452 - Why Everything You Know About Success & Productivity Is Wrong | Seth Godin

0:00Some might say there's a lot of unhelpful advice out there around productivity and success, like you're going to sleep when you're dead, all that stuff. If anybody watching or listening wants to truly achieve their dreams, what do you think are three things they should focus on first? The first one is you should get clear about what your dreams are as opposed to just have a hint of them. Because soft, intuitive, undisclosed dreams are just there to bother you. But specific dreams can be challenged. Specific dreams give you the chance to say, no, I don't really want that. And the second thing is to be very clear about the change you seek to make, the change you seek to make in yourself and in others.

0:47You are not entitled to change other people. They have to go along with you, which leads to the third one, which is to develop the empathy to realize that other people don't see what you see, don't want what you want, don't need what you need, and that's okay. So if we can bring other people something that helps them achieve their dreams in a way that helps us, it's way more likely that it's going to happen than if we just sit in a dark corner whining about the fact that our intuitive dream hasn't come true yet. The clarity piece. I feel like that's one of my favorite words and my favorite things to discover and to crystallize is that clarity.

1:28It's like, what is it that I actually really want? And what don't you want? Yes. So you can't, like, you know, I was, a couple years ago, I was at this ice cream place in Syracuse, New York, and there was 20 people in line, and this woman finally got to the front. She was paralyzed. She had had half an hour to pick her flavor, but in that moment, she realized she's only going to get one serving of ice cream today. She could have a double or even a triple, but only one serving, which meant she couldn't have 30 of the flavors. and a lot of people have trouble with, if I want this, it also means I can't have that.

2:04Yes, that's big. Opportunity cost, which we may or may not talk more about. I feel like our world can be really noisy at times or at least maybe that's the experience. And I've watched myself, like I'm so happy that I lived before the smartphone. And I'm so happy that I have memories of way back in like the 70s and the 80s and what my experience of living was like compared to now. What are your thoughts, perspectives, and if you have any practices around like morning or evening routines that have helped you do work that matters? You know, I admire you and I love you for so many reasons. And just one of the gajillion is how generous you continue to be with your work.

2:54in creating things for us to engage with in your books, in your writing. So morning and evening routines are a question that I always get. So I'm passing that along to you. And if there's ever been one or two that you feel like, you know what, that one really made a difference. So what is a routine? A routine is a decision not made. Meaning if you do something every morning, you're not reconsidering it every morning. You made a decision once and you're sticking with it. That's the single best reason for a routine to exist. The problem that people have when they confront their smartphone and social media and things like that is they keep trying to make a new decision.

3:35I'm only going to look at this one email. I'm only going to send this one thing. I'm only going to do this one. And then situationally, they have to reevaluate. And so there's decision exhaustion. And so I decided, for example, 20 years ago, that I have a blog every day. And that means that tomorrow there's going to be a blog post, not because it's my best blog post, but because it's Thursday. And that ritual then informs a big part of my life. It's a decision to say there are no circumstances under which a phone is going in the room where I sleep. It's a decision to say I will always go for a walk, even if it's only one block, no matter what the weather is.

4:18because if I go one block, I might keep going. But if I make the decision inside, I'm making a new decision about walk or no walk. So my particular rituals aren't that important. What's important is that you have some and that you don't stick with them because you want to stick with them. You stick with them because they're helping you achieve the goals you're seeking. What's a typical day in your life look like these days if there is such a thing? So when people ask me that question, I've often said they're so not the same. I'm very much a person who appreciates a lot of variety and sometimes it's just built in.

4:56Like for instance, today that you and I are shooting together and I'm like, oh, I need to be on camera. And oh, you kind of back up all the things that happen. But I'm curious if that looks different these days than it did say when you first started out. Cause I'm just interested in the journey of how that shifts. So like you, I worked really hard to make it so that days aren't the same. My first real job in a real office was moving an IBM 360 mainframe from one facility to another in Cincinnati. And it was only three days into the summer, I said to myself, if I have to do this for the rest of my life, it's over.

5:34I can't do this. Other people can't. I can't. I guess there was a phase, a long phase, when I woke up in the morning saying, how am I going to make enough money that I don't go out of business? How do I make enough money to feed my family? How do I make enough money that I don't have to get a job as a bank teller? So I was a book packager. I invented ideas for books. And everywhere I looked, something could be a book because I needed to come up with a new book idea every four days in order to sell a book every month so that 10 years later I'd have 120 books. And that was the cycle. There was a hole and I needed to fill it.

6:14as organizations i was part of grew then i would say my life shifted to what's the incoming who needs help i've got some life jackets i've got some insight i'm throwing them out to people who might be drowning but there's a team here and if i don't keep up with the incoming we're going to fall behind and that was thrilling for many years i had 85 or 90 employees and 50 of them reported directly to me. Wow. And so I was hooked on this magic, and the email was young. So there was two, and I could actually keep track and help 50 different people. But as soon as it got to 51, then like sooner or later, you have a meltdown, right?

6:57Yeah, totally. And since then, I think the shift has been that a typical day is, what's interesting? What don't I understand? how could I explain that interesting thing to somebody else in a way that would be useful to them? And a lot of it is spent looking for the white spaces, the gaps between, because it turns out if you let time slow down a little bit, you're not racing toward inbox zero, whatever it is, magic things can occur. And so some of the stuff you're talking about that people like to engage with that I've created, someone would say, well, how did you come up with the idea of a collectible chocolate bar and design the packaging on your 7-Block?

7:41I said, I have no idea. I just know that I was bored enough that I needed to invent a new thing. Do you ever feel like these days, like, have you simplified enough where, or maybe it's about boundaries and I'm so curious to hear your perspective on this. Like, do you feel like you have to protect, I'll call it like white space or open space or just spaciousness? in your day, that you have to actively kind of put some boundaries around things so that you can be bored and that new things can drop in, appear, emerge? I think that it's worth putting in a small advertisement now for productive technology.

8:24So I can build things using computers and the internet faster than many people, not everyone, but many people. And I can use tools like perplexity, more eagerly than many people. So what will happen is I can produce a lot of stuff in way less time than a team of seven people could because they have to go to all these meetings with each other and compromise and all this stuff. And I'm just touching the tool. And this idea of touching the tool, it's the difference between riding your bike in a city and having someone in a Chevy Suburban pick you up. That when you're riding your bike in the city, you're present, you're feeling things, you discover nooks and crannies that other people don't see.

9:08Whereas when you get isolated and picked up in this seven ton truck and you're just sitting there with no sound and no vision, then you end up in a stupor. So I guess what I'm hoping to help people see is you could learn these tools. And they don't have to be the tools I use, but there are tools that have enormous amounts of leverage. And so a simple example in my case, if I write a blog post, things will happen in the world. But that's not how my blog started. It had 100 readers at the beginning. So I would write a blog post and my brother-in-law would say, oh, that was clever, but that was it.

9:45So by building an asset and learning to use it, freedom can ensue. But to answer your question, having a limited attention span and still remembering struggling to make a living combined to make it so that I can get sucked into a project that I might not want to. And I have to be very careful about that. I believe you should quit projects before you launch them or stick with them until they get to the point where they're supposed to get, but not in between. Ooh, say more about that quit projects before you launch them. Okay, so if you want to be a productive creator, you have to ship the work.

10:28But if you're unwilling to quit, it means that once you ship one piece of work, you're going to be doing that for the rest of your life, right? You're going to be taking ballet lessons when you're 60 years old because you started when you were three. We need to learn to quit. So when should we quit? Well, in the dip, I point out, if you go to a gym in North America in February, it's very crowded. And in March, it's empty. Yep. Because most people who join pay for a year and quit after seven weeks. But you don't get abs or fitness until you make it till May. So don't even join if you're going to quit in February.

11:06There is no point. So what I do regularly is I build out a project. and it could just be on the whiteboard, but it could also be there's a digital platform and all this other stuff. And then I look at it and I say, if I press this green button, I'm committing to this for a fairly long period of time. Yes. But I'm not going to quit after two months. I'm either have a vision and I'm going to stick with it. I'm going to say, that was fun to build, but I'm not going to ship it. And that discipline is really a useful strategy. How do you decide what to say yes to and no to these days? Because I imagine you get a fair amount of incoming, you know, whether it is speaking engagements, potential collaborations, even your own ideas.

11:57Like in my world, what's working for me now is a lot of body truths and trying it on energetically, like I would try on a sweater if I went to the store and I'm like, huh, it looks like it could feel good. And then I see myself in the mirror and it's itchy. And I'm like, oh, absolutely not. And I take that off. And I've been doing the same thing a lot with projects. And the moment I can detect some dread, some heaviness, some contraction. I'm like, oh, hell no. No matter how shiny or alluring or attractive, it could be on paper. So I'm curious if you have any frameworks or methodology for how you navigate all the incoming of potentials.

12:46Steve Pressfield's book, The War of Art, is so important. But dread has two flavors. And a lot of people who are listening to this are confused about the difference between the two. There is the dread that I feel after all these years, one minute before I get on stage to an audience that I'm unfamiliar with. It doesn't mean I should turn around and not get on stage. There is a dread just before I submit a manuscript for a new book. It doesn't mean I should throw the book in the garbage. Liz Gilbert tells the story of the book after Eat, Pray, Love. She got paid a whole bunch of money. She went away, wrote it for a whole year, brought it to Kinko's, had it copied to send, and then she looked at it and threw it in the trash.

13:33And no one has ever read that book. And she tells that as a story of bravery. I tell that as a story of lost opportunity because I can't imagine that book belonged in the trash. So that sort of dread, the dread of resistance, is a symptom you're doing something right. So I look for that feeling in my days. The other sort of dread is the dread that comes with ennui and fatigue and this isn't interesting to me. That's the dread that I'm now fortunate enough that I can walk away from. And so many people who don't have the privilege I do still have to go to work because they feel dread about their work.

14:18To those people, I say, I'm sorry that that's happening. Where can we find in your work the other kind of dread? How can you make it so that you become that indispensable linchpin at work? How can we make it so that your work transforms into one that feels the other kind of dread? Yes. Because that makes you feel alive. Have you ever struggled with overwhelm or feeling stretched too thin? Like I've gone through this several times in my life. I've gone through it several times in my business. And before we kind of turned the cameras on, you know, I was sharing how I'm in another phase of simplify to amplify, which is one of my favorite things that I've done.

14:58You know, I can think about it even in terms of my junk drawer at home. And I'm not a person who likes a lot of physical stuff. It's just not my thing. And yet, and yet I can open and I'm like, how did that drawer get so full? Like it is time for a little clean out, you know, and I see that in my plants and my garden. And we have a place out in Long Island. And I'm like, yes, that tree is lovely and it needs to be pruned. So I'm just curious your experience with those two feelings. I know that in our audience, that feeling of overwhelm or feeling stretched too thin, I see it and hear about it a lot.

15:34So I'm curious your advice, your perspective, any stories that you have about that. Why is it that people can eat lunch every single day and never get burned out on the idea of lunch? Right? whereas a whole bunch of other things feel like they're cluttering in our days and we say i'm overwhelmed with this yes i'm burning out yes burnout is the feeling of two things at the same time i want to be here and i want i don't want to be here so it's like cleaning out a drawer is not stressful at all if you just throw everything in the trash but you don't want to throw it all in the trash because in fact you want that when you need it yes so there's stress i want it but i don't want it.

16:14And let's go back to the very first thing you said, which is if you're coherent about what your dreams are, it's way less likely you're going to feel burnout. Because if you're in alignment that this thing I'm doing right now, that I'm going through right now, is the obvious direct next step to get to where I'm going, then it's lighter. It's better, right? And I can't believe have gone this far without mentioning Dorothy, but the Wizard of Oz, which is the metaphor for all things, Dorothy goes through a lot of travails along the way, but she never feels burnout. There's no scene in the movie where she feels completely used up because every one of the steps is a step getting her closer to where she wants to go.

17:01I love that you're not on social media. Um, it just always, it makes me do like inner soul cartwheels and because we've known each other for so long. It just, I don't know why it just makes me just want to do jazz hands and all kinds of fun moves. I'm curious of your current perspective on social, just because we know how addicted folks are to their screens and phones. And the follow-up to that is, did you ever entertain using it more frequently or was it always just like, nope, not for me? Oh, so many things to say here. The first thing I would say is, please don't mistake the existence of social media and the fact that some people are addicted as an accident.

17:43It's on purpose. And the same way John Scully, when he was at Coke, made the size of the 16 ounce Pepsi bottle a little bit bigger so that teenagers could drink it all in one swig called slamming. There wasn't a lot of debate at Pepsi about diabetes. There was debate about will we sell any more Pepsi? Well, the people who brought you social media, and I was one of them early on, thought about, well, what will people do or not do? And how do we turn up these dials and turn down those dials? So here's this toxic thing that you're using. And some things that are toxic, like hot sauce, are fine in small quantities.

18:27But if you drink entire bottles of hot sauce, it's not a good thing. There's no limit on social media. so therefore everything is pushing you in one direction. Do I think humanity is better when it's connected at a certain level? There's no question about it. Do I think giving everyone a microphone, even if they're a troll, a scammer, a spammer, is a good idea? Clearly not. And the algorithms are optimized so that the people who are causing the most division and the most anger get the most attention. So that's the main reason we have so much division and anger in our world. is because those people are being rewarded.

19:08So for me personally, I started my blog more than 20 years ago and at the beginning, comments came on by default. And so there would be comments and what happened was the first couple of weeks because I only had 100 readers, oh, that's very nice. This person read it. And then someone who doesn't understand what you just wrote says something that's not true. And now you're like, hmm, there's somebody out there who seems angry at me and is confused, but they don't understand what I just said. So maybe I'll just respond to them. And then you discover, because you're feeding that, that it happens more and more.

19:47So you say, all right, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to start writing my blog so that people won't be confused. So I'll add parentheticals and explanations so that there'll be no chance for them to come to the wrong conclusion. and within a week I realized I only had two choices a blog with no comments or no blog because I stopped writing like the person I wanted to be I started writing like a lawyer defensively and I got all this angry mail from people how dare you blogs have to have comments why aren't you and I was like you should have your own blog and then you can write anything you want about my blog on your blog on your put this on your lawn not on my lawn right dying yes and so then twitter showed up and because i pay attention to tech i looked at twitter i said i bet i bet i could have a lot of people following me on twitter this is going to take off but i realized if i spent time doing that i would spend less time blogging so i'd become a mediocre blogger and a mediocre twitter user.

20:49And then Amazon reviews started showing up and I read a couple of my one star reviews because I want to be a better writer. And I realized all they say is this book isn't for me. Everything after that doesn't help because it's not for you. So I stopped reading all of my reviews, five stars, one stars, et cetera. And every once in a while, I need to go on a piece of social media to promote something for a partner or whatever, like a talk I'm doing. And I'll accidentally see something somebody wrote and I just, ah, no, thank you. So no, I have, I have no desire to go on to public social media. Private social media is different, but public social media, I have no interest.

21:31Yes. So, so many humans in my audience. So I have this new experience, which I haven't told you about yet. It's this magical space that I call dream club and it's an app. And it's essentially a private online community and coaching program where... Yeah. You sent me the link. Yes, that's right. Very cool. So we talk a lot and we chat and we have conversations. And even with my B-Schoolers, so many hate social, but they're like, Marie, but how am I going to grow this business? How am I going to grow this brand? So I'm just curious what you would say to folks who absolutely despise, They're just like, no, you know, like don't make me do it.

22:13But they feel like they have to use it in order to be relevant. Like, are there any other alternative suggestions or what would you say to those folks? All right. So we'll begin with this. What I talk about in the new book is when you pick your customers, you pick your future. This is an intentional act. If you pick people who only do business with folks who are popular on Instagram, then those are the people you're going to get. And that's the life you're going to live. And when they decide to switch to a competitor of yours that's more popular on Instagram, don't be surprised because that's what you signed up for.

22:49So that's the first principle is the people you choose to engage with and respond to are the people that are going to determine who you're engaging and responding with. It seems obvious, but people don't understand this. I was out on Long Island a couple years ago, really privileged, rich part of Long Island. I went to a fish store and it was off season. and I said to the fishmonger behind the thing, you must have so many Masters of the Universe coming in here, giving you a hard time. I said, you're running a great little fish store. What do you do? And he says, the first time they cut the line or give me a hard time or whine, I just say, leave the store.

23:28He added a lot of profanity, but leave the store. My kind of guy. Well, it's very clear what happens. The only customers he's left with are people he likes and he's doing fine. and the people who are inclined to be a jerk don't because they're afraid of getting kicked out of the store. That makes a lot of sense. Okay, so that's the first rule. Pick your customers. The second one is someone is going to win the influencer lottery. I have my hair just right, I have that hat thing on, I've done the thing, but it's not going to be you, right? The Kardashians ruined it for a lot of people because you want to be the next Kardashian.

24:04We already have a Kardashian. We don't need that. Plus, if there's 50 ,000 people all trying to be the next ex, one or two will be. One or two will go viral on YouTube or whatever. It's not going to be you. You've signed up for a struggle, feeding the algorithm, working for free for a social media company, and using it as the barometer of your days. Your highs are based on, did you get a bunch of likes and you're low. Why give up your future this way? And then the last part, as a marketer, I will tell you, social media is a symptom, not a cause of a brand's success. Meaning when a brand resonates and catches on, other people talk about you.

24:49You don't talk about yourself. And so it's true. I'm not on social media, but people talk about my blog all the time because I give them something to talk about. That's my job. But if I'm there talking about it, it's not gonna make it any better. It'll make it worse. I just feel like we went to some marketing, life-telling, truth-telling, church, and I am here for it. And I say a big amen. Last year, we talked briefly about AI when you were on. And in the beginning of this fabulous new book, which is called This Is Strategy, which y 'all gotta get your copy. If you don't have your copy, you need to get your copy now.

25:24You encouraged readers to challenge Claude with prompts and lists from the book. I'm so curious to hear about your experimentation with AI, how it's evolved. Like, what do you see the potential for entrepreneurs, especially because, again, we do have a lot of folks in our audience who are a one-person show looking to grow to something more than that? Okay, so I was a computer science major. I studied advanced AI in 1983 with Doug Linott. So I've been seen by this for a long time. I worked with Arthur C. Clarke, the 2001 guy. It's here. But you need to understand a couple things. The first thing is it doesn't know anything.

26:02It's a trick, and our brain makes us think it's intelligent. It's a trick. I could explain the trick, but it wouldn't help. It's a trick. So don't get confused by the story your brain is telling you. There isn't a little man or a woman inside. It's not filled with wisdom. It's a trick that will help you in certain ways if you give it the right boundaries. Number two, it's the biggest shift in our world since electricity. Just like when electricity came, some company said, I don't want anything to do with electricity. They went away. It's here and it's not going anywhere. So there are different platforms the same way there is Google and Bing.

26:42There is chat GPT, which is the most famous one. I don't use it that much because it's arrogant and lazy. there's perplexity, which everyone should use starting right now. It replaces Google. You just ask it a question in English. It does the search for you. It gives you footnotes so you know it's not making anything up. And you'll see. You can send me a thank you note later. And the other one I use a lot is called Claude. Claude is run by Anthropic. Claude, in my experience, is kind and wiser and not lazy. And some of the things you can do with Claude. You can say, here is my five page strategy plan i wrote it as a word file and you upload it you say claude please ask 10 hard questions about this what did i miss what's a contradiction and it will and it won't be perfect but it will surprise you you can say to it um i got this memo from this person and this memo from this person please write something that's the synthesis of both of them and it will and it will surprise you what i used it for in my books are always written by me just me and my blog as well but i would come up with lists for the books like four things we need to worry about system traps and i would say claude here are my four system traps can you name five more and i go and at least three of the five were brilliant things i hadn't thought of it is really good at completing lists like that.

28:09Yes. So if you are a solopreneur, if you're somebody who has a small team, either you're going to work for AI the same way you find yourself working for social media, or AI is going to work for you. If AI is going to work for you, you better hire it, understand how to feed it, and start putting it to work. That doesn't mean you have it do mediocre writing and try to sell it as non-mediocre writing because there's no market for non mediocre for mediocre writing anymore what it means is you find tasks that need to be done frequently and quickly that it will do for you that you can then package and sell to people who need it from you and you know what i expect to see soon for example is you could go to a company with 100 employees and say, give me access to your email and the spreadsheet of every one of your employees and how much you pay them.