and honed and crafted over time? Well, the book came up in a coffee that Rick and I had. So I'm not going to say it's my idea, but it's close to my idea. Not surprised. I've known him for a long time. He, this isn't in the book, but what he does is he creates a reality distortion field. So when he was working with Johnny Cash, which was the breakthrough after his success in rap music, Johnny would play a song and then come into the recording room, the control room and say, what do you think?

38:10And it's in that moment that the producer has the most power. And usually in that moment that the producer says, well, you were a little flat on the C sharp, blah, blah, blah. and Rick would say, and he's relentless, he does it every time, he would turn to Johnny and say, what do you think? And Johnny wasn't used to that, that responsibility, that, you know, what's the best version of Johnny Cash? And Johnny would say, oh, and go back and do it again. And so that's all Rick does. He creates this reality distortion field for an artist he believes has something to say and just creates an expectation that they need to please Rick, but he never tells them what that would be.

38:54So I've heard that phrase used with Steve Jobs or maybe even Elon Musk when it comes to deadlines and getting things done. I haven't heard it used as much with somebody like Rick. What do you mean by reality distortion field and how would that maybe apply beyond a music producer? I'm not talking about Elon Musk in any way. So we're going to take that off the table.

39:18What Steve did was take technology that was already working, but not being used in the way he imagined it. And assert for people, give them permission to believe that that technology could be used in these products. whereas a more conservative project manager would say, we need to let somebody else go first. So in the case of the Red Hot Chili Peppers or Johnny Cash or whatever, it's, I know your last three albums didn't do great. Let's pretend for a minute this one's going to do great. If it was going to do great, what would it sound like?

40:07I think from a leadership perspective that instilling belief and setting high expectations for people and then nudging them and pushing them along. I know for the leaders in my life, those are the ones I love so much and cherish them, even if I didn't always love them in the moment that that was happening. And I think that's leadership is helping people perform at a level that's maybe even higher than they think they're capable of. Right. Right. And figuring out a way to do that. Right. So you're changing their reality. Yeah. So the reason that I didn't want to talk about Musk is Musk lies and cheats.

40:46That's not what I'm talking about. Yeah. What I'm talking about is saying, you came in thinking this was going to be a Billboard top 500 record. Let me assert that it could be a Billboard top 10 record. let's move your reality. Let's distort your reality so that you could inhabit what is possible for you as a leader. Okay. I want to get back to some of the risks. One of them. So we talked about like finding the areas where maybe there could be wind at your back, but also riff number 34 is low hanging fruit isn't meaning like it's already all been picked and the easy, direct, obvious, obvious paths are unlikely to get you the results you're working so hard to obtain.

41:27In fact, they may even be a trap. So you hear that phrase a lot, like low-hanging fruit. What's already out there? Let's go get it. Let's go get it. And you're writing that that could potentially be a trap. How so? Okay. So you may recall Hotmail. Hotmail was the first free email service. It went viral. It gave, many people say viral marketing became a term because of Hotmail. He ended up selling it to Microsoft for half a billion dollars in cash. And the low-hanging fruit would be, let's make another Hotmail, just like Hotmail. Whereas the current, the putting the wind at your back, the elegant strategy is, oh, things that are easy to share on the internet can grow fast.

42:13So let's not build another Hotmail. Let's build something that rhymes with Hotmail, right? That's what we're talking about here. That's a worthy strategy. If you look, if you were an internet investor for the last 40 years and all you did was invest in companies where there was a network effect, where it worked better if your friends used it too, you would have the best track record in the history of finance. Because that single sentence is the elegant strategy for the internet. it. So would you say Gmail looked to do something that rhymes with Hotmail? So Gmail is a huge success, sort of as the exception that proves my point.

42:58Gmail probably wouldn't have succeeded if it wasn't integrated into Google. So that's something we can't use as an example. But what I would say is Facebook rhymed with Hotmail, so did Uber. Let's say we're talking about Uber. If I tell my friends about Uber, I'm not using up the drivers, making it more likely there'll be more drivers. The more people who use Uber, the better my Uber experience is. That's not what happens if I tell people about this vineyard that only makes 100 bottles a year. Because if I tell everyone about that, they're all going to get sold out and I'm not going to be able to get one.

43:45So the internet works best when it's connecting people to one another and the businesses on it work best when there's a network effect, when all the way back to the telephone, the more people who use it, the better it works. Number 297. It's your last one. These are questions that lead to strategies and you write 84 questions. I counted them and wrote down a few of them. 84 questions. The reason I appreciate this and love that this is the way you ended the book is because I think a lot of us are probably like this, but I'm a prompt driven thinker and writer. Meaning if you supply me with questions, I then have to think about them and I'll write them down.

44:26And that makes me a clearer thinker and it's better. And so this is a great way to end the book because you're asking these questions. From a more like meta perspective, what is it about asking the right questions in order to help you develop your strategy? And how do you come up with such useful questions? Because that's what I feel is a big part of why you've been so effective. Well, just an aside, I made this deck that has 54 cards in it, the strategy deck, and you play them and you play four cards in juxtaposance. You get 5 million combinations of questions and statements. It turns out that people are very good at coloring inside the lines and very bad at dealing with an empty sheet of paper.

45:14Yep. because that's what we were indoctrinated to do from the time we were three. And often if I bring someone an idea that they think is original or worthwhile, it will simply be because I've trained myself to have blanker sheets of paper than other people. I'm still coloring inside the lines I see, but my lines are bigger in scale than someone who has little tiny lines, right? and so the reason for the prompts is to give you little boxes that you can fill in you can make prompts very easily once you decide you want to and that's the subtext of the entire book is once you read the book you could write a book like this if you haven't read the book you couldn't write a book like this because probably because there was too many blank sheets of paper And what I'm trying to give people is just enough scaffolding that they can start talking intelligently about strategy the way so many people can talk intelligently now about sales or about marketing or about finance.

46:20No one that I know of gave folks the scaffolding to be able to talk intelligently about strategy. That's what we're trying to do. When you're writing, are you collecting prompts? Are you collecting questions to answer to help create more of a box the color within or i'm just curious about your creative process when it comes to writing and topics and ideas to be useful so it's changing a little bit it used to be when i'm writing something i'm thinking about the objection why would some smart person like ryan read this and be skeptical yeah and so i'll ask myself the question i'm imagining you're asking and then i'll try to answer it in my writing once i get in the practice of doing that and being a salesperson my whole life is a great way to do that.

47:07Zig taught us about objections. Objections are your friend. They're not the enemy. So if you work at a car company and you're not spending time on the showroom floor, you're making a big mistake. If you're on the showroom floor and four people in a row walk out because the trunk isn't big enough, you just learned a lot about how to design the trunk of your car, right? So I'm used to thinking about the objections. But the method I propose a couple of times in the book, what I would do is I would give Claude.ai a few sections in my book and say, yeah, but what did I leave out? What questions do you have for me?

47:43And it is private and it's not a person, so I don't have to worry about hurting its feelings. And that feedback would help me write new sections or come up with new prompts. Yeah. I've heard you mentioned Claude before in other podcasts as well, as you mentioned a lot in this book. What is it about cloud.ai that's been so helpful for you and why that specific one? Well, that specific one is first perplexity should instantly replace Google on your browser, for sure. There's no debate about this. Every person who I propose perplexity to says thank you. But leaving that part aside, chat GPT is annoying and lazy and arrogant and really gets under my skin.

48:27It fights with me all the time. And I don't know what they did or how they did it, but we don't like each other. And Claude is kind and thoughtful and takes its time to work its way through. It corrects itself when it's wrong. And we're just a good team. That could change at a moment's notice, but it's the best 20 bucks a month I spend, I think. Love it. One more, Seth, before we run. When you think about all the leaders you've been fortunate enough to be around and spend time with and talk to, like the Brian Koppelmans of the world. I love listening to you guys talk, by the way. When you think about them, what are the commonalities among leaders who have sustained excellence over an extended period of time?

49:28The thing they have in common is they've chosen to be leaders. That the time I spent with Barack Obama I'll never forget. The time I spent with Jacqueline Novogratz at Acumen has changed my life. Watching Jim Zilkowski build on, Liz Jackson who does important work with disabled populations, They have nothing in common except this. What they have in common is they're here to make a change happen. That's it. And, you know, if you look at famous, famous leaders, some of whom had tragic endings, they're famous, but they're different from each other as well. And this is not about who does the media celebrate.

50:15This is not about who is the latest troll of the moment, who's getting inking followers. Those people aren't leading. They're simply making noise. The leaders that I know and admire so much are doing it on purpose. Love it. Seth, also, you were six minutes early. I greatly, greatly appreciate that. I think that is a mark of a respectful leader. You could be late and I would have waited here forever and you're six minutes early. I want to say that publicly. I greatly appreciate you. The new book is called This Is Strategy, Make Better Plans. It has all these riffs and ideas that really made me think.

50:58As you could tell, we talked about some of them. We got about like 3 % of the book. So there's plenty more. I think I would really, really urge people to go get this one. And it's written so beautifully as Seth Godin does. But man, I'm so grateful for you. I appreciate you. And I look forward to the next one and us continuing our dialogue as we both progress, man. What a treat. You're a star. Thank you, Ryan.

51:47of choosing what to do today to make tomorrow better. I love that never arrived, always becoming mindset. Then Dorothy and her crew. How did Dorothy persuade the lion, tin man, and scarecrow to join her on the trip to see the wizard? Did she make the case about how much she missed home? No, no. She created the conditions where the others could get what they wanted by joining her. How are we creating the condition so that others can get what they want by joining us? A great question to ask ourselves. Then, what are the commonalities among leaders who have sustained excellence that Seth has worked with over the course of his life?

52:32And he named a number of them. And they're all quite different, but they had one thing in common. And that's that they have all chosen to be leaders. They make that distinctive choice each and every day. And that means that they are here to make a change happen. As Seth always says, they're here to make a bit of a ruckus. And I ask you, how are you making the choice to lead each and every day? Once again, I want to say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling a friend or two, hey, you should listen to this episode of The Learning Leader Show with Seth Godin. I think he'll help you become a more effective leader because you continue to do that.

53:11and you also go to Spotify and Apple Podcasts and you subscribe to the show and you write a thought forward review and you rate the show hopefully five stars by doing all of that. You are giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis and for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much. Talk to you soon. Can't wait.