How to Be a Linchpin | Seth Godin on Impact Theory

I think mentors are way overrated they don't scale it's an unequal relationship and it's an easy way to let yourself off the hook I wish I had a mentor heroes aren't enormous ly large supply you can say what would Bill Gates do what would Elon must do what would Jacqueline Novogratz do and you can study their work enough that even from afar without them knowing you exist because they're your hero you can start to model it everybody welcome to impact dude you know my friends because you believe that human potential is nearly limitless but you know that having potential is not the same as actually doing something with it so our goal with this show and company is to introduce you to the people and ideas that will help you actually execute on your dreams all right today's guest is one of the most prolific authors of our time he's written 18 international bestsellers including linchpin tribes the dip and purple cow which had been translated into more than 35 languages and when he was a book packager he wrote a book per month every month for ten years he's also written more than 7,100 blog post which he publishes at a rate of one per day every day and less do you think these are cheap throwaway posts that no one reads his blog is one of the most popular blogs on the planet in fact it's so popular that if you want to find it you need only type for single letters into Google se th that's madness there are companies that spend hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising and marketing that don't have that kind of visibility in addition to his writing he's been an entrepreneur since the age of 14 creating numerous companies including Squidoo and Yoyodyne which he sold to Yahoo for 30 million dollars he is a true iconoclast who over the course of a staggeringly varied career has helped invent children's educational games commercial email and he is routinely disrupted the publishing industry with radically divergent tactics such as free books ebooks books with wordless covers and books that ship in milk cartons his book spreading the idea virus was the most successful ebook of all time and when he launched a series of four books on Kickstarter he reached his goal in just three hours becoming the most successful book project ever launched way he's also revolutionizing the education system by creating some of the top performing online classes on platforms such as udemy and Skillshare as well as running his own successful online course called alt MBA which seeks to provide the best post Industrial Revolution era education possible so please help me in welcoming one of the most sought after speakers in the world the creator of the brand new podcast akimbo the man who has been called the ultimate entrepreneur for the Information Age Seth Godin doesn't sound like anyone I know the frustrating thing about writing your intro was I kept having to leave things off it is really incredible what you've managed to accomplish in your life and what I found fascinating cuz I know you as an author have read a lot of your books which really and truly by the way if influenced me as an entrepreneur and I didn't know as much about your entrepreneurial journey so diving into that and seeing how many risks you took there how many successful and unsuccessful things you attempted was staggering and then I think the favorite thing I came across in researching use this concept where you told people to fly closer to the Sun and I promise nothing bad will happen to you what do you mean by that well I'm not sure I want to promise anything but I don't let any back guarantees here the story of Icarus is fascinating to look at from a cultural perspective it's been around for thousands of years we all know it Daedalus and Icarus go to a desert island Daedalus the dad makes wings out of feathers gives them to his son put some on with wax says to his son obey your father were flying out of here don't fly too high because if you fly too high the wax will melt and you'll die and we all know what happened Icarus got uppity he had you bris he disobeyed his father and he died except that's not what the myth said in 1700 or 1500 or 1200 they changed it it used to say but more important don't fly too low because if you fly too low the water and the mist will weigh down your wings and you will surely perish they took that part out why do you think they took that out they took it out because the people in power the industrialists want us to fly lower because it's easier to ignore us it's easier to keep us in line it's easier to get a factory job that way people who have the you Burris to dream of something bigger change the status quo and the people who are in charge aren't in favor of that and I'm not a conspiracy theorist at all but I do know where I where public school came from and public school was invented by factory owners who didn't have enough compliant factory workers and it worked great for a hundred years we had this wonderful system do what you're told go to the placement office you'll get a job for 50 years you will like the job but you'll be able to go home and watch TV buy enough stuff you only distort JUnit and then you'll die and the deal was straightforward and kept on both sides and during our lifetime in the last 20 years deal's off and the mistake the problem is that people are still seduced into thinking that what they're supposed to do is fit in more and social media has made it worse because there's this whole pack mentality of how do I fit in more with small bursts of here's one quick tip for a flat stomach in three different ways to get rich and you can learn to flip houses today and be a millionaire tomorrow none of which work right but the combination of those two mean that people are starting to feel broken and bitter because the promise isn't being kept so what does it look like then - and you said something which I thought was pretty racy in the best way possible which is that in the 1600s the unemployment rate was zero because there were no jobs had been ever so we're going you said that we're going back to that hey what does that look like and how do people fly closer to the Sun in that scenario so let's think about a job where you have to train 12 years to be good at it radiology you and I could never read an x-ray and figure out if someone's got a broken leg or not well a few years ago they figured out that x-rays are digital so you don't need the person to read them here scan them send them someplace overseas where someone's cheaper they don't have to do that anymore because our computer can do it and a computer can do it better than an average radiologist so what jobs are left for radiologists the job of being so expert at something and doing something so beyond competence that a computer isn't going to be able to learn how to do it then all we've got left are jobs where you're doing something someone can't tell you what to do because if someone can tell you how to do your job we can find someone cheaper than you to do it do you have a process so that's so powerful i when i read linchpin it changed me and it changed me in at a point in my life where i'd a lot of employees and i struggled with this notion of okay i wanted to be an entrepreneur so i started doing that and i would make a terrible employee and so but how do i have 1400 employees and preach like everyone should be an entrepreneur i'm like the math doesn't add up it literally would make my own comforter or math doesn't add up quest was this huge home run and you owned a factory you may not have had a building with steam coming at the top but it was a factory you needed people to do factory jobs and those people probably had a good job but the point is that going forward most organizations are gonna get smaller and smaller per dollar in sales because you don't need as many people and if you think about how many people worked at sears roebuck versus how many people work at amazon now if you think about how many people it takes at Tesla to make a car compared to how many Henry Ford needed to make a car we're all going in the same direction so you have a choice and the choice is one of three things either you're the replaceable cog in the pyramid who's going to get paid as little as possible or you're the founder of the owner the person who runs the thing but for most of us the best choice is to be the linchpin one we can't live without the person who figures out what to do next and I'm betting that of the 1,400 people who work for you you had 50 linchpins and those people made the place work the other thousand you could have replaced down a weeks notice but those 50 people what they knew how they cared how they work through the world there would have been no company without them do you think at all how how do we get people inspired to become linchpin okay so now we're getting I think to the core of what you're trying to build here and what's open to so many of us mandatory education makes no sense nobody ever learned anything against their will sooner or later it becomes voluntary you need enrollment not enrollment from the legal sense of you're not truant but enrollment in the sense that you are leaning into it and want to learn it so if we want to teach someone to be a baseball fan here's what we don't do we don't say here's the baseball textbook there'll be a test tomorrow and if you do well you can take another test and if you do ten tests in a row really well we'll take you to a game that's not what happens but yet kids memorize all these statistics and they know all this stuff because they wanted to know it so we must begin by gaining enrollment and there are a couple ways to do it one way is to promise a quick win all right just read these six paragraphs and you will lose thirty pounds and it's easy to get the masses to pay a dollar for that but doesn't work to data and the other way to do it is to say to people being a Navy SEAL or being physically fit or being smart at business these are endeavors they take effort if you're ready to pay the price to get the benefit there are people who will teach you so it's the opposite of the question will this be on the test if you're asking will this be on the test from an online course or from a school what you're basically saying to the teacher is without a certificate I don't even to be here I'm only here to prove that I was here and in this post educational institution world that we're entering certificates are worth less and less what's actually where something is did you sign up to learn something where you opened yourself up to possible failure opened yourself up to the stress of becoming someone else in a way that made you better and not everyone wants to do that but my mission is to work with the people who do so that I can help them open those doors and how so the concept of to make sure I pronounce this right it's all tome or Tali I guess I'm not familiar with this I've only heard you say it so I think you have to I think have to rolled photo metallic that's much better Vega so how do we get how do we knowing that that's staring into the void and that a moment of like this could fail and am I really gonna jump and die forward how do we train people through that and God maybe that's the wrong question but like so I grew up in the standard education system so I try to cram everything into process which by the way as as a leader would make it so much easier if I could just like push the cattle through the chute and that they would come out the other side awoken and excited and excitable but it may not work like that but how close can we get to making people thirsty for that moment so salt amor Tali refers to an important work of art by Yves Klein from the early 1960s he went to a small suburb outside of Paris and did basically the first Photoshop to picture and he's standing there like this falling out of a building and he's literally falling and they did it with a double exposure there's mattresses under him that they were then removed so he didn't die or anything but you feel in the pit of your stomach that sort of Six Flags feeling the question is where do we go in our life for those six flags feelings and what they discovered in the social media world is knowing that there are people talking about you behind your back it's a good way to simulate that oh I wonder what they're saying I'm gonna go check my status and check but it's not productive so the question is where can it be productive let's say you're a server and a restaurant well if your job is only to bring the food from the kitchen to the front table we've already figured out how to replace that right it's the buffet or the fast-food restaurant your job is to make people feel welcome and to connect with them so there's just space between you and them and the question is will you risk entering the space putting yourself forward even though in that moment the person might say you totally misjudged what was happening here I don't want your smile and I don't want your connection but when you do it well not only is it addictive it creates enormous amounts of possibility and so that leap into the void doesn't mean mortgage your house and put everything you've got on one business project it means are you hooked on that feeling of this might not work and this might work we'll find out one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard you talk about and I always try to give people examples of you know look if you want to play in a world stage I'm the guy to follow like I will paint that picture for how you get there but it doesn't have to be entrepreneurially it doesn't have to be that you want to be an athlete you could want to be a great parent but I've never had the words to explain what that would look like and you do and you've used this incredible story of the woman I think she was at 7-eleven who sells like more coffee than any other 7-eleven in the country or something what's the whole concept about like bringing this down to something that's really tangible for people other than the one that you just gave where people can really see how this plays out in their life so the system wants you to feel mostly powerless because they have power you don't and it also wants you to feel inadequate until you buy more stuff because that's what marketers sell us is the idea that until you buy this you're incomplete it turns out those two things don't make people happy what makes us happy is agency knowing that we have some sort of control over what's going to happen in our life and unfortunately the economic structure that we live in isn't going to be easy for most people to fix not in the short run but what we can fix right now is how we respond or react to what's happening in front of us and my friend Kat Hoch says you can't be curious and angry at the same time that's interesting so you got a choice you got a choice in the traffic jam you get a choice when you're dealing with an angry clerk you get a choice with a bureaucrat am I going to be curious about how this person got to this moment am I going to be angry at this situation and what we find is that as a parent as a clerk at 7-eleven as a third grade teacher we could did deep into emotional labor not the physical labor of digging latrine but the emotional labor of sitting when we feel like running of whispering when we feel like yelling we could dig deep and say in this moment I'm gonna choose to be the best version of myself and seek possibility and it turns out that that's a life that you can build an entire life merely doing that and then what happens more often than not is the world responds by inviting you to play on a bigger stage so this is not about hustling I'm not a fan of Sling I'm a fan of a generous hustle and the generous hustle says how can I do things in the world to leave a better trail and to help other people not how do I do things so I get my fair share because the world doesn't respond well to hustlers they don't like being hustled but the world responds really well the people who take responsibility and give away credit and that boundary there is totally different and if you work in an organization they can't respect that there's another one that wants you it's the way you've crafted your life is utterly fascinating to me and when you talk about not being a fan of hustling and talk about generosity and things so we've obviously been trying to get you on the show forever and I remember the first time Christopher who books the show because people always they dance right and it's like oh well maybe not now whatever and he goes oh no Seth goden was a hard no I had to laugh because I though it was so clear and he said look he has these guidelines about traveling and all that stuff well that's really interesting and then as I dug into your and it was interesting to me because I was so on the climb of trying to build a community build a following which you'd obviously already done very successful well and you're hitting home runs every day overly kind from you but thank you and it was so interesting to me than to see your entrepreneurial career and realize oh he could have kept going like you after the success of Yoyodyne I know you there were other huge offers equity offers that were made to you and you turned them down one why and how is that for you the version of flying closer to the Sun versus the safe path right so I don't talked about this much after in 91 I helped invent commercial email so if you've ever gotten an email from any company that you wanted to get not spit because I was loud and proud against spam from an early age I got kicked out of the Direct Marketing Association for my behavior but permission marking that that was my invention years before I wrote the book and we built a company that was getting more email every day than any company in the world with only you know 75 employees so that was a fascinating ride and it was energizing and I sold it to Yahoo right at the peak of the bubble and then I got a call from Bill Gross who's a great entrepreneur and he said Idealab needs a vice president of marketing we're gonna go public in six months would you like a billion dollars in stock options to take the job and I looked at my little kids and I looked at my life and I said I know how to do that but what would change for the better if I did and so I turned it down and once you turn down a billion dollars in stock up since it becomes really easy to prioritize the rest of your life because you say yourself well don't do it for money because you didn't do that for money and so the model has been I see myself as a teacher that's really incredible and I think everybody judges their life by metrics even if not by standard metrics what are the metrics by which you judge the success of your life judge what you do next that kind of thing well so you know I'm fortunate because I've shown up a lot longer than most people thought I would show up that there's a lot of people who trust me and my goal is to build that trust not to trade in on the trust and that means putting things into the world that match the promise that I've made and the promise I've made is this might surprise you this might not work there are no shortcuts but you might be able to see a different way through that puts a lot of pressure on me to not do the safe thing so you know we will go you're down one of the first privacy policies ever on the Internet we won't rent or sell your email address now you see those everywhere I don't need that policy anymore because the people who trust me know that I would never do that and that's the goal is how can you engage with people so that you don't even need a lawyer so you don't even need the fine print because you can live a life with no fine print yeah that's really interesting very hard to do and when I look at you referring to yourself as a teacher coming out of being an entrepreneur building things realizing that this is somebody who's doing this purely out of choice it's really fascinating especially in our culture today where the entrepreneurs become the new Rockstar buildings like unless you're building something like you're just not living up to your potential it takes a real level of self-discipline not to get caught up and cultural pressure or yeah what other people think about you the just lizard brain and Migdal a desire to fit in and so it's really tempting to look at you and in fact if I'm honest I did look at you as somebody that just sort of naturally had an easier time with that than others but then in researching you realizing that you really grew to understand self narrative self talk that you actually struggled with negative self-talk walk us through that what's your relationship with cognitive behavioral therapy like how did you unwind the self-talk to be able to make such clear decisions for yourself well as you mentioned earlier I've been a small time entrepreneur since I was 14 and never did it for the money I did it because it was interesting because I saw a problem and I wanted to help change it I saw a project I wanted to see if it would work and it was a fun ride through college I went to business school briefly and then I had my one and only real job at a software company which was a great one because I was making mistakes in somebody else's dime but I left there in 84 and proceeded to just fail and fail and fail I sold my first book the first day to warner books for $5,000 chip Conley and I wrote it together and when we were 24 and then I got of did 86 26 years old and then I got 800 rejection letters in a row I got rejected by every well-known publisher again and again and again because all you needed to sent out a book proposal with stamps he had to go down to the local laser printing place I couldn't afford a laser printer and you'd print out the proposals and you just mail him and if they liked it they send you money but they didn't like it and then he didn't like it and they didn't like and they just kept not liking it and I was doing projects that were sort of like in those days you couldn't find a recipe for fortune cookies wasn't in a Chinese cookbook wasn't an enjoyer cooking how do you make fortune cookies so I was gonna do a cookbook with a recipe for fortune cookies but what are the other 200 pages the other 200 pages were little tiny perforated fortunes some bike like Henny Youngman and others that we were just gonna make up so the fortune cookie Construction Set what a great idea and I like it and they're big bucks little books no one liked the books and so the question is how do you hustle harder how do you get in front of more people how do you and I I was bringing in spreadsheets and I was wearing a suit and I realized that it was the frustration was turning into anger and I was almost daring people to reject it so my number could get even higher than 800 right once I could relax into the idea that maybe I could do something for other people things started to go a little bit better and one project led to another so there 120 bucks I didn't write them I put together teams I wrote parts of them really complicated almanacs 600 page books that were basically the internet for the internet but then the speed bump would come right because you spend a million dollars a half million dollars to make a book and then it didn't come through or whatever and when they did that whole talk would come back and I'd be afraid to answer the telephone and it's all caving in again and that was the first time I discovered CBT which for those who haven't explored it is the single most proven form of therapy you don't have to go over any many times three four times it's a series of techniques we had a family friend whose kid at the age of four had significant OCD he was washing his hands for hours every day which if you have a foil there's a very scary thing to watch just after three sessions he never did it again and the trick because it's a trick is oh your brain has a loop going on when that loop gets started is when it's at its weakest how do you train the kid that when that happens there's a little interactive intervention Oh put a gold coin over here instead of over here that's a signal it starts this other thing a prize occurs you've completely forgotten that you want to wash your hands things like that so for me there were certain triggers and it's like oh when I feel that trigger instead of launching this and launching this and launching this why don't I do that instead and about the same time I had this horrible crackling in my ears and I went to the ear nose and throat Hospital in New York and I explained it to them and they listened say yeah you have a horrible crackling in your ears it really bothers me and they gave me some serious sudafed and I slept for a week because it's very sensitive that advice I can't take this anymore and the crackling came back and they said well what makes the crackling start I go when I call like this and they said don't do that so I stopped because the crackling was bothering me I can I just made the crackling come back right now but I just stopped making that move and the crackling went away well the same thing is true with so many of the stories we tell ourselves about business about sales about relationships about customers about employees here we go again well the minute you start saying here we go again you have a moment when you could say well what if I said something else right now what if every time I felt that way instead of pushing someone away I gave them a hug right that you reprogram that cycle and it doesn't work every time people have very serious issues that I'm not minimizing at all I'm just saying for me it made a huge shift in how I decided to be present in the moment and not run away from the lizard not run away from those things that scared me but dance with them instead I love that you brought that up that notion of dancing with the fear or something you've talked really eloquently about what is that what's that process look like and how does it end up serving somebody who wants to become an artist in the way that you mean it pen the artistry of the person who walks up to your table and greets you with a smile and does things that can't be outsourced you know there's a really good reason to be afraid and if you look at a lizard or a wolf or a fox they spend most of their time afraid that's why they're alive that what makes a wild animal a wild animal is that they're good at having grandchildren staying alive in the wild that involves a little bit of you know reproduction and sort of almost an anger thing but mostly it's fear get out of trouble right now well we evolved from that and it worked when we were cavemen or in the jungle because if you hear a twig snap and you don't run away that's it it's over if you're in the circle in the village around the campfire and you offend the chief and they banish you from the tribe you're gonna die and so there's a lot of things that evolved for a really good reason about how we behave and now they're all wrong that the thing that you are trying to avoid with saber-tooth Tigers or the campfire the opposite is true if you want to do public speaking make a presentation through sales invent something new write all of the where did writer's block come from write writer's block is a glitch that we think we're in the jungle when we're actually in front of our keyboard so when it shows up we can't deny it's there the harder we make it go away the more powerful it becomes because it's at our brainstem our amygdala it's very powerful so the alternative is to say oh welcome back thanks for letting me know I'm onto something and that narrative is something that we can learn to do and we now have such an easy time to put our ideas into the world if we can do it generously and we can do it with fear not without fear but do it with fear because over time it's like athletics we can train ourselves to get better at it one thing that I love I was literally floored by the fact that you've written more than 7100 blogpost I was freaking out I was like how is it number real I made sure that you hadn't misspoke so that I was hearing it multiple times it's like Jesus like that's scary and then you said but the law of statistics says that over half of them are below average I thought wow that's really interesting and you couple that with the 800 rejections one after the other after the other it gets to be really interesting and what I want to know so I get the technique of cognitive behavioral therapy but why did you care enough to keep going like when you got that many rejections why not just go for a typical job or why one a day like exactly well you just gave it away when you said when you rolled your eyes when you said typical job because I knew I knew what the typical job was and I knew I would be stuck in it and I would be bad at it that I still have trouble not speaking up when I see things that are broken you're not paid to speak up about broken things when your bank teller or when you're you know a junior trainee but so I knew that I would view that for the rest of my life as a really significant failure so the idea was how do I cost reduce macaroni and cheese for dinner window shopping at restaurants so that I could just make it one more day how can I cycle this so I get to keep playing and the magic of the book business when I was in it was you didn't need any cash to get started the publisher funded in the work and then paid you a royalty so it looked like it could work and there were people who were making it work and I talked about this in the dip that there's a difference I'm totally in favor of radicals who do something that's never been done before but if you don't have the resources to support that better to do something that's been done before better to follow down a path where there's a path because the work is the point the process is the point not being other brag that you were the first one one thing that I really think is interesting is if you're going to be writing the blog posts you're going to be doing that many know that some are gonna be below average or your isaac asimov and your writing until noon just everyday even it's not good how do you turn getting better into a process do you think that we're born with it do you think that we can increase our talents right so people who talk to me about writer's block who talk to me about being stuck I say show me your bad writing and they never have any show me the six novels you've written that are terrible they don't have them show me the 18 screenplays they don't have them because what they're really saying is I want to have really good writing then I'll have some and in my experience it begins with really bad writing if you have enough bad writing someone can help you make it better if you have bad taste you can learn to get better taste so I don't believe that there's any genetics associated whatsoever with what most people call talent I think there's an enormous amount of culture associated with it and I think there's learning associated with it that you get better at this craft because you're in a culture that rewards you for getting better at it like here we are in LA it surrounded by some of the greatest sounding camera people in the industry most of the sounding camera people in LA are better than the sound and camera people in Guadalajara why because there's a cultural loop here that says if you get a little bit better you're gonna get more work which will get you a little bit better which will get you more working around and around it goes right it's no one's born being good at manual focus that's something that you develop an eye for and the same things true with writing some people get lucky out of the gate but they compound that look because they keep going and they edit they develop good taste you know I'm good at direct mail copywriting partly because I've written 3,000 direct mail letters and until you've written 2,000 it's not fair to say you're not good at it that is so powerful I'd literally didn't want to breathe because I want to make sure that like we got that whole thing that's so powerful and I really hope everybody at home is listening to that what was your process how did you were there people that you sought feedback from specific like how did you go through to get better I'm gonna put a little sidebar here about the alt NBA because what I've found is some people can bootstrap their way into this and I think you're one of those people I know I'm one of those people and other people because of school and lots of other things need a support system to do it so the Alton ba that this seminar run I'm not in it there's no video of me there's no video of anybody there's 75 resources but it's projects and giving and getting feedback and what happens is the people in it there's 125 people there's a lot of coaches give more feedback in 30 days than they've ever given in their whole life and get more feedback than they've ever gotten in their whole life and it keeps cycling and cycling and cycling and cycling because you can simulate that bootstrap situation if you're surrounded by other people who are on the same path as you I used to go to Barnes & Noble every Sunday and buy every one of the five important business books that were published that week no only five a week that were worth buying now it's five every ten minutes but it's five a week you could read them all I used to you know listen and map and look and chart and say well how did this work and how did that work when I was going to be a thriller writer I took six James Bond novels and decoded them chapter by chapters they're a rhythm to this there's lots of ways you can do that stuff but the fact you haven't done it already might mean you need somebody to help you and a mastermind group that you organize yourself is a great way to do it there's 20 great ways to do it 50 great ways but it begins by accepting you can get better and if you think there's a shortcut you're wrong that breaking down the James Bond thing is so smart did you know that that was how Benjamin Franklin got better at writing by reading James Bond out by reading James Bond necessarily oh yeah but yeah that he used to deconstruct the people that he thought were the best and tried to read it and then from right what they were saying so that he could figure out do I understand sentence structure do I understand paragraphs and I thought that was so fascinating at a time where you couldn't just go take a course on creative writing that people still found ways to do it that it's like the most tried-and-true method which is essentially to have a mentor somebody that's walking you through this stuff but even in the absence of that that there are ways especially now with social media and I young online like you can get in contact with people even if it's just their work so you're keying in to one of my favorite blog post ever which is about mentors and heroes I am in the minority here I think mentors are way overrated they don't scale it's an unequal relationship and it's an easy way to let yourself off the hook I wish I had a mentor heroes are an enormous ly large supply you can say what would Bill Gates do what would Elon Musk do Oh Jacqueline Novogratz do and you can study their work enough that even from afar without them knowing you exist because they're your hero you can start to model it years ago when I was a book packager I did a series of novels for Scholastic and the idea was twelve-year-old boys even back then weren't reading and there was the baby-sitters club and Sweet Valley High but mostly for girls what for boys so I licensed the rights to a bunch of Nintendo games and I invented the idea of novel izing Nintendo games how do you get from that idea to a million books sold and the answer was there are people who novelized movies for a living so that when you you know the Black Panther movie is going to be coming out there's gonna be a little black panther novel I'm sure that someone's gonna write it turns out they do him in two weeks there's a craft to it the people who know how to do this but you got to give him the screenplay well I didn't have the screenplay because it was a computer game so I developed this process I said well I know how to take a 12 year old and give them a video cassette player and have them play the game to the end then I can take that cassette and have somebody write out and think then I can turn it into a Bible 20 pages long who are the characters what do they look like what are the where the sources of tension which I'm just stealing from you know six different kinds of script development books they can hand it to somebody who writes novels based on movies and 2 weeks after we started we had a novel and it wasn't a great novel but it cost 99 cents and it was for a 12 year old and it got them to a lifetime of reading the point of that process was there was not one single act of genius in the entire thing but as a packager my job was to be that person who could produce something from afar that all fit together and this economy we live in isn't an industrial one it's a connection economy not based on who you know but who trusts you and what you have access to so the possibilities right this moment not for long are enormous for a human being who wants to take a threat of this a threat of this a threat of this weave them together braid them up and say I made this and I think that's being ignored by too many people who are looking for a shortcut do that that example you say there is not an act of genius in it and and I'll take that genius maybe is simplifying things or at least seeing that I process can be created I don't need it to be Einstein and that I really want people to understand this so at Qwest we went from I don't know how to make a shelf stable put like literally people would not believe how ignorant we were to the process we had no idea but he didn't do it right we didn't even know that water would make it rot right like that's how bad we were and then had to figure out the equipment and then now starting a studio right it's the same thing but what we do is we sit down and we go okay it's a game we play called no [ __ ] what would it take so no [ __ ] what would it take to build Disney now knowing that now I have to compete against Disney right so at least he didn't have to do that so you you're you start breaking it down these survivable failures right that's how I look at it so I never want to bet the farm so I need to be able to lose a lot and so where do I go that's a natural part of the the runway Zac where I can fail fail fail fail fail iterate figure it out and then go and if people could have watched us and I've tried to give it to them but if they could have watched that process like entrepreneurs and my way of defining it would be born because they would see oh like there's no magic it's fumble through but it's it's getting that path how did you guys break down the problem with education that you're trying to solve and then the actual way cuz I'm shocked when you said there were no videos I assumed all MBA was you and videos right so how did you guys figure out that wouldn't work and I'm really looking for that process like what were some of those early AHA is that you had about problem solution okay so I won't make up a convenient answer I'll tell you exactly how these things work for me about six times in my life I have met somebody who in the moment prodded me provoked me and encouraged me and something came out at the other side so my friend Lisa ganske who helped invent the world wide web when she and I met I was busy building my email company she was busy running the first web crawler search engine kind of thing and just being in the room with her caused me to invent a whole bunch of things click through ads stuff that is still around because she understood what I needed to keep going and kept in but that's not gonna work and then I would need to top that these are priceless things when they happen to me they don't happen very often what happened with the Alton ba is I saw the Skillshare courses working and saw the udemy courses working but I also knew that the typical online course has a 96% dropout rate and I knew that a bunch of money could be made taking money from people by making promises and then having them drop out I had no interest in that whatsoever so I said to myself what would of course it had a 2% dropout rate be like and then I went to the desert and I just sat there with my problem until I figured it out and that's hard work it's much harder work than when you find a magical person to dance with but I came back and I said here are the 13 projects and we're gonna use slack and zoom and WordPress and this and this and this and we're gonna go I'm gonna look younger patch until it works and let's go build that so one of the things that I find propels people through times like that where they're off in the desert and they're trying to figure this out and it's hard as hell and it might even be scary and I don't know if this is gonna work kicks in and the thing that I always tell people you need is to have something that gives you more energy than it takes and we'll shorthand that and say it's passion what do you think about passion a calling yeah what's uh what's your take on that so another controversial thing for me a lot of people hide behind the expression if I could just find something I love then I could do great work and I think it's way more powerful to be able to say I choose to love the thing I do and that idea that we can become passionate about our work as opposed to expecting our work to give us passion makes us way more flexible gives us way more leverage allows us to move forward and it gets back to the narrative the self-talk we have about this work we get to do as opposed to having to treat it as something we have to do I am absolutely ablaze with agreement on I really think that it's a process to create a passion and it drives me nuts because even I slip into saying find your passion and Mike you don't find it you create it right so what advice do you have for people that are like okay get it intellectually but I don't like what does a process look like like how do I decide to love something I don't know who said at first but it turns out that if you smile you're gonna be in a better mood not the other way around right that when you watch people trudging through the mall spending hundreds of dollars just before Christmas there is miserable right what a privilege to spend hundreds of dollars if you don't want to do it there's some really worthy causes that you ought to send it to this choice of saying I made the decision to be here today I made the decision to do this for live if you really want to make money go work for Goldman Sachs it's the single best way to get really rich if that's not what you're doing then you've already decided you're not doing it for the money so why are you doing it and coming back to that you know and Tony Robbins Master they said reorganizing our brain chemistry around the signals that come to us that deciding to smile and pause every time we see our kid right even if we're in the middle of seven other things that you can burn that in and it will persist for four years and so this isn't my area of expertise I've done it for myself I don't teach people how to do this but what I can tell you is it's mostly triggered by fear our fear of death our fear of being alone our fear of failure so we invent all these narratives to protect ourselves from the thing that's going to happen to us one day anyway and so there's an enormous amount to be said for accepting the fact that you're going to die accepting the fact that it's all gonna go away what are you gonna do in the meantime right the chung-yong Trumper rinpoche said we're falling and we're falling and were falling but the good news is there's nothing to hold on to in doing the research there was one thing more than and I actually thought about starting the interview here but I have no idea where it was gonna go okay so I thought I really wanted to get to the line closer to the Sun you cried when Leonard Nimoy died that caught my attention in a way that like I can't explain why I'm getting choked up right now I never met him I think there are a few reasons one is the human he was and the work that he did behind the scenes so small example when they when the TV show went off the air was failure and they decided to make the Saturday morning cartoon and the deal was they would bring back three of the characters but then they'd have anonymous people do all the other voices and Nimoy Spock said if you don't bring back Sulu and check off and the rest and over I'm not doing it no upside for him doing that and it enabled those humans to make a living going forward so that we got all the other stuff that came from it in terms of his work as a professional I blogged about the day on the set he actually became Spock because you know you know all that stuff every time the ship gets into trouble and the ship gets into trouble and he's gonna do what everybody else does and the director says be the different one and so while everyone else was throwing themselves across the deck he says fascinating and just raises one eyebrows and that is what genius looks like that's when an artist does an artist says oh right now someone tossed me the ball what am I going to do with the ball and how can I do it for other people not to get more screen time right so that's part of it and then the other part of it is I think that what Gene Roddenberry created in the Spock character is this combination of Buddism rationality and the best of what an emotional human is and when I think about the culture that I want to be part of I'd rather have more Spock's than Kirk's right Kirk's just want to blow [ __ ] up but Spock was living weaving together something and I know he's a fictional character but it felt to me like part of the family was leaving us wow it's really incredible before I asked my last question where can these guys find you online beyond just typing Seth into Google which is I had to test it by the way I didn't go I was like there's no way and it works my mom was gonna name me Scott and if that had happened none of this would have worked but my grandfather said that's the brand of toilet paper don't do that that didn't have a nice big grandpa I belong every day at my blog which is currently at Seth Godin duct iPad calm but again you find am i typing Seth the Alton Bay's at alt mba.com and now I'm working with my team to reinvigorate and expand the marketing seminar that we also run but no new books because people want to go deeper and so that's what we're focusing on what about Kimbo I listened to your first episode it's good you had a very busy morning because it went live today akimbo is a new podcast for me you can find it at a Kimbo dot link it's not like other podcasts there's no guests I don't read the ads there's QA at the end it's an experiment it might not work we'll see I'm gonna tell you this right now it is going to crush episode one which will almost certainly be your worst is already fantastic because I can feel you blogging in podcast and so it's like those same idiosyncratic incredibly like cut through the noise insights but wonderfully longer than the blog post which of course is the only crushing problem with your blogpost is there's there you just want them to last forever so that's so kind of you think you dude I'm telling you you've impacted my life so first of all let's just start with that I don't know if you know but I have a book list of the most important books any human being should read in order and linchpin is on there it's just it think it was transformative for me I think it would be transformative for many others obviously seeing you adapt the way that you do is so incredible and that you haven't gotten stuck in books which would be so easy for you because you've been so successful and to see you shift over into podcast it's it's gonna be incredible I'll just say that right now and then my final question what is the impact that you want to have on the world I've thought about this a little bit and it's a little meta but here we go I would like to be known by what the people who learn from me taught other people because I'm not trying to teach for my own sake I'm trying to teach so that other people can help the culture around them level up because it's all we got so thank you [Applause] guys this the world that he has created is absolutely astonishing and really think about the choices that we all make in our life I believe this to the core of my being that's what defines us it isn't our intentions it isn't what we end up having at the end of the day in terms of financial success it is entirely the choices that we make that show what our value system is show what we prioritize and when he says he views himself as a teacher he holds true to that in everything that he does I literally just got the chills from the books that he's written to the the nearly infinite wealth of information in his blog to his podcast everything the generosity of spirit incredible and we didn't even talk about what he's like on stage which go do yourself a favor right now it is absolutely incredibly as like 150 slides in his presentation he never looks at the clicker which I was very impressed by so they just seamlessly magically change as he's going through it is absolutely incredible it's some of the best stage presentation I've ever seen in my life absolutely incredible it's all available online but the thing I want you guys to see doesn't believe that we're born with anything it's all created writer's block is total BS you don't have a passion you create a passion this is all coming from somebody who has built one of the most magnificent examples of a life designed from the ground up to develop to deliver fulfillment fulfillment at the end of the day is the only thing that matters and so to see him craft success and fulfillment and equal measure is breathtaking dive in check it out and I'm begging you let it change you forever and for the better all right if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care everybody thank you so much for watching and being a part of this community if you haven't already be sure to subscribe you're gonna get weekly videos on building a growth mindset cultivating grit and unlocking your full potential

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 503,744

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, Seth Godin, seth godin, Linchpin, linchpin, How to Be a Linchpin, linchpin seth godin, purple cow, the dip, tribes, seth godin impact theory, impact theory seth godin, tom bilyeu seth godin

Id: F80WmftF5YY

Length: 52min 25sec (3145 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 13 2018