#672: Seth Godin — The Pursuit of Meaning, The Life-Changing Power of Choosing Your Attitude, Overcoming Rejection, Life Lessons from Zig Ziglar, and Committing to Making Positive Change

29:17But leaving the climate aside for a minute, when we think about our days, where we go to work, who we work with, whether we're in a community orchestra or not, is it significant? Is it about you and the change you seek to make? Or are you quote, I'm just doing my job? So I'm doing a talk for Harvard and they said, what do you want to call it? And I told them and they renamed it, which I got them to unrename, to having your employees feel significant, as if it's some sort of hand-waving that you get to do with the free snacks. And that's not my point. My point is we built all these systems so we can actually be significant, so we can actually point to what we made.

30:07So let's go back. How long ago was the first breakthrough book for you? 10 years, give or take? 15? Last breakthrough, or the first breakthrough book? The four-hour work. Yeah. Yeah. The four-hour work. Yeah. The four-hour work was 2007. So let's call it 15 years ago. Right. 15 years ago. So what you said to people, to a lot of tutting and disbelief, is that you as an individual have access to tools so that you can find some thing or somebody or some system that can do the grunt work so that you can actually do human work that is valued by others. And that opened the door for what so many people are now capable of doing.

30:48However, there's still all this pressure to race to the bottom. If you put your freelance work on Upwork, the race is to be the fastest, cheapest person. Well, if you're the fastest, cheapest person, you're just a mechanical turk. You're just cranking it out and no one cares about you because the minute someone's faster and cheaper than you, they'll switch. And what we're looking for is to find work where our work is unmistakably us, where our work is something we can point to and say, given who I am and what I see, I made this. I made this for you. Can you please help me make it better? And when we can do that, our days are totally different than when we're basically sure that an AI is going to take over our job for free as soon as the boss can figure out how to write down what we do all day.

31:39So let's just say as a thought exercise that you came across through, doesn't have to be through Alt-MBA. You end up taking on as a mentee the 25-year-old current day version of you. Similar background, similar education. How would you help that Seth to do this? So I haven't run the Alt-MBA for a long time. I'm very proud that There's a B Corp and it runs and lives happily without me. And I don't have any official mentorships. And you've heard me talk about this before because it just doesn't scale and it becomes this bottomless pit of repair. Yeah, this is just a total thought exercise. Right.

32:21But I need to say it because sometimes people hear your thought exercises and then they send me notes. Seth's taking mentees. The subreddit, Seth's mentees. The point of my work is for me to be able to be a mentee without showing up in person. and I'm thrilled when that happens. When someone sends me a note saying, I'm 25 years old, how do I become a marketer? Where do I get a job? Where do I train? My answer is, you do it by becoming a marketer. Go find a charity that you care about and go raise$10 ,000 for them. Go to a garage sale, buy$40 worth of stuff and sell it on eBay for$100. Go figure out how to tell a story to somebody else that changes them.

33:05and if you're a receptionist at an ophthalmologist, you can do the same thing. You can figure out how to take that patient who just came in or is on their way out and make them feel 10 % better by saying something, doing something, interacting with them. Not because it's in the manual, not because you memorized it, but because you see a way to connect to another person. If you can do that just a little, you can do it again. And that is the breakthrough that industrialists do not want us to understand. That they invented public school so we would say, will this be on the test? How little can I do and still get picked?

33:46And all three of those things are wrong. And the option instead is to say, is there a human somewhere connected to you in person or online? Can you connect with them in a way that makes things better for them at least a little? and then can you do it again? That's what culture is. That's what we've been doing for 10 ,000 years. That is what fills people with meaning. And you don't need tips or tricks or hacks like someone sending me an email saying, Seth, what's your favorite color? Because then if I write back, somehow we've built this sense of mutual connection. No, that is not marketing. That's hustling.

34:24And hustling doesn't work anymore because everyone's doing it and just wait till the AI spam shows up. AI spam is going to make your head explode because it's going to be so effective until you end up not even trusting that. So putting AI spam aside, I agree with you. I mean, honestly, I'm just enjoying my current level of spam while I can. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Aeropress. that's A-E-R-O-P-R-E-S-S with more than 45 ,000 five-star reviews. It might very well be the highest rated coffee maker on the planet and I've used it for more than a decade.

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35:47For now, they have a new crystal clear version, sleek enough for display and tough enough for the road. you can pick one up and try it out at aeropress.com slash Tim for less than$50. Check it out. I promise you, you will not be disappointed. My listeners, that's you guys, can get 15 % off. Just use my link, aeropress.com slash Tim. One more time, aeropress.com slash Tim. If people are listening and they want to, as you've outlined, create meaning, do human work, not succumb to a race to the bottom where they end up replaceable by the next fastest cheapest fill in the blank do you have any other guidelines besides get started do the thing that you are aiming to do or any other reasons to be optimistic i think that might be helpful also just to not level the scales a little bit but i feel like optimism is often a precursor to action or prerequisite in a sense.

36:47How would you speak to that? And I want to footnote, I did take a note on paper. You said, I think we're going to come back to the B's, if I heard you correctly. We're going to come back to the B's. We are. Let's talk about the boss. It is entirely possible that you work in a place where you have no options, you have no agency, you have no significance. If that is actually true, you should quit. because you don't get tomorrow over again. My guess, it is not actually true. My guess is you have more agency than you are prepared to embrace. And so, go start a book club at work. Start with one of Tim's books, read it with four other people.

37:31And so, get on the customer service line after your shift is over and answer three questions. And so, figure out how to engage with someone in the organization in a way that is not part of, quote, your job, and figure out how to lead and connect. You can do those things without getting fired. Or after work, a friend of mine got married at a old folks home, and the person, the witness, was 97 years old. And two days later, she passed away. So do you think that that's going to be a magical marriage, to have honored that person, the one thing that she was staying alive for that she got to see before the end?

38:13Or do you think it makes more sense to be a bridezilla and to just make sure you're part of the wedding industrial complex and everything matches everybody else's wedding, right? So in all these elements of our life, we are pushed to do something the normal way, the profitable way, the way where we are blameless, or we can choose to do something that matters. So now the bees, if you don't mind. I don't mind. I am fascinated by the bees. So the story, it's more personal than most stories I tell, but I have been hoping to share it with you. So I'm glad we're getting this chance to talk. I got to note, I don't apply for work anymore because airplanes feel like cannibalism to me after working on the climate thing.

38:57I feel like I can do my work without doing that. And after a thousand in-person speeches, I've earned the right to say, no, I'm not going to get on a plane anymore. But I needed to get somewhere for family reasons. And someone reached out and said, for family reasons, I have built a firm that's remote. I'm really remote in Australia because my daughter, who's 10, was born with some health problems. And I've tried to organize our lives to support her in having the most magical life that she can. And I'm running a conference for the entrepreneurs, my venture-backed, my venture firm funds. They're all in regenerative work.

39:38They're all dealing with the climate problem from a commercial point of view. Will you come help run a two-day seminar for them? And I happened to be somewhere near there. So I said, yeah, I can do that. And so for free, I showed up to do this two-day workshop. Well, the day before, he reached out and said, I'm not going to be there in person because my daughter's not feeling very well, but I'm sure it'll go great. So the person I ended up running it with is a beekeeper from Australia. And he started talking to me about the bees. And he told me the story of Jacqueline Freeman's Song of Increase.

40:15And the Song of Increase is just such a great Tim Ferriss story. So here's what happens. A typical hive, not the big honey hive, if we could have a whole conversation about big honey, but a typical feral beehive at the end of a long winter will have barely made it through. That's what the honey's for, to supply them with food during the course of the winter. But if they made it, the council of maidens will meet. They're the ones who really run the hive. And they will do a couple of things. The first thing they will do is build a vertical egg chamber and instruct the queen to lay and fertilize a queen egg, which is very unusual because there's only one queen in a hive.

40:55And the second thing they will do is tell the rest of the maidens to go get as much pollen as they possibly can and replenish the honey supply. This happens in May and June in the Northern Hemisphere. And so what will end up happening is the hive will, this is 20 ,000 bees, will be back in ship-shaped condition by June. And then, based on the weather, because they know what the weather is going to be. They're very good at this. They will organize without an organizer, lead without a leader. 12 ,000 bees will leave the hive in a 10-minute period of time. They will leap out of the hive singing the song of increase.

41:36And Jacqueline has written beautifully about this. And then they end up in a tree 100 yards away in a tight ball because bees have to maintain a body temperature of 98 degrees or else they fall apart. They get into a torpor. And now they only have three days to find a new place to live. And each one of the bees is doing what the bee does. Almost every bee except for the queen is only three weeks old, which I didn't know. I thought bees lived a really long time. So the scout bees are doing their scouting and the maidens are doing their thing. Each bee is doing their thing. But the hive is basically a human brain inside out.

42:14their neurons all working in sync to create this leap forward. And hearing this story, I was completely transfixed by what the song of Increase could mean to people. And then I realized people aren't bees, and we're looking for something with even more internal meaning than simply this leap forward. So I ended up driving then really far, hundreds of miles, to visit a friend. And early the next morning, I went for a swim with all this, forgive the pun, buzzing going on in my head. And there was, as someone who swims almost every day, there was a very fierce ariptide. And I came as close to drowning as it is possible for a person to come.

43:02And as it happened, I was pretty okay with the fact that that was the end of that. I would miss my family. I would miss so many things, but it was like, well, if that's the end of that, that's the end of that. And then this mission of talking about significance just flooded over me and I somehow figured out how to get back to shore. And then the next day I heard from Dan and his daughter, Frankie, at best of way. And the combination of all those things helped me realize that the world probably doesn't need another marketing book for me, but probably could benefit from thinking about all of those things at once and realizing that we have so much more power than we want to acknowledge thank you for sharing that seth that is more personal than most stories you've shared and i'll just take a beat on that and would love to hear what happened after that swim after that phone call, what did the next week or two look like for you or feel like for you with respect to this germinating seed, maybe it was beyond the seed, of significance and shifting perhaps to a focus on that with your communication, with your thinking?

44:24What did the subsequent week look like? It's funny because no one's ever asked me that, but it fits right into the question you asked a little while ago about what can people do. I wrote a whole book in two weeks. I said, how can I honor Frankie? How can I honor Jacqueline? How can I honor all of the people who are being brutalized by billionaires in Silicon Valley? How can I honor the climate refugees? How can I honor everybody who has something to lose by doing the thing that some people think I'm good at? And what could I do for Frankie that would be better than this? And so that's why I did it.

45:05Because writing a book, as you know, is more of a lift than is rational. And I could have just written a few blog posts, but having people see you do this irrational lift helps them understand that you have something important to say and that maybe they'll share it with somebody else. I'm going to throw out a few terms. Actually, I'll give you two, two choices and we can go down whichever path you choose or option C, which I don't present. You're all, you're good at choosing option C when people say you can choose between A and B. So that may be where we go. Wooden tiles or Quakers, where would you like to go?

45:47So let's talk about, I learned something fascinating about the Quakers. The Quakers invented solitary confinement. And when we think of Quakers, nonviolent, etc., the whole idea, think about the word penitentiary, right? It's where you go to be penitent, to repent. And the idea of solitary confinement was to create the conditions for people to get comfortable with their sins and to repent from them. And then across in England, they built the Panopticon, which was a prison where you were under constant surveillance. So this is super low tech. You just put the guardhouse in the middle and make sure the windows are all lined up so everyone feels like they're being seen all the time.

46:33When we add solitary confinement to the panopticon, we end up with surveillance capitalism. We end up with this idea, not the surveillance capitalism of consumers being surveilled, which is what that book is about, but more about workers being surveilled. that we isolate them from each other, except when they're in a Zoom call where the meeting was designed to make sure they weren't picking up their dry cleaning when they were home and counting their keystrokes and measuring their output and counting the clicks, constant surveillance, and for many people, the equivalent of solitary confinement.

47:13Well, why are we surprised that turnover is high and work satisfaction is low? Because we stripped meaning from people when they go to work because we don't trust them to be people. We need them to be resources. And that's why the very phrase human resources is such a challenge because after you've optimized the machines, the next thing to do, of course, is to optimize the people. And, you know, the whole measured self-movement about how can you get better on your bike with Strava, but that's happening too at work, whether you want it to or not. So let's just say you're the founder of a small company and maybe it started off as a solo operation or husband and wife team and good news.

48:00You seem to have created something that people want or need and it's growing. so you hire. You hire people. And you have the best of intentions. You believe yourselves to be moral people, ethical people. And that husband and wife team are listening to this podcast. And they have four employees. Maybe they're in a fast-growing bakery. Who knows? And it could be any type of business. They have the tiger by the tail. They're growing quickly. There's not a lot of room for underperformance because a lot of people are wearing a lot of hats. How would you talk to those people? Because they may hear this and say, yes, Seth, I want to value my employees as humans, not just resources.

48:49And the reality is we have pretty tight margins. We're attempting to grow quickly. We have a lot of inventory. We need our employees to really perform at the highest level possible. And if they're not performing, we do need to let them go or replace them. Okay, so we're going to do an aside in a minute in my old voice about freelancers and entrepreneurs and growing a small company. But before we do that, I want to highlight, I am not here to say we need soft to replace hard. I am not here to say that workers benefit when the boss goes easy on them. In fact, I'm talking about the opposite, that the significance of what can be built by Cesar Chavez or what could be built by the Carbon Almanac team for no money has nothing to do with soft or hard.

49:36It has to do with the idea that you make a promise and you keep it. And you need to have a lot of rigor where you are relentlessly criticizing the work, but you are not criticizing the worker. you earn enrollment on the change you seek to make, right? That the original Mac was built by 13 people who had a pirate flag, and they worked harder than anybody in Silicon Valley has ever worked before or since, and they didn't get paid very much. And if you talk to Susan years and years and years later, I don't know if she's been on the podcast, but she's great, she will talk about it as being a seminal moment in her life, right?

50:21Because they got something done. So that's why we need to have the aside about freelancers and scale. Freelancing is magic. I am a freelancer. I used to be a freelancer. In between, I was an entrepreneur. There are different jobs. Freelancers get paid when they work. They do the thing and it has their name or something like it on it. It's very hard to scale freelance work. What you need to do is strip away the busy work, outsource it. And what you need to do is get better clients because better clients demand better work and pay you more. But what usually happens when a freelancer starts to succeed is they hire junior versions of themselves and try to push those people to read their mind, work ever harder and faster for less money than they get paid and then pass it off as their work.

51:11That's super stressful and it almost never works. And so if you really are building something bigger than the two of you, I would say, tell me this thing you're building and why some customers will pay more for it because you added human value. Because if you're trying to out Amazon, Amazon, you got troubles. Even Walmart can't out Amazon, Amazon. That's not a race you can or want to win. So what we see is if someone is going to build a bakery or a wedding services business or a physical therapy facility, they can win by racing to the top, by saying, there are people here who do work you cannot find anywhere else.

51:58But do not expect that you're also going to get that work faster and cheaper than you can get at other places because you can't have everything. And if you could make a promise to your customers and your employees can see their contribution to that promise, you're not going to have any trouble at all getting your employees to do what they need to because you created the conditions for better. You didn't try to manage your way into getting them to give you a bargain. So let me take a step off the highway onto the footpath, the bike path on the side for a second, because this is related and very self-interested, but I'll ask it anyway.

52:40Since I guess this whole podcast is pretty self-interested, I get to have conversations with people I like and respect. But you've known me for a long time now. I would say that I think that's a fair way to put it. We've known each other for a decent stretch. I consider you very good at being aware of your own assumptions, the constraints that you've applied to your life, choosing the rules, choosing, for instance, a story about money past a certain point, past the requirements, past your basic needs and wants, money is a story, so choose a story you can be happy with, et cetera. Is there anything you've observed over time with me where you're like, it's funny, you know, Tim has this sort of conceptual limitation stuck between his teeth all the time, and he can't seem to see it when he looks in the mirror.

53:26It's always got that spinach between those two teeth. And it bothers him. He's always picking at it, but he can't quite get it loose. This is a very long-winded way of asking, what are some of the maybe questions or issues that you seem come up repeatedly with me? Is there anything that comes to mind? I was completely wrong about my first impression of Tim Ferriss. And that's because I based it on people who didn't understand what you were trying to do, trying to do that to me. And so I was getting hustled by people who said that you were the person who was teaching them how to hustle. And I didn't bother to spend the time to understand what you were actually doing.

54:13And that's completely on me. And you have developed a voice and a contribution to the culture and your community faster and at a younger age than almost anybody I've worked with and way faster than I did. And I don't see any spinach in your teeth. I think that it's unlikely that you knew 16 years ago that you would be having conversations like this, that you would have built this platform and leverage you have to teach so many people things. But at the same time, when the opportunities have arisen, you have been really smart about saying, no, I don't want to be a judge on Shark Tank. And no, I don't want to figure out how to hustle people to pay me on Cameo.

55:03You're saying, I have something to narrate here for people, whether or not I know exactly what tomorrow's going to be like. And it's not easy to do that regularly at the level that you do it with the amount that you put out. So I know you weren't fishing for me to say this, But I've needed to say it in public because in private, in my head, for the first nine months that I sort of knew you, I didn't really know you. I appreciate that, Seth. And I should provide a little context for folks. And the context is when we have dinner together on the East Coast, or I guess it's always on the East Coast because you're very good at setting your geographic bounds.

55:48And I ask you for a lot of advice, and you're very forgiving and tolerant of me asking many, many questions, which I really deeply appreciate. So that question came from a genuine place, and thanks for the very kind words. I love doing this. I love having these conversations, and there's absolutely no way I ever could have foreseen this being my quote-unquote job 16 years ago. No way. Absolutely not. And I think probably four or five years from now, whatever I am doing then, I will have the same statement for. There's no way I could have predicted now that I would be doing that five years from now.

56:28And let's just, to broaden that out, parents who have a sticker on the back of their car have been indoctrinated to indoctrinate their kids to do the same thing, to say, oh, you studied mechanical engineering, so you're going to be a mechanical engineer for the next 70 years and then you'll die. And that's not what humans are capable of. What a joy to be able to say, I have no idea what I will be saying and doing in five years. What a privilege then. It is. I feel really fortunate. Can we talk about false proxies for a minute? Let's talk about false proxies. I'll let you lead the way. Okay. So people might be wondering about the wooden tile.

57:05So I have a 70 watt laser cutter in my basement, doesn't everybody? And so I make these things that are like I Ching cart. And so instead of having notes or something, I just really like the texture of them. So that's what the wooden tiles are. And so there's a wooden tile right here that says false proxies. False proxies, we need proxies when we go shopping at the supermarket, because if you're going to buy ketchup, you're not allowed to taste the ketchup before you buy the ketchup. So the label on the bottle is a proxy for what's inside of it. And we're even capable as consumers of figuring out we haven't had this particular flavor of salad dressing before, but we can guess from the other clues that it's going to be good or not good.

57:51And we use proxies to pick which restaurant to go to and proxies to figure out what book to buy because you're not going to read the book until after you buy it. Judging a book by its cover is a very common and important thing. At work, we developed proxies because we have to hire people for a 20, 30, 40 year career before they work for us. So one proxy is, did you go to a famous college? One proxy is, are there any typos on your resume? One proxy is, are you good at interviewing? But of course, unless you're hiring someone to be an interviewer, being good at interviewing is a false proxy. And the thing about false proxies is they lead to caste systems, to social stratification, to prejudice, to misogyny, because we are quickly making decisions on who to swipe left or right based on clues that aren't actually related to whether the person can do the job or not.

58:50If someone is in a wheelchair, they might be a great programmer. Whether or not they're in a wheelchair is irrelevant to whether they're a great programmer. And yet, it's 2023 and it's still happening. So there's all of this information that's now available to us where we can look at the work instead of looking at the proxies. So the simple solution, which I've been lucky enough to adopt, is I won't work with someone unless I've worked with them before. And that means I will pay someone to do a short project and I pay them whether they do a good job or not. But if they're good at the project, now I know that they're good at the project because they did the project.

59:30and with all of the stuff that's happening in our world, with the rate of change that's going on, with the need for people not, who know something they learned at school because they can look it up online, it's stock overflow in two minutes. What we need are people who are resilient and risk-taking and honest and transparent and connected and loyal and all these other words which don't match up with the proxies we usually use when we decide who to hire, who to let into an institution, who to reward, who to follow online. So I think it's important to just name it. There are false proxies in our life and they're expensive.

1:00:11They get in the way of our output and they also steal our soul and they denature our culture. Because when a proxy becomes important, when, for example, a celebrity gets the benefit of the doubt, what we've done is we've handed this person leverage that isn't really helping anybody. Did I hear you correctly, Seth? And if so, I'd love to hear you expand on this a bit, that you only work with people you've worked with before. Did I hear that correctly, or was that a different line? No, no, so what I mean is, if I'm going to do a project, the old way to do it was to look at the 10 million viable people pick the one who has the shiniest set of easily measured proxies and hire them and i have hired hundreds of people that way and for a while i told myself i was really good at it and then i thought about it i realized i just thought i was really good at it because of all the people i didn't hire because they didn't match my perception of what I was looking for.

1:01:12And what I learned, particularly working on the Carbon Almanac, is everyone was a volunteer. Everyone got the keys, you know, take the car for a drive. And if you did something that was really good, we asked you to do more. And if you didn't, we asked you to do something different because the work was the point. And so now I'm working on this interesting software pilot thing. And I went to people who I've seen do projects and who I've danced with before, not based on where they live. One lived in Nigeria, one lives in London, one lives in Portland. I've seen your work. I don't know you personally.

1:01:51The personal stuff is an interesting proxy, but it doesn't usually match. So let's dance again. and once we can seek enrollment, once we can say to the world, I'm looking for a freelancer who wants to make this change in the world. This project is this size and I'm going to pay you this much to do it. We can use our human judgment to decide who to offer the project to. But then when the project comes back, this one hour, one week project, yeah, pay them fairly and then decide based on the work product, whether it's useful. This is exactly the way Matt builds WordPress. That Automatic is a reading and writing culture where if you're good at reading and writing, you get to do more stuff.

1:02:37But there's no point for being good in a Zoom meeting. No one gets promoted to that. No, definitely with Matt. No one gets promoted for Zoom meetings. And you do have to do some customer service, which I think is actually a fantastic practice. Even if you're C-suite, You get to spend a couple of weeks answering customer tickets. Question for you about employee retention. And I'd love to hear you speak to your personal experience. You've hired many people. And this may not map directly to the writing or the principles in the Song of Significance. It may. But I'm wondering, because hiring is one thing, retaining is a close cousin, but not exactly the same.

1:03:17And there are people out there. I know quite a few people are really good at putting in the time to hire really good people, but they haven't been able to, for whatever reason, as thoroughly, as effectively think about retention. so they lose some people who are very, very good. What have you found to be, in your experience or observing others, some of the key ingredients or possible approaches to ensuring that you retain high performers? So if we look back just 50 years, the purpose of a company town is if you are the landlord, it's much harder for someone to quit. That the goal of the old school industrialist is that your employees have no options.

1:04:05Because if they have no options, you don't have to pay them very much. Let's compare that to an ad agency. I read a book about them many years ago called St. Luke's in London. There were 30 people. They won a whole bunch of awards. When you win a bunch of awards as an ad agency, what happens is you get a whole bunch of fancy new clients, which means you have to hire more people, which means the average goes down. And then you get big enough that you've exhausted and you sell out to Saatchi and Saatchi, and then you're done. And the 30 of them looked at each other and they said, we don't want to do that.

1:04:35So they made a rule. And the rule is we're never going to be more than 30 people. They then said to their clients, that means we can't take any new clients unless we lose an old client. So they have a waiting list of clients. We have a waiting list of clients. You can go to your old clients with your best ideas. And if they give you a hard time, you can say you're fired because I got another client ready to take your place. And it also means that if you're only going to have 30 employees, if someone wants to leave, let them leave. There's a waiting list of people who want to work there. Turnover is a good thing when we are doing human work, not a bad thing.

1:05:13And what I would do if I was running a real company is I would say, the first thing you got to do on your first day is update your LinkedIn page and keep it up to date. And we're going to have a resume job finding seminar every two weeks here. I don't want you to stay here because you can't get a better job. I want you to stay here because the conditions we've created, the work we are doing is worth you staying here for. And then I would listen. If I'm not creating the conditions where the people who I need to be dancing with want to stay, I have to change the conditions, not curse the people who are leaving.

1:05:54And this permeability is where the future lies. We don't have 40-year careers anymore. We have four-month careers or three-year careers. So onboarding is faster because you can say to somebody, read everything in Slack, come to work tomorrow, ready to start, because it's all there, right? So now instead of onboarding you in a month and a half, I onboarded you in three hours. And because we're project-oriented, turnover is a little different. And if I can keep somebody here for a long time, it's because they want to stay here. This enrollment is the key. Manad Khosla has written a book called Let's Get Real or Let's Not Play about B2B selling.

1:06:36But the lesson of Let's Get Real or Let's Not Play is simple. What promises are you going to make this week? Promises about your career, promises about your learning promises to our customers. Show us your work. We will relentlessly make it better. This is how we're going to treat each other. If this is the right place for you, I hope you'll stay. If it's not the right place for you, I hope we can agree that it's not. But seeking retention doesn't feel right to me. So let me just elaborate on this book because it's overlooked and so beautiful. If you're in business-to-business selling, selling expensive, committed items to large organizations, large organizations can now find out everything they need without calling a salesperson.

1:07:19So the intelligent, trained, expensive salesperson benefits by saying to the prospect on the first day, look, you've told me you have this big problem you need to solve. You have a$5 million assembly line that's letting you down level. If we can solve this problem together, are you ready to install our system? Because if it's not real, let's not play. Don't waste my time. I won't waste yours. You're not going to buy from me because I'm going to take you to the golf course. You're not going to buy from me because our RFP is going to come in cheaper than somebody else's. You want my valuable time.

1:07:54I'm going to engage with you and tell you the truth and you'll tell me the truth. You're going to draw your org chart for me. You're going to tell me other complicated products you've bought and why your company bought them. And I'm going to get you promoted by teaching you how to buy the thing that's going to save your assembly line. Let's get real or let's not play. That kind of selling is how you sell a$10 million product. You don't do it by spamming people and pretending you know their favorite color.

1:08:25Very true. This is truth. I, long ago in a former life when I had a lot more hair and was just at of college was selling to CEOs and CTOs and you do not sell expensive systems by guessing their favorite color or even having that conversation. In fact, it'll be really counterproductive. The topic of sales makes me think of Zig Ziglar. And I'm wondering, out of my own personal curiosity, were there things that come to mind where you disagreed with Zig? Maybe you respected his position or a principle he had, but you personally did not embrace whatever it was that he used as part of his own script for navigating the world and people.

1:09:13Is there anything that you disagreed on? Many things, and we did it as friends. So it's funny, Zig has come up twice today before you brought him up, which is weird. I sent a picture of him holding one of my books to someone just four hours ago. Zig was my teacher from afar for a long time. I memorized more than 72 hours of his tapes. I listened to the selling tapes until they wore out, and then I bought another set. And I saw him in person a bunch of times, and each time I wrote him a letter afterwards, and each time he wrote back. And my letter would highlight the things that worked and talk about the things that didn't.

1:09:50And one of the highlights of my speaking career was when he and I shared a stage in front of 22 ,000 people. It was pretty cool. And then I got to publish his goals book toward the end of his line. Zig and I disagreed about astrology and yoga because he was coming at it from a different cultural point of view from Yazoo City, Mississippi. And we were like, okay, we can disagree about stuff like that and organized religion and things like that. And what was interesting is when my understanding of permission marketing evolved and Zig's key sentence of you can get everything in life you want if you'll just help enough other people get what they want kept coming up.

1:10:35Because he meant it two ways and one of the ways didn't work for me. he would say you can get everything in life you want if you help enough other people get what they want as a way of encouraging self-interested short-term people to see that the best way to get ahead was to do a favor for someone else because that forced empathy opened the door to making a sale. And what shifted for me over time was how about you can get everything in life you want and you can help other people get what they want, but they're not one gets you the other one. That what we have is the chance to hold open the door and let somebody else go in, not because we want them to give us something in return, but simply because holding open the door is in itself a significant, useful act that will fuel our next cycle of war.

1:11:34And we talked about it a little bit toward the end of his life, but what Zig did for a lot of folks is help them become professional instead of just hustling and I also learned a lot about living the life of the professional speaker and I could go on and on but if your listeners haven't listened to a bunch of Zig yes it's dated but you can find the good stuff and be glad you did. Where would you suggest people start or what would you suggest they search for because the universe of Zig Like, as you mentioned, 62 hours as a starting point. Where might you suggest they start? What should they look for?

1:12:13The stories in the book, Secrets of Closing the Sale, are gold. I could tell word for word the story of the overalls. And his original classic, See You at the Top, also filled with stories. When I was starting out, I failed for seven years in a row. It was a very long slog. and his tapes, which you can still get today on CD, also filled with nothing but stories, were super dated even then, but so cheesy and wonderful that if you listen for an hour a day, you can't help but not quit. And to give us an image in time, what were you failing at over that period of time as you listened to these audio cassettes and wore them out?

1:12:56So my first job was in 1983 at a software company in Boston. I worked with Arthur C. Clarke, Michael Crichton, Ray Bradbury. I was a brand manager. I was 24 years old. It was spectacular. And then I left there, moved to New York and started my own gig and just kept failing at the book business. Chip Conley and I did our first book together and then I got 800 rejection letters in a row. That meant every day I opened the mailbox and three people had taken the time to write me a letter with my name on it and put a stamp on it saying, we don't like your project and we don't like you either. And it's very easy in the face that, and then, you know, I was just pitching and pitching and pitching and often in a way that amused me, but was selfish.

1:13:44And I was pitching to people whose job was to be pitched. I wasn't calling people up on the phone at home, right? This was the head of acquisitions at Simon & Schuster, whatever it was. But when the rejections feel personal. If you don't have a way to keep caring, but understand that what they're rejecting is the work, not the person, it's super easy to give up. And that was the transition that I needed to make. You didn't like this idea. It's not that you didn't like me. What can I learn from your criticism of the idea so that the next one will be better? You strike me as someone who's quite happy to have solo time, engage in solo projects, maybe a project with a family member or something else, like building canoes.

1:14:34That could be a whole conversation in and of itself. How are you building? Are you building a community orchestra for yourself at the moment or looking forward in the short term to doing that? Or I should say in the soon to be present future. And if so, So how are you approaching it? Because this is something that I've also noticed, and this is not a brilliant insight, but it seems to alleviate a lot of the existential dread and mitigate some of the nihilism that people feel. If they simply have some type of shared purpose or activity with a few people consistently, how are you thinking about that for yourself?

1:15:15This is just me. I don't know how to broaden this to everybody. So the reputation I had from the beginning was, I don't miss deadlines. I never go over budget. And I'm going to deliver you what I said I was going to deliver you. And no one who has worked for me has ever been part of a layoff. People have lost their jobs because it wasn't a good fit. But I've never said, all you guys, we're downsizing. When Google shut down Squidoo in one day with no warning and no honest explanation as to why. My eight co-workers and I all went down together, but the promises I make, I make very seriously. So that's good and it's bad.

1:15:59It means that I hesitate to make big promises that might create the possibility that the big thing is going to happen. But on the other hand, I can live with the confidence of knowing that you can count on me to keep that promise. So when I think about what am I going to do for my next five or 10-year gig, I think very hard about who am I promising and what am I promising now. So I can't say to people what I used to say, which is, we're renting this theater. Come, and for seven hours, I will be on stage answering questions. And by the way, I'm organizing the whole thing with one volunteer, and I'm going to serve you lunch.

1:16:41That's what I used to do, and 400 people would come. It was thrilling to stand there for seven hours and weave together all the answers. If I announced I was going to do that, I could sell it. But I couldn't keep that promise for sure. I don't want to do that because I don't want to, as my career evolves and has a different pace, try to regain my ability to ski at high speed. Not what I'm trying to do. So where is that sense of community? The Carbon Almanac was that and continues to be, but there's going to be another one. And I think about whether I need it to be in person or whether this future you and I have been describing for so long is real.

1:17:23And it won't be in person because I'm very comfortable engaging with people who aren't sharing the same hair as me. And most of all, is it worth doing for others? Not am I just here to entertain myself? Seth, what else? What would you like to talk about here? We can go in a million directions. What else do you have on your wooden tiles? Okay, so I want to tell the story of the piano cover at the B conference, and then I want to talk about meetings. Is that okay? Sounds great. Okay, so I'm about to go on stage in front of these entrepreneurs, all of whom have raised far more money than I've ever raised, all of whom are young whippersnappers who are going to save the planet.

1:18:08I got no slides or anything. I'm just there at this beautiful winery north to like Youngville or Boonville or something. This is in Australia or somewhere else? No, no, this was, I haven't been in Australia in a long time. This is north of San Francisco. Got it. And I need a shtick. I need some anecdote to get started. And off to the side is a piano in one of those quilted piano covers. Can you visualize that? You know, they have those special custom-made piano covers. And on top of the piano is one of those little metal things that says, do not place anything on top of this. And on top of that is the sign.

1:18:48But I can't read the sign, so I walk over, because that's going to be my shtick. Which is, did you ever notice that people put a do not, and they put a sign on top of that? And on the sign it says, this is the original Steinway Grand D piano. Not an original, the original from 1884. And I had my story. I went over and I said, the folks who built that Steinway in 1884 had no idea that 140 years later, it would be working, it would be creating magic, and we would be talking about it. And I said, there's no guarantee that what we do is going to be around in 140 years. But we could act like it might be.

1:19:34we could say this thing we're doing together is not to say, how do we raise as much money as we can? Or how do we get written up well on this blog site or whatever? It's important. And there are lots of kinds of important. It could be important to one person. It could be important a century from now. But this idea that the piano is still here, that just, it gave me chills. I love that piano cover. That is wild, too. The original experience just to be able to touch something like that or be close to it. Wild. So, meetings? Meetings. I have been obsessed with these for a long time and have lived a different path for meetings.

1:20:21Our friend Toby at Shopify wrote a script that deleted every group meeting that was regularly scheduled in the whole company. And then the next day sent an email to everyone in the company and said, I just bought you back your day. Because if you have 10 ,000 employees and there are all these weekly or daily meetings, We're talking about tens of millions of dollars of wasted time. But on top of that, we're talking about the enervating, brain-deadening idea of watching someone talk because they couldn't care enough to take the time to send a memo instead. Or couldn't care enough to just record a 10-minute video and send it to everyone to watch as many times as they wanted, slower, faster, read the transcript, and then get back to them.

1:21:10And Toby said, if you really need the meeting, go ahead and put it back on your calendar. You're welcome. And what meetings have become? So Zoom is a miracle because Zoom eliminates geography when it comes to being able to connect with people. And memos were a miracle because they eliminated time. They're asynchronous. And when we add video to this, what we get is either we're going to have everyone get together for an hour so I can talk at you and I can take attendance based on you sitting there. And what we know from surveys is people hate this. It's one of the things they hate the most about their day.

1:21:48And it's a form of power, authority, status, and control. So conversations need to happen more. Meetings need to happen never. You can have conversations all day. You can have a two-minute conversation, a six-minute conversation, talk to this person or that person. But a conversation means there are questions and their answers. People are talking to each other. Everyone is changed at the end. A meeting is a delivery of information for the convenience of the person who called it. And I think it is possible. I know it is possible. We never once had a meeting the whole time we built the Carbon Almanac.

1:22:26There were times I sent a video to people and said, this is what's up. Watch it if you want to. But because we were in time zones around the world, a meeting wouldn't have made any sense. we had things where I said, I'm having office hours. You can come ask questions, but I didn't do that other thing. And it feels to me like the future of the resilient organization is a lot closer to what Matt does at Automatic, which is how do we build this asynchronous, geography-free institution that doesn't depend on me making stuff up while I'm on camera. Yeah, absolutely. And for people who may not have caught his name before, Matt Mullenweg is his name.

1:23:07He's been on this podcast a number of times. And he also has been part of a podcast, and this is, I believe, automatic produced, called Distributed. I may be getting the name wrong, but it is entirely about distributed organizations and unorthodox ways of approaching the type of thing that we're discussing right now. Meanings or lack thereof, different means of communication, etc. And he's been distributed first for a very, very, very long time. So they were incredibly prepared, albeit coincidentally, for everything that happened during lockdown and so on. Right. Well, but coincidentally, everyone else was unprepared.

1:23:49Have you seen what his team has built with chat GPT for blogs? Has he shown you the version yet? I don't know if it's public. I have seen screenshots, but yeah. Is it public? I don't know. It's not public, but we're only talking. So we're allowed to talk. Okay. Go for it. So if you want to talk. I was just going to say, it is the single best use I have seen of chat GPT or whatever they're using being implemented in a way where it's not just, you know, a talking llama. It's actually, oh yeah, I need this. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. They create some amazing products. So yes, that'll be the teaser, the teaser for people for things to come.

1:24:32I'm just here for the hype.

1:24:36That's what I think when I say that, when I think Seth Godin. uh seth is there anything else you would like to chat about before we begin to okay so your listeners love tips i got one last tactic tip that changed the lives of a lot of people and then we'll do the magical wrap-up stuff we invented something called page 19 thinking and we knew there was going to be page 19 of the almanac it was going to be written copy edited illustrated typeset footnoted but there wasn't one person on our team who knew how to make page 19. And so we said to the team, we know in the future there will be a page 19.

1:25:14We know that it will come from this group, but we also know there's not anyone here who's qualified. So what should we do? And the answer is someone should write a paragraph of page 19 and say, please make this better. And then someone else will add to that and someone else will footnote that and someone else will illustrate that. And we will relentlessly criticize page 19 without once saying the person who worked on it was wrong or incompetent. And page 19 thinking, I've always had page 19 thinking. I didn't need it. But so many people, when they heard this, felt the freedom to now speak up and contribute because they knew it was going to get better.

1:25:57And if you think about it, that's Apple, that's Ford, that's every company you can name. Sergey did not program the Google you are using today. it started with a little tiny German and someone and someone and someone and someone and someone when you feel stuck just look for page 19 thinking and is the way to look for page 19 thinking to take the pressure off by lowering your expectations in a sense so that you can iterate your way to excellence is this applicable to a solo shop or a very small shop could you maybe elaborate on what you mean, what it could mean to embrace that thinking? It puts the pressure on.

1:26:41It doesn't take the pressure off. It puts the pressure on. Because you can no longer be a prima don who says, I'm afraid someone's going to punch me in the nose. Because you have to say, my nose is not involved. And I heard Danny's great story about my nose, and it made me smile. This is Danny Meyer, folks, for people who don't know. After he broke my nose, he offered to straighten it out. And as you can see in the video, it's still crooked. But once you understand that you live in a page 19 world, the pressure is on for you to put out work that can generously be criticized. Don't ship junk. Not allowed.

1:27:21But create the conditions for the thing you're noodling on to become real. That doesn't happen by you hoarding it until it's perfect. It happens by you creating a process for it to get better. So now you're on the hook. Fish don't like to be on the hook. People should be on the hook. I love it. And I was thinking of how this might apply to my own. And I have, since we last spoke, been writing fiction and shipping fiction. I'm not saying it's Ursula K. Le Guin, but I'm happy with it. I am on the hook and I've tried to create. I haven't found exactly what I think will be most helpful later, but to create an environment in which perfect is not the enemy of good, but that I also have a means of not shipping garbage and actually having people review my work.

1:28:14How do you like to solicit feedback on writing? This is, I know, a tangent, but if you reach out to people to proofread or review drafts of something you've put together, how do you enable them to be the best proofreaders? Three words and then some definitions. The three words are criticism, feedback, and advice. I'm terrible at criticism. Don't like criticism. You're terrible at receiving it. I'm okay with good feedback. I'm receiving it, yeah. Yeah, criticizing people, no problem. But being criticized, not my thing. Feedback, good feedback is precious. But advice, advice I can handle. Because advice is one human who's on the side of the other human helping them turn on lights.

1:29:02Now, when it comes to writing, there is line editing, copy editing, developmental editing, and proofreading. They do not mean the same thing. proofreading means did the changes that were instructed to be made get made so proofreading is sort of trivial copy editing says what do you think about the oxford comma copy editing says uh i don't like the way you spelled this kind of thing line editing says this sentence would be better if you move the second half to the first half that i'm going to smooth your voice up and developmental editing is magic. It's, I read your work. Let's just talk in general about the change you seek to make and why it could be made better in a different way.

1:29:49So I work with the magical Nikki Papadopoulos at Penguin, mostly because her developmental editing is the best I've ever encountered. She says, the title of the book is wrong and you need to move these three chapters to the end. Like, what's that worth? That's spectacular. But I will confess, if she's not listening, that before I send her a book, I send it to a paid copy editor who works for me. I don't work for him. And for$1 ,000, he copy edits the book. So he's not allowed to change any of my voice, but he fixes every one of the little things. So when I send it to Penguin, they think, wow, this guy's so good at all the details.

1:30:33No, I'm not. Dr. Aker is. but you don't know he exists because I sent it to him before I sent it to you. So the point is, you will run into people who think that the most important thing they can tell you is you're missing a comma in the third line. This is not helpful. This work is now cheap. It's free online. You can just upload a file and someone will fix it for you. But developmental editors, they're priceless. You need to find someone who has that as a skill. Opinions don't matter. That's why the whole thing with logos, don't show anybody your logo and don't tell anybody your new kid's name before they're born.

1:31:11Because everyone thinks they have an opinion about a logo, but no one's got expertise. It's none of their business. Pick your logo and do your logo. The same thing's true with your kid's name. And when you show your writing to an amateur, they're going to give you logo advice. The book isn't for them. You need to engage with people who the book is for. watch what they do with it, see what lights them up. So in my case, after permission marketing, hearing people say back to me which parts of the book resonated with them taught me how to write the next book. Because I didn't ask anybody, how do I make this book better?

1:31:49I just said, I wrote this book. And seeing what they did, I gave them more of that. By extension, Zig could have taken the fact that you know the overall story, word for word and be like, okay, interesting. Let's take a look at why that worked and maybe I'll give him an extra heaping dose of something like the overall story in the next book. Exactly. And I know for a fact that that's exactly what Zieg did. So Seth, the new book is The Song of Significance, subtitle A New Manifesto for Teams. People can find you at SethGodin.com, Seths.blog. Is there anything else you would like to add, any requests you would like to make of my audience, any complaints you'd like to lodge formally, criticisms maybe, or anything else you would like to say before we wrap up?

1:32:39I am overwhelmed with gratitude that I get to do this. And I'm feeling the murmurs of generosity and abundance replacing the small-minded scarcity that was so common for so long as people hustled their way through one thing after another over the last bunch of years. And I think as we all come out of, hopefully come out of this worldwide pandemic, people are taking a deep breath and focusing on contribution and generosity. And all I can tell you is I'm overwhelmed with gratitude for you and for the people who support my work, just making things better. Because if not that, what? So thank you. Thank you so much, Seth.

1:33:28And to everybody listening, we'll have everything that we discussed in the show notes and probably quite a bit more at tim.blog slash podcast, where you can find this and show notes on every other episode. And until next time, just to be a bit nicer than is necessary to yourself and to other people, make things just a bit better. Have that extra conversation. Say that extra nice word. Do what you can. It doesn't have to be huge. Probably shouldn't be huge because then you can hide behind that as we've covered in previous episodes. Make it small, make it matter. And until next time, thanks for tuning in.

1:34:25send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, It's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about.

1:35:00If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser, tim.blog slash Friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify is one of my favorite companies out there, one of my favorite platforms ever. And let's get into it. Shopify is a platform, as I mentioned, designed for anyone to sell anything anywhere, giving entrepreneurs the resources once reserved for big business. So what does that mean? That means in no time flat, you can have a great looking online store that brings your ideas, products, and so on to life.

1:35:37And you can have the tools to manage your day-to-day business and drive sales. This is all possible without any coding or design experience whatsoever. Shopify instantly lets you accept all major payment methods. Shopify has thousands of integrations and third-party apps, from on-demand printing to accounting to advanced chatbots, anything you can imagine. They probably have a way to plug and play and make it happen. Shopify is what I wish I had had when I was venturing into e-commerce way back in the early 2000s. What they've done is pretty remarkable. I first met the founder, Toby, in 2008 when I became an advisor, and it's been spectacular.

1:36:13I've loved watching Shopify go from roughly 10 to 15 employees at the time to 7 ,000 plus today, serving customers in 175 countries with total sales on the platform exceeding$400 billion. They power millions of entrepreneurs from their first sale all the way to full scale. And you would recognize a lot of large companies that also use them who started small. So get started by building and customizing your online store, again, with no coding or design experience required. Access powerful tools to help you find customers, drive sales, and manage your day-to-day. Gain knowledge and confidence with extensive resources to help you succeed.

1:36:51And I've actually been involved with some of that way back in the day, which was awesome. The build a business competition and other things. Plus with 24 seven support, you're never alone. And let's face it, being an entrepreneur can be lonely, but you have support, you have resources. You don't need to feel alone in this case. More than a store, Shopify grows with you and they never stop innovating, providing more and more tools to make your business better and your life easier. Go to shopify.com slash Tim to sign up for a$1 per month trial period. It is a great deal for a great service. So I encourage you to check it out.

1:37:27Take your business to the next level today and learn more by visiting shopify.com slash Tim. One more time, shopify.com slash Tim, all lowercase. This episode is brought to you by Allbirds. Incredibly comfortable shoes, sustainably made with design rooted in simplicity. I am speaking from experience here. I've been wearing Allbirds for the last several months, and I've been alternating between two pairs. I'm traveling with them right now. I started with the Tree Runners in marine blue, in case you're curious, and now I'm wearing the Tree Dashers, and the Tree Dashers are my current daily driver.

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