Seth Godin: How to be INDISPENSABLE

[Music] behind the brand features the people who are making things happen get the insight to grow your Biz from experts who've done it get behind the brand uh hi R we're here with Seth Goden hi Brian we're really glad that you made it out Seth is the author of uh new book lynchpin and we wanted to talk to you about that and kind of get your thoughts but uh I guess the most pressing thing on my mind first is about the socks about the socks so what's the story with the socks I don't know if our friends with the cameras can see the socks so the socks are for 12-year-old girls they're made by a company called little mismatch they come in 133 Styles you get three to a container none of them match and the entire marketing strategy of the company is that 12-year-old girls with a fashion problem that's not all 12-y old girls just some members of the tribe who care about fashion uh don't have enough to talk about during recess and if for 10 bucks they can have socks that don't match that are colorful they can go during recess and say to their friends the magic sentence want to see my socks sure So when you say want to see my socks the other kid goes home and says to her mom I need new socks and so the idea spreads it's a purple cow it's remarkable it spreads through a tribe not through everyone yeah and so I wear them every day as a reminder that you can build a $40 million sock company on the basis of one sentence uh I wear them because it's a reminder that doing what everyone has done for years isn't necessarily the right answer and it solves my personal problem which is I constantly lose the companion sock so you have to worry about finding its perfect right and sometimes I accidentally put on a pair I have so many a pair that match and I have to start over and mismatch them on purpose sure yeah well that's excellent um there's a lot of things I want to ask you um thank you so much for an advanced copy of the book uh I've read it now going on 1.5 times uh it's a very different book than you've written before right it's very different from some of the others you know tribes and the dip and permission marketing even tell us about that yeah well this time it's personal and it's not not personal about me it's personal about you that what I'm trying to say and the dip is a little bit of this but most of my books have been strategic conceptual tactical they're about how an organization interacts with the marketplace how an organization interacts with a story or an idea and what I heard from so many people who are in a lot of pain is that the strategies weren't working and the reason was that the underlying bargain of our economy is busted and so I had to take it down to the personal level and say how does an individual navigate in a world where the Industrial Revolution is not only over it's dead that's interesting so I was thinking when did you when did you begin writing the book you finished tribes what two years ago yeah I started writing the book 10 or 12 years ago um it the books have to come out in order but they don't have to get written in order yeah right I mean because it's I think a really timely message and I was just wondering you know what is the process and if you know if you if you're uh I guess what I feel when I read your books is that you are a thought leader like you're you're far and ahead of the curve and so um in your typical fashion you know you're you're already one or two steps ahead of everybody else and sure enough you've launched this book perfect timing for people who need to sort of reinvent themselves yeah I don't I don't write books because I want to I write books because I have to not because I have to do it to make a living but because the idea deserves it right that it's not just a blog post it's a chance to use paper and you know a small transaction to get under someone's skin and tell a story that might resonate with them right sometimes a book takes me two weeks to write uh two of the books I've written I've written in two weeks sometimes a book takes me five or 10 years to write and it's not like I wake up in the morning go boy I wonder what book I'm going to write now it's the idea arrives and if you have to serve the idea or or you're going to kill it so what book were you writing 10 to 12 years ago when you were thinking about lynchpin what what book was then at well I mean I've tried to to live a life and and hire people and run organizations filled with Lynch bins I didn't have words for it the original title of the book was the chef the cook in the bottle washer because if you think about it there are three kinds of people in every restaurant chefs they're the ones who get all the fame they're the ones who make up the recipes they're the ones who get the money Cooks they're the ones who follow the recipes but they're sort of interchangeable and bottle washers they're disrespected they're often illegal Al Ians they don't get paid anything and it's really lousy to be one and the question is in every business there's those three kinds of people which are you got it what's your expectation when you write a book um you know you must hope that it's going to do well but like do you have any preconceived expectations like you know you want to change change the status quo I mean that seems to be a thread that runs through most of your books is is fighting against um old strategies don't that don't work anymore and um old ways of thinking that not working anymore um I don't think you're fighting against tradition that's still working but you're fighting against the status quo yeah I'm fighting against stupidity right that what I do for living is I notice things and if I no something that doesn't make sense anymore it frustrates me because why are we doing something that doesn't make sense anymore why are people in pain why are people underutilized why are we disrespecting people who deserve to be respected yeah so the the reason to bother cutting down all those trees and waiting a year and putting at all those stores and then having to promote it is so that a few people and I don't care how many but a few people are impacted by it it's the best tool available to me without spending my day interacting with you know hundreds of people every day it's the easiest way for me to leverage an idea and to do it justice so speaking of interacting with hundreds of people every day um do you or do you not answer all your emails because I I tend I have a I have a feeling that you do uh I certainly try to um if someone's going to bother to send me a non-anonymous email I can certainly take the time to read it and write back I'm certainly not a verbose correspondent but I have no staff um you know someone I work with to create hoopla but if if you see something with my name on it I wrote every word of it yeah and and why is that so important to you to is it about making personal connections is it about engaging with your audience yeah I think it's about being a citizen right that Community is really easy to get rid of when you're just bits and Anonymous people and racing through you know this is Orange County there's a lot of movie stars around and we've all seen that sort of glazed stay away from me look and that's really sad it's sad for both sides right it's sad for the side that's constantly you know throwing stuff at people and hoping that they'll catch it but it's also sad for the person whose eyes are glazed over who's isolating themselves yeah so my goal is to be a citizen of whatever organization I'm in and whatever Community I'm in so I'm going to create a community of people who read a book I'd like to be a citizen of that community and and contribute what I can contribute as much as I can excellent what has uh what what's your favorite book to date of mine of yours yeah what what are you most the book you're most proud of the most the book you like the best you know everyone is I wouldn't write them differently each time you know what I say to people is I wrote a book called survival is not enough Charles Darwin wrote the forward it came out uh 6 weeks after 911 not a good time to to launch a book about scary things uh no one read that book so if people ask me which book do I think is underserved it's that one I worked on it harder than any book I've ever written it's got a lot of intricate things going on and some people really liked it you know if someone says to me uh I've never read any of your books what should I do you know the dip is only 85 pages long so it's a good fun place to start and purple cow seems to resonate with a lot of people so those are sort of the highlights when you write a book you're all by yourself for a really long time you don't know what's going to resonate with people and what's not and sometimes you write stuff that just doesn't work and with a blog post it's no big deal because tomorrow you can write another one right but with a book it's a year you spent two years and now it's nothing so that's scary sometimes the blog post is probably uh one of the most read marketing blogs in the world uh what is the process there is it is it you write something you put it in a queue and then you sort of change things around like you write posts in advance I would think yeah and then do you ever change your mind like know this this has just become relevant I'm going to switch this to the to the number one there's a lot of moving around there's a lot of deleting yeah I probably write 2,000 posts a year and post 400 so you know and I think about 20,000 posts a year I you know I walk into a hotel and I say why do expensive hotels charge for Wi-Fi but cheap hotels give it to you for free yeah and like that's a really good blog post and you think it through and you well yeah but it's sort of not that good a blog post because we don't run hotels who read this plug so what is anyone going to do with that information and then can I bring it into the idea of what is luxury today and luxury used to mean something different than it means now and and then the next thing you know I'm off to the next thing so that's why blogs are great for people like me because otherwise I'd be running around all the time and people would think I was just talking to myself well I think it's probably not just me who feels this way but when I you know when I wake up uh to your blog and I read it I feel sometimes like it's speaking directly to me have you noticed the camera I put in your kitchen cuz I'm like watching every day is that what that is yeah it's we we if you have a a microwave of made by GE or Sylvania it's it there's a special camera we've put in I'm announcing today for the first time I've been watching everybody on the the Opticon so now it all makes sense yeah there you go so behave in your kitchen uh you talk a lot about fear um in the book you talk a lot about overcoming fear and you talk a little bit about the the lizard brain talk us about what the lizard brain is I think fear is the single most important emotion that any creature on earth fears feels that you know squirrels probably don't feel Envy but they feel fear they don't say that boy that guy's got a lot more what are those called acorns than me right yeah so most of the decisions we make the way we eat where we live the friends we make fear is driving a lot of that and what I'm going to talk about tonight is there's actually an evolutionary reason for that there's a biological connection to part of our brain that does not want us to stand out and for a really long time that was effective but what happened was the captains of industry built a system to take advantage of that and now we're the suckers and we've got to figure out how to stop doing that and realize the thing to be afraid of is fitting in you know now you know you you've you've got great success your books are National bestsellers and you're sort of marching to the beat of your own drum but was there a day that you were afraid uh what are some of the things that you used to be afraid of I don't see you as being afraid of anything now I'm afraid every day well I mean you called Steve Jobs on the carpet right when you made that post I felt a little bit of um what's word like resentment in your voice like Steve doesn't bother to call you back what's the deal with that no I don't mind if he doesn't call me back um you know you don't care right it's like no that's not that was a joke but the um if I'm not afraid I'm not doing my job right what I do is I use it as a compass the more afraid I am the more likely it is that I need to do it yeah and um you know the the thing that I work very hard to do is not think about the fact that more than 10 people are reading my blog it's way easier to write a good blog for 10 people than to write a good blog for more than that you know so you have to calm the fear but you also have to feel it cuz it's your compass that you're doing the right thing so um so what's next this is it this is next well brilliant it's it's an amazing book um I really think it's a timely and important message for a lot of people uh it's about creating art and shipping and just doing stuff and uh you know I think from you know you had me at permission marketing and I've been a huge fan of her since but um I know that you're making a huge impact in the lives of many people and changing the game yet again with with lynchpin it's an Incredible Book thank you so much I really appreciate the time appreciate thanks [Music]

Channel: Behind the Brand

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Id: CpY_5XFDaXI

Length: 12min 33sec (753 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 06 2012