🔴 Seth Godin—Make Something Everyday (Best Hour You'll Spend Today)

what's up everybody today could not have come sooner as soon as I knew this guest sorry next guests coming on the show I was super excited and here we are and I can't tell you who it is yet but you're definitely not going to want to miss this episode so stop what you're doing drop it tell a friend tune in right now because on our show we have Seth Godin I want to say two things before I kind of run through my deck first is I'm starting this episode with a little bit of regressive regret and remorse in my heart because there are more questions I'm going to have than the time permitted to do this so this one's going to be weird the second thing is Seth has done an amazing job of sharing his thoughts making it visible in written form and doing videos on all kind of kind of stuff I'm gonna be honest there's probably no question that hasn't been asked of Seth at this point in time but I feel like this could possibly be if I do my job well with the help of Ben burns to the rest of the team and you of course this could be the best of so with that let's jump into it let's look at my deck this episode is gonna be epic how epic well let me tell you some facts about Seth Godin he's a best-selling author of over I'm sorry of 18 books that have been translated into 35 languages he's written and spoken on topics such as the post-industrial revolution ways ideas spread marketing of course quitting leadership and he's written a bunch of books like linchpin all marketers are liars slash tell stories Purple Cow which many of you guys probably know about already the dip permission marketing the Icarus deception and tribes he's written a blog post a day every day like forever guys forever that's a lot of post and because that he's he's got one of the most popular blogs in the world 2018 he was inducted into the marketing Hall of Fame he's a mass of tremendous following on Twitter over six hundred sixty-three thousand followers he's credited as inventing commercial email not spam we could talk about that little bit more he's also been the first to develop educational games raised something like over $225,000 for a Kickstarter book project he's created the alt MBA again we'll talk about that and he's described himself as a person who notices things for a living we like to call him troublemaker because the things he does and talks about is truly markable well who am i talking a lot of course I already told you we have Seth Godin on the show you guys alright Seth my brother from another mother I've dressed up for you today I know that you like a little flair of color so you guys can't see it but I'm wearing blue glasses and this is the closer that I have to yellow so my orange tie beautiful beautiful first of all thank you for doing this I know you're a busy person where to spend the next 60 minutes with you and so I'm gonna just dive right in if you don't mind okay so you did this TED talk which really caught caught my eye on intention and something that I feel very passionate about it's felt like you were speaking directly to me a talk called stop stealing dreams and what is school really for and some of the summary notes just to get you guys caught up with speed and in case you guys want to Ben's gonna drop the link in the chat box and also in the description below you guys so some ideas that are kind of radical to some who don't know anything about Seth he talks about maybe we should do homework during the day and lectures at night it should be open book open note all the time we should be able to take any course any time in anywhere and instead of doing mass education it should be precise focus education he wants to end multiple choice exams and instead we should measure experience versus test scores in compliance as an outcome you you talk about resumes and what that's a form of well we get into that cooperation versus isolation and to amplify the outliers the people on the edge and teachers should be coaches we want to create lifelong learners at an early stage and to put an end and death to the famous college so I'm gonna start up and just kind of tee you up for this one because I want to hear you pontificate on this what is school for you asked this question a lot in the TED talk right so the core first thanks for the great intro thank you for we need to ask that question my answer as important as every parent every kid every teacher asking the question what is school for because my antrum might not be right my answer is two things teach kids how to lead teach kids how to solve interesting problems that's it because if you know how to lead and you know how to solve interesting problems you will always be able to find a job you will always be able to create value and you will never get bored that's the opposite of what school was 400 years ago which is trained compliant factory workers to do what they're told and work cheap and I don't think we need that so much anymore I think we need the other thing mmm-hmm well there's an issue that coming up a lot now with artificial intelligence and machine learning and it seems like what you're saying is even more relevant today I got back recently from the Philippines and they're one of the world's largest call centers and they're already being replaced and displaced in ways that I think is gonna cause massive disruption in their local economy so this idea of creating obedient compliant people it is part of the the system that was created to teach us in theory so what are their alternatives right now like what would we do differently if we could just start over and design school systems for the economy and then the information age we live in can you give us some ideas on that please well let's begin with this if it's worth memorizing mm-hm it worth not memorizing because the amount that you can look up online if you know what to look up is close to infinity what's the purpose of knowing how old George Washington was when the Revolutionary War happened just look it up and so we begin with this competence is overrated if we can write down your job we can find someone cheaper than you to do it in fact that the thing we find to do it might not even be a person so that means we need to teach kids to eagerly do jobs that cannot be written down and so the pressure in a universe with call centers is top-down we're pushing people to do evermore menial labor and bottom-up we're pushing computers to do that same job and so people are getting squeezed in and the alternative is to be a linchpin to race to the top and to say I solve interesting problems problems that no one's solved before if you can look it up don't call me I'm the person who can help you if you can't look it up wow that sounds wonderful but in such a large society can every is that a realistic endeavor for everybody to be able to solve problems that can't be solved I'm not worried about it I'm not worried about everybody if it happens to everybody that will be fascinating come back to me then I'm worried about you and your kids and those kids and those kids and those kids that to get 5 million people to take this leap would be unbelievable I say 250 million would be astonishing so that's the issue is not you know it's like when someone says we should eat healthy people don't show up and say well what will happen to the Doritos company because the fact is you can talk about eating healthy all you want McDonald's is still gonna be busy mm-hmm you do an interesting thing where you ask your audience I'm hoping am I giving anything away to everybody to raise your hand as high as possible and they do so and then you say raise a little higher and they're able to do that so why is it that we raise our hand but we we hold back what is it about us how we're hardwired or what we're taught that makes us I don't think hardwired I think we're brainwashed ok great by the industrial economy so the industrialist and and we've known this for a hundred years there's a tenth more than that Karl Marx thought there's a tension between the boss who wants unlimited effort for no money and the worker who wants to do as little as possible the reason the worker wants to do as little as possible is she knows that the boss is going to ask for more and we took that model and took it to coaches and to teachers and to the system and so everyone holds back because they know the boss is gonna ask for more the people who don't hold back are artists you don't see a playwright saying I had a really good line I could have put in this play but I saved it for my next play that never happens mm-hmm because when we're doing art we say how can I do more and when we're doing work we say how can I do less that's the difference between our didn't work so if you love what you do does that make you an artist or is there more to that I think there's more to it I think it's possible to decide to love what you do I say that it if you're on the chain gang and you know you're gonna be there for a year you could spend a whole year hating what you do or you could brainwash yourself into loving what you do because why not spend a year doing so than you love what I'm saying an artist does and a lot of artists I know hate what is you are staring into the void that you are doing work that might not work you are doing work without a manual you are showing up to make change happen in a generous way that you're not sure is going to work and that's really frightening mm-hmm so if you do things that are risky that things that might not work then you're heading towards becoming an artist I think that's true because what we got trained to do as compliant cogs in the system was find deniability find authority find the established protocol take good notes and repeat back to the teacher what we learned and that's not what solving interesting problems are and solving interesting problems is I don't know the answer to this let's figure it out mm-hmm and I can't remember the last time we taught a kid how to do that in a typical school mmm now I don't think you do this often but you you don't really talk about your personal life - unless your wife and I believe you have a kid or multiple kids yeah I don't talk about them it's their life to have not much okay so have you been able to incorporate some of your ideas into the way that you parent yeah can you expand on that a little bit no okay asked and answered okay moving on all right there's something else that you talked about that I want to just highlight here a little bit in terms of like mentors versus hero's can you speak about why you think maybe we don't need mentors so much well so there's this trope and it's pretty new the hustle people mm-hmm go find yourself a mentor that mint will look out for you that mentor will tail pull you along that mentor can change everything well if you can find someone like that please by all means but let's do the math right for every successful person in the public eye there's 2,000 people who want that person to be their mentor how does that math work okay mentors don't scale the alternative is to find heroes and they don't even need to know you exist you can ask yourself what would Susan do what would Tracy do what would Bob do and use their voice in your head as a compass to help you go on a path because heroes are easy to find and they scale like crazy so before you hide by saying well the reason I'm stuck is I don't have a mentor maybe what you ought to say is figure out the Shazam method the the the strength of s and the diligence of H and the persistence of a and the insight of Z whatever heroes you want to assemble as your advisors go find those heroes and then start you don't need anyone's permission did you come to that thought out of any reaction to people I imagine constantly asking you to be their mentor in fact it's what prompted the thought but I stand by it even if no one had ever asked and I'm just curious as a person who's so visible who's so prolific in writing and speaking do do people just mob you at these talks after you get off the stage people are generally very respectful and I am thrilled at that mm-hmm every once in a while and it's unfortunately it's happening a little bit more now people are in such pain that they forget that the other person they're dealing with is a person hmm it's interesting at Disneyworld the stuffed animal characters have security guards and the reason is people were pinching Tigger and Mickey as if because that other creature is wearing a mask you're invisible which is of course not true and often what we do is if there's someone we see who we know from afar we feel like there's a an ability to connect with them in a different way right and it's not true so I am super open to having come non-anonymous conversations with people I prefer not to do it by email because it's asymmetrical and most people are really respectful with me and if they're not I just have to excuse myself mmm it does that happen often that people cross over boundaries and aren't respectful of your choice not that I'm super lucky to be able to do what I do in that fantastic I bet you do we want to hit the internet yet or the yeah I have questions absolutely my give me the question alright so this comes from jazz fear Sidhu he's asking what are some daily habits to unbraid wash yourself oh that's a good question yeah so why was the brainwashing so easy I mean it took 12 years but it works it works on so many people why is that because the promise has two pieces three pieces part one in the future there's a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow this is how you will succeed promise number two if you listen to what I say I will not punish you and a problem problem promise number three is this will make you less afraid that if you wait to be told what to do it will make you less afraid so it's an irresistible set of promises so the habit and there's just one is regularly find generous work that scares you not selfish work that scares you generous work that scares you if you can dance with the fear it won't go away it will never go away but you can learn to use it as a compass so that when the fear shows up you can say oh that feeling I'm getting that's reminding me I'm on the right path and that is the habit once a day five times a day fifty times a day and this is why I'm so confirmed that everyone should blog every day even if no one reads it the act of blogging every day is a generous way to confront your fear and if you do it for a hundred days in a row you'll be able to look back and see 100 signposts you laid out on the ground to say here I made this I made this I said this I gave this I showed this do that a hundred times in a row that's a habit mmm now you've done things on the edge quite a bit you push boundaries you've made some tremendous innovations we talked about the earlier in the opening of the show I'm curious what would he do today that scares you from time to time or are you constantly scared well I'm getting older so I'm you know not as good at scaring myself so the new book came out today Oh fantastic and the inside is pictures of hundreds of my fans who sent in their picture to be on the inside of the book mm-hmm but I did that once already I did it inside a tribe so I knew it was so you know you hit your 50s and you start doing you steal from yourself mm-hmm but my my work is to figure out how to share emotions and stories with people to turn lights on for them and the part of it that scares me is wasting the privilege wasting the leverage wasting the opportunity so that's why I keep pioneering and pushing new ways to do it and encouraging people to copy me because if someone copies one of my methods I don't have to do it anymore hmm go on to the next thing mm-hmm I think you talked about in one of your lectures about how the cyclist was laying down and then is able to speed ahead of ahead of everybody else and then the guy on the moped sees the idea that he copies it and you said well here's the scary part is that after you innovate you can't just stop there you have to keep innovating right you have to keep pushing towards the edge and then I but I also said and that's the good news mm-hmm right that there are a lot of people who would like it to be once and done you know you climb Mount Everest once and you get to be famous for the rest of your life and that might have been true for Sir Edmund Hillary and his Sherpa but it's not true for the rest of us the movie Internet catches up too fast mm-hmm so how do you balance that when when you achieve something and you push the boundary and you surprise yourself in others and then you quickly realize that's now you have to go on to the next thing how do you take in that moment to celebrate it and then move on without feeling like depressed that now you have another thing to do well I don't know how you feel about lunch but the way I feel about lunch is I try to do it every day mm-hmm and what and when lunch is over I don't get your crap I think some of us could probably skip a lunch but yes you're right fantastic okay I got to tell you guys you know there's almost 400 people watching and I'm gonna say roughly about 75% have a new haircut now because they want to tap into the secrets of your success so everybody's going out in Vine Gillette razors and doing a new do that's right only successful people are bald that's just one hundred percent one hundred percent yes and you have to have funky glasses too so that's right yeah and possibly wear a suit yep possibly okay just on a lighter note lighter note so people can process what they've heard thus far because there's a lot of information that's already packed in here on the lighter note I know that you wear suits quite often do you have a favorite brain or tailor that you go to that you feel like this is the suit maker for me how do I go through cycles I about six months ago I decided to switch to Lululemon oh why did you do that I don't know I you know there was a there was early on there was an Armani cycle because suits used to fit me right yeah and then there's this this company in New York called my suit that's cheap but custom mm-hmm did that for a little while but you know I needed to wear a suit for a long time because I worked at home by myself and so for 15 years I went to work sort of naked and so I made a rule which is if I'm gonna leave the house for work I'm gonna wear a suit like one extreme or the other mm-hmm naked or sick Wow the whole world has gotten way more casual right well here in the office with me so it feels to me like there are audiences I speak to where it's not necessarily appropriate and I thought all right time for a shift so I shifted mm-hmm oh okay my wife is a fan of Lululemon so she brings me there and don't practice yoga or anything like that actually quite inflexible but she showed me some of their jackets and her clothing and it seems like it's kind of you can wear in a casual place you can go to the gym in it and you can also go to the board meeting which is fantastic if you travel a lot because you don't want to pack a lot of clothes with you right so I've learned to do all that without even taking a shower in between I would cost you some of the young listeners to definitely shower some of you guys think a little bit okay I have another question here I guess you touched on this and you've said this before whoever fails the most wins so are you a winner because you failed a lot well if I'm a winner it's because I failed a lot yeah now the key to that sentence is understanding that if you fail too big you don't get play anymore oh so that means you're not going to fail the most so part of failing the most is strategically failing at the right scale so when I was a book packager I would send out you know a proposal 30 proposals a month 20 proposals a month 40 proposals a month to different people and if any of them didn't work I was only out $0.50 that's really different than being a real estate developer betting everything you own on a building that sits vacant because now you're out of the game right and so my mom my mindset here is find a space where you get to play for a while long enough that you can get good at it by failing and make it so that your failure serve a purpose they're not annoying other people they're done in the service of generosity hmm I love that I mean the the original sentiment was pretty powerful but what you just did there to kind of expand on that is to teach us to make small calculated risks so you can be in the game long enough to succeed because I guess a failure is a true failures like your final failure where you have to end and give up right fail small yeah yeah love that okay let's see here Ben you have another good question from our audience on YouTube yeah Seth this comes from Chris Anthony what is the biggest miss take that people make when they're trying to craft a story or storytelling I would say two the first one is they don't try to craft a story but the second one is that they do it without empathy they think people care about them they think people believe what they believe want what they want know what they know and what practical empathy is is the generous act of realizing that other people don't know what you know don't want what you want and that's okay and then going to them based on their worldview and telling them a story that fits into the way they see the world because if you can't get enrollment from them they're not gonna listen to you and so that's the heart of telling a useful story not an authentic story because I think authentic is way overrated but useful when a professional would do which is telling the story to a to a person in a way that they can use it to move forward well I have to say for me to process they're pretty good on these shows but it's it's too dense it's because we just do the deep end oh my god well because so many people talk about trying to be authentic and now it's like hey forget about authenticity just be useful well let me tell you what I mean by that okay please though if you need a haircut I'm told and if you get there and you've gone all the way across town you don't want the barber to say aha I really don't feel like cutting your hair I just had a fight with my girlfriend no be a barber cuz you promised you were gonna be a barber I don't really care whether you're having a bad day I hired you to have a good day right now with me that is what it means to be a professional hmm there is a tiny tiny group of people on the internet who make a living baring their soul right that's a form of entertainment but that's not for the rest of us for the rest of us authenticity like what did you feel like this morning right here just know you told me you could make a change happen for me you promised me something might happen I'm interested let's do it mm-hmm that is a professionals work that's not the work of I don't feel like it right well this that's a perfect segue into something I heard on your podcast which is you going to tell us a history of like why the writer's block or craters block was how it was invented and you say well plumber doesn't have that luxury he doesn't have plumbers blog can't show up and say I'm not feeling like unclogging your drain can you expand on this idea that this writer's block is just a thing that we got to get over all right so I got to tell you I went to a movie this weekend called can you ever forgive me which is really good really and in it the main character goes to a party of a bunch of authors like an agents party at a fancy apartment mm-hmm and there is this blowhard pontificating at the party on and on quoting me without using my exact words about how writer's block is a myth hmm and after about 30 seconds of it she turns and says what a jackass this is on the movie yeah oh my god my wife my wife thought I was hysterical yeah anyway I may be a jackass but I'm correct writer's block is a myth okay and what does that mean it means that that feeling that we have when we say we can't write is really the feeling we have we say we can't write anything that's perfect that we are certainly capable of writing poorly no one has writing poorly block mm-hm mm-hm and so if you write poorly enough your brain will give up and sooner or later you will start writing well and so I take umbrage at people who say I don't know how you do that how do you write like no no one says that to a plumber no one says ah how did you find the energy to fix a toilet if that's what you do so go ahead and write if you want to write poorly write poorly if you tell me they've writer's block first show me all your bad writing if you can show me 50,000 words of bad writing then maybe I'll tell you you're not a writer but until you've done fifty thousand words of bad writing you have no idea if you're a writer or not mm-hmm I think I can speak on behalf of a lot of designers that are listening to this who and I've had part of my team tell me this Chris we just can't turn on the creativity whenever I just I have to be inspired to make this thing and I think part of that comes from their fear of right I don't want to do something that you're gonna judge me and I'm only as good as my last piece of work and so I'd rather sit here and do nothing and we've run experiments like this with groups that we coach where we say half of you guys just make a piece of artwork every single day and the other half make one masterpiece and of course we already know the outcome of this the people who do something every single day wind up making masterpieces in just the daily pursuit and most of the people who were asked to make a masterpiece missed the deadline yep they never finished hmm and you were like saying like somebody wants a comment on this yeah so this is a question from Darren by design he's he asked how do you overcome that fear of sharing what you know how do you overcome this question the quest for perfection is it oh sorry good no it can't be you cannot overcome it you can dance with it and the harder you try to overcome it the more you're giving it power because what it means to overcome it is you are saying I will be creative as soon as I get a standing ovation from my brain and your brain will not give you a standing ovation because it's afraid so what you have to say is I will be creative especially when my brain is freaking out that every day at 4 o'clock I'm gonna ship something and if you make that commitment and keep doing it then you will become creative perfect everybody in the comments is like hashtag procrastination army I'm so guilty of this it's touching a nerve for sure yeah so you guys you don't have any more excuses you got to get over it you got to stop using Mentors a crush and saying you aren't where you were supposed to be because nobody will help you and there are a lot of heroes there out there that you can learn from today okay I mean I have to admit in doing research for the show I'm watching a lot of your talks and I come across your your conversation with Gary Vaynerchuk and from the outsider and also reading the comments there was a lot of people angry Gary for asking you questions and cutting you off but I'll watch it several times at first I thought I think Seth is pissed off he says I'm gonna walk out on you but then you're still smiling and you guys are still hugging and touching each other and everything seems to be okay so can you clear the air for us are you mad at Gary what's going on there oh I'm not mad at Gary Gary Gary back to this idea of authenticity and being a professional do you think that Gary's like that all the time everywhere he goes no Gary is Gary playing the role of Gary mm-hmm I know that and he knows that and we're fine it's great it's not professional wrestling or I guess maybe it is right and so but there was one point in there he started talking about something where I did seem I thought I saw a real reaction from you but when it came to science Rick no yeah let's not get into superstitions it's a science and that science and that's it exactly because it's that's not a laughing matter that's not something to pull around with it's a matter of life and death mm-hmm though people are totally entitled to their own opinions right but they're not entitled to their own facts hmm facts are what got us here I mean you and I are 3,000 miles away connected by satellite for free talking to each other on machines that would have cost 10 million dollars right 15 years ago all of which were based on facts and I don't want to give facts up I don't want to give up the facts that gave us clean water and it gave us all the benefits that we've gotten you know people who are watching this did not wake up this morning wondering if their kids were gonna die of food poisoning and I'm really glad that that's true hmm okay perfect thanks for clearing that up because there was a lot of speculation and videos made after the fact analyzing play-by-play what's happening not a very good analogy by the way so there you guys heard it from Seth's mouth okay there's a heart transition here I want to ask you a different question and I believe what you believe I think in in this whole idea of education system being created like this factory thing to make compliant obedient workers to exploit them for their labor I think and I was asked this question during a talk and I didn't have a great answer so I'm pretty sure you could have a much better answer then I did so you went to Stanford you're a well studied person you've gone through education you read prolifically and so if you are a part of that system how would you have turned out if you weren't part of that system because we're talking about changing the system or at least asking the question of what school is for sure well first I'll say this if you are super lucky like me and you have support from amazing parents and you get a pretty good head start which gets you the magic grades which gets you into a super famous college that you can afford to go to knowing that you are going so you could get a job at Bain or McKinsey or Accenture or Goldman Sachs and that's what you want then you should go that going to one of the top five business schools is the single highest yield way you can make a lot of money if you want to be a management consultant who flies around the world where someone who moves pile from money from one pile to another mm-hmm but for everybody else it's a massive waste of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in tuition and opportunity cost and you don't think my word for it we've got tons of data about this here's one fascinating one that I got from I believe Malcolm Gladwell or a book about Harvard one or the other which is this if you look at people who got into Harvard and went and you compare them to people who got into Harvard and didn't go both groups are equally happy and equally well-off Wow whoa so what does that tell you right what it tells you is there's a sorting mechanism that's going on and sometimes an imprimatur can pay off but four years is a really long time and I hundreds of thousands of dollars is a lot of money yeah you know what happened to me as an undergrad the thing that mattered the most to me in college by far is I co-founded with three other people what became the largest student-run business in America we had 400 employees at a college with 4,000 students in it and I started a new division every week so we had a birthday cake service and a ticket bureau and a coffee shop and temporary employment agency and a bagel delivery service and on and on and on and I only got paid 50 bucks a week to do it because it was semi related to the school the sense that we got their insurance and stuff but that act of when I didn't have to pay rent and when I didn't have to support a family that I could start a new business all the time that's when I got out of college more than anything and so when I say to people is if you're going because you think you can comply your way to success keep getting an A until when you get to the placement office you get the ultimate a which is you get picked for a great job and then you do a an a-level job there and you move up and you move up and you move up well your list living in 1961 that that's left the building instead figure out how to build a life with low enough overhead where you can be a creator of ruckuses the kind of person that goes into the world and makes things better by making better things over and over again because that's how you're gonna learn how to fail that's how you're gonna learn how to solve interesting problems and then the world will start a line at your door instead of you having to get picked by them they're gonna say please help me with this problem and that's what we need to be known by we need to be known by our work not our resume hmm whoo Ben yeah another question I have more questions and I'm so nervous because I'm I'm watching the timer countdown and the it feels like sands slipping through my fingers are Ben I I do want to talk about this a little bit you talked about how Henry Ford was able to do something rather remarkable he was able to take a person who was getting paid I think five dollars a day at that time and got them to be paid $50 because he taught him a specific skill that they can make and learn how to make profit off of that and actually it was 50 cents to five dollars I'm sorry 50 cents to five dollars it was a gigantic jump and so it was that a good thing that has happened or is that a not a good thing oh it totally changed the world world in a whole bunch of ways the bad news is it paved the planet the good news is it went to a whole bunch of people who were used to scraping by and it made the middle class not only it ford's employees become middle class able to send their kids to school through 12th grade able to buy a house but it raised the bar because it meant if you wanted to compete for those workers you better do the same thing so Henry Ford more than anybody is responsible for inventing the middle class of America so that's really good the magic of industrialism is how productive it made people we went from a car needing I don't know three thousand four thousand dollars worth of labor to a car needing two hundred dollars worth of labor because it was so efficient but the thing is that was a long time ago once you get to 200 you can't get to 20 until it's all robot based and at 20 that means there's no one to do the work so the industrial thing is over now that everything is so cheap and so perfect it's really unlikely you're gonna make a lot of money working on an assembly line doing industrial work because we found a computer to do it instead and so the new revolution is the one that says wait a minute everyone has a keyboard everyone is one click away so here you are talking to people around the world and none of them have met you before so you've built this resource without a building without millions of dollars if you add a zero to that number it will make an even bigger difference to people you had two zeros to that number you'll be independently wealthy and so the question is how will human beings enter this connection economy without too many scars left over from the industrial economy mm-hmm you know this relates to a great question that we have from the comments this again comes from Jeff veer Sidhu he asks how do we integrate that education and learning into the workplace without disrupting things like deadlines and productivity things like that well there's no chance you're not going to disrupt everything I mean isn't that what happened when Henry Ford showed up when Henry Ford showed up there were 2,300 car companies in the United States think about that well he killed them all because here he was selling $600 cars and his competitors were selling $3,000 cars boom they were all gone Henry Ford was not a hero to the people who had 2,300 car companies and so the same thing is true you know if you if you look at what is a newsroom look like you know go go look at all the President's Men or even spotlight the newspaper used to be organized a certain way but when you take away the paper and you take away the need for everyone to be in the same building what does the newspaper look like today I think it looks a lot like what we're doing right now right right so all of a sudden people say well you've disrupted everything yeah we have do you get called upon by companies to help them to innovate their way out of a box like you were mentioning newspaper companies and traditional publishing companies they're having a hard time making this digital jump and so I see you out there saying hey guys is the problem everybody wake up do they call you and say hey help us out set well I don't do any consulting and oh okay never and the reason is I would think if I took one's money I'd better be able to solve their problems and I don't think I can solve their problem I think I can describe the problem I didn't tell them how I would solve the problem but to them to solve it so instead you know I spoke to the newspaper publishers of America 22 years ago mm-hmm I described in detail how they were all gonna disappear and I didn't do it to be mean to them I did it to them with them because it wasn't too late and I'm not always successful because what we know from the innovators dilemma is that successful companies are usually the last ones to do giant leaps forward right because they don't want to give up what they already got and by the time they don't have it anymore it's too late well as a person who talks about catering to the edge and paying attention to what happens on the edge do you write and do you make content because you want to be that that light tower for companies is Alec wow he's seeing something and you're connecting things like you noticed things is what you've said before so that they can hopefully save themselves on the many people that depend on them on making the right decisions yeah most of what I do is not on the edge okay you know in 92 when I started an email company I was on the edge because almost no one had email and in 98 99 when I wrote permission marketing it was super controversial if you look at the response to the new book there aren't very many people say I'm a wild-eyed crazy person and that's because over time innovators have the choice to move through the curve to reach more people or they can stay as innovators so if we look at a company like Apple for 25 years it was a company where their customers were nerds early adopters and edge cases mm-hm and since Steve has died tim has chosen true to change the company to one that almost never innovates in a significant way but instead offers a different kind of upside to a different kind of user and so as I am shifting more and more to being a teacher my goal is not to say something so revolution Neri that no one ever thought of it before my goal is to talk about things that are important in ways that people can understand in ways they haven't understood before mm-hmm okay I guess is that the arc that you're out on the edge and then you say things are pretty radical and eventually you you take those ideas and you help to kind of spread them towards the middle is that what happens yeah because because I'm a teacher I didn't take the posture of saying how do I always look for a new thing I believe the revolution started in 1990 we're only you know 28 years into it and this is our revolution and I've been chronicling it for those many years mm-hmm so the revolution is getting a little less revolutionary because the revolution is connection that's it so I keep writing and talking about what does it mean that we can now connect to all the data in the world to all the people in the world all the workers in the world to all the customers in the world that's my thesis I might been the same for 28 years hmm well I really admire how you're able to go out there and write and share what you know so I have a question as in terms of your process when you're when you're giving a keynote because I've been watching many of them I'm curious about how you prepare for these things I have my own theories but I'd like for you to talk about that if you if you if you can alright so something I innovated about 25 years ago is a different way to use PowerPoint and I wrote a book called really bad PowerPoint booklet and then and I said you should never put bullets in a PowerPoint presentation because if you want to give me words send me a memo the PowerPoint is great at showing me pictures and then I can save the words with my voice or I can send you a memo so now I can go to both parts of your brain the part of your brain that's gonna see the picture of the cow in the pasture it's gonna hear the words about what that means and so my presentation now changes every time but it has between 150 and 250 slides in it that I cover in 45 or 50 minutes and so every one of those pictures reminds me of a story and I tell the story differently every time depending on who I'm talking to mm-hmm but so that's my template now one out of every five times that's not what I do 105 times I either don't use any slides at all or do all new ish material hmm but most of the people who hire me to give a talk would prefer I do something that works as opposed to something that has never been tested with the right so that's what I do mm-hmm and it doesn't bore me that I have greatest hits yeah it eases me that I have greatest hits and I feel like I can deliver those greatest hits in a way that's coherent that fits in with my new ideas and my old ones and that resonate with people and what I have found is even people who have seen my stuff more than once and I would put you in that category don't say to me it's boring the second time which is what they'd be saying if I was a comedian but they say to me oh I saw something in this a second time I didn't realize that was there right and so that's what I'm trying to do is open the door for people to have a conversation after I leave mm-hmm change what happens around the conference room table after I'm done so I have so many questions because as a person you're so prolific in in writing and creating content I see these slides and you were able to find both obscure stories about people and some strange slides that get everybody to laugh like the sign with the the bird the seagull with a cross and like no seagulls and there's a seagull on top like do you have an assistant that digs these things up or you just start to collect these images knowing that somewhere in your life you're gonna be able to tell a story about that we read to make this really clear I don't have an assistant okay I haven't had an assistant if you see my words or my work I did it mm-hmm Orton to me let me tell you a little bit about the seagull picture mm-hmm I don't know where I found this Eagle picture I fell in love with it immediately and I've been using it ever since but I wanted a higher resolution version of it because it's a little grainy right so about five summers ago I went and I made a commercially graded sign of the pigeon with the slash to it mm-hmm I put on a commercial-grade stick and I went to the beach in New Jersey and I covered the top of it with bread crumbs like what this chick in this thing yeah and I took my camera and I waited for a seagull to land on top and start eating the bread crumbs and I sat there for half an hour and I couldn't get a seat like bread crumbs or something and so what happened so I still use the old one oh my god I tell you what chef just as a token of our appreciation for you coming on the show you send me that sign we will take care of that for you and I'll get a seagull on there one way or the other with Photoshop magic or one way the other I will give you promised you a high-resolution image so that you can tell that joke in full high resolution HD quad HD fidelity okay we can do that okay that was fantastic so the other thing is I noticed that that talk that you gave the TED talk and I know TED talks are very rehearsed and they they work on all this stuff with you is that right we didn't know they were gonna be on video it was a seek no one it was like a secret like in the back room they were filming you know they felt they were there were cameras but you know Richard Saul Wurman started Ted thirty years ago and it was only for 300 people it was a dinner party and all of the old ones right Sir Ken Robinson the number one popular one my first TED talk I can name dozens of them none of those people knew it was gonna be broadcast because none of them had ever been broadcast mm-hmm what until 92 thousand four or five - Chris started putting on the Internet and we all have such big egos then when someone saw their video on the internet for me no one complained right but no one knew that they were being that it was gonna be a thing I don't one mm-hmm so they filmed them for posterity and then later on they released that thinking whoever said idea worth sharing or spreading then we should share it and spread it and so it goes beyond the three other people okay so I'm watching that video stop stealing dreams and then I I searched for that because I was trying to recap for the show and then I see that you have a medium post on that and it goes through the entire thing so one of my questions is I always am in all of writers when they give a presentation because it feels like every word every joke every pause has been thought out and worked out in advance he's out the case with you do you kind of know the structure so what happened with that one mhm I wrote a fifty to eighty thousand word rant which you can still read online for free it's been downloaded four million times called stop stealing dreams it's it's accent everybody download that I'll include the link in the description later thanks and then I got a call from this school in Brooklyn doing a TEDx will you come talk about it oh I see and I talk exactly once mm-hmm and I've never given it since and I practiced it for half an hour before I went Wow okay cause yes the reason I'm telling you that it's not because I'm bragging I'm telling you that because a presentation is a transfer of emotion mmm if you're gonna practice it and practice it and practice it just send me a memo instead because people can tell I'd rather be present and explaining myself like I didn't rehearse this conversation with you today right well I don't regret what I've said because I'm present I'm here I see you I see your team and I'm doing my best to communicate that's what we need more of we don't need polished time to punchlines I love that you said that I really do and it's even scarier now that you said that I don't know you help me or hurt me because I was thinking oh my god that's what all the professionals do they show up they're prepared and they've written it all out and there's many people who teach this process and I don't want to start any beef between you and simon Sinek because I look up to him as well I saw that you were on a show together but Simon as I see him go from lecturer venue to lecture venue he has the exact same joke the exact same pause even the awkward phrasing and the stuttering is all built into it and he's fantastic so I was sitting there thinking I'm doing this all wrong I'm using the slides like you say they're prompts for me to talk and tell the story but then sometimes I don't tell it exactly the way I thought it was gonna play out in my mind let me tell you I'm gonna interrupt about Simon three things first he's in the CIA don't tell him I told you okay second I've seen him give a talk with no notes that he did not prepare before until two minutes before he got there mm-hmm he's great at it yeah but the third thing is I gave 200 talks a hundred talks that I paid money to give before anyone ever hired me to give a speech mm-hmm so you're gonna need to practice a lot yeah that's okay mm-hmm that's like your thing about blogging mm-hmm writing every single day until you get something good okay I know we're short on time so I have to talk to you about the alt mb8 can you tell us what the alt MBA and what you're trying to do with it so after stopped killing dreams I started thinking really hard about how I could help change education what would be a version that I could bring forward as an example so we launched the alt n be a two years ago it's a four week intensive workshop its elite it's hard you have to apply to get in it's not cheap you can be in any one of the 44 countries we support we have coaches and video conferencing we do not have me I am NOT in it okay there's video it's project based or what happens in those four weeks is you give more feedback than you've ever given in your life you get more feedback you learn to see things differently you learn to skip you learn to be engaged with projects and at the end of the month you say I can't believe I got that much done and so it changes the story you tell you yourself which lets you change the story you tell other people and we were only gonna run at once but we run it 26 times so far and we will keep running it as long as really passionate people show up hoping to level up mm-hmm if I'm considering enrolling in the course and implying to the system who is it for ideally how much does it cost it costs thirty-eight hundred bucks it's very reasonable well yeah I think so I think it's a screaming bargain but it's also more than a twelve dollar udemy course right who's it for it doesn't matter where you live how much money you make how old you are or what your job is we don't care about any of those things what we care about is are you thirsty are you passionate are you generous are you interested in getting to the next level and the application is really simple it takes five minutes but we can tell right away what kind of people you are and if you're our kind of people we would love that somebody runs this part for you then process and our Provost is in Toronto our Bursar's and project organizers here in New York so we have 80 coaches around the world all of them are alumni every single one of them mm-hmm and so there isn't a place we are everywhere and I am still involved but I am not present as a teacher hmm fantastic okay I know you have to run so I'm gonna say a few things before we say goodbye to Seth III also want to say he's a trouper because he's sick I'm sick we're both doing this show this is what professionals do we show up and I didn't know that this dropped today so I changed this book number 19 this is marketing written by Seth Godin drops today and this will be sold on Amazon or directly to your site Seth no I by penguin it went to the top 25 on Amazon Oh fantastic so again we'll include that link in the description below I want to thank you the sustaining members this is how you get in touch with Seth he's at this is--that's blog on twitter and if you want to read some of his writing you go to Seth's dot blog and also Seth Godin dot-com said thank you very much for coming on the show really appreciate it what a privilege you guys are true professionals it was really fun thank you thank you very much ok I think that's it we're gonna get taken out of the show right Erica all right that's if you just hold on for a second I think we're gonna I think we're supposed to ramble on about something and just so that we can get all the credits up she does not except for a we we just have no mics on her right now because of the way I just I felt badly because it looked like everyone there had a cold if we keep saying this close together everybody will get sick and then

Channel: The Futur

Views: 361,256

Rating: 4.9376888 out of 5

Keywords: seth godin, permission marketing, tribes, marketing, education, stop stealing dreams, tedx, the dip, author, most popular blogger, blog, altMBA, purple cow, writer, blogger, speaker, summary, best of, highlights, the futur, chris do, make something everyday, writers block, creative block, most popular blogs, TEDx spaker, TED speaker, seth godin marketing, seth godin linchpin, seth godin purple cow, seth godin impact theory, seth godin 2018, marketing 101, purple cow seth godin

Id: kZmxAOHyDBI

Length: 56min 9sec (3369 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 13 2018