How To Be More Creative and Marketing During COVID: Marketing 101 with Seth Godin

you're listening to yap young and profiting podcast a place where you can listen learn and profit welcome to the show i'm your host tala taha and on young and profiting podcast we investigate a new topic each week and interview some of the brightest minds in the world my goal is to turn their wisdom into actionable advice that you can use in your everyday life no matter your age profession or industry there's no fluff on this podcast and that's on purpose i'm here to uncover value from my guests by doing the proper research and asking the right questions if you're new to the show we've chatted with the likes of ex-fbi agents real estate moguls self-made billionaires ceos and best-selling authors our subject matter ranges from enhancing productivity how to gain influence the art of entrepreneurship and more if you're smart and like to continually improve yourself hit the subscribe button because you'll love it here at young and profiting podcast today on the show we're chatting with seth godin known as the ultimate entrepreneur for the information age and a demigod on the web seth is an entrepreneur marketer speaker educator and the author of 19 best-selling books soon to be 20 best-selling books with the release of the practice shipping creative work out tomorrow november 3rd seth is one of the top marketers of our generation someone i personally look up to and in 2018 seth was inducted into the marketing hall of fame tune in to this episode to learn the definition of permission-based marketing understand how to approach creativity as a professional and discover why being generous with your ideas is key to your success hey seth welcome to young and profiting podcast well thanks for having me it's great to be here yeah i am very excited honestly i've been trying to get you on the podcast for a couple years now since i started my podcast and it's very exciting that we've gotten to a point where we have thought leaders like you and robert greene and mark manson on our show i'm absolutely honored to have you on you are the goat of marketing so um thank you so much for being on the show it's very kind of you a lot of people don't understand what marketing is but i think you get the joke yeah yeah so um you are about to put out your 20th book it's called the practice um you've wrote 19 other sellers you had a founding company which was sold to yahoo for 30 million dollars you were inducted into the direct marketing hall of fame um you've educated millions of people worldwide with these your courses so you have so many different accolades you are you know world famous author um very impressive guy and some of my listeners may think you know seth 19 best-selling books 30-something year career he's you know he's just been hitting home runs this whole time um but i know because i'm a fan of your work that really it's it's been based on a lot of failures and you know you've you've stepped to your success um by stepping on your failures so tell us about you know your career journey what it took to get to where you are today and some of the things that people may not know in terms of the failures that you've had along the way well you know we can play failure olympics games all day long uh it's interesting to think about why we need to do that you know so i got 800 rejection letters in a row after i sold my first book for five thousand dollars i have gone window shopping in restaurants for years at a time and gone home and had macaroni and cheese i could go on and on i have failed definitely more than anybody who's listening to this because i'm older than most of you um but why is it even interesting and the reason it's interesting is because when we're in our work it's tempting to say it's not worth it unless it works we become attached to the outcome and as soon as you become attached to the outcome you start really getting angry at the people who don't get the joke who aren't into it you get frustrated when you are rejected because you take it personally but no one is rejecting you no one knows you no one cares about you they're rejecting your work they're rejecting what you thought to produce and you can learn from that it's a gift and so if you ask me what would i change about all those failures the answer is nothing because i ended up being who i am because of all the stuff that didn't work things that i worked on for years you know the book that took me the most time to write sold the fewest copies and there's just no rhythm to the universe other than if we do generous work without hustling people and we show up in a way that's generous where we say maybe they don't get the joke but i made it anyway we do better work and it's actually more likely to work something um i want to touch on your new book it's called the practice so we're going to get into all that we're going to talk about you know focusing on the process rather than the outcome like you just mentioned but something that i've read in your book that i want to touch on early in this conversation is the fact that you feel like you've been an imposter and and that you suffer from imposter syndrome and then actually when you feel like an imposter you believe that it's when you're doing your best work so tell us about that feeling because you've done so many things you've jumped as to so many different lanes in your career so tell us about how you feel comfortable with starting something new and get over this feeling of imposter syndrome so to be clear i don't suffer from imposter syndrome i enjoy imposters and they're different lots of people think they're the only ones who have impostor syndrome that that feeling of being a fraud of not being qualified what right do i have to be up here is unique it's not unique it's only shared by people who are doing important work it's only shared by people who are leading because leading is an act of being an imposter you're announcing the truth before it happens hey we're going to cleveland you want to come you're not sure you're going to make it to cleveland you're just going to try hey i'm a comedian oh that means you think tonight's performance is going to be funny have you done it before to these people no then how do you know you're being an imposter imposter syndrome is a symptom that you're about to try to make things better and you're not sure and when it shows up it's tempting to make it want to go away but you can't make it go away you can instead welcome it and say oh thanks for reminding me i'm on to something thanks for reminding me i'm about to do something generous so yeah that feeling of being an imposter it only shows up if i'm having a good day i love that i think i think that's a great thing for our listeners to keep in mind as they tackle new things especially women because i think a lot of women really suffer from imposter syndrome um so before we get into the book i definitely want to get some foundational uh knowledge out to my listeners a lot of my listeners are not in marketing and so you know they don't have some of the foundational basics one of the things that you coined or um pioneered i should say is permission-based marketing so tell us a little bit about permission-based marketing what that is and um how the world worked in terms of marketing in the 1990s before you put out this concept to the world first your listeners are all in marketing they just don't know it marketing is what we do when we interact with the market so if you show up anywhere with anything you're a marketer marketing isn't hype and it's not advertising so yeah i did coin the term permission marketing i'm in the oxford english dictionary for coining oh wow permission marketing is anticipated personal and relevant messages that people want to get it is the opposite of spam and the opposite of hustle and the simple test is this if you didn't show up on insta or you didn't send out that email blast would people reach out and say where are you because if they're not missing you when you're gone then you're not doing permission marketing it has nothing to do with your privacy policy has nothing to do with opt-in or opt-out it has to do with would they miss you if you were gone and people say to me well yeah but i sell insurance no one wants to hear from me and i say so sell something else that in a world where attention is so precious and scarce just because you can steal my attention doesn't mean you have a right to steal my attention you know attention and trust go hand in hand and what we need is not more attention we need more trust a couple times a day i get an email from somebody that goes something like this i love your podcast i've listened to lots of episodes i would like to be a guest on your podcast here's why i should be on your podcast well they are just writing to a list because i've done 140 episodes and i've never had one guest not one they're spamming me and i would not miss them if they were gone i want them to be gone and now i don't trust them because they've already lied to me and so the opportunity we have now that all of us have a megaphone all of us are connected to anyone who wants to connect with us is to make promises and keep them is to show up with anticipated personal and relevant messages to people who want to get them and when i started my blog i had 50 readers and when i started my podcast i had seven listeners that's the way they all start and then the question is will people tell their friends so let's touch on that trust piece a little bit how do we get our audience to start to trust us and how do we know when our content may be relevant to them okay so i will start with the second part first relevant the internet is not a mass medium television is a mass medium it used to be back when you were a kid that the typical television show reached 40 million people now there is nothing on the internet that reaches 40 million people at the same time nothing what the difference is is that there's 40 million channels that each reach 100 people so it reaches more people it's micro it is not mass so finding people who are interested in what you're doing isn't that hard because they're already grouping up by what they're interested in but then the question is how do you earn their trust not their attention but their trust and part of the problem is we've been indoctrinated indoctrinated into believing that people who look like us or who match certain tropes are smarter or wiser or richer or better than we are we've been indoctrinated into thinking we're not allowed to speak up or that people who don't look like us are somehow inferior and so getting the benefit of the doubt it's really important and people like me who grew up with privilege who grew up with so many advantages got the benefit of the doubt when we didn't deserve it and lots of people who deserve the benefit of the doubt aren't getting it and so we must begin by making small promises and keeping them making them for people who are open to being able to trust us not hustling people and showing up with giant flat belly diet instant overnight let's change everything promises but small people small groups of people the smallest viable audience show up and say i'm going to offer you this and then do it and then do it and then do it and then overdo it and if you do that they learn to expect it from you that is what a brand is a brand is an expectation not a logo and so you have this opportunity because everyone starts with almost nothing everyone starts small who will you start with and how can you do something with and for that person that they will tell the others yeah let's dig into that concept of a smallest viable audience i know it's something that you talk often about tell our listeners what that means exactly and and how they can recruit a smallest viable audience you know when you think about the name of your podcast and stuff there is a conditioning that the only way to win is to win win win that you want the biggest possible audience that if you listen to the hype and you read the business plans and you know i'm gonna crush this and we're gonna revolutionize that but that's not ever never how it actually works that the way it works is you find the smallest group of people who if they trusted you it would be enough and then you overwhelm them with delight because if you overwhelm that small group with delight which you can do because they all want the same thing they will tell the others so name any brand you want and i will tell you how they did that because starbucks or supreme or jet blue i don't care which one you name that's how they did it the smallest group they could that could sustain them and then they delighted them even google even facebook facebook started serving 100 people 100 harvard students who needed a date that was facebook that's all it was for it didn't talk about what was happening in new haven and they didn't talk about what's happening in the election they talked about you're at harvard and you need a date smallest viable audience could you tell us the use case of starbucks and how they use that to grow so howard schultz did not start starbucks starbucks had two or three stores in seattle and you could not buy a cup of coffee there they would only sell you beans and howard went to italy and when he came back he had fallen in love with standing at the counter and drinking an espresso and he couldn't find a place in the united states where he could do that and he persuaded the people at starbucks to give him a chance and so starbucks began really began with one place in one little corner of one city where you could stand there and have an espresso that's all it was for and then the word began to spread and it began to spread but it happened slowly compared to internet time but howard did not come back from italy saying i'm going to revolutionize the united states and caffeinate 100 million people a day he came back and said i need there to be a neighborhood espresso bar now do you have an example of when a company maybe went too wide and failed because they were targeting too broad of an audience well you know there's a semi-famous one from silicon valley a startup called colors that raised 40 million dollars before they even launched and they launched a giant kind of social networky thing and it lasted 15 minutes and went away because if it's for everyone it's for no one and you know if we go down the list of the giant web failures you know whether it's webvan which was going to be the next amazon um you know they they launch with a lot of fanfare and then they disappear if we think about twitter twitter failed and failed and failed for a long time until they optimized it for one conference in austin texas to make 500 people delighted that's all that's all it was for and it's hard to do this as an entrepreneur or small business person because you think not that's too small for me but you think if i pick the specific people and i fail at that then i'm really bad right if no one had come to howard schultz's one and only espresso bar he's toast yeah right if people at austin south by southwest hadn't used twitter they were going to go bankrupt you got to pick something and put yourself on the hook because being on the hook is exactly where you want to be totally and if you spread yourself too then you can't really maximize anything because it's like you're trying to chase two rabbits you'll never catch either one that as that old adage goes well said yes okay so another foundational marketing uh topic i want to cover is story so we all know that stories are really important it's how humans learn humans are just like addicted to stories so tell us more about why we're so addicted to hearing stories why we learn so well by hearing stories and how we can create tell you know compelling stories so stories are the oldest human technology let me ask you a question when you were growing up did someone in your house make nestle's toll house cookies chocolate chip cookies yeah so if you smelled that smell right now how would it make you feel hungry hungry but also loved that smell is a story that smell reminds us of something very complicated it reminds us of home it reminds us of being seen it reminds us of possibility and it's just to smell that's what a story is a story isn't once upon a time and happily ever after a story is a set of hints and shortcuts and an innuendo and rhyming that gets us to an emotional place so you know the story we were talking about facebook before the story of facebook is people are talking about you behind your back do you want to hear what they're saying that's their story and so every time people see that facebook ui show they go uh oh i wonder what they're saying and they have to go look then they solve their problem and about a minute later they go have they said anything new and then they go look that is the story of facebook and so you've got to figure out which basic human emotion are you trying to tap into with the story of what you're doing and being inconsistent and erratic means that people are going to trust you less being blurry because you want the biggest possible audience means that you're probably going to mess up so i'll give you one more example 40 years ago coca-cola for reasons that we can get into if you want but aren't that interesting changed the formula and they launched new coke and new coke in every taste test tasted better than coke it was the biggest marketing failure in the history of the united states why did it fail it failed because the story of coke is this is what your mom served you for breakfast the story of coke is this is stable this is us this is tradition you can't put the word new in front of the word coke they don't go together right the people the reason people are drinking it is because it's old it's a classic yeah and so changing the story is what cost them a billion dollars yeah so do you suggest that when somebody's coming out with a product or service that they should create a brand story and how would somebody go about that uh you're creating a brand story whether you want to or not so you might as well do it on purpose and i think different people have different approaches to doing things on purpose i interviewed diane von furstenberg a bunch of years ago she was functionally illiterate in her ability to talk about how she did things she was unable to tell you or me why one dress was better than another she did not have words for her good taste she just did it and there are other people who have lots of words to describe how they're going to approach something i would put myself in that category because the words a are useful boundary and b they help me teach other people what i'm doing and so it really helps to be able to say this is like that except this way so this is the equivalent of chocolate chip cookies but it's a car that helps me understand how to design something so let's let's look at tesla the tesla model s tells a story which is if you bought a mercedes because you thought you were smart and taking care of your family now you feel stupid because this is that car that you should have bought and as soon as a mercedes driver in california saw the model s it totally mooned their day because now they were driving the wrong car and they had to go solve their problem that's the design of the model s so then they decided to come out with that pickup truck and they blew it because elon lost discipline what should the pickup truck have looked like well who buys a pickup truck why is the ford f-150 the single most popular vehicle in america why do pickup trucks keep looking like pickup trucks because the story we tell ourselves if we're going to be the kind of person who buys a pickup truck is this is utility i'm not trying to stand out i'm just a hardworking fella or a woman who's trying to do their best that's a pickup truck so when you make the cyber truck look like that weird thing that was carved out of a piece of whatever yeah they blew it that's not the story of a pickup truck what they should have done is built the most boring ford f-150 knockoff ever but with just enough of a twist that it says i'm the kind of person who buys a pickup truck but i'm smarter than you that was the opportunity and they missed it because they didn't understand story yeah so i'm hearing uh a couple things here one of the things that i'm hearing is that it's not enough to just like create your own story you kind of have to align to the stories and the beliefs that are already out there right yes yes yes okay so a couple more general marketing questions before we move on to the main topic of the show which is your new book to practice um what do you think that marketers are doing wrong today in 2020. if you could call out a few things that marketers do wrong today what would they be yeah it hasn't changed in my whole life selfish short-term narcissistic lying cheating shortcutting profit-seeking that's what they're doing wrong anytime you do any of those things you're burning trust and marketing is a race to earn and preserve trust because we live in a true a low trust low attention world and if you can earn and maintain trust then everything else takes care of itself i see a lot of that in like the paid acquisition space especially like facebook ads youtube ads uh google ads they just care about the clicks and things like that but a lot of them are really generating a lot of revenue and profiting off of this but are you saying that that's really like short-sighted i've been doing this online thing now for 30 years and every time i do an interview like this someone brings up a shortcut or a hustle that someone's doing that's working yeah what about listicles why aren't you having troll fights on your blog whatever you're doing about ads on myspace and every time i say the people who were doing that two years ago where are they now and they're gone it's not sustainable there's always going to be someone who profits from racing to the bottom always it's always going to be someone who can out-hustle you always and then they'll be gone and you know have you ever gotten any of that spam that says i know the prince of whoever and if you click on this you'll get 40 million dollars yes have you noticed it's filled with typos and stuff yeah it's really poorly written these people are making millions of dollars you think they could hire a copy editor and make it grammatically correct right why is it filled with typos and read so stupid well the answer is simple because if smart people answer their emails they won't be able to afford to keep up with everybody who ultimately will not give them money the purpose of the first email is to attract the stupid people because only the stupid people are the ones where they're gonna be able to rip off and the same thing is true of the people who are seeking clicks on facebook and google for this kind of hustle which is they need to come off this way because people like you and me would never click on it and they don't want to pay for us they're just trying to get people who are looking for a get rich quick scheme and people who sell get rich quick schemes don't get rich quick yeah so i know that we talked earlier one of the first questions i asked was you know the definition of permission marketing and what that means so i think we're all clear on that how has that evolved because i know now everybody's just talking about like personalization is that really the same as permission marketing or is it different oh it's totally different so you know when i wrote the book i did not realize how much pressure would be on marketers to become spammers and you know the amount of spam i got as an email user in 2000 was four a day and now i get 400 a day yeah and some of them from like banks and reputable organizations they they've socially acceptable it doesn't work but at least you don't get fired they think personalization is different than personal personalization is something you do to somebody you buy some mailing list you do a mail merge you throw some data points in there you pretend you're a data miner that doesn't work it worked for a little while because it tricks people but it didn't earn trust people don't want personalized stuff they want personal stuff they don't want email they want me mail and so when you show up and pull some stunt it says welcome back mr x we know that you like this drink and we turned your bed down this way and we did that that's not personal that's personalized but if you pay your people well enough that they stick with you and i come back and i remember the person and they remember me now i'm sticking with your institution because you're sticking with me they're different yeah i think that that totally makes sense so how do you feel about direct message automation and things like that so i'm sure you see that where on linkedin and instagram people like they've got these tools and they can plug in first name and make it seem like it's personal i've used it and people honestly believe it because i don't think a lot of people really know what's going on and what's available so right now i think people can still get away with it seeming at least the first message seeming like it's authentic um so how do you feel about these kind of like automation tools do you just like not suggest them at all or do you think that there's a place for them in marketing it's not that they don't realize it it's that they don't realize it yet again we're getting back to the fact that if you're in a hurry and you keep taking shortcuts you're always going to be on the first step on the other hand in the same amount of time it takes you to do 10 shortcuts and be on the first step you can do 10 long cuts and be somewhere else and it's this stepwise process of earning trust of being missed if you were gone after you've done that if you want to use personalization it's fine with me yeah but that's not the secret right so when i go back to amazon.com it knows my name that's not why i'm going back i'm going back because you know 1200 orders later they haven't ripped me off they haven't screwed me over if they make a mistake to give me my money back that's why i trust them and so the personalization is just a tiny little frosting they're not in the personalization business they're in the promise business yeah yeah and i'll just ask people why are you doing this in the first place there are better ways to make a living than hustling around hoping no one notices that you're using technology right that you should do things that really benefit people that you get paid for fairly so that you can do it again totally and also because it's it's more financially like viable to do that because if you're if you're always just kind of starting from scratch and tricking people to download or click you have no retention you know and you have no real following or subscribers um and that's why i i find a lot of like clients and people that i know like they they do paid ads for their youtube channel or podcast and then you know on a daily basis they have no views no downloads and they look silly when they put out an episode when it has zero and then their other video has like a million views you know they have no no real audience um so yeah it's important i had a i had a friend who was obsessed with how many instagram followers she had she had 800 followers and one day she said i have to go negative and i said what does it mean to go negative and she said well i have to follow more people than are following me because there's interesting people but i feel terrible because i don't want to look like i'm out of balance so for her birthday i bought her 15 000 instagram and like it made a ding sound every time she got one this was in the old days and so she's just sitting there and she immediately knew it was me right what kind of pop followers do you get for 149 right they're not real people so what was the purpose it's just the story we tell ourselves why don't we just instead tell ourselves the story that i'd like to be of service exactly exactly it's way better to grow organically have a real community grow it from the ground up and and have that trust and and just build it organically than it is to just like pay for the visibility i totally agree so let's talk about your new book the practice uh from my understanding you're talking about the process of creativity um and that is what the practice is can you explain to us really what this title the practice means and uh you know why you decided to write this book so the subtitle is shipping creative work so i would ask people are you in the business of shipping creative work are you rewarded for showing up in the marketplace with something new something that hasn't been done before something generous something that might make a difference if you're not this book will be of no help whatsoever and i think you need to find a new job as well because if you're not you're going to get replaced by a computer or be outsourced but if you are where are all the books teaching us how to ship creative work right there are books that teach us how to build bridges and there are books that teach us how to do seo but the core of what we do all day is ship creative work how just when you feel like it when you're in the flow when you have when you're in the mood when you feel like being authentic which is a term i hate right no you need a practice you need a method you need a way to be a professional to show up and show up and show up and do work you're proud of and so the practice is not about how do you hustle the market to move up on some ranking it is in fact about forgetting about measuring the outcome and focus instead on the pattern on the process learn to trust yourself so that you can do the work you want to do i'm going to quote something that i i read in your book you say the industrial system we all live in is is outcome based it's about guaranteed productivity in exchange for soul numbing predicted labor but if we choose to look for it there's a different journey available to us this is the path followed by those who seek change who want to make things better so tell us what is what is the problem about focusing on outcomes and like what's really the alternative there you know if you watch a two-year-old fall and skin their knee they'll quickly look up to see if any adults saw them and if an adult saw them they'll cry and look right and if no adults saw them they'll just move on because the audience changes the experience the thing about creative work is we don't have an audience until we've had the experience the audience doesn't show up until we've made it so the question is after we've made it should the first person who gives us feedback decide if we get to do it again what about the eighth person that if you are working super hard on your play or you're a stand-up or if you've designed a user interface is it all worthless if the first person who sees it didn't get the joke maybe they just are the wrong person maybe you learned a lot doing this with the right spirit and the feedback you get about why it didn't work will help you do it better next time but the thing is we shouldn't judge our practice only on did we get an a that's not what it's for it's for the journey and our ability to get better next time most podcasts every podcast i'm guessing your podcast how many people listened to the first episode 10 right how did that why did you keep going everyone hated it seven billion people did not listen to your podcast yeah was your first podcast that much worse than your tenth one no but over time people told other people to change the culture means to go first to help people become uncomfortable to turn on lights we don't know what the audience is going to do we don't own them their response is up to them our work is to guess who they are what they need and then learn from what works and what doesn't but we have to have a practice to get there yeah um in your book you have this analogy about juggling and you say that you teach people how to juggle so tell us about juggling oh this is great because we have them on video with a ball throwing it around tell us why like throwing is more important than catching and tell us about this analogy of juggling i'm so happy you have props so i've taught more people how to juggle than most i'm not a very good juggler but i'm a very good teacher of juggling and they're different if you go to see a juggler a good juggler you will notice that they almost never drop the ball that's what you're paying attention to and that if you're enamored with them and they do drop the ball you feel badly we are paying attention to balls dropped and the reason it's so hard to learn how to juggle is because that's how people try to learn how to juggle and at first they're catching and they're throwing and then a ball goes errand it goes in one direction or another and we lunge to try to catch it and maybe we do and now we are out of position and no matter what we're going to miss the next one the reason is because we're focusing on catching the way to juggle is to focus on throwing if you are good at throwing the catching is easy the catching takes care of itself throw throw throw it's fine so the way i teach people how to juggle is all we do for half an hour is throw we do no catching whatsoever we just get good at throwing and if you get good at throwing catching is not such a big deal and the same thing is true here that most of the people who are trying to make it in social media even the dreaded influencers who i think are misguided most of the time are all focused on catching all focused on what was their yield today all focused on easy to measure metrics they're not focused on important to measure metrics they're not focused on did i change the life of one person today instead they're saying did i get a thousand clicks screw a thousand clicks lots of people can do that what's hard is to show up as a human and make things better i love that um so let's get into some definitions um because i think they're important what is your definition of a leader so leaders are impostors and frauds and the reason that they are is they're doing something that might not work they're doing something where there is no manual they're announcing in advance what's going to happen even though they can't prove it's going to happen and so when you feel that way you should know that you're on to something and leaders are different than managers managers tell people what to do with authority managers are important you can't have fast food without a fast food manager managers demand certain results and they know it is possible leaders that's voluntary voluntary to lead voluntary to follow and leaders show up with a different posture and a different point of view so leaders basically they they don't necessarily know what the outcome will be they they can't yeah they're they're envisioning the future and trying to bring people along that journey and that's what makes them a leader they're not told what to do they don't know exactly what's going to happen that's why they're leaders correct yeah how about um art what is your definition of art i wish i had a better word and if you could help me with this how i'd appreciate it i think we could all agree that jackson pollock was an artist we can all agree that frida kahlo was an artist we can all agree that uh marcel duchamp was an artist but wait a minute what about william shakespeare he was definitely an artist and so was neil gaiman right so it might be art painting it might be writing but you can also be an artist as an architect and i think you can be an artist as a child's therapist showing up with a kid who hasn't been able to engage with someone and you got them to engage so i need to say art is what happens when a human being does something generous that might not work designed to change somebody else that's my definition of art yeah i thought it was really interesting that you kept talking about generosity in your book in relation to being a creative being an artist being a leader tell us about how generosity um you know interplays with all of this okay so there are two ways to get at this the first way is this if i have six dollars and i give you three dollars generously i don't have it anymore you have it so if i give it out to everybody i'm broke but if i have an idea and i give it to you i still have it in fact the more people have my idea the more it's worth and so the world has changed from the scarcity mindset of i don't have it anymore to the abundant mindset of connection connection creates value so that's one reason to be generous we live in that world now and the second reason to be generous is because a lot of people are trained correctly to not want to take or steal or hustle or just put stuff out there that they're not proud of and so we hold back we hold back our good idea but imagine that you're standing on the boardwalk in venice beach or something and someone is drowning a couple feet away from you will you jump in and save them or will you say well i can't be sure i can save them will you say someone else here might be more qualified than me will you say i'll just hide well i'm guessing you would jump in and say i try because you're generous and that makes it way easier to do our art if we realize we're not doing our art for links or clicks or money yeah we're doing our art because the other person will benefit suddenly it's selfish to hold it back it's generous to say here i made this and that's an extraordinary opportunity and a great way to hack your brain and get out of your own way to trust yourself yeah and i think this relates a lot to um shipping your work and the importance of actually delivering sharing your work tell us about that and maybe some of the reasons why people hold back when it comes to shipping their work well if you don't ship it you can't get criticized right if you don't ship it there's no defects if you don't ship it you get to tell people you're still working on it i know someone has been working on his new business idea for 34 years and he keeps telling me oh soon soon i'm still working on it so safe if you ship it it might not work if you ship it people might look at it and say you're not going to mount anything but if you don't ship it you're not being generous yeah and so i think it doesn't count if you don't ship it it's not art if no one else sees it yeah and it's not throwing you're not throwing enough and if you don't throw enough you're not gonna get anything that catches right exactly yeah exactly right um okay so i know we're up on time i want to be respectful of your time we've got a few minutes left let's talk about writer's block because from my understanding you believe that writer's block does not exist oh there you go what does that say no such thing as writer's block that's right so tell us why you believe that's true and i know that you have an example with aretha franklin in the book that my listeners might find interesting okay so writer's block is real and it doesn't exist what people actually have is fear of bad writing that if you show me all of your bad writing you will prove to me you don't have writer's block but you're holding back from writing anything because you're afraid something bad will show up and the most successful artists i know get through this by having a lot of bad writing a bad a lot of bad painting a lot of bad symphonies a lot of bad seo a lot of bad whatever it is you do because if you do enough not so good stuff some good stuff will slip through and so good taste involves knowing the difference between the two but you're not blocked you're just afraid and no one gets talker's block no one gets plumbers blocked no one gets juggler's block there's no such thing as writer's block uh in the book i tell the story of aretha franklin's purse is that what you're asking about the great aretha franklin queen of soul if you look at any of the videos of her online performing live what you will notice is that in the piano is her handbag it's because when she was coming up in the 60s artists particularly black artists particularly black women got stiffed a lot they didn't get paid and so she developed the habit of getting paid before she walked on stage if you didn't hand her the cash she didn't walk on stage and then she kept that in her purse the whole time this is part of the reason i think she died without a will but that's a whole other discussion the interesting thing about it is that aretha understood that she was able to do her craft she could have made it her hobby but she made it her profession and by making it her profession she said yeah i'll show up at eight o'clock i'll show up at eight o'clock you show up with a piano and a bag full of cash and we can make that transaction and then in that moment you will get the best version of aretha franklin that is available to me that day not the authentic aretha she might not have felt like playing that day doesn't matter she's a professional here's the piano here's the bag of cash play the piano and that's what it means to be a professional on top of many other things is we make a promise and we keep it yeah so sticking on the professional um aspect of everything a lot of times when people think of creatives they think it's a hobby you know i'm an artist i paint i sculpture whatever it might not make money it could make money why do we have to think of ourselves as professionals when we're you know being creative and being a creative you know you can be it's i love hobbies i have hobbies just don't get confused don't try to sell your hobby don't try to make your hobby something that makes other people happy don't expect that your hobby is going to pay your rent it's your hobby don't ruin it do not ruin your hobby just because the internet is filled with people who are trying to make money from your hobby doesn't mean you have to like i have lots of hobbies that i don't make any money from and you know i love listening to jazz i have a decent stereo and i wrote a column for an audio magazine and i wouldn't take a penny from paul because the minute i got a dollar to write a column on music i would be a professional music critic not me that's my hobby and on the other hand i don't show up and give a talk to a company for fun it's my job and i don't care what kind of mood i'm in when i get hired to give a gig i show up as seth godin and seth godin is playing a role and that role is that person who's giving that talk that's what a professional does and you should pick got it and the last question that i ask all my guests on the show is what is your secret to profiting in life words matter and i think getting really clear about what the word profit means is super important after i sold my company to yahoo bill gross the great entrepreneur was putting together a company that was just a few months from away from going public and steven spielberg was on the board it was a big deal and he called me up and asked if i would be the vice president of marketing of this company and he offered me a billion dollars in stock up and i turned him down because i needed to be with my family i needed to have my life and i gotta tell you once you turn down a billion dollars it gets easy to be really clear about what profit means because profit is not more clicks profit is not more likes and profit is not more money profit is deciding what's important to you and going and doing that and not playing somebody else's game just because it's easy to measure i love that that's beautiful and where can our listeners go to learn more about you and everything that you do seven thousand blog posts at seth's blog s-e-t-h-s dot blog you can read about the book at cess.blog flash the practice and our workshops including the alt mba are at kimbo.com aki mbo.com awesome we are gonna stick all of those links in the show notes seth you are a legend i am so happy we had you on the show i'm gonna promote the heck out of this episode i can't wait to put it out i'm gonna bump you up in front of some other people and and get this episode out as soon as possible or to align with your book we'll figure it out but uh thank you so much for coming on the show thank you you're great at this it was really a pleasure oh thank you so much thanks for listening to young and profiting podcast if you enjoyed the show please write us a review or comment on your favorite platform nothing makes us happier than reading your reviews we'd love to hear what you think about the show and don't forget to share this podcast with your friends family and on social media i always repost re-share and support those who support us you can find me on instagram at yapwithhala or linkedin just search for my name it's hala taha big thanks to the yap team as always this is hala signing off

Channel: Young and Profiting

Views: 14,917

Rating: 4.9078693 out of 5

Keywords: Seth Godin the Practice, permission marketing, digital marketing, marketing 101, marketers, imposter syndrome, creative exercise, seth godin marketing, seth godin, seth godin tribes, how to be more creative, seth godin interview, marketing strategies, content creation tips, marketing secrets, how to be creative in thinking, personalized marketing, marketing during pandemic, marketing during covid, creative marketing, failure to success, storytelling, seth godin podcast, yap

Id: J_WI54sbR0g

Length: 46min 22sec (2782 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 03 2020