Making work that matters | RSA Events

hi everyone i'm adam grant i'm an organizational psychologist author i host the ted podcast work life and today i'm thrilled to have a chance to guest host this rsa session i've had the great pleasure of speaking on the rsa stage in london i'm a huge supporter of the mission of bringing people and ideas together to solve big problems and i cannot think of a better person to do that today than seth godin seth is an epically popular ted speaker has written more best-selling books than i can count seth has a new book the practice which i'm delighted to have a chance to talk about today seth welcome back to the rsa adam thank you for being here i know that in a virtual world where we all have a ten thousand things to do you have a lot of choices but spending time with my friend is a treat so thank you well that was an easy choice for me i have to say though this book starts in an unusual place which is it takes me back to the first time that we met which was on a train and i asked you what you're up to and you said i don't think i'm ever going to write another book again because i i'm just out of ideas and i'm very glad that you were wrong but i'm also curious about what happened um i have trouble running out of ideas but a book as you know is a special sort of challenge because we are writing across space and time and we're doing it for an unknown group of people in an unknown place the book industry as we know it has been transformed the book industry has as its customer the bookstore and now the bookstore is gone and uh your book doesn't usually interrupt you with an email but your electronic device does so for all of those reasons i had decided that i just couldn't deal with the pain in exchange for the journey and i was wrong in the sense that the pain is part of the deal and the pain makes me better and i needed to write this book for myself as much as for anybody else because when i started to lose my practice i didn't like who i was becoming and i like the privilege of showing up and doing this work but you can't coast you got to figure out how to have a practice to get it done well i've made a lot of bad predictions over the years but this this was one that was clear-cut to me because i i feel like ever since i became a writer and i'm sure you've had this experience over and over again too i've had people say you know well well i'm i'm planning to to be a writer one day and my first question is well what do you write like well i don't i don't really write well that's what a writer is a writer is a person who writes and you are clearly a writer seth uh you've you've had a practice that many in our field have just frankly marveled at right your your productivity is astonishing you've been you've been a go-to expert and thought leader on marketing uh for now an entire generation um so it's hard for me to believe that your practice had ever slipped what happened well resistance is real i was talking to our friend steve pressfield earlier today resistance is that fear that we have that it won't work this time that we have passed our moment that people won't get the joke that we don't have what we need and one of the things you know you mentioned the ted talks when i gave my first ted talk they hadn't put any of them online and when they put them online they didn't ask us first they just did it because chris knew that we were such egomaniacs that no one would complain and no one did uh but when you're giving a ted talk for 300 people it's different than when you're giving one for three million people the feeling shifts and for me what happened was most of the work that i was seeking to do in places like marketing i had done and i didn't want to just do encores i didn't want to play covers of myself and so where do you find the open territory the the fresh powder how do you dive deeper into helping people and that's why i five years ago started the akimbo workshops which are now an independent b corp and the idea there was maybe it's more than three hours with a book maybe it's a hundred days in community and one of the workshops we built was about creativity and about getting out of your way and developing a practice and what i saw was that there was work left to be done there were things that needed to be said and it wasn't seth godin the marketer talking it was seth godin the person who on a good day has a practice talking and it took me two and a half years to make that workshop and i then i got to test it on a thousand people over the course of a hundred days and i learned a lot from that which most authors don't get the privilege of doing so i wrote the book for me and then i wrote the book for them and now as long as there's a book we might as well share it with more people well i'm envious because i think every author has had the experience of saying i've just finished my book tour and now i wish i could rewrite the book because now i understand what i was trying to say and you actually it sounds like did the tour before the book correct and it you know you've had the luxury of of teaching in front of people at wharton for a long time and you know which lines work and which ones don't because you're working it out every day and if you're working at home and sitting in front of the computer sometimes you drink your own kool-aid or sometimes you don't believe the stuff that's worked is gonna work and the magic of these workshops is like uh the what was the what's the panopticon like the panopticon the the prison guard who can see down on everyone i could watch all of the interactions without being in the room and that was truly creepy and fascinating at the same time well the the book is vintage golden uh granted it's a new topic and a new domain for you but it also brings some of your your signature strengths to the table um it's full of practical wisdom right so i i felt like reading it i had multiple aha moments and sometimes you've given me the language for a practice i already do but haven't been able to describe in other cases you've opened my eyes to a practice that i've never tried and so i want to dig into the meat of the book a little bit tell me what is the practice it's actually a series of practices right so it starts with this that there's no guarantee that any creative work we're going to do is going to work the subtitles ship creative work because if it doesn't ship it doesn't count and too many people die with whatever they have still left inside creative because if it's been done before and there's a manual it's not creative and work because we have to do it even when we don't feel like and that last part is really important because it undermines this toxic mythology of authenticity this toxic mythology of i need to find my calling neither one of those things is real those were invented fairly recently to explain why we are tired of doing our work because we can't just say my muscles are sore from digging this ditch it's the other muscles are sore from being on call to do this creative work but my argument is even though there's no guarantee a practice will always get you a better outcome than not having a practice that's showing up on the regular understanding there's no such thing as writer's block realizing that you're going to make mistakes and divorcing the work from the outcome all of these things add up to create a dynamic of productivity and i made these things these are i call them writer's blocks they're one and a half inch square i make them on my laser cutter it takes three hours to make a set and and they just they just sit here in front of me to remind me of some of the basic principles of how we should deal with criticism what should we understand about genre where do we go with trust so these are all things that if this was plumbing or architecture someone would have written down already but for whatever reason because of the mythology of creativity no one wrote them down well that that speaks to something that's that's bothered me about many people's creative practices for a long time which is i feel like a lot of people they criticize their own work as they create it and so they can't get out of their own way right every sentence in writing a book gets edited as it's being produced every brush stroke on a canvas right needs to be adjusted because it's not good enough and at some point you lose your creative spark because you're just evaluating as opposed to actually building and i think part of the the joy of this book is that it helps you get out of your own way so walk me through how to do that well so maybe examples can get us started abby ryan who lives not far from you made her career by painting an oil painting every day and she did it in public uh she sold them on ebay 300 400 500 bucks added up it's a decent living and now she's a respected grant-winning tenure-track professor because making an oil painting every day doesn't give you a lot of chances to get blocked and what people are doing when they're editing themselves too much is they're sanding off all of the edges even though they are not competent at that part of the work the work that they are competent at in this moment is doing the first draft and the first draft is different than the last draft the other example is my friend the late isaac asimov and i worked with him on a project a long time ago isaac published 400 books back when that was hard and um it's still hard for the record immortals with the kindle you just press go and no one had to say yes right um and i said isaac how did you do that and he showed me the manual typewriter in his little apartment near lincoln center and he said every morning i sit in front of this typewriter and from 6 30 to noon i type and then i'm done and it doesn't matter if it's good writing or not i just have to type because the subconscious in that moment says well if i have to type i might as well type something good and even though most of this stuff wasn't good six hours a day of productivity was enough to produce for uh for 400 books so what i'm saying to people regardless whether you're a you know a an eye surgeon or somebody who's trying to write a kid's book is we compartmentalize the parts of the practice and if we say i have this bucket and i have to fill it up with ideas i have to fill it up with words or i have to fill it up with this skill or that skill then we don't we have to put ourselves on the spot and we don't end up saying i'm hiding now so let's let's go through the compartments then uh it sounds like idea generation is at the beginning of the process do you other than than just having a you know a target or an amount to fill what are your other favorite practices in that realm well i think that we might get stuck waiting for a really good idea and the number of super original ideas in the world that we're glad came along is very very small so if i think about something like warby parker to bring up a sore topic warby warby parker is not an original idea they didn't invent eyeglasses they didn't invent e-commerce but what they were able to do was understand genre and genre is the box our idea is going to fit in and there are very few successful creative ideas that don't fit in any box the box is not a trap it's a platform and if you have domain knowledge if you've done the reading if you understand what has come before you can decide which genre you wish to inhabit that's not a crutch that's a requirement and so once we know the form once we have an idea of who it's for and what's it for now we can start doing something that is productive and again we're going to do it wrong on the way to doing it right but at least we're not a wandering generality we're meaningful specific as zig used to say and being meaningful puts us on the hook and so early in the book i talk about being on the hook which i love being on the hook but so many people have been brainwashed to not be on the hook yeah i think that's great advice and it certainly tracks with the evidence we have in psychology that sometimes quantity is the best path to quality right if you can if you can just generate a big enough haystack you're probably going to find a needle in it but that also goes to one of the challenges which is evaluating our own ideas so at some point you have to decide okay i just created a first draft is this something worth refining into a final draft is this something worth eventually shipping and uh i have a former student justin berg who's found that we are notoriously bad judges of our own ideas um sometimes we throw them out the window too soon but maybe even more often we fall in love with garbage and i think anybody who's watched shark tank or dragon's den there's that moment at the end of the show when all five sharks have or dragons have rejected the idea and said this is terrible i forbid you to ever pursue this and then the camera cuts in close and the entrepreneur says oh but i know better and this is going to be the next hit and it just breaks my heart to watch that happen what can you share with us about how to avoid those moments and how to know if our ideas really have potential so criticism is a skill and most people aren't very good at it that learning to become good at giving incisive feedback is a practice in itself and most people around us aren't very good and you're probably not good at doing it for yourself and you know it's interesting some of the sharks are terrible at it and they're just amusing but if you can find somebody who actually has that experience and is good at it it's gold and we need to seek those people out to reward them to embrace them because they're the ones that are going to help us figure out what is worth bringing forward and what's not not your job right now your job right now is to make the work not decide whether to publish the work now in the internet world there are no filters anymore you want to put on youtube you can put on youtube and so we have this challenge of if there is no one to applaud me and no one to criticize me how will i learn from this and that's where the idea of the smallest viable audience comes in of figuring out which group you know so your colleague dan ariely's work with the bionicles has stuck with me for a long time where they pay some college students apparently are the only people in psychology experiments but they pay these college students to put together bionicles and then they sit in front of the investigator and the investigator is taking them apart while they're putting them together students who watch their bionicles ripped to pieces are much less likely to sign up to do more than ones who are simply watch their pieces get put carefully into a box it's an inherent form of criticism to have someone tear your bionicle apart so we have to be super careful who are we bringing this to and this early in my career was a huge problem for me because the circle of people who could look at my ideas before i invested the next cycle were incompetent at giving feedback and i listened to them and i was heartbroken and disheartened and all the words were hard in them and it was only when i found my colleague michael keator and a couple other people that i got good feedback so yeah we need to be in the right circle of people the right circle of people who say yes when they should say yes and who say no when they should say they should say no that's helpful and you know i think one of the things that that's striking to me about that guidance is it feels like in a lot of cases people end up you know we've all seen versions of okay you only gravitate toward your yes man and your yes women uh who cheerlead who cheerlead for you or on the the flip you only go to your harshest critics who tear your work apart too soon and so your guidance it sounds like is to find the people who see your potential but also are willing to tell you the truth so let's think about john hammond for a second who doesn't get nearly enough credit try to imagine someone who in one career discovered benny goodman aretha franklin bob dylan and bruce springsteen one guy right so what does it mean to be in the music business for 50 years and discover those people well he had good taste what does it mean to have good taste it means you know what the audience wants 10 minutes before they do and i actually spent a month of my life trying to chase a definition of good taste i couldn't find one on the internet so i made that up but it really resonates with me to know what the audience wants 10 minutes before they do and he could turn to dylan or springsteen or aretha franklin and say when you go this way it's more likely to accomplish what you want than when you go that way and every once in a while someone comes along who has good taste about their own work but in my experience that person is usually uh non-verbal in their narrative about it so i i interviewed diane von furstenberg years ago and she developed the wrap dress which got her on the cover newsweek magazine it was the most successful thing of its kind and then the rest of her career she just relied on this inherent good taste and almost all the time she was wrong because she couldn't describe it in a way that other people could hear whether she was being true to her got her compass right and i think learning to put words behind your good taste is super rare and a worthwhile thing if you hope to give yourself or others feedback so a couple reactions first i love your definition of good taste uh knowing what the the audience wants 10 minutes before they do i think that's so compelling and i think we could even judge meta taste by whether people recognize that as a good definition of taste second thing i'd say is this idea of translating your taste into words um another way i might think about that is is basically trying to make your intuition more conscious as opposed to subconscious well time i've i've always thought about intuition as subconscious pattern recognition and whenever people say follow your intuition or trust your gut no maybe you should you should articulate your intuition figure out whether the patterns behind it that you recognized in the past are relevant to the present situation and there's a there's actually a term for this in psychology it's called referential processing which is basically the the ability to translate images into words more or less and vice versa so like a great art critic has amazing referential processing because they can look at a painting and then they can they can describe with language okay here's what you know what emotion that evokes and here's why the artist's choices will do that i have zero ability to do that apparently i am all verbal and i can look at a painting and say uh yes i like the colors in it i have no no ability to deconstruct it and you are one of the people who just excels at referential processing i think it's been one of the the gifts that's really propelled a lot of your work is you take things that resonate with people visually and you explain them verbally can you teach me how to do that or can you walk me through what your practice is for doing that well you're very kind and i love this and actually seth if if you want to concrete example i'd love to hear how you came up with that definition of taste even because it fits the bill this is a brilliant riff on your part referential processing um i'm just gonna take enormous uh angry uh exception with your word gift because it um corey doctorow says uh we call it a gift when the person who has a skill doesn't realize they've been working on it for a really long time because it's not a gift it's a skill and it's learnable and the way we learn it is by practicing it poorly until we can do it better the way we learn every other skill so i grew up with amazing parents and my mom was the first woman on the board of the albright knox art museum in buffalo which is generally considered the best contemporary art museum in america painting for painting so i grew up looking at max bill and jackson pollux and moreau and everybody else and what a docent is trained to do is tell a story about a work of art and to tell a story in a way that triggers our conscious programming in addition to our subconscious because then it locks in and you know when i used to go on the road and give talks my slides 150 slides in one presentation no words on any of them because the picture goes to one part of your brain my words go to the other part of your brain they lock together so in the case of the good taste example i knew i needed to be able to teach the people in the workshop what it meant to have bad taste because i thought a lot of their failure was due to the fact that they were in love with something that they had made and nobody else was and they needed to not take it personally they needed to see what the audience was seeing and so i tried 15 20 25 different ways to do it and they failed until i stumbled on one that didn't fail and i rarely get something right out of the gate what i have is a practice that says education and learning are about using words and images to change people's minds let me keep throwing things at this until i figure out what's going to decode this problem for them and i think that you know all someone has to do is read two pages of one of your books to see you do exactly the same thing i i appreciate the sentiment i will try to earn it but i i think you're right to take issue with my use of the term gift i think you're right it's a skill at the same time though i think there's something about the language of gif that's also liberating it's a little bit like the way liz gilbert talks about you know how how now we say someone is a genius and we used to say that they have a genius i think when you when you tell someone they have a gift for something um it frees them from the pressure uh to to have to be able to to effortfully produce it and it signals that in fact maybe you've worked on it your whole life uh but now you i've seen you do it multiple times right there are times when you can just do it on command and even though it took you a long time to build up that capability right it's i think it's a gift now can you can you live with that definition i can as long as you're willing to put every single seven-year-old in the gifted and talented class at school that's fair right because i don't want to take it away from anybody i don't want to say to anybody you can't do this because you don't have the gift yeah no i think i think that's exactly right so tell me ben you you say something really interesting in the book uh something that at first i bristled that uh and as i thought about it more i said damn it he's i think he's right uh you said that that basically creating a practice for shipping creative work is not just an opportunity it's an obligation and i hated the idea of being obligated to anything right i i come from a land where freedom is a quintessential value and the moment anyone tells me i have to do anything i want to do something else and yet the more i thought about it the more i thought you know i am letting down a lot of people but especially myself if i don't see through or live up to my potential so tell me more about that idea of obligation why you wanted to make that argument knowing i imagine that it's difficult for people like me to swallow yeah there's only one hack in the whole book because i'm not a big fan of hacks and the hack is we have good i'm glad thrilled and aversion to hustling other people we don't want to call people at home on their phone at night in the middle of the night to sell them insurance we don't want to close talk somebody you know as they walk down the street good i'm really glad about that and so a lot of people hesitate to ship their creative work because they don't want to hustle because they say i don't like marketing i don't want to pitch my work if i could just find somebody else let the editor do it and then i'm done right well what if we turned it upside down and said lifeguards aren't hustling people when they rescue them when they're drowning nobody who's a lifeguard says i don't think i should jump in they might want to drown no they they're drowning you go rescue them it's a generous act and that makes it much easier to jump in the water because you're not jumping in the water for you you're jumping in the water for them and so i think by my definition of creative work which is something human that will make something better for someone else it's a generous act well if you're a citizen we have lots of things that we say to citizens in a free society are their obligations because our culture our community works because we are obligated to one another i think i ain't rand was a fool and the way that she is interpreted by many that being short-term selfish is the way to go makes no sense to me i think that we're communitarians and if you are in community then you have an obligation and your obligation is if you have something to say or do or ship or paint or create that will make things better for other people you shouldn't hold it back this may be a matter of semantics but part of me wondered if it's if it's easier to get people on board with the idea of a responsibility than an obligation an obligation feels like i have no choice a responsibility feels like i want to make the choice to do the right thing i've written it down we'll change it in the next edition great great point no i i have to say from a rhetorical standpoint i like your your decision better because it really forced me to wrestle with this right and if you had said it's my responsibility i would have said yeah you're probably right and i enjoyed having to you know to really grapple with it a little bit so i i wouldn't back off on challenging people uh it was just it was just something i wondered about um i i have another question that that relates a little bit to this dynamic which is there is a fascinating mix of i would say encouraging and challenging uh in in this book and i think this is another theme that runs through your work um you know on the one hand you're telling people look writer's block is a myth right you don't need to you don't need to be held back by that on the other hand you need to show up every day and do the work so you know what what are you doing right get get focused get committed how do you figure out where when you're coaching people when you're advising people when you're trying to motivate people in your life where to draw the line there so you know we learned a lot building a kimbo out the way that we did because the workshops are difficult they're not like you to me where you watch a bunch of videos and what i discovered is the word enrollment that education happens because you're trading a certificate for compliance but learning happens when someone is enrolled in the journey you know that the person who stays after class is way more likely to learn something than the person who raises their hand and says will this be on the test someone says will this be on the test joke's over right and so i made the decision a long time ago not to coach or consult for money but if i'm talking to someone i care about i can tell pretty quickly how enrolled are they in the journey and if they're not that enrolled then my job is sorted to reassure them even though i don't believe in reassurance but if they're enrolled just like at crossfit blisters are on the agenda and blisters are part of the deal so do you really want to get from here to there because i'm happy to describe to you what i see ahead of you but it's going to be something you need to lean into not something where i can show you an easy path that resonates it reminds me of an eyelet fishbach set of experiments where the basic question is when when you're trying to motivate yourself or somebody else to to do something do you focus on how much progress has already been made or how much progress there is left to go and they basically found that it depends on the degree of enrollment or or commitment so if somebody is already committed you highlight the gap right you say you've got a long road ahead of you and then they're they're going to double down whereas if somebody's wavering if they're not sure they're engaged or they're on board with the idea you let them know they've already put in plenty of effort and they've gone part of the way so you know might as well keep going that sounds very aligned with the way you've thought about it that's i had not heard that before i couldn't even guess where you were going with it i think that's very cool well speaking of guessing i have to ask you seth we share a hobby which is being magicians uh that has been a practice since you were a kid if i remember correctly you know i i love i mean what what kind of author would just keep cards not just cards not just cards cards with my cover on them oh even better you designed a deck of cards around them the card has it has a slogan from the book and spoiler alert don't listen if you're not a magician it's a stripper deck just saying so you're going to be able to find the card of choice at a moment's notice i love it here i thought we were just going to get a regular flourish but no you gave us you gave us the practice as a deck tell me from from your years practicing magic what you learned about um about creativity in that realm that's transferred over to other work you've done okay so um are you a penguin magic customer i have been at many points in my life okay so i have a trick that may or may not show up on penguin magic i think it will i've made the video for them and what it's about is wonder which is a riff i got from a guy named harris iii wonder is something that we all want as human beings and wonder in the world of magic tricks is regularly trampled upon by people who yell out i know how you did that right so oh there was wonder for a moment and then we did everything in our power intellectually to make it go away and i think that adjacency to wonder is one of the most wonderful magical things a human can do and so the thing about penguin magic is the way they make money is they show you a trick and the only way to make the wonder go away is to buy it and that's how they make a living and so i did i i made a video for this and executed the trick fairly poorly and said you already know how i did it that's not the question the question is can we talk about making wonder in the world around you and so what i've learned i've taught magic to a lot of kids is the kid who wants to yell out i know how you did that has a long way to go to finding a journey toward wonder and i don't want to know how it's done i like living with that gap in between what i know and what is in front of us i can still function as a civilized human being with a little bit of wonder in my life and i think most human beings would agree that we've probably gone too far to stamping it out and that really great magic with or without playing cards is about how did i how can i bring a little bit of wonder back to the world i think that's so interesting because there's it seems like a tension between maintaining the wonder and also cultivating curiosity right so when i when i think about the george lowenstein view of curiosity as an itch you have to strap a scratch right the the the question mark in your knowledge where you desperately want the answer or the insight um there's a part of me that thinks you know that's that's part of why i became a psychologist right as as a kid you know wanting to know the answer to magic tricks and reading them in books i had that same feeling when you know when i was learning about psychology and trying to figure out okay what can we better understand about how the mind works do you think it's possible to maintain wonder while still scratching the curiosity itch oh yeah because i think curiosity is about journey that there's almost no one who's only curious about one thing that as soon as the curious person finds out one thing they quickly decide to go after the next thing you know if you read david deutsch's last couple books which will blow the top of your head off as soon as he has the answer to something like hilbert's hotel the next chapter he's back at being in the curious business again and so i think one of the part of the hedonic treadmill of magic is you get release from the tension and then two minutes later you can go be back on the treadmill yeah yeah and that's a that's a very nice resolution tell me also then from a magic perspective the a lot of the practices is pretty boring compared to the astonishment of the trick right i know a lot of magicians who love to perform and they hate to practice do you have any any guidance or insight about how to bring intrinsic motivation into an activity that lacks it because i think that's that's at the heart of why a lot of people struggle with the practice you know it's funny um for the last 10 or so books i did the worst day was the day i found out it was a bestseller of the whole journey why because it's not why i wrote it and it's when i i still remember the day someone came and handed me a piece of paper in the middle of a conference that a book exceeded expectations and i actually started to cry because nothing happened for me i got no joy out of the news and i realized that that spot of my quest the ego part of it had been extinguished and i wasn't going to have it again and that this idea do you know who i am um never makes us feel better right the person who's had a ted talk that's been seen three million times and doesn't know why it hasn't been seen four million times that's like it's not going to make us better and so when i talk to people like why does bob dylan live in a bus the guy has 200 million dollars in the bank at a nobel prize he lives in a bus to get to the next gig because for him it's not about i won it's about i get to play so if you want to get to play i have really good news which is you get to play you don't have to win but if you want to win i have bad news which is you're probably not going to win and the only way to get there is to do the work anyway this is like the joe heller kurt vonnegut story about i've i've gotten one thing the the rich person will never have the knowledge that i've got enough yeah exactly i wonder though if you're being too harsh on on the person who celebrates the bestseller because in the world of creativity we have very poor measures of impact right there are days when i think look if if we were doctors we would know when we're saving lives right if we were engineers we would know when we we built a product that somebody really directly benefited from in the creative world impact is much more ambiguous and so i think sometimes bestseller is a signal to people hey you know what that work actually was useful to someone or people took an interest is that all ego or is that just for me it feels like i just want to know that my time is well spent i i don't know if it's an ego thing but i think it's not at least for me helpful i don't think oncologists are significantly worse at being a doctor than podiatrists but oncologists have a lot of patients who die and if you want to write a new york times bestseller give me 80 000 i'll show you how you can buy a slot on the list right it's not hard at all because the list is corrupt so easily measured metrics whether someone died or you made a list i find really shallow because you can do really great work and only a thousand people bought that book because it didn't hit the slipstream writer it came on the same day as barack obama's book right um and so instead for me it's show me one person show me one person who you turned a light on and who they turned a light on i want to be measured by what the people who learn from me taught other people and i feel like that's a network effect that i could be proud of but i fired publicly the new york times a long time ago because i didn't want to be attached to an outcome that i knew how to game because i'm a good marketer i know how to make a book that is more going to sell more copies than this one much to my publisher chagrin but that's not what i'm not in the cutting down trees business i'm in the did i find something for the people i seek to serve business and i think the same thing is true for a palliative care physician where every single patient is gonna die they gotta measure the right thing i think that's beautiful it reminds me of something i found in my early research in grad school that if if you looked at people's perceptions that their jobs made a difference the depth of impact was much more important than the breath right it was it was not how many people am i am i helping it's how much am i how much good am i doing for each person that i have the privilege to help and it seems like that's that's your compass and i think to let you off the hook a little bit it's yours too because i've seen what your students have said about you and i've seen you know when that when the rsa says hey adam you want to do something like this you're not keeping score of some easily measured metric you're saying i'm in community and this is a thing that i'd like to do what a privilege we all have we don't dig ditches for a living and we have this internet thing and instead of watching cat videos we're trying to make something better with it and we won't have this moment for long but as long as we have the moment i think we need to lean into it i think so too seth well it's been it's been such a delight to have a chance to talk with you as always i think the the practice is such a great i i dare i say gift to the world of both creative people who struggle to ship their work but also people who don't realize that they're creative and do have a responsibility maybe even an obligation to share their ideas with the world and i think you've done us all a great service by by bringing that gift to us thank you professor such a privilege to talk to you you

Channel: RSA

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Id: 2KHaUN4nXvE

Length: 40min 40sec (2440 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 19 2020