Failing On Our Way To Mastery | Seth Godin

i've never said these out loud so i'm going to try them with you first are there three pillars but before i share them with you a quote from the great philosopher dolly parton and what she said was find out who you are and do it on purpose the do it on purpose is a lot is a significant underpinning of the kind of ideas that you expose in your work that here's something you might benefit from if were trying to do x y or z on purpose and i would like to flip dolly's phrase upside down and i'd like to say do it on purpose and you'll find out who you are asking for a guarantee before you start isn't helpful instead we need to look at a concept and idea and be willing to try it out with intent because if we do if we try it on for size we will figure out if it fits us as opposed to the opposite which is spending a lot of time figuring out who we are and then going and finding the things that fit us seth godin i've been looking forward to this conversation for a long time well i had to send some scouts ahead and you've talked to some of my dearest friends so it was time it's a pleasure there's a quote in your new book to practice by sculptor elizabeth king and she put it beautifully when she said process saves us from the poverty of our intentions what does that mean to you the poverty of our intentions if you wake up in a bad mood if you hit a speed bump if you get a bit of negative feedback from someone who's just a bystander it's super easy to spiral out of control and to determine that maybe you should take some time away or that what you're working on isn't really important enough and in those moments you are not the best version of yourself but you're still yourself if you have a practice you get through them you get through them because you already decided there was going to be a blog post tomorrow and you already decided that the podcast comes out on a regular basis and you already decided whatever it is make the decision once then you have a practice forever i like that a lot creative work obviously doesn't come with any guaranteed outcomes but there's a pattern to sort of who succeeds and who doesn't tell me more about that pattern and what it means to succeed so what i'm trying to do in the practice is decode what works and what doesn't because too much of the internet has been about chasing down the longest possible list of hacks and coming up with as many uh aphorism shortcuts or best practices as you can as if having all of them means that you will get to where you're going and i know a lot of creative people some of whom are well known some of whom will never be well known and the question is what does it even mean to make creative work happen what does it mean to show up and make change and i looked for patterns so years ago when i wrote linchpin what i said is the only thing that leaders have in common is that they are leaders and the only thing that charismatic people have in common is that people ha think they have charisma but there isn't a given set of checklist items that you have to have to be creative or to be a leader or to have charisma instead we can look for what rhymes and what the the patterns are and in the case of a creative it involves somebody who has made the decision that they want to change things and that is different than adopting the brainwashed mindset of i will do what i am told can we dive a little bit more into the hacks i mean we see them everywhere where does the term hack originate and then maybe dive into why they're so prolific why are we so drawn to those well by now the word means three or four things so let's just isolate them because i'm i tend to use it in two different ways there is the cracking hack of illegally opening somebody's systems and messing with them there is the esteemed hack of figuring out how to use code or other forms of technology to solve an intractable problem in an elegant shortcut way but there's also the hack of figuring out exactly what the audience wants and giving it to them that is the original definition of hahak the borough in london called hackney used to be on the outskirts of london when london was smaller and they raised horses there but they didn't raise great horses they didn't raise expensive horses or thoroughbred horses or beautiful horses or trained horses just ordinary cheap horses and if you were a cab driver that's the horse for you and that's why london cab drivers are called hacks oh that's interesting but we're drawn to that right it's almost like the illusion of knowledge that if somebody else is giving us the nugget the gist of something we've lost something in that right so the the other definition of hack which is that i found the the core nugget the the mental understanding of what's behind this uh it corrupts what the elegance of the original word right that the original word means if i'm in the doobie brothers and i'm doing my 50th anniversary tour the people without a pandemic who would have come to see them don't actually want the doobie brothers to sing new songs they want the doobie brothers to be a cover band of the doobie brothers that that's a hack in the sense that anybody who sounded like the old doobie brothers would have been a substitute because no one could tell the difference and what i'm arguing is you want to be doing work where people can tell the difference because that puts you on the hook do you think we're naturally drawn to shortcuts i think that we've been uh indoctrinated and brainwashed by an industrial system and i wasn't alive before frederick taylor but frederick taylor definitely changed the world that when you bring a stopwatch to a factory suddenly you are taking capitalism and weaponizing it you're saying if i can figure out how to save 30 seconds for every single part at the end of a year we're gonna have a million dollars so there's a real incentive to turn that screw to get quote more efficient and i was just reading about um a mochi shop in kyoto japan that's a thousand years old and building a business to last a thousand years you're not going to be able to do that with shortcuts or hacks you're going to do it by focusing on something else and the thing is they bought a rice kneading machine i don't know 20 years ago but that was the first major technological advance they'd had in a thousand years because the job of the mochi store is not to be the biggest or most profitable mochi store it is to do their work the way they want to do it there's something noble in that right and i think you mentioned a story on another interview that i was listening to yesterday where you used to eat at this restaurant and you wanted the brussels sprouts but because you're vegetarian you ask for no bacon and maybe you can tell this story a little bit better um well there's a little celebrity angle which makes it an even juicier story so um david chang momofuko the whole empire that grew from nothing we used to go to momofuco when no one knew about it and it was probably david behind the grill i'm not sure and the place only seats 50 people we would get there for lunch on saturday with the family five six weeks in a row they happily made me the brussels sprouts with no bacon because after all that saves them the cost of the bacon and saves me having to deal with the fact that i don't eat bacon and the sixth week we went and david said you know there's a restaurant about a block from here that really likes vegetarians and we have almost no vegetarian items on our menu and i think it would be better if you went somewhere else for lunch next time and that was the day that momofuku became momofuku and that david chang became david chang because yeah there are plenty of people you could cater to but the question is does that help you make the change you seek to make i want to just explore this a little bit more because if that restaurant wasn't successful the story we would be saying afterwards is well they didn't adapt they didn't serve their customers yeah i think that's legit except the word the gets into us into all sorts of trouble because nobody has everyone as their customer nobody maybe the water company but that's about it that our goal cannot be to be for everyone that we have to be for someone the smallest viable audience not the biggest possible audience and so for people who are you know taking notes in search of a nugget that's one that can change how you do your work whether you're a professor at york university or whether you are trying to do a startup or whether you're an investor the whole deal is the internet is not a mass medium we haven't had a new mass medium since television the internet is a micro medium it is the best medium ever developed to reach specific people but it is terrible at reaching everyone there is no home page it is impossible to reach 100 million people in one day on the internet which is something tv used to do every night and what that means is we have the luxury of saying who this is for and who it's not for and the mistake that so many people building something make is they get hung up on the feedback of people who it's not for as opposed to being obsessed with the people who it is for can they live without it would they miss it if it were gone let's make that that's what we should make that's interesting i have a friend who's writing a book and i said who's the book for and he said it's for everybody why do you think that we default to this big everybody concept right so that book is gonna fail i happily put that in writing right this minute that book is gonna fail uh harry potter the most successful uh book franchise in history it made the author over a billion dollars that book is for almost no one right that book is for precocious 12 year olds and people who like to remember what it was like to be a precocious 12 year old that's not everyone that's a very small group of people and we say it's for everyone because it's fuel it helps us be an evangelist it says uh i am going to be so generous that i'm going to bring something to the world that everyone will benefit from but we are not who we are because of our atoms our molecules our dna we're who we are because of the stories we tell ourselves about the pain we're in the hopes we have the dreams we live with pick those be specific about those and then those people not only will find you but they will tell the others are we hiding when we make something for everybody because that way we can't really fail like if we put something out for a specific audience and it doesn't resonate then we get this immediate feedback that we missed the mark yeah the way to be on the hook is to say this is only for people who are like this because if those people hate it then you were wrong whereas if you say this is for everyone you're allowed to hide behind while everyone hasn't found it yet i want to come back to the inner stories that we tell ourselves how do we how do we change that inner voice how do we listen to it how do we debug it okay so in listening to your work over time i love the whole idea of first principles and mental maps and i think it's very easy in the information tsunami that we live in to feel like our defect is we don't have enough information if i just had more information then whatever i'm working on would go better and so i got to thinking about what are the pillars behind how i'm looking at the world five years ago i started the alt mba which is now an independent b corp and the alt-mba teaches people to change their mind and it does it in this intensive 30-day online session and it combines a lot of the thinking i've put together for the last 20 years in my book so here are i'm gonna i've never said these out loud so i'm going to try them uh with you first are the three pillars but before i share them with you a quote from the great philosopher dolly parton and what she said was find out who you are and do it on purpose and the do it on purpose is a lot of is a significant underpinning of the kind of ideas that you expose in your work that here's something you might benefit from if you were trying to do x y or z on purpose and i would like to flip dolly's phrase upside down and i'd like to say do it on purpose and you'll find out who you are asking for a guarantee before you start isn't helpful instead we need to look at a concept and idea and be willing to try it out with intent because if we do if we try it on for size we will figure out if it fits us as opposed to the opposite which is spending a lot of time figuring out who we are and then going and finding the things that fit us so the three pillars the first one is the change you seek to make are you here to make a contribution or are you here to take something are you here to do what you are told or are you here to question and to make things different and answering that question honestly is really difficult because it's all about the story we tell ourselves and so if we can figure out how to tell ourselves a different story then we might be able to make a different level of contribution so some people wake up in the morning and say how do i double my net worth and some people wake up in the morning and say how do i help the people in borrelia india get through another night without electricity those are two totally different kinds of change that you seek to make in the world but they are both a change right the second pillar which fits into the first one because i think the first one's too hard to start with is what possibility do you see because we have indoctrinated people from birth to either believe that they are entitled or not to believe that they are special or not to believe they have leverage or not do you see possibility in the change you seek to make and the flip side of that which goes with it is learning to see the world as it is and this is why you know the work that my friend derek sivers has done for example is so important annie duke on decision making learning to see the world as it is because it's so easy to imagine we get to make it the way we want it to be but we don't the world is the way it is and learning to see that reality is critical and it changes our understanding of what is possible because if no one has ever done the work you hoped to do then you might be deluding yourself if on the other hand there's a well-trodden path and people have gone on that path then you might be able to follow it so if we think about the stock market of which i know nothing lots and lots of people millions of people have read ben graham but almost none of them turned into warren buffett so part of that is discipline part of it is seeing the possibility part of it is deciding what kind of 50-year journey you want to go on and how you will approach it but none of it is that you didn't read ben graham because all of the people did right and then the third pillar is and this is the one that is the most interesting to me lately how much emotional labor are you able and willing to expend to accomplish the thing you set out to do when i think about learning versus education which i can talk about for hours education is compliance education is uh compulsory education is coercion learning is serial incompetence on our way to getting better and so the flip the pairing the tandem of emotional labor is do you care enough to learn something so there are all these things in my life i don't care enough to learn that i could go get a book from the library or i could go listen to 20 podcasts or i could go practice something and i would get better at it and i haven't done it and i'm 60 years old and the honest answer is not because i'm talented or not talented it says i don't care enough to expend the energy of what it would take to get good at that so you asked me a simple question and i gave you a half hour answer but there you go back to you you give me a beautiful answer i've got three follow-ups to that that are sort of like different rabbit holes here the the first is how do we learn the only way to learn is by doing things that we can read about how to swim and we can read about how to make a vegetarian mocky roll but you will not learn how to do it until you do it and the reading the listening is important preparation but learning is the act of failing on our way to mastery and that is part of my beef with organized education so that organized education has precious little learning in it and you mentioned in your book that when you got your mba there was an open book test and i thought that was a typo because when i got my mba there wasn't one open book test every test was closed book and when i thought about it i realized that the only courses i learned anything in in college and business school were the ones that were essentially open book because what it means to have an open book educational interaction is that you have to do the work you have to actually learn something because it is not about did you memorize things for 10 minutes and then write them down it's did you actually do the thing and now you know how i think so much about what organized education is also doing is preventing failure it's going out of its way to not build those muscles in in children for sure and you know i like to talk about the acton academy uh which is now there's more than 100 of them it's basically a one-room schoolhouse typically there are 50 kids and two adults in the whole building and one of them is the custodian and one of the rules at acton is you're not allowed to ask an adult a question and so we've got kids between 5 and 17 years of age teaching each other learning from each other they get a report card every week that goes home to their parents it says what they built and what they created and who they helped and the process just keeps repeating and you got to believe that the end of 12 years of that you are probably more optimistic more resilient more generous and better qualified to make a contribution than someone who got a's and was on the pep squad how do we learn to become an observer of reality this one is so important particularly in our siloed world that it is really dangerous to deny science and accurate reporting of the world around us because it permits us to live in our own reality which is fun for a while but then you try to do something and you discover that the laws of thermodynamics are actually correct and you discover that viruses don't care that you tried really hard for five days and now you deserve a break that's not how epidemiology works and you could learn how epidemiology works by actually exposing yourself to the data and the experiences around it so when i read annie duke's first book and she tells the story about jim carroll in the super bowl it blew my mind because for the first time i really understood what it meant to make a decision where when i teach people about sunk costs it's really fascinating to watch some people get it because they'd never properly understood what song costs were and how they were holding them back these fundamental principles are at the core of so much of what you've been sharing and so i don't have to persuade people who are listening to this that there is a shared reality we live in but pursuing it by testing it by exposing ourselves to why is this true not just did it get past a peer-reviewed journal if we understand it and it holds up to examination then we've learned to see it as it really is there's a little wrinkle or nuance to that that i would say that i see occasionally which is we understand how the world works but we think it should work differently yeah and you know if you listen to david deutsch who i don't you think you've interviewed him have you no i would if he's listening i'd love to have him on the show what a character and i i i listen to his stuff on audiobook because i would just slow down so much if i had to turn the pages but everything he says makes absolutely no sense and yet it's coherent and so multiplying multiple universe quantum mechanics times how can someone not you know donate to a charity how can someone eat this unhealthy food i mean all around us there are people who make choices that we would not make who do things that we would not do it's not quantum mechanics what it is is everyone tells themselves a different story they don't believe what we believe they don't know what we know they don't want what we want and if we don't have the empathy to say that's okay then we have no hope of ever serving or working with them i want to come back to some costs what are those okay so the first lesson of almost any business school is ignore some costs and then people who are smart say what are those a sunk cost is a gift from your former self maybe it's a law degree maybe it's tickets to the movies maybe it's the deposit on a vacation that you had long planned maybe it's the emotional connection you have uh to a certain kind of thing happening in your future like a big wedding it was hard for you to earn that dream and it was hard for you to get that degree and now here we are it's a gift from your former self and the question is do you have to accept that gift so the story i tell is they were doing some construction work across the street from my house and the guy put in a new flight of stone steps and i waited till he was done and then i went over and i said you did nice work he said thanks a lot and i said i don't know if anyone mentioned to you but you have these signs that say quality masonry with your phone number on them and we live in a fairly literate town and i was just letting you know you spelled the word masonry wrong and he was like yeah i know it cost me a lot of business but i already paid for 50 of these signs and that's a sunk cost because if he had found 50 signs lying by the side of the road with his name spelled wrong he wouldn't have picked them up because he would realize these signs aren't going to help they're not worth having for free and these signs are free because the old hymn paid for them he didn't pay for them and every time he's using them it hurts and i have a pair of shoes at home that don't fit me anymore and i should throw them out but i don't because i remember what it took to get them when i was younger and i can't throw them out but i should because i didn't pay for them my former self paid for them if you're walking around with shoes that don't fit you should probably get a new pair of shoes do you think that applies to relationships as well it does but it's largely misunderstood with relationships in the sense that a new relationship is like fresh powder it is new and shiny and exciting but it will not be a new relationship for long and then you're still stuck with an old relationship and the question is will your old relationship a year from now be better than your old relationship that you currently have is and if the answer is yes then yes some costs completely apply but if the answer is no then what you're really doing is shopping for novelty not ignoring sell costs are there other ways that we don't think of some costs that are non-intuitive well our ability to rationalize sunk costs is really spectacular and one of the things that we do is we increase we dramatize how expensive it will be to tell other people that we are ignoring sunk costs it will break my parents heart if i tell them that after 10 years i hate being a lawyer because they paid for me to go to law school and so therefore i'm going to be unhappy for 10 more years because i don't want my parents to be unhappy for an hour right that we really like being hooked on the effort and the feeling it took to get our neurons aligned around who we thought we were the story we tell ourselves and that is probably why sunk costs are so challenging so what i encourage people to do this is a hack in the good sense is establish new sunk cost for yourself to keep you going this is part of the practice so i've written 7 500 blog posts in a row i haven't missed one it's really emotionally expensive for me now to miss a blog post my blog is a sunk cost in the sense that if it stops giving me joy for the long haul i should stop writing it it doesn't matter how hard it was to build the streak going forward it's a gift from my former self but i can tell you on a thursday if i just don't have anything to write that sunk cost is enough to get me over the hump all right we're coming out of this rabbit hole slowly here how do you make decisions well how do i make decisions that i talk about in public because i'm proud of how i make decisions or how do i make decisions most of the time in reality how do you make decisions how do you make important decisions what i found when i was 12 is that my mild case of aedd was either a curse or an asset and it certainly got me in trouble at school and it certainly made my life a lot more interesting because i'm easily swayed by novelty and bright shiny objects and opportunity and possibility but what i also discovered shortly thereafter is that i could develop the willpower to wall off certain areas of choice so that i wouldn't end up chasing those sorts of novelty i just decided and so i don't look back so i haven't had meat since 1981 or 1979 or so i just decided i'm done not going to do that and i have no yearnings cravings whatsoever i'm just done and um by walling off areas of what i do and don't do and how i do it i've narrowed the frame of the decisions that i need to consider and then within that frame i try to use this this this math of how do i build resilience into the process how do i see the dip that lies ahead with any given path because if i'm not willing to commit to something it's probably not worth starting doing it because again the novelty will be satisfied but then i might be stuck without the objective that i sought to serve i will tell you that certain things that are designed to be really difficult but somewhat trivial decisions like what kind of car to buy they can really mess me up for weeks at a time because there's no dominant choice but when it comes to something like should i have a podcast the way that i did that math was i care about the form of media i always come up with my media boundaries before i come up with the media content and i learned that when i was a book packager meaning i don't say i have a good idea i'm going to make a book i say what are the constraints of books how do i explore that and then how do i find an idea that fits into that container so with podcasts i did one a really long time ago it was the number one business podcast for years and years but it was completely out of date and so the question was should i make a new podcast so i explored the format in my head because that was novelty that was fun the commitment didn't exist because i didn't have to say yes to anybody and once i solved the problem in a way that made me happy there was no point in making the podcast because i'd already gotten all the satisfaction i was going to get out of solving the problem and then i got a call from somebody who said we will pay you to make a podcast and in that moment i wasn't taking intentional action i was reacting to something that was incoming that was sloppy but it's okay because i was busy doing other things and this wasn't my intention in the moment but then i looked at the options which is well you've solved this problem and so you could say no and then you get nothing or this person will make a contribution to the things that you care about and you'll get a laboratory to explore new ways to do this and so i said yes and now i'm on the eighth season the question is is there a dip or is this simply part of my practice and i've come to the conclusion there probably isn't a dip in the sense that this podcast is going to get to become as popular as yours and that's fine because that's not why i built it but as long as chopping this wood and carrying this water satisfies me i'll keep doing it and the day it doesn't it will become a sunk cost and i will walk away it sounds like when you're walling off certain areas of your life that you're forcing yourself to focus through either environmental constraints or mental constraints how did you go about deciding which areas to put barriers on it doesn't matter that's the key right it doesn't matter that i just said i'm not gonna watch television and with all the time i saved not watching television i got all these other benefits but i could have just as easily said i'm not going to do this with my time so i can watch television it doesn't matter it's just limiting the incoming limiting the distractions forces me to be on the hook because i can't go home at the end of the day or can't go to bed at night and say well that day went fine because if i don't do the things that i'm left with i do nothing and it's that doing nothing becomes a fuel for someone who needs novelty that doing nothing deprives me of the fuel that i need to to feel alive and so i don't do nothing i like that um i want to come back to the emotional labor too which is do you think that that's our willingness to accept a certain degree of pain or effort that's associated with the goals we want to accomplish is that really just asking us like how bad do we want it okay so let's talk about labor labor first karl marx labor labor most of the people listening to this not only don't we do it we don't even live next to somebody who does it right the person who worked in the mine the person who worked in a a dark factory in manchester surrounded by candles for light who was grinding their way through work that was painful tiring and ultimately unhealthy that's what labor used to be digging ditches being you know outdoors in the heat having someone tell us how to expend our energy emotional labor uh ariel hockside named it 1963. emotional labor is showing up when we don't feel like it emotional labor is smiling when we're grimacing emotional labor is being kind to a customer who's not being kind to us if it's your hobby and you can do it when you want to do it there is no labor whatsoever right hobbies are great hobbies help make us more human but if we're going to get paid at some point we're doing some form of labor what i argue in some of my writing is if you're going to run a marathon you're going to get tired and you shouldn't hire a coach to teach you how to run a marathon without getting tired and if you're going to do this work of emotional labor you're going to become afraid you're going to get fatigued you're going to feel like giving up you can't make that go away that's part of what it means to do emotional labor the question is what emotional labor do you want to sign up for and when do you want to do it and what do you get in return and there are definitely people who are so privileged they don't have a requirement to do labor emotional or otherwise and i don't think those people are very happy because part of what makes us modern humans is we are on and we are off and when we're on we're doing some sort of labor do you think that part of that is our need to contribute to something larger than ourselves now that's a really good question because that's what i grew up with i had amazing parents i won the birthday lottery a lot of people didn't have that luxury that privilege and yet many of those people have grown up to make a contribution but we're also surrounded by people many of whom are in the media who make no contribution at all who are just taking all the time and sometimes we'll ionize those people and sometimes we call those people heroes of ours i don't think that that makes sense i think the forbes 400 is actually a toxic pox on our culture because that's no way to measure someone's contribution but apparently some people in many pockets of our world believe that their role is not to be a contribution but to get rewarded for exerting their power how do you think about success well i try to keep track of would they miss you if you were gone would they miss you if you didn't show up have you done something for which there are few uh happy substitutes and have you done it in a way that leaves things better than you found them and so that's the compass i'm trying to use each day i don't you know plenty of data shows that after 70 000 us dollars happiness does not increase for people and you know there are billionaires who had a really bad day yesterday because something changed in their the numbers on their screen and that seems like a really bad reason to have a bad day i want to come back to something you said about sort of winning the the birth lottery here the ovarian lottery i think as buffing calls it and how how that puts us sort of on a trajectory that we didn't control right we get a push uh into the world based on this and then other people get a push that may be more or less than than we are with a different trajectory and yet at some point we take control of our trajectory we become an adult and we're responsible you know ignoring luck we're responsible for our outcomes so you can you can outperform your initial trajectory or you can underperform it i'm curious as to how you see things that we control that would help us out perform versus things that we would spiral us downward or change our trajectory into negative that's a really elegant way to talk about it i'm not sure i completely agree because the imagery of uh hollywood movies in free fall and people pushing off with puffs of air and stuff i think it diminishes two things friction and luck how many times does someone have to get lucky as an adult for the outside world to say that person is succeeding and are you in a position to maximize your luck or are you in a position where you need to get lucky again tomorrow and the choices that we need to make in that regard are available to us but are often invisible you know so when i think about how deeply we've been indoctrinated on matters of caste and how the benefit of the doubt goes to people like you and me and the benefit of the doubt is not given to somebody who maybe doesn't look like us or speak with the same accent as we do or have the same kind of parenting that we did that the benefit of the doubt is profound and putting yourself in a position to leverage you know so when i think about i started one of the first internet companies and when i started it everyone said i was delusional in fact in a best-selling book i was they used the word delusional to talk about me the thing that i thought was going to work didn't work and uh we were resilient enough to shift gears and then i met jerry colona and fred wilson and i was their first investment as a team and that was a really lucky thing but then super unlucky things happened in very quick succession and we almost got wiped out and so when i think about all of the lefts and the rights and all of those choices some of them were mine and many of them weren't and i didn't know 1 50th of what i know now but i'm not sure if i did know the things i know now that the outcome would have been any better so i'm i think luck is way more important than most people give it credit for i think it's important too we do have some control over the things that we control but you mentioned friction can you explore that a little bit yeah so the you know we the convenience obsessed internet and the tech behind it have made it so certain things have so much less friction than they used to i mean i'm talking about trivial things like how long it takes to reach somebody with a message because back at spinnaker when i worked there in the early 80s there were 30 40 fedex envelopes waiting every day just to leave the building to more difficult bits of friction like how do we end up finding the resources to get the next piece of the puzzle in place you know the shelf space still matters your product might be great but how do you get it on the shelves of walmart or how do you get it on the shelves of google because if you're not on the shelves at walmart and you're not on the shelves of google you might be invisible and it's friction that kept you there not some sort of merit contest in that in order for something to go forward something else is going to have to move out of your way a lot of what happens in silicon valley is friction reducing activities but these friction reducing activities create their own sort of friction because maybe you don't know reed and maybe you don't get introduced in that one setting where things would have been easier i mean i just this completely irrelevant story it was 1997 and they were launching zdnet which was softbank's tv network about technology and my office was outside of new york city and i get this call mr saan would really like it if you would come to the launch party for zdnet and i'm like well he's an investor in the people who are investors in me i'd be happy to help they said great it's tomorrow at four o'clock and figuring well i could get away from the office for an hour and they said in san francisco and i had to go and it was nothing but friction right it's all around us but it's easy to imagine that it's not for somebody like yourself who's so accomplished i think you've got 19 books now well the new one's the 20th bestseller but i used to be a book packager and there were 120 of those that people don't talk about how do you you get all these inbound requests how do you decide what to do and what not to do i don't get particularly hung up on no that's one of my disciplines it's one of my boundaries is that i think people appreciate a thoughtful quick generous no more than no response and more than a yes you don't follow up on your work is your work and defending it is critical because otherwise you are going to do nothing but be a cost-free unprioritized contribution to other people's work that will never amount to what it needs to be because your your work will not be appropriately allocated and so you know a long time ago tom peters changed my life by blurbing one of my books so i tried to do that but i can't do it for every book because i read every word and i write my own stuff so more and more several times a day i write back saying i didn't read what you wrote i'm really sorry i can't no i won't be able to do this good luck not having cognitive load associated with that is critical because otherwise there'd be no more work from me i like that because so often we just do this non-response are the other sort of other things in that script that you have because it's really hard for us to learn how to say no like how do we say no with grace and appreciation for the other person but also put up that boundary in a way that doesn't affect that relationship and i think that we we struggle with that so often we just i won't reply to this email right so again i take the i won't reply off the table except for the now dramatically increasing number of semi-personalized spam that's coming from uh virtual assistant farms that is going to be the end of email forever but leaving that part aside why is the person asking you so for example uh i give speeches for a living it's one of the only things i charge for and if it's a non-profit in new york city i never charge them but everybody else i charge them because it's not fair to some people to charge them and not others i need to be able to honestly say to somebody this is how much it costs so someone will send me a note and they'll say i'm doing this thing for these 20 entrepreneurs there's no budget will you come speak to us for 20 minutes what i'll write back is well here's four videos of me on youtube i have found it's way more effective for your group to have everyone watch the videos before the meeting and then have a discussion with each other about what i said way more effective 99 times out of 100 that never happens because they weren't actually asking me to come say something to them that they couldn't get somewhere else what they were actually doing is saying i will gain status in the eyes of my peers if i can persuade you to give us a very expensive speech for free and i heard that and i saw that and i wrote back basically saying yes but you will gain more status with your peers if you can persuade them to exert emotional labor to actually learn something so i'm not doing it to tweak people i'm doing it for the one out of a hundred who were doing what they said they were doing which is trying to help people i think that that distinction is important because just because i'm easy to find and just because i'm sort of known doesn't mean that i have an obligation to make you happy right this minute talk to me about some of the lessons you've learned about giving good talks versus bad talks we're going to talk first about a postcovid precovered world where we're alive in person i've seen ten thousand talks live in person because i've given a thousand of them and uh almost all of them are terrible and they're terrible for a couple reasons first of all the person giving the talk is afraid and secondly the person giving the talk is mistaken about what the talk is for if you want to exchange or deliver information to a group of people one of the worst ways to do it is with a live verbal presentation if your goal is actually to deliver that scientific paper or that insight then you should either write a book or write a memo and say here in an asynchronous way this is what we know if you're going to show up live in person in real time synchronized you are performing and the goal is to not deliver the information but to deliver emotion to cause a change in the people who are hearing you that is its purpose what change are you seeking to make so when i give my classic presentation it's different every time but basically it's 150 to 190 slides delivered over the course of 45 to 50 minutes and in that period of time i will tell a large number of stories and i will change the emotional state of the audience up and down and back and forth and it will be better because other people are in the room with you that is critical the same way twitter works better if your friends are on twitter my talk works better if you are not the only person in the room and yet almost every talk i've ever seen that's not true and then when we move to the virtual world most conference organizers completely miss the memo and they think their job because they're buying status is to cram a ted talk into a zoom room and that just doesn't work it works to deliver some level of status in the sense that we got this person to come live but what i can tell you is i could deliver an as live talk pre-recorded that eliminates all tech hassle and all synchronous risk and you can just hit play and no one will be able to tell that i recorded it a week before and yet most organizers don't want that because they think what they want is the status not the energy and what i believe in a virtual talk is if you're going to do it synchronized the goal is to change the energy in the room to sell people on the idea not to say here's the idea it's the difference between sushi and cold fish on rice right sushi is a sales process cold fish on rice is what it actually is what we have is the opportunity to say we all came together here you can see the other people you can feel that i am sincere in what i am doing you can engage with q a you can stress test this and when you leave you will have seen the look on the other people and realize people like us do things like this this is the way it's going to be around here from now on that is what makes it a good talk and so i think we're on the cusp of zoom actually becoming a useful tool but what is holding it back is status focused management that wants to make sure there's butts and seats and enforcement as opposed to using it as the peer-to-peer magical tool it could be i really appreciate that insight it sort of makes me wonder now what is the goal of a book and what is a good book so a book when we say book we're not talking about um shakespeare or steve martin i think we're talking about uh this kind of advice how-to and miscellaneous that you and i trafficking i think well i know when i first started i did 120 books as a book packager that was my job and i woke up in the morning and i said i need to invent a book today or i will not get paid but after permission marketing it wasn't my job anymore and the last 19 books i've only written because i had no choice because the idea would not let me just turn it into a blog post because i would argue of my 7000 blog posts i could easily have turned 200 of them into books they could have carried a book but i did the blog post and then it's off my chest i'm done a book is two things first it's a signal to the reader to say this person who you know could have written a blog post decided to devote a year of his or her life to handing it to you in this complete form that is timeless and shareable and the second part is and now you can share it you can have a book group you can hand it to somebody else and say this let's talk about this and those two pieces together are what every one of the successful books i've ever done have in common that permission marketing helped invent email marketing as an industry because you could hand it to people you hired and say this this is what we do around here and tribes has been used by people on every side of the political spectrum and other forms of organization because it's a touchstone and that's what the practice is supposed to be too what do you think most books get wrong the authors of most books are looking for many of the magical elements of status that come from successfully being published they pay attention to the best-seller list they game it they pay attention to reviews they worry about what their friends think of the book even though their friends don't read books even though it wasn't written for those people and they listen way too much to risk adverse editors who are going to do 50 or 100 books a year those people are only going to spend three days total on your book and then there's going to be another one whereas this is your book and you should write it at the length you need it to be to make it singular and idiosyncratic and peculiar because we don't have an information shortage and we don't have a book shortage why is it that we can get a thousand compliments and then one criticism and we focus relentlessly on that one criticism even if it's from somebody we don't know don't like don't respect hasn't even read the book perhaps but that's what sticks in our mind why is that well i don't think that's true for everybody because narcissists and sociopaths don't have that problem so if you do have that problem uh welcome to the decline reassurance is futile the reassurance that we seek is like a warm bath it feels great and then you need more of it because the future is unpredictable and when the future doesn't match what you hope for the reassurance you used to have isn't enough you need more reassurance reassurance is part of our armor against the criticism that helps us feel like a fraud that amplifies our imposter syndrome that uh makes us believe that for every person who had the guts to criticize us there's 10 000 people who feel just as badly about the work we did but don't want to speak up and i have a hunch it's because of high school i think it's a combination of high school and mortality i don't know about you but most of the people in high school and me that was brutal the idea that there's kids at the other lunch table who are talking about you behind your back when the thing you most want from an evolutionary biology point of view is to procreate and it's you know think about what happens if you're in a tiny village on the savannah and the chief kicks you out you're gonna die that we have deep deep need to be in community and to be part of something in harmony because it connects to our survival and criticism feels not like the generous act of a professional which is a different kind of criticism but it feels like an assault and i'm not surprised that in our head we've weaponized it into this threat you've said that creativity is a choice it's not a bolt of lightning from somewhere else can you explore that for me yeah this really rubs some people the wrong way which makes me like it even more what does it mean that creativity is a choice well first thing have you ever been creative once in your life have you ever solved an interesting problem told a funny joke said something to somebody else that needed to be said i've never met anyone who said no everyone has been creative at least once so what does it mean to be creative more than once it means that you have to extend yourself with empathy to the person you are seeking to serve to the person who the work is for and you have to extend yourself not just through space but through time into the future announcing something that might or might not work you don't know yet that's what makes it creative if you exert the emotional labor to do those two things sometimes you will have a successful creative outcome that's a choice so the people who say i don't have any questions well no it's impossible you don't have any questions what you're actually saying is i don't care enough to ask a question that might embarrass me that's what you're actually saying and that's a euphemism for i don't want to make the choice to be creative i have this theory that one of the biggest things that holds us back in life is that we're unwilling to look like an idiot in the short term to be successful in the long term yeah that's brilliant you should write that one down what does it mean to trust yourself so the original title for my book was trust yourself i even own trustyourself.com which is lying mostly dormant and it wasn't inexpensive when we say i am talking to myself nobody thinks that's a weird thing to say who is i and who is yourself why does it feel so normal to have two voices in our head because we all do one voice is hyper literate and verbal and vocal and a critic it is responsible for getting us to fit in all the way the other voice not that good at being verbal that self is the one that wants to make things better that's curious it's inquisitive that might color outside the lines and it's the first voice that is mostly in control and so when we look at great shortcuts and hacks like morning pages they exist to bypass the first voice that so many of the things that creative people do as part of their practice exist to make the first voice the monkey mind be a little calmer so that the other voice can be trusted enough to speak up that doesn't mean it will always work and it doesn't mean we should let that voice do whatever it wants to but it should at least be allowed to present its agenda so that our more cognition-focused brain can make a decision what does it mean to be a professional you said doing what you love is for amateurs and loving what you do is for professionals can you expand on that and then explore some other differences okay so there are very few amateur surgeons right you want a professional surgeon you want the surgeon to show up and do her work beautifully even if she's in a bad mood and you want her to keep going to continuing education classes to be understanding the state of the art not because they are fascinated by how the knee works but because they said to you i'm really good at knee surgery and i will take care of you a professional makes a promise and then keeps the promise whether or not they feel like it amateurs get to be authentic whatever that means amateurs show up when they want to and make what they want to make i love being an amateur at some things don't sell your hobbies do your hobbies for you but if you're going to be a pro it means you need to understand the state of the art it needs means you need to raise the bar you need to understand who it's for and what's it for what change do you seek to make there's a whole bunch of obligations that go with being a professional that put you on the hook and for years i've had uniforms at work i don't usually wear them in public they change from time to time the beginning was a lab coat lately i've just been trying the japanese volunteer fireman hoppy coat because when you put on the uniform you've just sent yourself a message do your work at your workspace do it at the appointed hours never ever miss a deadline never ever go over budget because professionals don't miss deadlines don't throw tantrums and don't go over budget and every once in a while a creative breaks through because they're doing their hobby for money and they do those things they miss their deadline blah blah and people applaud them and then eventually they fade away because the industries we work in they want to work with professionals how do we define work well there's the work and then there's work the verb for me the work is what the professional said they would do and there are definitely times that i the permission marketing the phrase that enabled me to be an author came to me in the shower right but it didn't come to me shower accidentally it came to me in the shower with intent i went into the shower and i was getting close to the self-appointed deadline and i said i'm going to stay in the shower until i have a name for this thing we do here even if the water gets cold and we only had a 40 gallon hot water tank at the time so i knew i didn't have a lot of time i was in there to do work and i think as we get more and more privileged where our work looks so much more like what people used to think of as hobbies we can get confused by the fact that our work is a hobby it's not and treating it like our work i think helps us make it better you mentioned earlier something um and i forget the context but uh maybe you can expand on it about meeting the spec talk to me about that i know i've been ranting so thank you for giving me this platform this is beautiful keep going man there's there's lots to be said about spec first let's talk about uh edward's deming and what spec and quality mean quality is not luxury quality is not expensive quality is not that you love it quality is just one thing it meets spec so if i look under an electron microscope at any part of a lexus which is by any measure the highest quality car there is under electron microscope it's filled with defects but they're not defects that matter because they're defects that are within spec and so we begin by understanding what is the spec of the work we're going to do if it meets spec not only is it quality but it is good enough and good enough is not a slur good enough is a definition it met spec so once it's good enough we ship the work if you're not happy with that change your spec but let's be really clear about what the spec is that what it meant for a lexus to be good enough when they first came out was it had to be a standard deviation better than a mercedes that was their definition if someone's going to say no no we can't ship this lexus because it's not perfect the product manager should say no no no it was never supposed to be perfect it never can be perfect it simply met spec the hard work was in defining the spec a spec that will get you to the next step two questions about spec do you think that applies in a world of leverage where the difference between something that's you know meets spec and something that exceeds spec can be massively disproportionate yeah no i think that we're having a semantic discussion here but if the massive shift that you're looking for that comes from leverage is important that should be part of the spec okay and do you think we hide behind perfection oh yeah all the time talk to me all the time double click on that so if we've had a hundred years of industrialism and industrialism has been all about don't ship things that are defective if we have brainwashed every human being who is alive who has been through organized schooling into understanding that an a is better than a b and there are wrong answers and right answers on the test well then it's super easy to say good enough and perfect are the same thing so when i was in college the logic symbolic logic was one of my favorite classes the symbolic logic exam was not only open book open note it was unlimited time in the room so you got there at 8 am you could stay as long as you wanted i decided when i got to college i would take as many classes as i could because it was all the same price and i wasn't going to care about my grades because i didn't want to be tempted to go to law school and so if i could take a class pass fail i would because spec was easier to meet right and after three and a half hours at the in the logic exam i said i could probably get a few more points here but i have met my spec and i left and i was one of the first people to leave but someone stayed there for i think it was 18 hours and the question is what did they get in exchange for that focus on perfectionism because i know what i did in the other 15 hours that were free to me and i think unless you believe you're immortal using your time wisely is probably a good practice i like the way that you think about that in terms of spec i often think about it as the bar sort of and there's areas where you want that bar to be raising and there's areas where you just want to sort of do the do the table stakes or the bare minimum possible and you need to decide what those leverage points are for you in those areas that you care about and then identify people and surround yourself with people who are going to encourage you to raise that bar so here's a a great approach which is next time you're working on a project turn on kind of blue from miles davis first of all surround yourself with the right people the the people who joined him in the studio for those four days were the right people but secondly he made one of the most important one of the best-selling jazz albums of all time in four days and the question you need to ask yourself is if they had spent four more days in the studio what would have happened that's a great point i'm gonna listen to that after this um talk to me a little bit about shame we avoid shame by avoiding blame can you expand on that okay so what has happened in my lifetime and it happened hundreds of years ago in salem massachusetts and it has happened in many other places is that shame has been sharpened into a tool for cultural coercion and compliance that what people have figured out is that shame is a is a soft spot on almost everybody that if you press that spot people will shrink they will run away it is particularly used against women but it is used against large numbers of people to cause them to not take an action it's a ridiculous method because it doesn't scale it's not humane it is not kind and it's unpredictable and yet we use it all the time how dare you is not said often enough to people who are seeking to shame us that what we need to do is take shame off the table because it extinguishes part of our humanity when we shame people and shaming yourself there's that trust yourself thing shaming yourself is something we do all the time there's a rant in my book called the world's worst boss and i just gave away the punchline but basically if you had a boss who woke you up in the middle of the night scolded you for not working hard enough criticized all your work and told you you were never going to amount to anything you would not work for that person for very long and yet most of us that is our own boss that's who we work for that voice in our head and if that voice is shaming you you need to figure out how to undo that internal narrative because it is extinguishing your work how do we learn that like what does that process look like well i'm a huge fan of cognitive behavioral therapy and a trained cbt practitioner is certainly better at it than i am but catching ourselves when we begin the cascade is the key to the whole thing because once the cascade of shame begins it is very difficult to stop but if you can figure out what are the trigger points where are the moments what is that phrase and in that moment intercede and replace it with a different one and that's part of why i wear a uniform and i like the idea of being a professional because now and this is key the work is not personal the work is the work in the resources i had allocated i did the best work i could to meet the spec here it is this is not me this is the work if you don't like the work teach me so i can change my spec for next time but i will not shame myself nor will i let you shame me because that's not helpful what's helpful is to learn from this interaction of what we put in the world and you know some of the workshops inside of kimbo and the alt-mba people give and get between 400 and 600 pieces of feedback a month from fellow travelers who are doing what they're doing and what they say is that's more feedback than i got in two years and it's useful feedback from people who know how to give criticism and it doesn't come with shame it's just information and that's so freeing you know i learned the first year i was in the book business i sold my first book the first day and then i got 800 rejection letters in a row i would go to the mailbox every single day and there'd be letters there with stamps on them that someone had paid for to write me a letter saying we don't like your idea day after day after day sometimes 5 or 10 or 15 in a day and learning to separate the feedback of this idea isn't working for us from you're a bad person who will never amount to anything was a key part of my internal development as someone who could do this work how do you think about the difference between coaching and criticism that's a really good question um so michael bungay stanier has written the best book on coaching and it would be great for you guys to chat he's in toronto coaching is not telling someone the answer and i think i heard you talking to derek about what happens when you make someone's idea one percent better when you make someone's idea one percent better you actually disincentivize them not incentivize them and with little kids saying to a little kid you're so smart or the horrible you're really cute or beautiful is not helpful what's helpful is helping people see what they are capable of given what they told you was important to them criticism is completely different criticism is what happens when someone with domain knowledge who is not trying to earn status by hurting you is able to help you see the world as it is and those three pieces are the key right because most of the criticism i've gotten in my life has come from people who felt like they would feel better if i felt worse and they maybe didn't verbalize that to themselves but we certainly see that i mean you know i don't know what canadian thanksgiving is like but that's one of the things that happens with american thanksgiving all the time stock analysts do it all the time the person who said amazon.toast no one remembers their name but at the time they were a sensation because one person mighty enough to take on amazon and then but the part about domain knowledge is critical because you not only have to know it when you see it you have to be smart enough and practiced enough to put it in words to teach someone else so years ago american express hired me to interview diane von furstenberg and it was absolutely fascinating interview because i felt uh unprepared because i don't understand the fashion world very well so i read both of her autobiographies as i was um talking with her asking her questions i realized not only hadn't she written her autobiographies she hadn't even read them but leaving that part aside she was unable to describe why the things she had done that succeeded had succeeded and she was unable to describe why the things that had failed had failed she was just completely intuitive she just had a hunch she saw it but she didn't have words to explain it so she didn't have domain knowledge she had locked into good taste what she liked is what other people liked and if you can hire somebody like that you should do it but you shouldn't work for somebody like that and you shouldn't have somebody like that as a client because it's going to be really hard for you to get better and when i met two of my uh colleagues from the book industry michael cater who's still the most influential person in the book business he writes publishers lunch every day and john boswell who did french for cats and oj's legal pad they were the first two people in the book industry who could explain to me in words why things that worked worked and they weren't always right but they gave me a grounding a taxonomy and as somebody who thinks with both sides of their brain that was really useful to me because i needed taxonomy and that's why i love media because i had a set of theories about how the internet worked if you read unleashing the idea virus which i wrote 20 years ago i was right about so many things because i had a theory and once you have the taxonomy you could say and then maybe this and then maybe this and then maybe this i didn't on the other hand trust myself enough to invest in any of the companies that changed the world because that's not what i do but learning a narrative and then changing it based on new data i mean that's what you've been doing for years it's super generous work who is the first person to ever bet on you my parents did do you remember how you felt in that moment when you realized that they were doing that the high school thing was really painful and seeing them uh show up with more than parental obligation was i i mean it was 10 years of fuel it made a huge difference to me do you find your biggest mistakes um in life are commission or omission omission for sure people i didn't help things i didn't start things i didn't say folks who i could have given the benefit of the doubt to who i didn't i worry a lot about the commission ones but there aren't that many of them the omission ones is an endless list what are some of the hard earned lessons that you've paid for in business that we can benefit from i would think i think the biggest one is people don't want what you want employees don't want what you want customers don't want what you want you know that one of the challenges of the whole stock option thing is entrepreneurs and founders think that other people will be as motivated by owning part of the company as they are they're not not even close it's a sort of a prize pool at the end of the game show and it ends up becoming a massive demotivator in almost every organization because it hasn't cashed out yet right like you promised me and in people's minds 100 shares without knowing any percentage numbers they've just decided that that's whatever so people don't want what you want and that means we have to extend ourselves and go to where they are like i already read the book but everyone who's gonna read the book hasn't read it yet so they need something i don't need right or what fuels someone to go to work every day is different than what fuels me to go to work every day so that was part of it number two is if you play any game in which money is involved the fact that people have a different story about money will cause you to make mistakes and they will either be mistakes because other people are better at piling up money than you are which is extremely likely and so if part of what you're seeking to do is play on that axis they'll beat you if they have the chance because they think that because it's easy to measure and socially acceptable that is all that matters and so people the phrase it's just business is really a horrible phrase but lots of people mean it which what they're saying is all right so when i worked at spinnaker for david cease in 1983 he loved board games and i've been a game designer since i was 16. and so we were playing diplomacy me and the seven other senior people at the company and david and i formed an alliance he was the president i was 23. he was russia and i don't remember who i was and we had a mutual non-aggression pact and in round five i double-crossed him and uh knocked him out of the game it took a year for our relationship to recover because my whole thing was it's just a game that's the way you're supposed to do in diplomacy and his thing was there was this overhang of yeah but i'm your boss's boss and i'm your mentor you're not supposed to go double-cross somebody else and i didn't learn nearly as much as i could have about some people's story of money until much later and then i'd say you know we talked about the criticism thing you know i had a guy on my board when i had my first startup who gave me not one useful piece of advice and completely maximized his income through the interaction and i took it all personally as opposed to realizing that that's just the game larry played he was very transparent about it and i just assumed he would act the way i would act if i was in in his shoes but i wasn't in his shoes he was in his shoes and he was acting in a consistent way for him and then i guess the last one is finally coming to grips with the smallest viable audience and not just settling for but completely embracing the fact that 1 000 true fans is more than enough you don't need to be on the cover of a magazine you don't need to be on a best-seller list that the status games are really significant that i used to go to ted and there's some really cool people there but there's also way more cocktail party status games than i can handle and i felt like i was failing because i wasn't good at them and didn't enjoy them and then i realized i don't have to go anymore and that was just so freeing because i'm not here to make those people happy i'm here to make the people i made my promise too happy because that's my professional work and who else is sitting with me at the lunchroom table i got done with that in high school and i want to stay done with it that's a great place to end this session thank you so much for your generosity and your time well this was worth waiting for but i hope we won't wait as long before we do it again i would like that you

Channel: The Knowledge Project Podcast

Views: 33,477

Keywords: Shane Parrish, The Knowledge Project, Podcast, The Knowledge Project Podcast, Farnam Street, Farnam Street Blog, Listen and Learn, Better Thinking, Seth Godin, blog, altmba, akimbo, tribes, what to do when it's your turn, ted, marketing, linchpin, the practice, this is marketing

Id: xIHx2H5YT60

Length: 80min 42sec (4842 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 23 2021