Seth Godin - Finding Consistent Patterns of Success

what got you there with sean delaney what got you there trust yourself is three words trust your self well who's doing the trusting and who's being trusted turns out we have two things inside our head we have the verbal critic and we have the non-verbal creative and if you can't trust the non-verbal creative to do decent work then you will keep it quiet the whole time so only by trusting ourselves to make things better do we have a chance to let creativity out [Music] seth godin is the best-selling author of linchpin tribes sean's favorite marketing book of all time this is marketing and his latest work the practice shipping creative work on this episode seth uncovers what will inspire artists writers and entrepreneurs to stretch and commit to putting their best work out into the world creative work doesn't come with a guarantee but there is a pattern to who succeeds and who doesn't and engaging in the consistent practice of its pursuit is the best way forward this episode will help you get unstuck and find the courage to make and share creative work godan insists that writer's block is a myth that consistency is far more important than authenticity and that experiencing the imposter syndrome is a sign that you're a well-adjusted human most of all he shows what it takes to turn your passion from a private distraction to a productive contribution the one you've been seeking to share all along seth welcome to what got you there how are you doing today i'm fantastic thank you for having me i am delighted honored to have you and one of the words that i always think of with you is magnitude and the reason that is is because the amount of impact you've had both on me and then thousands if not millions of others so i'm wondering for you is there anyone you've never met but has just had a tremendous impact on your life oh most of the people who have an impact on my life i've never met i mean i've been lucky enough to become friends you know the late zig ziglar roz and ben zander there's a lot of people who have had a voice in my life but when i think about the thousands and thousands of books i've read that never mind just the examples of people who have come before who have shown up and done something that was important you know madame cj walker who made her fortunate hair care i certainly have nothing in common with her but i passed her house where she lived in 1900 just down the street from me and when you look at what an impact that example can have on somebody about what's possible about the magic that we can make yeah it's a long long list the magic that we can make i think that's what a lot of this conversation is going to be about and the magic that we can make around creativity and one of the big things you've done for me is just around that mindset shift that creativity is a choice and i'm wondering for you when did you first realize that that this is a skill we can hone all right so for people listening at home let's just decode that for a second here people think they're born creative or they are not and i have a really hard time with that because i don't think that creativity is a talent i think it's a skill and my evidence is that every single person has been creative at least once and so we're not discussing whether it is possible for you to be creative we're discussing is it possible to be creative more often and in a more productive way so yeah i'll give you that uh slam dunking a basketball as a talent if you're not seven feet tall you're never going to do it but if you do it once then you can do it again i can't even do it once but creativity you know i understood professionally what it could mean the very first day of my first summer job at a business school i showed up at spinnaker software where i was clearly under qualified to be there compared to some of the extraordinary people there were only 30 people at the company when i got there and they had one of those while you were out message things because before voicemail they used to write on a little pink slip someone called you and the way it worked was uh it had 50 slots it was a plastic carousel and they would just each one had a name dymo labeled on it and they would put the slip in the slot and i showed up and i could see that i was going to have to every day spin this wheel to get to my name and that seemed silly so i took a paper clip from the receptionist's desk and i put it next to my name so all i'd have to do is spin for the paperclip which would be much easier than reading every name because they weren't in any order and within three days every single one of the slots had some sort of flag or thing it did spread right and i realized in that moment a that nobody had been keeping anybody else from doing this innovation didn't cost anything and b that was going to be my contribution i wasn't going to do spreadsheets better than anybody else i wasn't going to be able to work more hours every day than anybody else but i could come up with an interesting way to cause productivity to happen that other people also could have done but for whatever reason didn't decide to what do you do what are next steps when you realize what it is that you can have an impact with well you know i talk about shipping the work and i don't mean just ship the work because that means whatever what the hell put it out there i mean merely ship the work simply show up without commentary without a lot of drama without bothering yourself show up and ship the work because the only way to find out if the work is useful is to ship it and i'm not arguing that people should ship junk i'm saying until you engage with the market you have no idea if you're making a contribution how much does trust have to do with that i'm thinking even just the ability to trust yourself and the work you're going to be putting out and then even the reciprocation end of that and the trust once others do receive your work how does this play into that right so there's two kinds of trust the uh my book the practice was going to be called trust yourself and i still own trustyourself.com um but it's too complicated because trust yourself is three words trust your self well who's doing the trusting and who's being trusted turns out we have two things inside our head we have the verbal critic and we have the non-verbal creative and if you can't trust the non-verbal creative to do decent work then you will keep it quiet the whole time and so only by trusting ourselves to make things better do we have a chance to let creativity out and you are right if we are sloppy if we are selfish the marketplace won't trust us and so there's a balancing act and the balancing act is don't ship junk don't be selfish but at the same time don't hold back for perfect because perfect isn't the point the point is to make a contribution how have you wrestled that the two ends the creative and the critic throughout your career well um at the beginning there was probably too much creative at the beginning uh when i was busy trying to make a career as a book packager i came up with an enormous range of books that i wanted to read but i had no empathy for the publisher and what were they willing to take a financial risk on and understanding that distinction uh took me a year and it was very expensive because for a year i failed and failed and failed only when i added the empathy and allowed it and allowed their desires and their voice into my head as well was i able to find a balance between the two have there been other big evolution type moments understanding empathy i'm going to place as one throughout your career have there been these other ones that have come up that have just been almost phased transitions for you oh on a regular basis you know when the most expensive decision i ever made was in 1993 i was running one of the first internet companies in the world and uh a guy who worked for me showed me the world wide web and i said the world wide web is stupid there's no business model it's slow it's worse than prodigy we're not interested and that cost me i don't know 40 billion dollars um what did i miss what i missed was i knew what i wanted in an online service but i wasn't yet facile enough and aware enough to know what other people might want how much do you identify then and i'll call this game selection in your own life in your own career where can your talents match up with what interests you so it's a great question so i i don't think talents enter into this at all people don't generally find a way to make a living that is directly aligned to what they were born with i think that the hard part is finding a sustainable slot where you can persistently add value and get paid fairly for it so there are plenty of marketplaces where you can add value but you can't get paid for it right so if you think that you can make a living putting music on spotify the math will show you that you probably can't you can try and it might be fun but it's more of a hobby for a million people than it is a form of making a living on the other hand it is entirely possible to make a living as a creator of music but you have to find a more finite sinicure where you can own something and do it regularly so i think where we fall down is believing that being in the industry is itself an act of creativity it's not what uh you know just because you work in an art gallery doesn't mean you're an artist and just because you do filing for sony doesn't mean you make music we need to differentiate between that feeling of being creative which you can feel if you're an hvac heating and air conditioning installer versus what the public labels as creative and i think that distinction is overlooked way too often i remember um again like right after i made my mistake with the world wide web i was sitting in the office of the guy who was busy building disney's website and their whole business and on his desk there were probably 200 pieces of paper stacked up neatly and i said what's that he said oh these are resumes that just came in now at the time i was hiring a person a week and we were struggling to get good resumes and this guy had 200 sitting on his desk that he hadn't even asked for why were people killing themselves to get a job where they would not be creative at disney online and unwilling to apply to a job with only 40 people in the whole company where we did creative things every minute and the answer is because it was easier to tell your parents and your friends that you had a job at disney than it was to explain that you were working for me that is another one of those huge mindset shifts and just how we're thinking about how others view us as a big one and i would love to dive into that in a second but i just want to know we're talking about game selection when did you feel most alive creatively throughout your career was there a project you worked on um i think in terms of uh thrills per minute it was um [Music] right this time of year in the year 1980 three so whatever many years ago that was 37 years ago um when i was at spinnaker software again because i wasn't an expert i wasn't jaded i was winging it as the product manager brand manager organizer of a line of science fiction adventure games we had to ship five products to radio shack target leachmere in and we only had 60 days left and if we missed our deadline the company would go bankrupt and i had to make a decision every 45 seconds 20 hours a day i didn't leave the office for a month i had an extraordinary crew of 20 people who were working for me only zero were my direct reports and we invented stuff that's still being used in the computer game business to this date and that was thrilling i will never ever do that again it almost killed me but uh yeah that was done there was a photo book taken of some of those moments and it got lost and one day i'm gonna find it because i really would love to see what i looked like on that little sleep filled with that much adrenaline you mentioned you would never do that again i certainly don't blame you for that i'm wondering though that sounds like one of those dog year type learning years looking back do you think that was just transformational for you oh yeah oh yeah there the two things that transformed me other than my parents were uh the years teaching canoeing in canada and that uh two-month sprint because i came to understand that that could be normal if you wanted it to be and so the you know people look at my productivity 20 books and then 140 books before that and the blog posts and everything i don't work that hard i just get out of my way and getting out of your way is part of the practice getting out of your way to say i'm not gonna marinate in this i'm not gonna argue about this i'm simply going to ship my best work and then i'll do it again tomorrow that's how we get things done and it's possible it's totally possible it's that dance with fear though isn't it well right and if you saw saturday night fever or any other movie people like dancing it's just they've decided that dancing with fear is a special case it's not a special case you can look forward to dancing with fear i would love to hit on responsibility i know we were kind of talking about this a few minutes ago with people putting their applications in for disney world versus coming and working for you and doing something much more creative and taking that responsibility and like you say putting something out there shipping it and saying here i made this is that one of the big things that we have to start becoming more responsible for the work we're doing well if you're not going to be responsible for it who will be well i think largely now it seems like a lot of people aren't owning their work yeah and so because you're not willing to be responsible you're frustrated and you feel overlooked and disrespected it's a it's a double-edged sword if you will that on one side we don't want to be responsible because then we're on the hook but on the other side being on the hook is the only place to be because being on the hook is the place where the interesting things happen and it's the place where you have the leverage to do your work i love that and one of the great concepts i love in your new book the practice is just the hospitality around discomfort and and i would love for you to hit on this and now you even love an example of how do you add discomfort to your own life so when we think about hospitality um it feels like pampering we get to the hotel they carry our bags they take us to the room they give us warm towels but my friend and colleague marie shot has pointed out that there's a hospitality of discomfort of being able to create an environment where people are able to dance with fear that when you sign up to train with a group of people for the boston marathon you are setting yourself up for discomfort not comfort that when you want to learn anything and that's what we do at the alt mba and the other workshops you're signing yourself up for discomfort the way it feels before you learn something it's always uncomfortable before you learn something and i think that's a form of hospitality in and of itself and we've probably done too much pampering in our culture and not enough appropriate discomfort yeah another one of those concepts that is tied into this is the words so far and not yet and i love that and not enough people have that approach so i would love for you just to dive into this yeah well so uh the first phrase so far means uh i have not accomplished something so far right i'm not good at this so far not yet means no one has said yes yet but these aren't final so when we say for example i am hungry we don't mean i'm going to be hungry forever we just mean until i eat my next meal i will feel hungry it's temporary whereas i am tall means i'm going to be tall forever so we have to distinguish what the am in that sentence means and so to be able to say this is where i am it's not permanent it's this is what i've accomplished so far and to say i didn't sell any of these ideas we have to add not yet i haven't done it yet and these phrases open the door for us to show up in a different way call it optimism if you want but i think it's a form of realism acknowledging that time marches on and as it marches on we have a choice about how to spend it you mentioned opening the door and i'm wondering how this phrase this phrases and these sayings came with the practice and and you working on on your latest project did they have an impact there well you know sometimes i'll write a book and i will learn from writing it that's certainly the case of lingepin a book that i discovered a whole bunch of ideas through the course of writing it other times i will write a book simply because i need to read it again and that's the case of the practice i did not discover a lot of new insight as i was writing it because i was writing about the insight i have discovered over the years what i realized though is when i was reading the audiobook it made me better when i reread the galley it makes me better i wrote this book to remind me of how to do better work i almost think about that reminding and exploration versus exploitation and i'm wondering for you so established in your career how much more are you looking to discover and how much more are you almost looking to to re-uncover what you've already learned yeah i you know i'm super fortunate privileged i have a lot of track record and people who give me the benefit of the doubt the benefit of the doubt is priceless but i don't feel like i'm close to done with the work that i want to do and what i'm looking to discover are more effective ways to help people do the things they've wanted to do all along and we are surrounded by social media and a political culture that tricks people into doing short-term things to manipulate us to get those other people what they want and i want to figure out how to help people see that they can do long-term things so they can get what they want has design thinking had an impact on what you just said oh yeah i've ever since so the phrase design thinking has been around for a few years i think it's a bad name and i don't think it's clearly explained i i think it's about intentional action what are we doing on purpose and in order to figure out what we want to do we have to ask two questions who's it for and what's it for this thing this action i'm taking who exactly am i doing it for and the second half what change do i seek to make most of the time we don't have an answer for those two things you know oh you're going to the black friday sale why well walmart's having a sale blah blah yeah but who exactly is this for and what are you going to get out of it because if you did the math you'd realize that the stress and the risk compared to the twenty dollars you're going to save if you spent that same amount of stress and risk you could create a hundred dollars worth of value for somebody online and have 80 left over so who's it for exactly what's it for why did you let that post get you upset and take that action who's it for and what's it for because if you're getting manipulated the person who's manipulating you knows that they're doing it and you've got to ask that question who's it for and you've got to say what's it for what change am i seeking to make you just mentioned manipulation and i'm wondering how you yourself have built in different constraints to avoid that manipulation yeah i mean first of all let's be clear that we are all indoctrinated that's what it is to be part of a culture and here in the u.s we've been indoctrinated into a racial caste system we've been indoctrinated into a commercial system that's been driven by mass marketers we've been indoctrinated into lots of ways of thinking and if those things aren't helping us get what we want then we've been manipulated because someone else got us to believe or act a certain way because it was good for them so there are certain principles we can put in place like don't use social media or if you do use social media use it with real clear intent don't engage in certain kinds of troll behavior or market behavior or debt behavior right that it turns out there's a non-trivial number of people in this country who think that paying more in an interest rate is better because big numbers are better than small numbers right well that's the result of someone manipulating you figure out how statistics actually work figure out what does a poll really mean being able to build very clear boundaries about what you're going to believe and what you're going to tell somebody else based on what you learned are super important because you should cross those boundaries when it's appropriate but you should do it on purpose back to intentional action yeah i'm thinking about that intentional action and i feel like you've really done a great job building in some long-term practices and i guess now that you've had some time to be able to assess this what are some of those best decisions you've made that have sustained your career and some of those things that continue to evolve and also make you better um well i'll share two that i think are available to just about anybody one of them is blogging every day it's free i've done it 7 500 times in a row the reason it's great even if no one reads your blog is because it forces you to say something in writing in public every day and like morning pages but different it's a commitment that to a practice of clarity of thinking and then the second one which we talk about in the freelancers workshop is uh get better clients that every time in my career that i have asked someone i was working for to move on and recommended a competitor to them i'm glad i did that better clients let you do better work better clients demand that you show up on a schedule better clients encourage you to go to the next level better clients pay on time better clients talk about you and your work so if you're a writer get better readers and if you're someone with a day job get a better boss better clients make a huge difference in your life i can't help but think about with getting better clients and then also putting yourself out there and we'll call it blogging every single day and the importance of feedback loops is that one of the key things being able to understand what you're putting out okay so different kinds of feedback loops uh if you've ever learned how to drive the curb has a feedback loop which is if you hit the curb it hits you back and lets you know that you're not on the road anymore you need to listen to the feedback loop of the curve social media has a feedback loop of trolls and other people who will write back to almost anything you write that's a feedback loop you might want to ignore and so a key part of engaging with feedback loops is being really clear about who gets to talk to you and who you are going to listen to because getting hung up on all feedback being the same is a real problem it's not all the same some of it is much better than others that's always one of those important keys where's that's come where's that coming from and it makes me think about you and just your ability to develop your taste and i'm wondering where do you think in life you've got the best taste so what's taste and when i was writing about good taste in the book i realized i couldn't find anybody who could accurately describe what good taste even is so let's start with that good taste is knowing what your customers want just before they do because copying them copying the people you're talking to people don't say you have good taste they say you're a mirror but if you're just a little bit ahead then suddenly you're anna wintour suddenly you're spike lee or miles davis because miles davis wasn't 20 years ahead of his time he was three months ahead of his time he had good taste so that's what good taste is good taste requires us first of all to listen a lot you can't isolate yourself in a farmhouse in sweden and expect that you will be in sync or a little ahead of the culture because you don't know what the culture is and then the second half is either consciously or non-consciously you have to make assertions about what it is that people are interested in so it if you know i did an interview years ago with diane von furstenberg the clothing designer and she was verbally illiterate about why her work worked she was not able to explain to me in the interview how she knew the wrap dress was a good idea she had no words but clearly a 70-year track record indicates that she had good taste so what's going on here well you could say she's intuitive she's natural i just think she just didn't develop the words she didn't need the words she just could use scissors in a pen to describe to people around her what she saw if you're lucky enough to be like that then go for it i'm not i have to put words on it and the magic of things like blogging or podcasting is you get to put words on it so go ahead and describe what's out there and what you think will happen next say it out loud and based on what you say out loud see if you're right and then do it again and do it again and do it again if you do that enough times you're almost certainly going to get better at it yeah no certainly and i mean you've got so many great examples of non-obvious things in the book that we need to re-explore and reevaluate and there's a bunch and i'm hoping the listeners pick up the book because like all your work it's another one that i absolutely love but i'm wondering is there one or two that you just love some of those non-obvious things to most but obvious to you right now well you know i i've been using my glowforge to make these writer's blocks and there's only going to be 400 of them and they take a long time to make but uh we talked about attitude and creativity being a skill i love to tweak people by pointing out there's no such thing as writer's block and i guess the one that's the most controversial is the idea that reassurance is futile and people hate that they hate that because reassurance in the moment like a piece of chocolate feels like it's helping but the thing is it wears out really really fast that if oprah called you on the phone and said you're doing great keep it up you'd be all over the moon for about 20 minutes and then you need somebody else to call you because reassurance fades too fast so seeking out reassurance is not your friend instead you're going to have to figure out how to extend yourself without reassurance the great chung young trump and rinpoche said uh the good news i got it backwards the bad news is that we are falling falling falling the good news is that there's nothing to hold on to and once we can get an understanding that there's nothing to hold on to it gets way easier to do our work i'm smiling so much right now because that part of the book the reassurance element i just loved i grabbed my wife and i said this is it this is what people need to be focusing on and putting more time and attention to um and putting time and intention is something i would love to hear about and just developing your own creative talents and i'm wondering where you put in the most amount of time that outsiders would just have no idea of but it's all the work underneath the water like the duck swimming his legs are moving crazy that others don't get to see um i would say there are two related things which is if i see something in the world that is working and i don't know why i challenge myself to explain it and if i can't explain it i have to dig in more to find out why so there's lots of things around us that we would never expect to be the way that they are right so you live in florida and if you and i had shown up when florida was a vast swamp we would not have done the urban planning to make florida look like it looks right so why does it look the way it looks how did those highways get there and why what is the history behind south beach and how did it architecturally evolve why is it like this it didn't just show up one day and understanding how the culture changed that led to the geography changed that led to the culture change that led to the geography change and around and around it goes help us understand so much about the world but too often we don't think about it so just to continue my rant about florida miami is going to be completely underwater in the next 10 to 12 years and the reason is because when they built the drainage systems they didn't want to spend a lot of money they didn't want to spend a lot of money because florida particularly miami evolved as a cheap alternative not an expensive one where there was plenty of land to go around and as a result they didn't want to raise taxes so as a result they built drainage systems that weren't particularly steep in any given direction and so when it rained a lot it would flow to the ocean but just a couple feet downhill and so as the ocean rises it's going to go the other direction and the water's just going to go right through the drainage ditches the other way and it's not an accident it's the way it was built and so seeing that helps us begin to explain the world around us and i spend three to five hours a day explaining things to myself i'm wrong a lot but then i figure out where i'm wrong and i explain it a different way and it's not hard work i love doing it but it takes a lot of time what does that work look like like why is that book a best seller oh i yeah well yeah okay or why is you know this person getting away with this and not getting away with that and why does the criminal justice system work the way i mean you can everywhere i look i'm just confused and i'm trying to get unconfused on a regular basis no that that learning process that skill acquisition distilling down it almost seems like a lot of things that you keep going back to is giving yourself the space is that one of the crucial elements for you yeah see the problem with that and the reason i'm hesitant to say it is you don't give yourself a lot of space and then get clients giving yourself space doesn't get you clients learning how to sell gets you clients having the empathy to show up and see someone else's problem and offer to solve it for money that is essential after that you get to give yourself space so that you can do better work but first you need clients and i don't think we should hide from that difficult act of doing generous work that we get paid for i'm thinking about getting clients and i'm wondering you don't have to necessarily be a client of someone but i'm wondering whose creative work have you been most in awe of there's so many people so um you know when i think about uh the early work that they did at ideo to reconfigure the way design worked when i think about spike lee's first three movies with no money coming out of nowhere when i think about neil gaiman who can write a groundbreaking piece of fiction anytime he wants or the late sir ken robinson you know sir ken and i were friends he did the most popular ted talk of all time and he didn't do the same talk every time and he didn't bring notes up he simply found a way to channel a certain voice and and use it without a lot of drama in a way that resonated with a huge number of people and he made it look really easy it was very difficult but it wasn't difficult in the way so many people make public speaking difficult it wasn't let's memorize this powerpoint presentation it wasn't here's all these bullet points it wasn't here's this not very good joke it was sir ken doing a thing that made it sound like he was being sir ken it wasn't really like that in real life he was sort of like that right or i was just reading dr seuss yesterday and you know dr seuss had a really tough childhood and when he was 10 years old teddy roosevelt humiliated him in front of his parents and a bunch of other people he never ever recovered from that but if you look at the work he chose to publish over and over again each one more classic than the next it's because he earned the privilege by practicing not because he was a talented cartoonist earning the privilege the practice the latest piece of work from you i really did enjoy the book i'm wondering for someone who's going to pick this up what are you hoping they walk away with i would like them to share it with three other people and say let's hold each other accountable simple enough simple enough a man who's been able to still down a lot of wisdom throughout the years into simple concise things i love it seth you brought up so many interesting people uh throughout this conversation i'm just wondering anyone dead or alive that is not a family member that if you could just spend the evening with having a conversation much like this who would that be yeah i'm just i'm gonna cheat it's gotta be my mom yeah i miss it every day that means a lot we i'm sure most of us have those people that we would answer the same way but seth this has been a true pleasure and honor you're someone i've learned so much from over the years like i mentioned magnitude is the word that comes because just the impact you've had so anything else you want to leave the listeners with i know the book is out in november where else can they stay connected with you um well our workshops are at kimbo.com uh and my blog's at seth's blog there's a new post every day at least as far as i can make it happen but mostly what i'm hoping people will do is start their own ruckus not necessarily be part of mine well the book is the practice you are seth godin this is a true pleasure thanks so much for joining us on what got you there take care sean it's good to talk to you you guys made it to the end of another episode of what got you there i hope you guys enjoyed it i really do appreciate you taking the time to listen all the way through if you found value in this the best way you can support the show is giving us a review rating it sharing it with your friends and also sharing on social i can't tell you how much i appreciate it looking forward to you guys listening to another episode

Channel: What Got You There

Views: 8,427

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Keywords: what got you there, wgyt, sean delaney, seth godin, altmba, author, blogger, creative, creator, writer, this is marketing, podcast, marketing, creativity, decision making, book, business, investing, podcaster, blog, permission marketing, entrepreneur, entrepreneur motivation, how to be an entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, success, business ideas, business insider, mental models, business podcast, creative work, passion, artist, inspire, game selection, critic, design thinking, design, feedback, discovery

Id: IgeWuqyz4ew

Length: 39min 3sec (2343 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 31 2020