419 - Why "Finding Your Calling" Is Complete Nonsense

0:00Quick heads up, if you want to make 2025 your best year yet and you want me as your mentor, Go to marieforleo.com slash dreamclub now to get on the Dream Club VIP list. That's marieforleo.com slash dreamclub. Okay, let's dive in to today's episode. Do you ever feel bad like you're supposed to have your career all figured out by now, but you just don't? Well, Seth Godin is here to break down why the notion of finding your calling is complete nonsense and what you should do instead. Enjoy. Seth Godin is an entrepreneur, author of 18 books that have been bestsellers around the world and a maker of ruckuses.

0:36He's been on the internet since 1976, invented permission-based email, founded two significant net companies, and defines his working life by the many projects he's launched, the failures he has learned from, and the people he's taught. His latest is The Alt MBA, an intense workshop that helps people level up in a way that truly lasts. Find out more about the course at altmba.com. You can learn more about Seth and his blog by typing Seth into Google. Seth, thank you so much for taking the time to be here today. I want to say before we get into the interview, thank you for your body of work over the years.

1:14You have made such a tremendous impact on me personally, on my team, on so many people that I know. And I think you and I both share a tremendous love of books. And I want you to know that any time I ever find myself feeling like a little stuck or in self-doubt or just any stage of going like, ugh, I reach into my bookshelf and undoubtedly yours is one of the books that comes out to get me back on track. That's so nice of you to say. It's the truth. Thank you. That means the world to me. I wanted you to hear it. Now you said something in your most recent book that I thought was brilliant. In your turn, you think that we're wasting the chance of a lifetime.

1:51time. So what do you mean by that and what can we do to stop, to not do it? There's the external thing and the internal thing. The external thing is this is our revolution. We live in this moment of time when anyone with a hundred bucks can connect to a billion and a half people around the world anytime they want to. We live in this place where we each have more leverage and a bigger platform than any human on earth ever had before us. And internally, if not this moment, when? Right? That if we're not going to speak up now, are things going to be easier or better a year from now? We wait for things to calm down.

2:31We wait for it to be the right moment. But this is the right moment. That we look back a year in our life, five years ago, and we rarely say, I'm disappointed that I spoke up. I'm I'm disappointed that I did my art. I'm disappointed that I connected to somebody. We don't. What we regret is not doing that. So here we are in this moment of high leverage and all we can do is watch cat videos and whine about our boss. And I just, I think we can do better than that. I agree. And one thing that I appreciate about you, you know, we got to spend some time together on Necker Island. And I also wanted to say this, you know, having admired your work for so long and who you are, You're one of those people who's like 100 times better in real life than you are even in your work, and your work is frigging extraordinary.

3:20And one of the things that I remember most about spending time with you there was how challenging you were in the best sense of that word. Like, Marie, you should sit at the front of the table. Marie, you should do that. I was like, what's – oh my god, Seth Godin is telling me what to do. And I loved every second of it because it was done in such a spirit of, hey, it's your turn. Go ahead. Go do it, girl." And I love that and that's why I love that book, Your Turn. Well, one thing I want to just insert as an aside because I've told you five or ten of your fans will be watching this is in real life you're exactly as you appear on TV.

3:57It's not an act that this generous, connected person is actually a generous, connected person. Oh, thank you. So I thought people might want to know that because they didn't get the chance to meet you the way I did. Thank you. So a question that we get often here is from people who are struggling to figure out, what should I do with my life? How do I find my passion or my purpose or my calling? And you've said, I'm not sure that anyone has a calling. Can you speak to that? Thank you for teeing this up. This whole calling passion thing is complete nonsense. It's, as Steve Pressfield would call it, the resistance.

4:35Yes. that Van Gogh, if he had been born 20 years later or 20 years earlier, he wouldn't have done what he did. It's not like some angel came down when he was born and said, you're going to become an impressionistic painter. He wanted to do a thing, but he didn't know what the thing was. And if Steve Jobs had been born 20 years earlier, he would have done a different thing. This isn't It's about waiting for the right answer because there is no right answer. What there are are challenges we can sign up for and emotions we can experience. There are kinds of engagements we can seek out and ones that we don't want to.

5:16If you're the kind of person that only feels good when all the chips are in Red 86, well, then you need to go find that kind of activity. If you're the kind of person that would rather have a small circle of people who are committed to you for a long time, find any variation of those activities. But if you're waiting for the perfect horse on that carousel to come around, you missed three, four, five, seven cycles while you were waiting. All the horses are just as good. It's the same carousel. Just get on the damn horse. I love that. When I first started my career and I was starting to do life coaching and I was starting to get into dance and fitness, I remember feeling when I was in front of a fitness classroom and teaching, you know, people doing bicep curls or we were doing hip hop dance.

6:04There was a lot of that same feeling that I get even doing what I do now. Like connecting with people, even honestly bartending and making people drinks and talking to them about their meals and like asking them who they are and getting to know them in their dreams. There were so many threads that I now can see in hindsight where it was me being me and who knows what's going to happen in another 20 or 30 years. And this is where the grass is greener thing gets us into so much trouble because, you know, you have a sensational life, but so do some fitness instructors and so do some bartenders. Yes.

6:38Your life doesn't get more sensational when you have more followers on Twitter. That's not what you ought to be keeping score of. Yes. It's does this interaction leave behind a trail that I'm proud of? And does having the interaction make me glad that I did it and want to do it again? And you know, so I know people who run nonprofits and some of them are big and some of them are small and they're getting equal amounts of satisfaction because bigger isn't the point, more isn't the point. And when we, you know, are there bad ideas? There are tons of bad ideas. I'm not saying all ideas are equally good.

7:16What I'm saying is finding a thing that works is sufficient. And that's the challenge. So entrepreneurs, for example. Too many entrepreneurs think that there's a prize for originality. There's no prize for originality at all. You should steal a different person's idea. You should bring something that worked in Detroit to Cleveland because you don't have to worry about apologizing and say, well, yeah, I went to a muffin store in Detroit that works, so I brought it to Cleveland. So what? What matters is now there's someone in Cleveland who's engaging with you, buying something from you that gives both of you pleasure.

7:53And there are so many places where we need more of something. No one's asking you to be that person who invents something that never existed before. What we're asking you to do is choose to matter in a way that aligns with who you want to be. Yeah. And I think it's also important to talk about this idea. How you do things matters. You know, thinking about the bartending days. And we were having lunch before, all the people on the crew, and we were just recalling folks. Like there was a valet person who I met in Venice, in California. This guy was amazing and he brought such light to what he did and lit up every...

8:33And I'm still talking about him and this is years later, but the level of excellence and joy. And someone else was talking about these two pizza guys, like the banter they would do. Makes you want to go into the pizza store again and again. And it wasn't even the best pizza, but you just had this quality of interaction. And I think so many people miss that, looking for the holy grail of a perfect purpose. Right. Yeah. And what they're actually looking for is a way to hide by saying, I'm looking for the perfect purpose. I went to business school with a guy who said he was waiting for the right moment to start his entrepreneurial venture.

9:04And that was 27 years ago. Wow. Right? That I started so many bad ones along the way, but sooner or later you're gonna stumble into one that you're glad you did. Yeah. So you run one of the most popular blogs in the world. We all love it. You publish every day. And you've said it's one of the top five career decisions you've ever made. Why? Even if no one read it, I would blog every day. I think everyone should do so. And here's the reason. If you know that tomorrow you have to say something about something you noticed, about something that might help someone else, about an opinion you have that might stand the test of time, you will form those opinions.

9:45You will notice those things. You will invent that idea. And if day after day, week after week, you leave this trail behind of thoughtful examination of your world, you can't help but get better at whatever it is you seek to do. And if as a byproduct other people read it and trust you more, that's a jackpot, right? Then my goal is not to have more readers. My goal is not to sell more books. My goal is to be trusted in a way that I can make the change that I seek to have happen in the world. Return on trust. How do you gain permission to talk to people in a way they want to be talked to? You don't do that with SEO and with gaming social media strategies.

10:30You do that by showing up in a way that you'd want someone to show up for you. And I still don't understand why people don't do this. I think, not that I'll get the answer right, but I wanted to ask this on behalf of, I know so many people who will be like, Marie, please ask them this. What I know from my interaction with our audience is sometimes people feel so afraid of being judged or they're going to run out of ideas. Yeah, they should. Yeah. Those are all the things. Being judged sucks. Yeah. Right? So write it under somebody else's name, right? That call yourself anything you want, Talon Stone, writing this blog.

11:08No one knows on the internet if you're a dog. You just post every day and you can't possibly get in trouble because it's not you. And after you've done it for six weeks, you know what you're going to do? You're going to put your name on it because you're so proud of what you're creating. Are you going to run out of ideas? Well, here's my thought on this. I write like I talk and nobody I know gets talker's block. Nobody. No one wakes up and goes unable to speak. So if you write like you talk, don't worry because you haven't run out of things to say yet so you won't run out of things to blog. Do you ever in your own mind, because you've been doing this, how many years now have you been blogging?

11:45Well, before it was called a blog, I would say the first email newsletter went out in 1990. I love that. So 26 years or so. That is so awesome. I remember when I first started doing email marketing, it was like 1999, 2000, and it was whoa, and like PDFs, ebooks. That was like mind-blowing. Yeah. It was so cool. Isn't that great? So few people saw what you saw. That they went ahead and they bought stock in bookstores and they went ahead and thought this just has to keep going in the direction it's going. Yeah. In hindsight, once you put words and then video onto the internet, it has to change everything.

12:27Our culture was based on scarce TV channels, scarce spectrum, scarce bookshelf space. And we blew up all three of them. And of course it's changing, right? All the way up to presidential politics. It changes everything when you take the scarcity away. And the amazing thing is it's happening in all of our lifetimes. Usually a change like this, Gutenberg comes out with this thing. I mean, Gutenberg's thing didn't change most of the world for decades, right? It enabled Martin Luther and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but it takes a long time. This happened like that. Yeah. I'm always thinking in my mind like what is 2030 or 2035 gonna look like?

13:02I get fascinated with like the Ray Kurzweil and all that stuff and I can go deep down that rabbit hole, but it is. It's a really exciting time. So curious, if that was one of the top five career decisions, is there any others? Well, I think that I adopted a practice of intentionally seeking out things I was wrong about. And I learned this the hard way. It cost me over$100 billion, which is a lot of money. That's a lot of money. So I was on the internet before there was a World Wide Web. And when the web came along, I said, this is stupid. It's just like Prodigy, which most people here don't even know what that was.

13:42That was before AOL. It was an online service. Just like Podigy, except it's slower and there's no business model. It'll never work. And so for months, my internet company didn't have a website, didn't buy up all the cool domains. Business.com went for$7 million. We could have bought it for$10. And we didn't do any of the things that would have helped us a lot because I believed it didn't make sense. So I have adopted this practice of on a regular basis finding a topic that I'm sure about and describing out loud to a trusted person why I'm wrong. Taking the other side, arguing in detail what could happen that would make me wrong.

14:25And what it is helping me with is not becoming wishy-washy and never making decisions, but every once in a while feeling that feeling. And it almost makes a noise when you do it of the brain flipping to a different way of looking at the world. And that flipping is essential if we live in revolutionary times. And I think we do now. So in an example, I have spent time with people in the record business. And when you talk to someone 10 or 15 years ago in the record business about how it was all gonna end, and it did end like two years ago, they would just yell at you and argue with you and throw you out of the office.

15:02I've been throwing up some great offices. But every once in a while, you'll see someone say back to you your words as if they believed them. And every once in a while, they'll go, yeah. And then you can just hear the noise. And that person now can just clear the table because all their competitors don't believe it and they do. And that is a really useful practice in small and in the big. So do you find yourself doing that regularly when you're considering taking on a project or looking at what you want to do next? You know, I am not a good role model for how to take on the next project. I spend way too much time in the pre-committal stage.

15:45What do you mean? Well, so I wrote a book called The Dip, which is all about why quitting is a useful tactic, but that you should never quit when it gets hard. Don't quit your gym in February if you joined in January. If you're going to do that, don't even join, right? but quit before you start or quit once you realize it's a dead end but quitting in the key moment is the wrong idea well quitting before you start means outline the plan act as if describe what could happen and then you're either in in which case you're into the end or you're not and in that moment it's really easy to just let it sit and sometimes I let it sit too long because I'm afraid because I don't want to commit three, five, seven years of my life to building a thing.

16:32Yeah. Right? And sometimes I let it sit because I don't see it clearly enough. And sometimes I let it sit because in fact it was a bad idea. Right? And other people are better at pulling the trigger and saying, go. I used to be better at it, but as the stakes have risen and as the amount of time I have to spend a decade on a project goes down, I'm more hesitant to commit. and that's not necessarily a good practice. I need to get back into that spirit of how do I pick among three and really commit? Go for it. Taking a quick break to let you in on something super special. If you wanna make 2025 your best year ever and have me as your mentor, go to marieforleo.com slash dreamclub now to get your name on the VIP list.

17:22On December 30th, we're opening up new spots at a very special rate, so don't miss out. Let's talk productivity, since we were kind of going right around there, and your ability to devote time to things that matter. So there are times for me, like for example, we were talking off camera before we sat on set about how like earlier this particular year for me was crushing. Like there, I just got buried. There was B-School, we launched a new website, I was doing this Oprah talk, and I remember… I heard the Oprah talk was great. Thank you. I'll send you a link. But like my email was out of… I felt horrible because I care about people and it was just like this long, you know, I'm like, oh God, somebody help me.

18:04And I'm curious to hear from you over the years, even if it's current or before, how you manage because you're such a thoughtful person. You create so much. And as our world continues to get more connected and there's more kind of avenues in, I know you're not on Twitter and you keep comments off, so that's one thing. But even email, how do you manage to not get buried by it? And even broader in all your projects, you know, making sure that you have the time for your creative thinking, but also for Helene and for the kids. All right. So there's boxes within boxes within boxes. Yeah. So let me try to decode it a little bit.

18:40The first thing I'll say is that productivity is an economic measure of how much you output for the amount of time and resources you put in. Some people have figured out how to be naturally more productive than others per minute. And the way you do that is by having an instinct to ship, not an instinct to polish, to be perfect, to justify you're not shipping. That most people hesitate to ship not because it's not ready, but because they're afraid. So I did a post about a year ago called Buzzer Management. We'll put a link to it below. That's how you win at Jeopardy. The people who win at Jeopardy aren't better than the people who lose at Jeopardy, except in one thing.

19:22They press the buzzer before anybody else. And the only way to press the buzzer before everyone else is to press the buzzer before you're sure you know the answer. So as your brain is thinking, maybe I can get it. Now you press the buzzer. And in that last moment, you're going to come up with something, right? So you agreed to do your Oprah talk. Was it done the day you agreed to do it? Oh, hell no. But you pressed the buzzer. I did. Right? You press the buzzer, which is going to require... so do I have a blog post coming out tomorrow? I do. I actually pressed the buzzer 10 years ago. So I know that's going to happen.

19:54So I'm apparently super productive because I'm good at buzzer management. I'm good at saying, I have this much time and there will be a thing when I'm done. Most people hesitate to do that because they're afraid. So that's the first thing I'll say. Second thing is once you've been busy pressing the buzzer, now you have to say to yourself, what am I not going to do in order to be able to do that? Yes. So this is about making promises and keeping them. So I am not going to say to somebody, please go ahead, engage with me in this level and I will get back to you because maybe I can't. I don't go to meetings.

20:28I don't watch television. So right there, I save seven hours that most people waste every single day. That seven hours gives me a lot of space to do things that make me seem insanely productive, right? Because I'm not doing these other things. Well, other people really should go to meetings. Other people really should watch TV. That will make them productive in the way they seek to be productive. I'm just saying you pick. So Twitter was easy for me because I said to myself, if I'm going to do Twitter, I should commit to it. There's a dip. And if I commit, I should figure out how to be really good at it.

21:02If I'm going to be really good at it, I'm going to have to give up something else. So what do I want to be less good at than I'm good at now so I could be good at Twitter? And I looked at what I thought would be the upsides of that. And I said, I don't want to give up anything I'm good at to be good at Twitter. Done. And I never have reconsidered it since because I don't need to. And there are other areas where I have said, you know what? I'm going to give up this part of my thing to do that thing instead. But we have to acknowledge we have finite resources, finite time, finite connections. Yes.

21:35How will we use them to produce outcomes that we're proud of? And the worst thing to do, in the words of Zig Ziglar, are to be a wandering generality. What you need to be is a meaningful specific. That means you have to claim it. You have to put yourself on the spot. You have to make a promise and say, I do this. You can count on me. That's what you're going to get from me. I love it. Okay. Any email tips from you? Because that... The most important email tip. Tell me. Do not send Seth Godin email. Yeah. I mean, you know that. Just don't send me email. Don't. That's the most important thing. I love it.

22:14Let's just leave it right there. There you go. Thank you. That's perfect. Disappointments and setbacks. So they come up with work, they come up with business, they come up with our life. And I feel like one of the themes that I've seen throughout your work over the years is having people be really comfortable with failures and setbacks and all the twists and turns. Can you talk a little bit about that journey? We have a lot of people in our audience who are just starting out and I feel like there's so much fear about if they fail or if things are going to flop and you always have such a great point of view on it.

22:47I used to think that Monopoly was a good board game. And I in fact invented Goat in Monopoly, which you can find the rules for online. But I thought it was good. Like at one point my kids and I were so good at it we could play it in the cart without the board. We just knew where all the properties were and we would roll the dice in our head and do the whole thing. Wow. Monopoly is not a good board game. I've come to that conclusion. But there's a good lesson here and the lesson is this. Unless you're four years old, if you lose at Monopoly, I think you realize it's not personal. Right? It was a game.

23:20You didn't get the roles you needed. Maybe you made a couple of strategy mistakes, but you can play again tomorrow. It's not about you. Don't have a tantrum. Don't turn the board over and don't beat yourself up. It's just a game. So what if we take that mindset, which is very adult and very mature and works for us, and apply it to what happens if your book proposal doesn't get sold? Or apply it to what happens if no one responds to the comment you posted under this thing? In all of these things, you didn't get a promotion? Well, that's a little bit like landing on Park Place when someone else has an apartment there.

23:51Sorry, but it's not necessarily about you. We are playing this game with 1.5, 2, 3, 4 billion other people, moving pieces around, contributing, investing, sometimes landing on other properties, figuring out what to roll next, right? If you can look at it that way, the question is, will you be better at the game or will you be worse at the game? And what we know is you will be better at the game. You will be better at the game because you can approach it with joy and you can approach it without being locked up in tense fear. And so isn't that the goal to be better at the game? So we can be mindful, we can be present, we can breathe and say, oh, that's interesting.

24:35And that answer, that's interesting, is so much better than, oh my God, I'm never going to get another thing and then that's going to happen and then that's going to happen and that's going to happen and then I'm going to be dead. Because we all fear being dead, but we don't have to fear being dead every time the phone rings every time we get the little tweet sound every time like, it actually isn't fatal. So don't act like it's fatal. I love it. You have a recent post called The Momentum Myth. And so I want to talk books and launches and consistency for a moment. I loved the graphic. We'll put it up here.

25:07The cumulative sales from your recent book, It's Your Turn. And you wrote, fast starts are never as important as a cultural hook, consistently showing up and committing to a process. So many folks that I get a chance to interact with, I feel like they're like, I want it now. And I'm like, you have no idea how long it takes. I was wondering if you could speak to… So let's talk about the worst name ever for an internet company, Kickstarter. It should be called Kickfinisher because people like come up with some cool idea, they put it on Kickstarter and then they hassle every single person they know to get whatever promo they can.