A FORMULA FOR AUTHENTIC CREATIVITY with Seth Godin

hey euro listen to the James Altucher show on YouTube you're gonna learn all about peak performance from today's greatest influencers and how you can get there as well I upload a new video every Monday Tuesday and Thursday don't forget to subscribe click on the bell notification so you don't miss a thing so I've got once again Seth Godin on the podcast welcome a privilege it's good to see you again I almost don't even know how to interview you've written like a gazillion best-selling books let's get to the good stuff then we'll talk well but I but I want to mention though your books are all fascinating like I spoke ever read was purple cat which is probably the many people's intro to you which was an amazing book about marketing that still applies and I also maybe like a year ago I read I love to remind me to no grace or graceful yeah graceful was an excerpt from linchpin I just love that book it's just how to act in the world with grace and I just thought it was such a moving book and written so many books about marketing you've written as you've mentioned you've written about 7,000 posts on your blog you blog every single day which is sort of and you've also written about how you avoid writer's block which is how you've been able to write 7,000 posts we'll talk about that a little bit all of your posts are so insightful you're such a smart thinker but now more recently you've started this podcast a Kimbo which again as I'm listening to it I'm thinking to myself and other people who listen to it with me it's like you're just you're such a thinker there's no way to really describe Thanks you're like you're like this modern philosopher which I don't know if you would describe yourself that way I don't view you as like a businessman marketer writer I really think of you as like this modern-day philosopher and even though your your origin story in my mind you talk about origin stories one of your podcasts but my origin story for you is you you were in the marketing business for many years decades you started a business sold it to Yahoo then started writing books initially focused on marketing so I initially I think you're a businessman marketer but you've really transformed into so many other things and a Kimbo your podcast there's so many interesting topics you've covered in such a short amount of time and will discuss some of them but what made you start a podcast but I've been thinking about a podcast for seven years I did a retreat six or seven years ago and recorded the whole thing four people couldn't come and then we broke it into 14 pieces and made it into a podcast this was your video podcast that I always saw in the iTunes it was never it wasn't videoed it was the number one business podcast for years and years and years cuz no one else had about right but I resisted the temptation to have a podcast a real one because I know people from radio like Krista Tippett right and it took me months to undo who I thought they were because of the intimacy of listening to them every week on the radio why did you have to undo who they were that's not who she is she's someone on the radio but in real life she's my friend right and the faux intimacy of audio is different than the phone intimacy of print because when you read something in print the voice in your head is your voice when you listen to audio the voice is the other person's voice and I was worried that once you give that intimacy away you can't take it back and so I knew the kind of podcast I wanted to make and I was taking notes about it and I knew I wanted to be the only guest and I knew it wanted to be short in blah blah blah but I just resisted and then probably too late on the curve I said sure we'll do it now but it's not a commercial venture it's not designed to be the most popular podcast it's just can i show up and do what i do which is teach people and help them see the world a little differently and I've been doing that for a really long time and podcasts the fun way to do it and and why you decide you know cuz you you've been doing that for years and years and years and you're writing it on your blog and so on why did you think that now is the time that okay podcast is a new outlet to do that because a lot of these topics you also write about yeah so as you and I were talking about earlier your insight was people don't consume media the same way the attention spans keep getting shorter oh look a puppy right and a podcast it turns out gets to a different part of the brain a different kind of listener in a different way I can take my time they're not gonna check their email because they're driving I hope they're not gonna check your email and so it's about being in the medium that has two things one that your reader listener wants to be in and to this is really important where you are doing the work you are proud of so I'm not going on Twitter I'm not interested in going on Twitter because even though people want to consume my tweets I don't want to write my tweets because I wouldn't be proud of the change I was making in order to make Twitter work for me whereas in a podcast I feel like this is a place where I can plant the seeds I want to plant and if that's the way they want to absorb it then we have a deal and you said you wanted only yourself as a guest I really find that to be a fascinating format you know for the past five years I've been doing this podcast and I would say 99% of my podcasts have been with a guest sure but lately I've been thinking also oh you know sometimes I have things to say where there is no guest and so I've been debating changing format so I've been listening to your podcast to see how it works and it works great it does require it to be a little shorter because it's it's kind of like the talking head phenomenon anti-b no it was actually just listen watch a talking head but with it shorter it really works and you're hitting a couple different topics you have nice break points yeah and I think you you are multi-patient 'el and and omnivorous enough to do the same thing right which is you have to make an assertion it's not interesting if there isn't an assertion what are you saying that's not obvious how do you support that point of view and if you can't do it in 15 minutes you probably can't do it at all and so interesting and you know I was gonna say and you started ringing up just then there is an almost formula to your podcast in the sense that you kind of take a belief that is opposite of or slightly different from a commonly held belief and then you spend the rest of the podcast defending your your perspective as new for many people and I find that to be you you say you're not trying to have a hit podcast but I find that to be a good formula for making a hit podcast or hit anything well yes I think that there's a just thought reversal there's a distinction between Malcolm and me there are two distinctions one is he's significantly more successful and popular than me but the second one is part of Malcolm Gladwell's approach that podcast is called revisionist history is to deliberately go in the opposite direction I'm more focused on overlooked under thought ignored or most of all the thing you're afraid to confront so my best posts people say are obvious I like that I like that I said something that after you read it you said of course but if I had asked you before you read it you wouldn't even have had it on your radar but and you mentioned the same thing in your podcast and your akimbo podcast about hits in the one titled Hitsville that after somebody sees a hit they often say oh of course that was hit a hit but nobody ever predicted right could have predicted that thing would have been a hit you know you like The Da Vinci Code you use as an example or you know Psy's Gangnam style and so I wanted to maybe I wanted to talk about a couple year podcast I thought some of the ideas were so interesting but let's start with Hitsville which I think was a you've been doing it in seasons as well and I think that was the season before this one or maybe the first it was the first episode of the second episode yeah and so so in Hitsville you talk about you know first there are platforms for creating hits like Amazon is this platform where you're gonna find many books that aren't in your local book store there's gonna be millions and millions of books for as a local book store we'll have 10,000 books so there's an opportunity is different opportunities for hits to occur because money more books could be sold there but you don't want to live on the long would you all the long tail will Chris Anderson cause the long tail um so let's talk about that for saying because I feel like in the beginning of that podcast you're talking more about the platform's rather than the hits themselves and the end and the ideas behind the hits so maybe just how are you thinking about it's okay why is this important to the typical person the reason it's important is we've gone from 50,000 books published a year to millions of books we've gone from a few people have a radio show to a million people have a podcast we've gone from no one has a blog to a team so all of a sudden everyone is out there with their stuff and the platform's Twitter Facebook Amazon iTunes they all need creators show up with their stuff because if there's no one showing up with stuff there's nothing to buy and what they've done is built this game where they've told you that if you don't have a hit if you don't have the most followers if you haven't hit number one if you haven't earned the most money you're somehow defective and so our culture has shifted to lots and lots of quote ordinary people wanting to have a hit in whatever space they are in and we've taught people if you don't have a hit you sort of have to apologize for and the thing is as Chris Anderson pointed out in his book the long tail benefits the person who owns the platform so Amazon doesn't care what books sell iTunes doesn't care what music sells they're gonna sell all of it so by selling all of it they open the door for lots of people to show up here's the problem the trap the problem is if you're making Jamaican polka music and you're way out on the edge of the longtail you're probably selling one track a day that's typical many songs on the iTunes store sells zero that you're busy making a podcast you have a hundred listeners you way out on the edge well apples fine with that but you're not so what do you do about it and that's what what I was trying to point out in the podcast is a couple things one is we bet that editors and people like editors can pick the hits the answer is they can't never and never never and number two is we believe that somehow we can game our way to the top and I wanna argue we shouldn't try it's it's funny I just wanna talk about that point a lot of these platforms set are set up to make you think you can game your way to the top right so for instance take Amazon is a great example let's say you write a book many people want to write books when you go on to write best-selling books Amazon's created so many categories if you even if you don't hit number one in the entire Amazon store you can always tell your friends oh yeah I hit number one in paranormal fantasies for boomers ages 2 to 4 right exactly so so there's thousands of categories where you can hit potentially hit number one and you can even game that I'm gonna pick the Caddy they let you pick three categories you could I find many people pick categories that have nothing to do with their book it's so they can be number one in that category right and that bragging isn't working anymore this you know you and I know that the New York Times bestseller list is completely gamed from now on and even bought yeah but forty thousand dollars you can buy yourself a slot eighty thousand dollars you can be number one and lots of people have done this why cuz then they get to brag that they have a number one bestseller which means they think that then they'll get speaking gigs and bubble and pay for itself so the people who matter now understand it means nothing to be a number one New York Times bestseller nothing so don't even try my argument is instead of trying to reach the large undifferentiated masses seek the smallest viable audience and this is what my new book is about then the smallest viable audience does several things for you first of all it requires you to make better work because that small group if there's only 500 people who are gonna be in the core group you're serving you better delight them you better blow them away because otherwise they won't tell their friend number two is it is truly achievable if you can describe the 500 people you seek to serve you can find them you can afford to reach them so it brings our work to a new grounding a foundation where we can say I sought to serve these 500 people to change them to influence them to delight them and I did and if you can say that now it's not up to Amazon it's not up to Netflix it's up to you and your relationship with that group it's so funny because this brings up several things one is Kevin Kelly's great essay of course a thousand true followers that the idea is that you need a thousand super devoted followers basically and you can make a living hmm the other is it reminds me of your last book which is this massive beautiful beautiful book and I pull if we had the title I think I have early onset Alzheimer's but what this might not work this way now and it was just a beautiful book it did blow me away and you came on the podcast to talk about it where you only sold 500 copies right how many copies do 5,000 copies 5000 right and that I refuse to make more so if once you know that right once you know the revenues gonna be a million dollars there's gonna be five thousand readers it's gonna be seventeen and a half pounds it's going to be eight hundred pages go make something you were proud of and that's enough because if I had tried to make it into a hit I would have compromised every one of the elements of it because no one would have signed I would not know it but a hundred thousand people wouldn't have bought a book that big and that extraordinary so I would have made it less of it and then what would I have gotten yeah yeah cuz I guess when you try to make something for the masses for millions and millions of people you might think to yourself okay well if I only hit one tenth of that I'm still selling a lot but the problem is you might just totally bomb you might never yeah but okay I'm gonna you bring up Psy's Gangnam style and I remember watching the video once the development of Psy's Gangnam style and you see psy every quarter second of that video he's working hard in the editing to make that quarter second funny and interesting sure so and he's aiming for a hit for the masses well but what we didn't see are the five hundred videos of the five hundred other people who spent even more time than he did also doing what he did and none of them succeeded so psy which his videos been seen more than two billion times right how does that happen we don't know how it happens and we know we cannot repeat it it is not based on his talent because if it was the one after that and one to that and one after that would be successful and he's invisible now he's gone why did something break inside of him no it's that his talent was never the point you have to be good enough and then after that it's a giant spin in the wheel and the arrogance of Western civilization is to say I won the spin therefore I must be good right and it's all that's not necessarily the case and you mentioned the concept of Wales that there are a few people in each tail on each platform who kind of let's say dominates the message of that platform and so you look at the background of almost all these hits and there's usually someone like a Justin Bieber who tweets oh my god I just saw the most amazing video Psy's Gangnam style and then that and then it takes off from there and without that one tweet it never would have caught fire yeah this is you know Malcolm wrote about this in the tipping point and it's been discussed a lot there's and Duncan it Columbia goes into this a lot too there's plenty of evidence that that's not actually what happens hmm that Justin came later in the process for something like that that usually it begins with people we don't expect it to begin with yeah Oprah needs to anoint somebody once a month and if you can get picked by Oprah if you can get picked by Justin Bieber go for it I'm not opposed to that but don't bet your happiness and your work on that magic happening and it's way more likely than what's going to happen is a small group of committed people are going to come out of nowhere around you're a thing and in epidemiology there's this concept of R naught R with a zero after it which is how many people who got a disease in fact how many do they infect and if it's over one it means you have a pandemic on your hands so it's very rare for something to go over one that one person gets you one person gets one person because that's infinity for something like the flu to spread it there's moments when it goes over one but usually it goes back down so when we make a piece of work that we want to spread mistake to try to get the gatekeeper to like it there the correct answer is to find though 500 people are the thousand people who cannot go to bed tonight without telling somebody else because then our our is not is over 1 then we have a pandemic on our hands and then the question is will the people after that and the people after that so you said Purple Cow was one of the first books of mine you read why did it spread right it's not better or worse written than my other books it spread because what happened was first I seeded it to 3,000 people those 3,000 people got it in a milk carton and then some of them left it on their desk you don't usually leave a book on your desk if you do everyone ignores it but if there's a milk carton on your desk your co-workers might ask about it so it was an example of what it was about but the real win was I gave you a term to use in a meeting and at the meeting you could say to your art director your product development people what we need here is a purple cow and there wasn't a term for that before but because you had the term and using the term would make you feel good you used it and because you used it people talked about the term and when people talked about the term they needed to know what it meant when they need to know what two meant they would go by the book okay but let me question on that so your so you mentioned Malcolm Gladwell's tipping point I could think of other books like Freakonomics or in my book choose yourself where we sort of not quite invent a term but creates a philosophy around a term right and almost define that philosophy around a specific time like you changed the meaning of the word the words purple cow Malcolm Gladwell change the meaning of the tipping point or at least made his name associated with that phrase so you can argue then okay if I want to create a hit the very first and you've told me this before what makes a best-selling book not what's inside the pages but what people see when they first look at it one of the things they see is the cover one of the things they see is the title so you can start to plan a hit based on what people's first reactions are to what they see well let me title for instance let me try it with a little more nuance which is every hit changes the people it touches it doesn't simply entertain them it makes a change happen and that's what marketers do we make change happen but that requires making an assertion saying I want you to feel this feeling I want you to believe this belief and once you see it you can't unsee it so that change has to happen before you slap a title on it before you make coverage and what change am i trying to make here in the way someone engages with us and this runs counter to our allergy of being criticized because if you don't want to be criticized you have to be invisible you have to fit in all the way and so if we look at what most people do on social media what most people do in their day job is they seek to fit in and the problem with fitting in is then you're not changing anybody so so with let's take purple well let's take a Kimbo as an example what's the change you want to see overall with this podcast what's the change you want to see happen I think that there are people who feel under challenged about the way they think about culture they would like to think about culture more deeply they would like to change the culture so a Kimbo means two things it means standing with your arms folded a position of power or your hands or your hands on your hip because I've seen it in a sentence but I never sign it by yourself like Wonder Woman yeah so you have that on you on a Kimbo dot link you have the woman right you know standing to the side like looking fierce exact you know has that strong stance and then but where did that come from it comes from the idea of the bend in the river the bend in the river is that crook akimbo from the Norse or whatever so I am making a podcast for people who want to change the culture for the better and you want to change the culture for the better it's good to know the geography of the culture and what causes it to change and so the episode that I just finished is about how we are driven by Prime our primary senses like smell even though we can't narrate them they just go straight to our amygdala and shift us well once you start to see that you will see it in a lot of places so why does your chiropractor office feel different than your surgeon's office because when you walk into the surgeon's office you're in a different mental state and emotional state than when you walk into that you know chief paneled chiropractor's office so why did the chiropractor do that cuz for not a lot of money she could have shifted your state into one where her placebo would work even better and once you start to see these bread crumbs that I'm leaving behind I think you'll become better at changing the culture that's the change I'm trying to make but but like everything seems like I know I keep focusing on the Hitsville but you've inadvertently or advertently mentioned concepts from several of your other podcasts it seems like part of the concept here is that there's a lot of randomness that happens and how do you kind of get a little bit of control over that randomness so again in Hitsville you mentioned you want to not just make a post that's a hit you're gonna also be a mini platform yourself you're gonna create 7,000 blog posts and overall your collection might be hit collection because you have more control just by the sheer mass so any one of these things could be hit or altogether they could be many hits and and together then the collections a hit yeah it is it the tactic you're talking about is a good one but there's a bigger thing behind it that's really insightful which is the arc of all the work here is about two things that I believe change all of us which are fear and status fear because we're all gonna die but we've because of marketing conflate that with will bring the wrong purse to a party which is the same as dying right and status which is the flip side of it is who gets to eat lunch first who's gets the water at the Oasis how do I move up where is my standing and so my theory is that the culture is being corrupted to make us more fearful and do status as a weapon to bring shame associated with status and this is not just a taste culture this is history back yeah when we were but it in the last 50 years it's been commercialized and amplified those two things that we do it on purpose and so that's where a lot of public misogyny and racism starts to show its face because we're using fear and status so what I'm trying to help people understand is one if a random event goes against you do not take it personally in fact you should expect it because that's what makes it a random event that means you shouldn't then cower in fear you should expect that that thing you're launching isn't going to be a hit how do you organize so that it's fine that it's not and that's the thing with 7,000 blog posts I've never once had a blog post at one the internet never once had a blog post I got millions of visits not once and that's fine with me because that's not what I'm trying to do I know how to write that kind of link bait I don't want to do that and then the other one is status which is when you look in the mirror and measure yourself who are you measuring yourself with and against so if you decide to become a stand-up comic does it mean that you are not a good one if you're not as famous as Jerry Seinfeld like is that your measure is your measure how many laughs you got tonight because that's foolish because maybe everyone in the audience only speaks Dutch and that's why you didn't get a lot of last night you have to figure out how to do it over time and measure the right things so what we teach in the author MA over and over and over again is the dance between the fear and the status because if you get clear about that and you can act in ways where the fear doesn't get in the way of your work and you can be generous so that status isn't the short-term goal it's the long-term impact you can make way more change happen than you ever expected I think that's really important and you bring that up in another in another podcast I'm gonna i'm gonna click a couple pages in I don't know which one it was in but basically the idea that you know you don't have to you write a book you write the book but now you have to think about what does the editor think what is the market about everything what is the publisher think where does the publishing industry magazines think what is the best sellers let's say so there's like 19 out of 20 things that you have to think about when you write a book instead of just the craft of writing so and so the idea is people should just go back to the craft of writing write the next book or rewrite their book or whatever and I think that's really important in any situation because we can't control the 19 out of 20 things and I think that's kind of the the theme of a lot of your of your work and it makes it even worse when we think we can control them because so we played a lot of croquet when I was going up on my lumpy backyard and the thing about Kokee is you got to go left to go through that hoop and then right through go through that hoop and then left to hit that pole right zoom zoom zoom and the number of people you have to have say I love your book to get it through the traditional channel make sure a book worse and it makes your book more average because each one of those people while they mean well is trying to please a conservative constituency so my argument is we just blew this whole thing up the longtail is here so instead of racing back to the old days and worrying about getting through all the filters let's go to a new place where we say it's not for you it's not for you here it is it's for you and it's pure it's exactly what I wanted to make for you and when we look you know sweet green the salad bar chain in New York doesn't sell french fries now there's probably not a board meeting but one could imagine one where someone on the board says but some people love french fries let's also serve french fries because then those people will have something to eat and you keep broadening it and broadening and broadening in the next thing you know you're Roy Rogers Sbarro junky stuff that's not what they did they said no it's not for those people it's for these people no filters these people and as soon as you go public that all gets wrecked because the public market so you gotta get bigger and bigger bigger so it gets averaged down but and then you do get compared to the ones who won the longtail like McDonald's yeah exactly so I'm not in favor of most people who care having their thing eventually go public I think if you care keep making the thing you care about and it's interesting to have watched Howard Schultz at Starbucks dance that dance for 20 years I'm saying we know we could make more money by serving soft serve we're not gonna we're gonna do this work we're proud of instead and it doesn't maximize return on investment it maximizes the cultural yield of your work and I get like how much once is a great example whenever he felt it seems to me whenever he felt like Starbucks was going kind of off course it's almost like he's visit Italy and go back to those original cafes that I don't know lit his heart on fire and say no no we got to just go back to what lights my heart on fire and I feel like you do the same thing like your what like your heart on fire is kind of taking these conceptions of okay you know this is what makes a hit or this is you know coincidences are this or you know you need to have a blog for this reason or I don't know all these things that you do when you kind of what you do is specifically if I'm trying to try to put a formula to it is take these things that you care about and think about and kind of twist the way people normally look at it not on not on purpose I don't the formula is here's a microphone we gave you a microphone and it's a special kind of open mic night because you won't get thrown off stage but people might leave the room but you have a microphone what are you gonna do with it my formula is I wake up in the morning and I think about the people I seek to serve I know I have a microphone I am not trying to get more people to come to the club I'm not trying to generate revenue I just want to teach the people who want to go where I want to go that's all I do and I don't reverse engineer and say well if I did this it would work even better I say this is an art project this is a chance to contribute to the culture that as I wanted to be and I understand that if I pick the fight with someone my law traffic would go up I don't want to do that even though it costs me approval it cost me clicks so I don't look at my stats I don't know how many people visit in my blog yesterday I don't know how many copies of a book I sell by refusing to know those things by not reading my Amazon reviews I make it so I can actually do my work and so if we're having a meta conversation here the formula is no matter what it is you do that is a good path because it makes it more likely you will get what you seek then if you try to reverse-engineer random events right so you're saying like let's say what you do is writing or what you do is a certain kind of business folk just focus you know get rid of distractions like oh what's my Amazon sales rank on my book that's sort of meaningless it's you know don't focus on the latest news about the Kardashians because that might not have nothing to do with improving my craft as a writer focus on what you do and then I think also focus on your set you've said over and over try to figure out who your audience is and yeah and we spoke about this before the podcast audience selection versus audience development don't try to educate a million people to be your fans what's the audience you really are aiming for that you could really focus a message to that you know they're gonna listen to and how do you select your audience like what's the audience you're going so if I was gonna say this in six words that people could write down it's really simple choose your customers choose your future if you're a freelancer and you have bad clients you're gonna be bad freelancer if you're a freelancer you have great clients you're gonna get better client it goes on and on your doctor it doesn't matter what it is choose your customers choose your future and who are your customers my customers are people who are thirsty dissatisfied and generous and what do you mean by generous cuz I like that phrase so I find the hole in Randian Atlas Shrugged thing complete nonsense it's the you know fine for 14 year olds but we had plenty of things we did when we fourteen that we don't take seriously this idea that you need to be selfish as that's some sort of way to win and that we should keep track of bank balances as some sort of indie of our worth makes no sense to me what it means to be generous is to say I'm gonna expend emotional labor which is not the physical labor of digging a ditch but the difficult labor of confronting my fear putting aside my short-term needs to help other people get where they're going because I believe if we can go to that place all of us will benefit right Zig Ziglar said you can help if you have enough other people will get what they want you'll get what you want I just like the first half of that you just help enough other people get what they want period then if we lived in a community where that's what was going on I think would be a good place because in the connection economy connection creates value who connects to us we're connected to people were generous to or connected to people we see because people want to be seen people don't want to be lonely they don't want to be objectified they want to be seen so my ideal reader listener whatever is somebody who looks at this opportunity says oh I got a mic right tell me how to be generous to the people I care about because if we can do that it becomes a virtuous cycle it doesn't tear everything down builds everything up because I think under the undercurrent of a lot of what you're saying is those five thousand people say they're not that might be the audience you're targeting but there's something else that seems like you're targeting which is you want to create content that's shareable so it's easy for you to create content that those 5,000 people will like and they'll consume it because they've been fans of yours for years and they've read all your books and they'll say oh here's another Seth Godin thing I'll buy it but you want to kind of always find that what am your you do push yourself to say what's new so that they can say to their friend who might not have heard of you hey you have to read this this will change your life pretty close I've said I want to be judged not by my work but by what the people who learned from me taught other people so I don't want people to tell other people about me I want people to teach other people and if I don't get credit it's fine with me that that second order teaching shows me that I did a good job yeah and it's it's related to all this math like about network effects so so for instance a simple example that is if you want to use LinkedIn to get a job you don't go to your first level connections you go to your second level connections you're your weaker ties and they're the ones that are most likely to help you find a job in part because a there's more of them but I don't know I don't know what the reason for this network effect is but somehow if your weaker ties appreciate what you're doing you know kind of the connections of your connections and that shows you're having an impact it's even cooler than that so the people who run LinkedIn told me that more than 70% of their revenue comes from things you don't even see not from in mail and stuff like that it comes from recruiters paying LinkedIn to help them find people like you the best way to get a job using LinkedIn is to be amazing because if you are amazing and you keep doing amazing work people will come find you that's what makes it work so the reason that second order effects are better than first order effects is first order effects are based on the connection we have with people on an emotional level who know us there is shame associated with not helping us there are status associated in this interpersonal relationship with helping us that disappears for second-order effect because there's nothing at stake other than Wow something amazing is happening here I better tell other people so that's the part that people miss it's what they miss about SEO it's what they miss about LinkedIn is what they miss about Amazon which is the place to do the work is not in the hustle the place to do the work happens long before the hustle where you are the person they want to find if you become the person they want to find you don't have to spend a lot of time getting found I totally agree I think the whole concept of SEO feels very fake to me because if you have nothing to say there's nothing to SEO but for you howdy and this sounds like a naive question but a question I want to know the answer to and maybe other people how do you become amazing I mean obviously those sit every day and work at your craft like you write your blog post every day you do this podcast now on a regular basis but what if you could formalize it how do you become amazing right and that's the essence of the work and so we've spent a bunch of time talking about some of the surface stuff but the work is the emotional labor of confronting our fear can't make it go away but you can dance with it and we live in a culture with more Neo Philly acts than ever before more knio knio Philly AK people who like the new and so something's new now for four days not four months used to be a movie would run in the theaters for a year now a movie runs in the theatres for two weeks and we say that's old what's next so given that there's so much new ophelia there's a demand for new that's good but creating new is really hard because what everyone wants to do is buy a dummy's book see the structure follow the rules through the bullet points and be done knowing it's going to work but all of the breakthroughs all of the magic happens when you do something that might not work and it's the things that might not work that are generous that's where art lives that's where innovation lives that's where the magic happens that might not work that's where the generous is right and so so give me an example like because I because I listened to your podcast and I've listened to pretty much all of them and I've always wonder did he just wake up and think about this odd story of coincidences this guy who had a baby fell on him you know the same baby two years in a row like where where do these you know take take your quote you just said and apply it to that example so you let me give you a public example first and I've talked about the baby thing so Warby Parker is saving Americans hundreds and millions of dollars by attacking an Italian conglomerate that's a multi-billion dollar community makes all the eyeglasses in the world Warby was started by a bunch of kids at UPenn at Wharton and it worked but all of their advisors and all the people who trusted they trusted it now that's never gonna work Adam grant managed this in exactly Adam grant is never gonna work so they did something that might not work and as a result large numbers of people benefited plenty of their classmates built another version of this or another version of that didn't work so I got a podcast coming up I know in the back of my head I have a microphone what am I gonna talk about and my art director creative director Alex Peck mentions James Cook to me for something else that I write about and the very next day I run into James Cook on Wikipedia twice and in 20 years and that's a coincidence and I feel that feeling we all get when we get a coincidence I say to myself that feeling right is it okay that I feel is feeling what could I teach people about coincidences that might rub them the wrong way but it's actually true so I said all right I'm gonna need some really juicy coincidence this year so I started googling for juicy coincidences and then I think about oh wait there's that doppelganger I met on that coincidence happen and I got this other one so now I got seven coincidences three that I found in the outside world for that happened to me I trust some lines between them and I say the obvious thing to say about coincidences is this I shouldn't say anything obvious because everyone go of course what's the non-obvious insight that we can tell ourselves about coincidences that might help us make better decisions going forward deal with conman bring better work to the world oh I need a couple more dots to make that argument so I search some more all right now I got enough anecdotes this isn't proof I just want to describe these anecdotes to people and if they're like me when they hear them they don't come to the conclusion I came to and I'm not saying I'm right I'm just saying look at these dots when you look at all these dots what do you think and if you of course then it was a good pocket and so what what's to you a bad example where you were going down an idea that you thought initially was interesting like for instance coincidence one um I thought it was a great podcast you bring up great anecdotes part of your amazing ability as a podcaster as your ability to tell a great story but like the coincidences idea you're kind of on the gray area of things people know and things people don't know because people know that okay over the course of a lifetime odds are you're gonna experience five or six coincidences amazing coincidences you would that's good man but that's not what my email says right so so that's why I say it's in the gray area like I had heard the concept before but then I really appreciated your storytelling and the examples and it made me think further about the issue where as some people might not know the concept at all and so the other thing I'm curious about is are you just a massive reader so that you're being exposed to thousands of ideas that people might think are common ideas I don't I don't think I work as hard as people think I do and I know I don't read as much as I would like or as I used to but one person who admits that but I'm a collector right so something happens to me at the DMV right and I'm like this this is gonna be a blog post it's gonna be a blog post a year from now five years now I'm remembering this story I don't remember where I parked I don't remember this I don't know that but in a moment yeah that one and I feel like a talent scout like I'm guessing and when a talent scout meets the next big actor or model they remember that that's because what they're looking for so I'm always looking for that most of the time it ends in a trite dead end right so you will never hear me say that the secret of success is to work harder because we've heard that ten thousand times there's nothing interesting and saying work harder that doesn't rise the level of me needing to teach it so will you start to think can i play with the idea the secret to success is to figure out how to work less yeah exactly not because I want to have that linkbait headline but say I will where would the nuance to not be and then that led to the idea of emotional labor that led to Steve Pressfield the war of art which led to the idea of the resistance which led to the amygdala which led to the fact that the fear can't go away which led to the fact that the reason emotional labor is so difficult is we're trying to make the fear go away because that's what we got taught to do which led to education which led to will this be on the test that's led to will this get me into a famous college all in a giant circle and that's three years of my work life right there and I would say a lot of it and and we'll close up I know we have some time constraints a lot of this is about self-awareness so yeah when you when you get into environment and then you have the all of culture attacking like what was it an Amazon bestseller was the New York Times exactly did everyone write you emails did everyone hate it like you get all you have to be aware able to put an arm's length distance between your belief and the craft and then society's beliefs in the graph Lee exactly right and so you know the documentary jiro Dreams of Sushi is fascinating yes because for 40 years of this guy's life he chopped wood he carried water for 40 years of his life he had a craft and he didn't worry about the outside world he did his craft at the expense of his family but he and many-to-many tuna but he did his craft and then he got a Michelin star and suddenly the whole thing shifts to the external right how hard is it to get a table what does this reviewer think of you what is this critic think of you and for me that's a tragedy after it happened you don't see any joy in Jiro's life anymore because he's always looking in the mirror he's always looking over his shoulder it's always that and that's not what he set out to do when he started but it's not awareness that the award wasn't the reward right exactly and so what I'm trying to say to people over and over and over again is my opinion doesn't matter the skeptics opinion doesn't matter the critics opinion doesn't matter did you change someone for the better in a way that you're proud of and if you did that please do it again and and I think having the ability to change something for the better you're saying focus a little bit on who you want to change in mm view based on your background and your experience you're not actually and then build up knowledge even more even more knowledge related to that and then kind of come up with these unintuitive ways to express it combined with storytelling yeah I'm sorry I'm trying to formalize you - I got it that I'm put me down for that yes so so let me ask you two questions and then you have to go how long have you been married 30 years 30 ish years I can I mention your wife's bakery please she loved that what what's the name it's called by the way bakery by the way bakery by the way it's gluten-free four locations one on 90th Street here in Manhattan what's the secret to a successful marriage I'm engaged I want to know I think the secret has to be that there is no secret that's very uh novice the the obvious things of listening and caring and creating space that there's two different people who are doing something together that they don't always agree but that they always are part of the together part and the leaving space for people to be who people are you know that's not gonna work for everybody but that's all not a secret right it's just be a good person keep your promises show up with a smile on your faces are all things that we already know I love the leaving space idea because again it's related to audience selection versus audience development yeah exactly so you have you find the person you can you can leave space with yeah I mean there are people who say the secret of a good marriage is marrying the right person which is very flattering to the person that you married and I'm so pleased that I married the person that I married but it's not very helpful advice because you know till 20 years later if you married the right person if that's the advice no I think the advice is there is 7 billion people on the planet and we ought to be able to find enough space to engage with any of them not necessarily in a 50-year marriage but to be able to have the ability to see people as they wish to be seen to tell stories that are true to engage with others on a journey because all we have is time and we don't have that much right and it's when we try to you know force other people using dominance not affiliation when we get all hung up on our status role so it's thinking the times today that men are uncomfortable when their wives make more money than them well that's nonsense that's got put on you don't take that that the alternative is to say if you like being married be married but then like it because it's a choice and the stories we tell ourselves matter way more than the stories other people just sort of saying one can get married to anybody and make it work I'm not ready to say anybody but I think if you look at all the data that's so easily available there's not a lot of correlation between marriages that work and demographics or even psychographics that are easily available that if we put all the data about everyone into a computer it's not clear it would find better spouses for each of us what I do know about our lives is the story we tell ourselves that narration is going 18 hours a day and it's that narration that changes so much of how we see the world and so much of how we do it's all cognitive behavioral therapies about it's that noise in our head and so as a teacher I don't teach about marriage but I teach about the noise in our head I teach about the story we tell ourselves and it's hard to help someone change their story but that that is the kind of teaching that matters if you want to teach shown to be a great hockey player you don't teach him a slap shot you teach them how to think that they're a great hockey player because then they'll make the slap shot happen so other question last question I've been doing this podcast for five years with guests such as yourselves I had the most amazing guest in the world over the past five years like just it's just I'm so feel so grateful for it and I kind of want to change formats a little bit like I've been doing the same thing now for five years how would you change the format of this podcast what could I do better well it's so thrilling and challenging to have these conversations with you because you're erudite and generous and smart in these conversations and so I wouldn't change any of that I think if you are feeling Restless why not make one out of every four podcasts a podcast with just you yeah start there I like the idea we've been doing that a little bit but I think I got to play with that more so settle in one jump when's your next book coming out comes out November it's called this is marketing this morning will you come on the podcast again for that if you'll have me excellent to talk about and a Kimbo I encourage everyone to listen to it I think we even had Campbell on an episode on yeah in the same cast and I've listened to every episode they're brilliant like and people around me who are just casually listening I'm like who is this guy this is brilliant thank you so thanks once again set for coming on the podcast it's a pleasure keep making a ruckus Thanks you're happy you pressed record because if you didn't press the cord you're in big trouble hey thanks for listening to the James Altucher show on YouTube today I have a really special brand new episode coming out next week but you can watch it early just click on the link right here or subscribe to the channel when you click on my face oh wait though don't forget to click the bell I'll see you next time

Channel: James Altucher

Views: 16,848

Rating: 4.8886075 out of 5

Keywords: James Altucher Podcast, Altucher Report, seth godin, james altucher, choose yourself, altucher james, james altucher show, the james altucher show, james altucher choose yourself, the james altucher show youtube, social media, authentic creativity, creativity, author, marketer, purple cow, this is marketing, gracefully, altmba, altmba seth godin

Id: e36DITpLjRU

Length: 51min 5sec (3065 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 30 2018