Why You've Been Lied to About Where to Put Your Time, Energy, & Focus | Seth Godin on Impact Theory

Everybody, welcome to another episode of Impact Theory. I am here with the legend Seth Godin. Seth, welcome to the show. Well, thanks for having me. The last interview still sits with me. You worked so hard, you prepped so deep. It was really fun. Awesome, man. Well, I'm honored by that and I am very excited to talk about the new book today. I went just as hard on this one and I think that this book is incredibly important for anybody that wants to do something profound with their life and when I first was researching you for the last episode, I came across an idea that is just It's something I repeat to myself. It's something I bring up to people all the time and it feels like it's a central theme of this book, which is show me your bad writing. So, for anybody who says, you know, I I can't write or I'm a bad writer, whatever, that question's so profound. Is that what you see as a central idea behind practice or is it something else? Well, the practice involves several things all woven together. One of them is definitely show me your bad video, show me your bad public speaking, show me your bad counseling, show me your bad therapy, show me your bad uh engineering designs. Because we've been trained to get attached to the outcome. And there's this belief that the effort, the process, the practice doesn't matter. And if the outcome isn't going to be great, don't even bother. But the only way to get to great outcomes is to show up with this practice and get better. So, that's one of the key things. The second one is that we can get out of our own head by stopping this mindset of hustling people to get more than our fair share of attention and instead approach it with generosity. Because the purpose of shipping the work is not so you can come out ahead. The purpose of shipping the work is to make things better. So, we will definitely get to the principle of generosity, which shows up a lot in the book, but there was another concept that shows up a lot as well that I think is important for framing the book, why you wrote it, and what the ultimate outcome will be. And this is the idea of being brainwashed. How exactly have we been brainwashed? Well, so let's say I uh had a secret committee and I came to the government of the United States or any place in the West in 1850 and said, "Here's what I want to do. I want to spend over a trillion dollars a year in time and money. I want every single child from the age of five to spend six to eight hours a day with me for 10 to 15 years in a row. And then I want to build into the culture a mindset of consumption and compliance. Okay?" Like, no one would go for that plan. And that's exactly what we did. And when you and I spoke previously, we talked about the mindset of education versus learning. But, the brainwashing runs really deep because the industrial system needs us to be acquiring, status-seeking uh cogs in their system because the factories are so efficient, they just keep making more stuff. And what I'm trying to reflect back on people is you can pick yourself, and you can show up and ship work that makes things better, that you are proud of, and you don't need anyone's permission. Now, this is a a period of pretty profound disruption, and I'm curious to Was that part of why you wrote this book now, or was this book long sort of in development before all of this hit? Yeah, I've been working directly on this book for 3 years. So, it has been, I think, a moment of disruption in our culture for at least 20. The internet um did some amazing things, and many of us who were there at the beginning forgot to focus on the things that weren't going to be so amazing. And one the things it did was it gave everybody a microphone. And that's a good thing because voices previously unheard were not heard before, and now they are. It helped focus a long overdue lens on racial injustice, for example. But the other problem was that it created these chambers of noise where you got ahead and the media companies got ahead by dividing us, by creating breaking news that isn't breaking, that isn't news, by calling people friends who aren't friends and buttons likes that aren't likes. And so we can't discount how hard the media worked against all of our peace of mind and well-being for the last 15 or 20 years. And it took a toll, and we're feeling that toll in politics, but we're also feeling that toll deep in our soul. So, a few years ago I set out to make a workshop for creatives, and it was a full year. Like I can usually make a workshop in a few weeks cuz it's based on years of my life, but this was a year of really digging deep to understand how do you even teach somebody to be a professional creative, to ship important work? And then we we ran the workshop for uh 500 people. It changed lives deeply. And as I was watching people engage with that work, I said I have no choice, even though it's so much effort, I have to make a book. So, what is it about all of that that is so profoundly changing for people? Is there like a key insight or a key idea that unlocks something for somebody? It's streaks. It seems really trivial. It's streaks. That inside the creator's workshop, people wrote every day for 100 days without missing a day. And the writing isn't the point. None few of these people are professional writers. Uh one person who was in the workshop just got a major record deal from a famous record label. Because he did his lyrics, he did his music, he shared it, and the average person gave and got 500 pieces of feedback a month. And I would ask people who aren't part of something like that, "When was the last time you gave and got 500 pieces of useful feedback?" We're not supposed to do that at work. We're not supposed to do that with friends. Where are we supposed to do that? And it turns out if you can make a circle of five people, you can do it with each other. That this practice says, "I don't have to be in the mood. It's my work. And I don't have to be motivated, and I don't have to have the muse talk to me. I simply do this work. I chop the wood, I carry the water, and then maybe it resonates with people, or if it doesn't, I learn something and I do it again." There's a quote from the book that I wrote down that I want to read verbatim, which um speaks to exactly what you're talking about now, which is "The practice is not the means to the output. The practice is the output, because the practice is all we can control." That That to me is one of the the most profound takeaways from the book, to be sure. And then in terms of that streaks, being consistent, putting in the work, doing the stuff over and over is exactly what I've seen in my own life. So, one of the ideas that I'm always trying to get across to people is don't worry about, you know, whether you're a born this, that, or the other. It's understanding that the human animal is the ultimate adaptation machine. That as a species, we've literally picked the strategy of improvement of being able to learn something. So, instead of coming out fully baked, we come out with the ability to be baked, as it were, you know, as you go down the path of something. What I want to know, and what you cover so interestingly in the book, is how do you move from blindly doing something to doing something with intention? So, intention, design thinking, intentional action. If it's It's go for it. It's for you. If it's work, it's ultimately for other people. It's ultimately to cause a change to happen. If you're not causing a change, then I'm not sure why you're taking up our time. But if you seek to make a change in the world, you have to ask three simple questions. Who's it for? Who specifically am I seeking to change? Who specifically am I building this for? What's it for? Can I say what this does? And what change am I seeking to make, which is related to the what's it for? If I can't say it, then I'm just ranting, right? But if I can be very clear, it's for people who believe this. It's for people who want this. It's for people who are aligned with this. And after you engage with my work, you will feel differently or you will act differently. That is the work of the creator. And we don't want to say any of those things because it puts us on the hook. And being on the hook feels uncomfortable. And so we wiggle away. But I think being on the hook is the best place to be. Let's talk more about that. In the book, you give an example I'd actually never heard before of this old Turkish custom of putting a loaf of bread on the hook, which then led me to look up the etymology of the phrase on the hook and did it come from that? And I thought that whole idea was so interesting. One, if you can walk us through that Turkish idea of putting a loaf of bread on the hook, which I think ties into your notion of generosity and and how that plays into artistry, um let's start there rather than asking eight questions at once. Um so I guess it's still true. I haven't been to Turkey in a few years. If you go to a local bakery and you can afford it, you buy two loaves of bread instead of one. And you say to the person behind the counter, put that one on the hook. And then somebody who's hungry stops by the bakery and says, "You got anything on the hook?" And they take a loaf of bread. Buy one, give one. And it's just in the sense that, you know, bread is the staff of life. It doesn't cost that much to to pay it forward. But that got me thinking about the phrase on the hook, cuz we usually associate it with fish. And fish don't like being on the hook. And it's not a generous act for a fish to be on the hook. It's selfless, but I'm not sure that the fish then goes on to live another day. So, I like this idea of putting your work on the hook. And saying, "Here, I made this. Here, I Here, this. And it might not be for you, but I made this." And that approach to it lets me shift my gears from please judge me, please pay me, please reward me to, "Oh, I had the ability to weave something together, and I did. Here." And most of us want to be generous. And it Getting out of our own way is so important. So, I want to push on that a little bit. I think there's something really profound in that for the person who's experiencing, quote unquote, writer's block, who doesn't have the bad writing, for them to begin to shift out of the inward-focused to this concept that you have of generosity. The story you tell in the book, and I don't know if you I can't remember if you intentionally told this for this reason, but when you went fly-fishing for the first time, you didn't want to hook, which I thought was utterly fascinating. And so, you practiced all of the things around fly-fishing, but you intentionally did not want to catch a fish. What what was it in that moment that made that act still useful? Okay, so let's assert for a moment that fly-fishing is not generous to the fish. And that um the other people I was with were throwing the fish back. So, we weren't trying to feed our families. We were out there on this river in Wyoming seeking to commune with nature and to engage in a process of practice, being mindful about what we were doing. And I just knew instinctively that if there was a hook on that fly, I was going to be using the all of my powers of telekinesis to will the fish to bite my hook. That I would be measuring the quality and goodness of my work based on whether a a primordial being decided to bite the hook. And I said, that's going to take me totally out of my head. I don't want to have the fish be part of my day. That's not why I'm here. And it turned out within a few minutes and for several hours after that, I was casting better than almost anybody in the crew because I was simply casting. I was merely casting. I wasn't connected to the outcome. And so there's a paradox here cuz on one hand, we only do the work to make things happen. We only do the work with this generous mindset, but we must do the work with a practice that ignores the guarantee that it's going to work. And back to your brainwashing thing from a few minutes ago, if you've ever said to a teacher or to yourself, will this be on the test? You have revealed education. Will this be on the test says the following, I will pay attention and learn this for a little while if you promise that you will give me an A. That's the exchange. That's not how you learned how to ride a bike. That's not how you learned how to do anything that actually matters to you. You did those other things cuz you could and then you enjoyed the benefits thereafter, not in some transaction. And so the practice says, I seek to make things better for people I care about, but the only way I'm going to do that is by not imagining them looking over my shoulder at every turn, but instead to engage with this work. Now, so as you get into the idea of generosity and you start focusing on um creating real art that changes people and it has this almost interactive focus, I know a lot of people then slip into well, then how do I even charge for this? So, how do you begin to integrate this into a real life where people have to feed their families and at some point you do need a fish, whether it's a literal fish or not, on the hook? How do people reconcile those two ideas? Yeah, so commerce has to show up in our western culture. And I guess I would start with this. Please don't quit your day job today. Just cuz you heard us talking. Uh you can begin with your side hustle. You can begin with your practice cuz it might take a while for it to get to the point where you have created something so peculiar and particular and unique and remarkable that people will eagerly pay for it. And if you need to paint your masterpiece in the next hour, I don't know how to help you. So, that's the first place I start. That you may have to be a cog in the system for a little while longer as you develop trust, as you develop a reputation, as you develop the permission to talk to your followers. So, um you know, we've been talking about art art, so we'll start with that. Abby Ryan. Abby Ryan decided, I don't know, 10 or 15 years ago to paint an oil painting every day. And when you say that out loud, you realize that's a pretty unusual thing to do. And then she started videoing her work as she did it and she started teaching people generously how to do it. And over time, as she got better and her reputation improved, her eBay sales went from oh, this painting was $100 to this painting is $800. But if you're making $800 every day making an oil painting in an hour and a half. That's a gig, right? And then it was featured in Oprah magazine, and then people are buying it not because they saw Abby painting it, but because she's actually really good at it. Okay? But it all began with this germ of an idea, which is I can connect people to my practice. But let's just go totally in a different direction. Let's say you're a real estate broker. Most real estate brokers are freaking out correctly because Zillow makes it clear we don't need them. Right? That you can look at every single house for sale in Vermont anytime you want from your the safety of your COVID-free living room. So, why are they getting paid 6% of $800,000? This is a problem. Except for some real estate agents who know every single person in town, who uh coach the Little League team, run this organization, have people have meetings in their office all the time, have a point of view, and only sell and buy in a very particular place, whether it's for a community or based on geography. That person is worth more than they charge because that person is bringing a level of humanity that is not in the playbook. They cannot easily be replaced. And so one of the things I mention in the book is the origins of the word peculiar. And peculiar comes from the Latin for cattle. And it means private property. You own the cattle. Peculiar means you are in and of yourself. All the systems in our life push us not to do that. You're an Uber driver? Well, you better be invisible. All their rules are you can't be a particular peculiar Uber driver, you have to be the standard one. So, my advice is don't be an Uber driver. Figure out what you can do instead where you actually benefit by being you. You have a quote in the book and I'm forgetting now who it came from, but it was like genius is the person who can be most truly who they are. And I found that really interesting and it got into this concept which you talk a lot about in the book and I'd love to get your real-time explanation of uh the alternate title to the book before you ended up settling on that one was like be yourself or the power What was it? Trust yourself. Trust yourself. So, what what is this? You end up separating the word self in the book. Um so, you put your and self. Why what's the distinction? What's the power of the self? What what was that whole idea? Um Trust yourself. When you're talking to yourself, who is talking and who is listening? Right? This is a fascinating thing that we don't examine very often. Someone's talking and someone's listening and it's still you. So, I'm arguing that the verbal, fearful, compliant, sometimes scared voice is the frontal cortex, the part of our brain that isn't particularly good at creativity. And then the one that's listening, the one that's getting shut down, the one that claims it wants to be authentic is that other one, that one that's willing to push us forward. And what I am saying is we are a dance of both. To trust yourself does not mean that you just do whatever you feel like and are guaranteed it's going to work. It probably won't. What it means is you need to listen to that voice more often. And if you can develop a practice that lets that voice show up in a way that it can, your work, your life gets better and you can start today. If you want to be a runner, you don't do a lot of planning. You don't get Runner's World magazine and change your sneakers and sign up for this and sign up for that. If you want to be a runner, you go running. It doesn't matter how far and you do it again tomorrow. And if you do it for 30 days in a row, you're a runner. And if you keep doing it, you'll get better. That is the practice. The practice says, I'm committing to this method and I'm going to have streaks, whatever form they take, and one day I'll get better at this and when I do, I'll be able to serve the people I hope to change. One of the coolest things in the book, I think this is so profound, is this idea that if you want to change your story, if you want to change your own self-narrative, if you want to begin to shape your identity, you change your behaviors first and not the other way around. Um, why is that? How'd you come to that? That's pretty counterintuitive. It's true and um there's a lot of brain science that goes to this. It has to do with where our narrative even comes from. We what we do is we see the world around us and then we make up a story about it. Not the other way around. That uh Dan Dennett, the great philosophy uh professor at Tufts, has proven that dreams happen in the moment we wake up. That all night, there's electrical activity in our brain, but it's not till we wake up that we try to make sense of it. That's interesting. I've never heard that before. Yeah, it's pretty cool and it makes perfect sense. How they proved it was tricky, but it makes perfect sense to me because the storytelling part is our conscious brain. And if you are somebody who always goes out of their way to open doors for other people and help them, then you will start telling yourself a story that that's the kind of behavior you admire. Not the other way around. And so, just choosing a behavior, if you want to be a writer, write. If you want to be a runner, run. That will change how you think of you and your work. You talk about passion as a choice. How is that true? And if it is, then how do we go about making the right choice? Right. So, this is um a little bit controversial cuz a lot of people want to find their passion. They say, "How do I find my calling?" And I point out to them that there are plumbers who think they found their calling, and there are plumbers who wish they could sing opera. And there are opera singers who think they found their calling, and there are other opera singers who think it's just a grind. It turns out it has nothing to do with the profession. It has to do with our narrative about the profession. So, to your previous point, doing the work changes our story about the work. And I think it's so much more reliable and so much easier to love what you do than it is to do what you love. Making the choice to love what you do means that whatever you're doing, you can be in love. And you know, I'm super lucky. I don't have to dig ditches for a living or work in a toxic waste dump. I'm really grateful for that. Um but there are also plenty of people who, if you said, "You have to write a blog post for free every day 7,500 times in a row," would say, "That's horrible." For me, I love that. And that was just a choice. I decided that I would love doing that. Okay, so we're in that moment. We're Gary Goldman. We know what we're trying to do, which you talk a lot about in the book. I think that's really important. How do we get better? Like how how do we march down that path? In my experience, the best creators have learned how to see. They've not learned how to see by using one of those uh digital "Please stay on the phone after this call and rank our service" kind of survey. They learn how to see cuz they understand genre, because they develop good taste. Good taste is knowing what your audience wants 10 minutes before they do. So, uh Diane von Fürstenberg burst onto the scene with her wrap dress in the 1970s, revolutionized a a corner of women's fashion. How did she know? And I've talked to her about this. She's completely nonverbal. She's unable to explain how she knew. She has nothing. But she knew cuz she learned how to see. Cuz she exposed herself enough. She developed pattern matching ability. And domain knowledge is so important. Genre is so important. It's not generic. It's genre. What does this remind us of? What does it rhyme with? When I touch the emotion you're seeking, what other emotions are right next to it? We develop these things. Some people are really lucky get a lucky early, and some people takes 10 20 years to develop this sensibility. The first year I was a book packager, I sold my first book the first day to Warner Books. Chip Conley and I, 5,000 bucks, we split the money. And then Chip went back to doing his gig, which was hotels, and I said, "I'm going to be a book packager. If I can sell a book a week, I'll be fine." And I got 800 rejection letters in a row. 800 times over the next 12 months, someone in the book industry cared enough to buy a stamp, send me a letter saying, "This is a bad idea. Go away." 800 times. And I didn't keep making the same mistake. I kept making new mistakes. And in that industry, it was socially acceptable to send people a proposal, and it was totally understandable that they would write back. And then something clicked into place, and I learned to see. And within 2 years after that, I'd sold 20 books, and over the course of 10 years I did 120 books. And I could tell about half the time I was right. About half the time if I said, "This one's a big one," it was a big one. Can you walk us through that process? Uh I know your story well enough to know like when you were trying to get better at writing, you were looking at James Bond. We talked about this in in our first interview. That process to me is incredibly important. How were you asking yourself new questions? Like how how did you make sure you were making new mistakes, not repeating it? And how were you making sure that you were getting incrementally closer to so that you were analyzing, okay, I did this, I got this result and Right. This is a great question. The first books were How to Hypnotize Your Friends and Get Them to Act Like Chickens and The Fortune Cookie Construction Set. So, The Fortune Cookie Construction Set was the only book at the time where you could look up a recipe for fortune cookies. Cuz fortune cookies don't have the recipes in American cookbooks and they didn't have the recipe in Chinese cookbooks. And so, the first page was the recipe for fortune cookies and the next uh 100 pages were little perforated fortunes that you could tear out and put into the fortune like Henny Youngman fortunes, this fortune, that fortune. No one wanted to publish that. And the other one was one of the first uh not first, one of the only books anyone had ever pitched on hypnotism, How Did You Stage Hypnotism at Home and How to Hypnotize Your Friends to Get Them to Act Like Chickens. No one wanted to publish that, either. And I just kept kind of with one thing after another that was either clever and I was proud of myself for being clever or because I had an MBA, I had spreadsheets to prove that people would actually buy the book. And then what came to me, no one explained it to me, but what I figured out was the people in the book industry who tended to go to famous colleges were dramatically underpaid. Really underpaid. And they weren't in it to sell a lot of books cuz they didn't know how many books they were selling. It took a year and a half after a book was bought, purchased, for them to know how many copies it was had sold. And by then they weren't even interested. They'd moved on. So no one in the industry had a spreadsheet, cared about spreadsheets, or was keeping track of spreadsheets. And no one in the industry wanted to reward me for being clever. So what I realized was book people bought books that they were proud of and they bought books that they wanted to talk to their colleagues about. And if I made books like that they would publish them happily. Particularly if I was the kind of person they wanted to buy books from. Not that I was well-liked in a Willy Loman sense, but that I was a professional who was in it for the right reasons, not somebody who was trying to hustle an advance so I could make another clever book. And that led to a real shift on my part of who's it for, what's it for, what change am I seeking to make? Cuz what I realize is first it has to be good enough in {quotation marks} to appeal to the gatekeeper. But I wasn't actually doing all this effort just to make them happy. I wanted to make the readers change. I wanted to reach readers. But I had to do a bank shot. First I had to get it through the editor and then I had a chance to get to the reader. And that's one reason why my blog has been around so long cuz my blog was disintermediated. My blog meant I didn't have to please an editor. I could just write for my reader. And that's a huge shift in our culture, but also means you don't get anointed by an editor the way you used to and get a guaranteed audience. Typical failed book in New York now, New York publishing um has gone from 20,000 copies is what a decent failed book would do to 200. Because 20,000 used to be we'd fill up all the Barnes & Noble's, we fill up all the local bookstores. It was all 20,000. Now, it's well, Amazon doesn't reorder and we only shipped them 10. I want to talk about imposter syndrome and the reason that I'm bringing it up now is as you were going through that I thought, "Oof, there's there's really something here about is it just that Seth Godin is inordinately good at that analysis or is it that the practice itself of doing something over and over and over is going to yield a result?" And for the person whose self-narrative is, "I'm not as good as Seth Godin." They're of course going to get into that imposter syndrome and you've already addressed that, "Hey, you probably really aren't good enough at this yet." You talk in the book about so many things being a process that you think you're sort of either born with or you're not. I'm working on this concept I call the physics of being human that there are just certain things that the brain does whether you want them to or not, they're universal to all of us and one of them that I was thinking about yesterday while researching you is this idea that we we analyze and you analyze by default. And so journaling is powerful because whether you want your brain to or not, it is going to analyze what you're writing, what you're doing. Practicing being a plumber, you're going to analyze. Submitting all the book proposals, you're going to analyze. Is there a way for us to sharpen our skill of being able to see that gap, to recognize, "Oh, what's really going on here is the you know, the guy with the Harvard MBA or whatever, he's underpaid and he's doing this for a whole different reason." I don't think most people verbalize as much as I do. And that's fine. That's some of the most successful people I know don't verbalize in almost every field. So I'm looking to see if I can show you Yes, here it is. So this book was a turning point for me. So, I'll give you the background of this book. Um CliffNotes used to be a very big deal. CliffNotes used to be the single biggest profit center at a lot of bookstores. And the guys from CliffNotes, because it was reliable, you had 100 titles, they sold and sold and sold. Uh and the margins were good. And the guys at CliffNotes in Publishers Weekly published the list of their top 30 sellers to help bookstores know which ones to stock. But it also told me which ones to compete with them on, because they revealed their short head. And I said, "Well, who wants a CliffNotes? Who wants a CliffNotes is some kid who doesn't want to read a 30-page CliffNotes. They want to read a four-page CliffNotes. So, why don't I just take 35 of the best selling CliffNotes and put them in all in one book?" So, for the price of two CliffNotes, you get all the CliffNotes. And I need a credential, so I got college students to write them all, A students from Tufts University. And this is a brilliant idea. I can prove spreadsheets back and forth that this is a brilliant idea. And it wasn't going to sell, cuz I still was floundering about trying to figure out what people wanted. And I met this guy named John Boswell. And John Boswell wrote uh OJ Legal OJ's Legal Pad, and he created French for Cats, and he'd done million sellers one after another. A real nice to me, profane guy. And I went to see him on a mutual introduction, and he ripped my proposal apart. And said, "I will help you with this, but we're going to split the book. We're going to split it." I'm like, "Fine. I got nothing. Go for it." And he said, "The first thing you're doing is you're laser printing your proposals." I said, "Yeah, it cost a dollar a page. I got to walk down there and print it out on the laser printer." He's like, "No, no, no, no, no." And he calls his secretary in and has her retype my proposal using carbon paper on that onion skin paper. I'm like, "What's that about?" He said, "Cuz authors have typewriters." And he didn't have words to explain why you needed to act like an author when you weren't being it. Blah, blah, blah. So, I decoded some of what he had learned, right? And then I learned that I watched him interact with the editors who we were trying to sell it to, and he was mean to them. One after another. And I tried to decode this cuz many of the most successful agents in New York at the time were mean to their clients. But I realized again, it's all a club, and it's a club people want to be a member of. And they only have a few tools to use to get them to be members of certain clubs. And if this club is seen as difficult to get into, the whole Groucho Marx thing, they will try harder to get into it. And like so, all And I never did the whole mean thing, but I got the joke immediately about He didn't know have words for what he was doing, even though he was a really successful book guy. He just knew what had worked. How did he know? Cuz he went through the process I went through. He showed up, and he showed up, and he showed up. And we look you know, I I was talking about this just the other day. Um go look on uh the streaming services, and you can listen to one of Joni Mitchell's first demos. She does a cover of House of the Rising Sun. And when I saw it show up on my browser the other day, I was really excited. It's not good. And if she hadn't made it, she wouldn't have made all the other ones. So, that's what you got to do. We show up, we cut the wood, and we chop the water, or cut off the water, and whatever. You get the idea. Chop the wood, carry the water. Uh you mentioned Joni Mitchell in the book. It is a really interesting moment and I'm curious how you think about this. So, one of the things that I worry about as people go down this path of, "Okay, hey, Seth told me that I'm going to have impostor syndrome. I'm not I'm probably not good enough yet, but I need to become peculiar. I need to be myself, really lean into that. Don't worry about alienating those people." And then you tell this wonderful story about Joni Mitchell. And Joni Mitchell realizes that she's going over people's heads, but instead of being like, "Oh my god, if I feel terrible about that." and sort of dummying it down, which is a very famous Jay-Z lyric about how he dubbed it down for his audience and doubled his dollars, um, she goes even more highbrow and now we obviously remember her, you know, decades later. Is there a danger in leaning into that where you may not actually Yeah. you may be being arrogant instead of being accurate. Yes. Okay, so, the first thing I want to put a pin in that's super important. I do not believe in authenticity. I do not think you have any right to do whatever you feel like and whatever pops into your head as the version of you that you think is the authentic one is not correct. The audience does not want an authentic you. You do not want an authentic anybody when you hire anything. When you go to a concert, right? If you go to a Jay-Z concert and he's in a bad mood, you don't want him to be in a bad mood. You want him to be the best version of Jay-Z. That's what you paid for. Consistency. Consistency is part of being peculiar. Consistently generous, consistently showing up, rhyming with yourself in a way that you're proud of, but no, not authentic. You're not entitled. So, with that said, the Joni Mitchell story has a key piece of nuance in it. Joni Mitchell, like most successful musicians, as I mentioned with the Doobie Brothers, was becoming a hack. She was a legend. She could Every record that she was doing was breaking every uh, uh sales record there was. She could have done it for 50 more years. She could have been the Rolling Stones. That was the path she was on. But, to do that, you need to play covers of yourself. You need to make sure it sounds like a Joni Mitchell album. What Joni Mitchell did, Bob Dylan did the same thing. She intentionally alienated her audience. She intentionally made them go away. She made Don Juan's reckless daughter breaking the hearts of her record label because she didn't want to be Joni Mitchell with a capital J and a capital M. She knew that her smallest viable audience was smaller than the audience she had. Get rid of the people who don't get the joke. Make the music that you want to be proud of. Back to art, away from being a hack. There's nothing wrong with being a hack because the fact is Rolling Stones made a billion dollars being a hack. But, Joni Mitchell said, "I only want my people who want to go on this journey enrolled where I am going." And the happy medium there is the is Grateful Dead. Grateful Dead sold 500 million dollars worth of tickets, but the promise was you don't know what you're going to get when you come. And the promise was there going to be parts of this that are boring. And we're going to explore the edges. That's what we do. And so, you can earn that right to show up and say, "I know I'm doing that or I'm doing this." So, when Permission Marketing became a New York Times best-seller, I had a big choice to make cuz I'd been in the book world for a long time and now I was finally an author. And that book sold. So, I could have done the Permission Marketing Handbook because that book would have been easy to sell to an editor. Or, I could have started Mailchimp because that business would have been really good. And then I would have been the email marketing guy cuz that was my background. I'd earned the right to show up and say this. And I intentionally did not do that. Because I wanted the feeling you get when you launch a book like Survival Is Not Enough. And then it comes with the feeling of what happens when it only sells 13,000 copies. Right? That's part of the deal if that's the journey you want to go on. You quote Joni Mitchell in the book and she says, I'm paraphrasing, but they're going to crucify you if you stay the same. They're going to crucify you if you change. Staying the same is boring, change is interesting, so I'd rather be crucified for changing. And I thought, "Whoa, that's actually really powerful." Yeah. And it's different groups are doing the crucifying. Right? If you stay the same, the real joyous fans are thrilled. They want you to play covers. It's the other people, the the fancy opinion-leading people, that are going to say you're not relevant anymore. You said you wanted to do something different because you wanted that feeling you get. What is that feeling you get when you do something that might not work? Um you know, the book ends with a quote from Papa Wallenda of the Flying Wallendas. Uh which he may or may not have said, but which is quoted in the movie Rounders by my friend Brian Koppelman and David Levien. And he says something like uh life is on the tightrope and the tightrope is the only place to be. And what it means to be on the tightrope is that our job as humans is not to eat, sleep, and die. Our job as hum- humans is to sing or to dance or to connect or to lead. And all of those things have tightropes associated with them. And it's in that moment of it might not work that we or at least me, that I become alive. Because you built something, you it's you organized a surprise party, you put together the pieces, and now in this moment, you're about to learn something. That is so different from taking the truffles from the conveyor belt and putting them in the box all day. That's not what we were born to do, I don't think. So, we're living on the tightrope. I want to make the most of that. So, if we're going to experience the danger, if we're really going to put ourselves at risk, um which has obviously huge potential upside, but also has potential downside, one of the things that seems to me to be the core of where you're at at this point in your life is that notion of feedback that you brought up earlier. Certainly the seems like the soul of the AltMBA is the feedback. One, how do we receive that feedback? Cuz most people are going to feel attacked. Most people, you know, they put up the psychological immune system and they reject that. Um How do we deal with that? Or some people do the opposite, and they take it all in and they're crushed. That's interesting. So, I've made these things on my on my Glowforge. These are uh writer's blocks. And they take a long time to make, um because you have to you like laser each side. And this one says, "All criticism is not the same." That is the key to the whole deal. I have not read an Amazon review of my work in almost 10 years. Wow. And the reason is simple, because I've never met an author who said, "I read all my one-star reviews and now I'm I'm a better writer." Never. Because what does a one-star review mean? A one-star review means, "This book wasn't for me." All right. Well, you just told us about you. You didn't tell us anything about the book or me. You told us about you. Okay, thank you for telling us, but I don't need to read that in detail. On the other hand, if Nikki Papadopoulos, the amazing editor at Penguin Putnam says, at at at Portfolio says, you need to change the title, I'm like, I just paid you hundreds of thousands of dollars so you would tell me to change the title. Thank you very much. Cuz I could have self-published this book all by myself with no feedback from anybody and no one would have told me to change the title. This criticism is magic. And so, you know, at Akimbo what they have built is institutions, workshops, the altMBA, where the only feedback you're getting is precious. And they filtered out all other stuff. And you can build a system like that. You can figure out how to make sure you're listening to the right people. This is why being an opening act for a rock group is a really bad idea. Because you're going to show up in front of the wrong people who are going to give you the wrong feedback. It makes way more sense to figure out who's it for and bring it to them. It might take a few extra steps, but the feedback you're getting is the useful feedback. Are there a few landmarks to knowing who the people are that you should be listening to to building that group? Well, I think it's two parts. In the case of me in the origin of my book world, there are the people who are going to pay you. And when those people give you feedback, you have to listen to them or else they're not going to pay you anymore. But then there's this other thing, which is as we discussed earlier, people are really bad at verbalizing where they're coming from. When you see someone who is angry, look for the fear. They're not they're probably not angry at you. They are probably afraid of something, afraid of what they'll tell their spouse, afraid of what they'll tell their boss, afraid of insufficiency or afraid of death, and they are expressing it to you by being angry about something you did. If you over index for that feedback, you are going to make a mistake. On the other hand, if you ignore all feedback, then the people you seek to serve will choose not to be served by you. And they will simply walk away. And so that's why this is so nuanced and so complicated, because what you've got to figure out how to do is thread a needle between being a hack and having a hobby. And there is a needle. There is a way to do it. But there are also people who were contemporaries of his that didn't make a living, that died in a gutter somewhere, because they turned it too much into a hobby. And then there were other people who got too famous, and I put Miles Davis in that category, and went from being magnificent artists to being bitter, because they turned into a hack, and then they wanted to go back to being an artist, and they couldn't. Why couldn't he? That's interesting. Cuz he got hooked on playing for 80,000 people. Right? I There I just watched a a great documentary about him about a year ago, and you can see the turning point, when Bill Graham put him on stage, when he realized that he liked being a rock star. But if you're a rock star, you don't also get to make Kind of Blue. You can't do both. And so he listened to a group of people who told him what he would need to do to be more of a rock star. But deep down, he didn't really want to be a rock star. He wanted to make his art. This is fascinating. Now, I'm super curious, if you could go back in time, and you get like 20 minutes with him, is there an idea that you would try to plant in his mind around self narrative that would help him understand, like, hey, you can actually reshape this so that you can get closer to rhyming with yourself? Um do you just go, "Hey, look, this is the way it is and some people get, you know, hooked on that and there's no bringing them back." Because there are so many people like they're chasing money, they're chasing wealth, they're chasing fame and you know, Jim Carrey's famous quote, "I wish everybody could be rich and famous so that you see that it isn't actually what you want it to be or it isn't the answer." I'm so curious, what would what, if anything, would you say to him at that moment? Well, I think I have a slightly different take, but it's specific. I would just say thank you. Um to have sacrificed so much to be who he was and to make the change he made for people in the face of overt racial oppression, he had so much to prove to himself, to other people. He was disregarded, he was spat upon. He's entitled to sell out all he wants. And to someone today, what I would say, regardless of your background, regardless of where you came from, I would say, "What do you want? What do you What What is it that you're seeking? Because if you're trying to fill an infinite hole and the filling part isn't making you happy, I need to tell you about math and math says infinite holes never get filled. And so, you know, every year when Forbes publishes their billionaires list, they ruin the day or the week or the month of at least 100 people who have at least a billion dollars cuz they're not ranked as high as they want to be. That's absurd. That's absurd that you are keeping track of that, that you care about that in any way. That's an infinite hole. It's not helping you get where you want to get. Instead, maybe it makes sense to say, "Where is your fuel? What is the work you do where when you do it, it makes you feel like you contributed something. Stop buying into metrics that were invented by other people to help them get where they want to go. And, you know, a simple example is people who buy their way onto the bestseller list, right? That they're spending 50 or 100,000 dollars to game a system that every insider knows is not very hard to game. Why are you doing that? What do you get in return? And how could you stop keeping track of something that shouldn't be kept track of and keep track of something else instead? That's up to all of us. Every one of us gets to make that choice. Who are you trying to please? If there's that person that you're trying to please that is always unpleasable, you found an infinite hole. Stop trying to fill it and go please somebody else. Seth, you like if I had to I don't have to conjure an image, I have an image of you in my head of somebody who tap dances in the most graceful, beautiful way around all the sort of mental traps that we all fall for. And I'm saying this specifically, I've never sort of put these things together. Um so, forgive me, I'm just sort of thinking out loud. You have this beautiful ability to be moved by people, people maybe that you've never even met. So, we talked about Leonard Nimoy the first time and now Miles Davis. Is it Do you open yourself up to that? Are you just naturally impacted by people? Do you seek the beauty in things? Like that was such an interesting framing around Miles Davis and to see that it obviously hits you in a pretty uh real way. Just curious, like that seems like a beautiful place to live for people that want to live there. What have you done to sort of end up there? I always resist something being natural or a talent because I think it lets us off the hook way too easy. Um I do believe that people have different emotional thermostats and they're set maybe by the way we're raised and the traumas that we have or don't have. Um but yeah, I do also think that people are on various spectra about where they are on that thermostat thing. Uh in my case I think the practical discussion is what are you training in? Like I can't bench press 10 lbs because my shoulders don't work very well from surgery, but even if I could I could train to get to 20 or 30 or whatever it is. And so we don't walk up to somebody who uh has a lot of muscles in various parts of their body and say, "Were you born that way?" No, they trained to get that way. And if you ask Patricia to play scales she can play scales blindfolded because she trained for years and years and years. The fact that her father was a jazz musician didn't give her any genes in music, she just trained. And so I've been training for a really long time to answer the question why did someone just do what they did? How do I get rid of some of the magic of the world is just a giant magic trick and I don't know how it works, right? Like I know what freon gas does and I know how a refrigerator functions. It's important to me. I know that when you flip the switch on the lights why the lights go on. That's important to me. And I needed to understand why that person who turned down my book on spots and stains turned it down and why the person who tried to buy the book and couldn't was really angry with me. I needed to understand that the same way I need to understand why the lights work. And often I'm completely wrong. But I'm closer than if I hadn't asked the question in the first place. And so I think the training is can we develop practical empathy? They don't know what we know, they don't want what we want, they don't need what we need, and that's okay. What do they know? What do they need? What happened to them that led them to believe that in this moment they are being reasonable? And if we can ask that question enough times, not only I think does it help us make change, it helps us uh live with the world as it is. Because we can't change the whole world, but if we understand it, at least we can decode it and and figure out a way to make it better. It's amazing. One final question. What do you hope, so knowing that you go into the book asking how do I want to change people, what what are you hoping people take away from this concept of the practice? Two things. Uh for all of us, we need what you could contribute if you contributed it it. And for you, the reader, uh I think it would be horrible if you died with whatever you've got still inside of you. And it's not formed yet. You will form it when you have a practice. When you start believing in yourself, don't wait to get picked. Oprah's not going to call. But instead, adopt this practice of making things better. Cuz 2020 is a year we all want to forget. But the only way forward is not going to be cuz some space alien comes and fixes everything. It's going to be because we made something better for 10 other people. If we all do that, it multiplies, and then things get better. I love that. Where can people find you? Uh I'm at seths.blog, and um I'm thrilled to announce that Akimbo, the workshop organization I started 5 years ago, is now a B Corp, uh legally obligated to work in the public interest as well as a for-profit, and it is run and owned by uh two of my senior people. So, I am part of it in that they publish my workshops, but it's them uh and it's now 20,000 plus people who are learning together at akimbo.com. I have a podcast, not like you, but a podcast at akimbo.link. And I'm sort of hard to avoid. If you just click around, you'll find me. I love it. Guys, this is in my opinion one of the most profound authors for sure, thinkers. If you haven't already subscribed to everything he does, I highly, highly encourage it. And speaking of things you should subscribe to, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe here. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Heroes are in enormously large supply. You can say, what would Bill Gates do? What would Elon Musk do? What would Jacqueline Novogratz do? And you can study their work enough that even from afar without them knowing you exist. Because they're your hero, you can start to model it.