Seth Godin: How To Sell Like A Pro & Ship Creative Work | The Learning Leader Show w/ Ryan Hawk

[Music] [Applause] what are the commonalities among leaders who sustain excellence over an extended period of time [Music] seth it's good to see you man great to have you back on the learning leader show welcome well it's always a good sign when they have you back um so a lot has gone on we talked it's been two years uh i've certainly read just about everything you've published in that time which is a lot prolific but i'm curious um i've asked you this before but two years is a long time and so i'm curious now when you think about the course of what you do and the people you study and your friends what have you found to be some of the commonalities among leaders who have sustained excellence okay so um excellence means two things tom peters refers to it sort of as this pursuit of wow this remarkable unpredictable passionate human thing lots of people use it to mean meeting spec management doing what you're told reliably the second one is an important part of industrialism but that's not your question it's about the first one but i wanted to just highlight that the people who are leading know that they are not management that leading is voluntary you volunteer to lead you volunteer to follow and leadership comes with no guarantee that you are going into the uncharted territory and so the you know if you look at people who are on the busy playing casinos as washed up rock groups from the 70s or 80s they're playing covers of their old self and playing covers of yourself is not leadership it's a you know form of hacking your way forward and there's nothing wrong with making a living doing that but it is not the thrilling work of leading and so i wrote the book to talk about that feeling inside when we're about to do something that might not work you have written about um the difference between leadership and management and you've said art is a form of leadership not management this is something i'm asked a lot so i'm curious when if somebody asks you seth what is the primary difference between leadership and management yeah it's about power managers have to have power you can't have a burger king unless that burger king has a manager and that manager is only able to do their job because they can fire people who don't listen to them every once in a while a manager acts like a leader but they're very different things and leadership as we said is voluntary which means that i can't tell you to do it you have to want to do it i uh recently recorded with art arthur blank the owner of the atlanta falcons and he told me he aims to treat he he created or he found at home depot um and he said he aimed to treat every single associate employee team member as if they were a free agent because he never wanted somebody there because of a contract he wanted them committed because of the culture and to me that feels like your definition of leadership i think that's a big part of it you know if you're a customer of home depot what you will know is that in the last 10 years they became an industrial entity racing to the bottom as fast as they could partly because of pressure from amazon partly because of the pressure from the stock market but the people who work at home depot generally aren't there because they had a lot of offers and this was the place that lit them up they're there because it's the lowest common denominator cog job that they've been trained to do and i think that there have been glimpses of leadership in the middle of this pandemic in the middle of all these uprisings where institutions have shown up and said we don't have to say what we're going to say we don't have to do what we're going to do but we're going to do it anyway that's when it turns into leadership is there one or two you can think of off the top of your head that that has really exemplified what leadership is especially during times of a crisis well i'll i'll pick two one is uh poignant and one is sort of trivial the poignant one is what nascar did um after one of their drivers was harassed because he was black that wasn't easy for them to do it wasn't an act of management the other one a year before that is when starbucks closed down for a day and um the thing is that no one works at the same time at starbucks they could have done it half and half and not closed down at all but howard shut it down because he wanted to send a message right it's like saying to your teenagers don't make me stop this car and he stopped the car and that was an act of leadership not saying we have to punch a button on some sort of uh training so we have a fig leaf it was yeah we're really serious about this and the next time we'll close for a week seth you've taught a lot of people how to juggle uh and i'm curious what is it about juggling that makes it something worth you teaching to others okay so first let me teach you how to juggle and then i'll explain okay i'm attracted to it you're gonna teach me through zoom how to juggle yes i don't even need video actually okay let's let's do it because we're on the radio right yeah yeah yeah we're on both yeah we're on both yeah we're on where did i put the balls they're right over here i usually keep them right near me i don't know where they went so if you go to a juggling performance if you see someone juggling on the streets or whatever here's what you will pay attention to you will pay attention to the fact that they don't drop any balls and if you like this person and they drop a ball you'll go oh because juggling apparently is about not dropping the ball and when people try to learn how to juggle what they do is they get the first throw maybe the second throw and then they're out of position because it's not a very good throw so they lunge to grab the ball because that's what you're supposed to do is catch the ball but by the time they've lunged they're out of position for the next ball and then it's all over every time what you learn is that juggling is actually about throwing not catching that once you learn to throw the catches take care of themselves and it's really hard to teach people just to throw and let the ball hit the ground and so the way i teach juggling i'm not a great juggler but i'm a great juggling teacher so i teach juggling is we stand there for half an hour throwing one ball and having it hit the ground every time no attempt to catch and then we go to two balls no attempt to catch and if after an hour of throwing throw throw drop drop throw throw drop drop your throws are no good then you've got a hand eye coordination problem but everybody else can make the throw the same over and over again then we can go throw throw catch catch that's easy because the ball's landing right in your hands and then you're you know how to juggle right that you're in and um the marketing reason why i teach people to juggle is because i have deep deep affiliations with a summer camp in northern canada and one of the 42nd summer would have been this year one of the best ways to get new kids to come to camp is to send kids home from the summer with a show offable skill because their friends will say where'd you learn how to do that and so this place in northern canada is about sailing and canoeing you can't sail and canoe back in the city so i thought if sending kids home with juggling skills that would be a useful marketing tool so that's how i got into the whole juggling thing i i knew there was a marketing purpose behind it um one of the things you've written about so just so you know seth my prep was just taking a ton of notes based on your book so i'm gonna i'm gonna i want to surface some of those notes and quotes and then i like love hearing you expand on them and have us relate them to being excellent leaders so you said if you want to change your story change your actions first we become what we do um and that pull that part is is is italicized we become what we do for the leader listening why is this so important for someone to think about changing their story and to do that changing their actions first great question so we'll start with the simple if you want to be a runner don't spend a lot of time daydreaming about running reading runners magazine buying running gear and psyching yourself up to be a perfect runner just go for a 10 minute run if you go for a 10 minute run every day for 30 days you're a runner and you didn't need to make any decision other than i'm just going to go for a short run if you want to be an empathic leader don't go to a conference or a seminar just find one person and be empathic with them and then do it again and then do it again and by the time you've done it six times you're an empathic leader we spend all this time searching for perfect and a guarantee when what we really need to do is simply do the work and i think of the story of i may pronounce this name wrong drew dernovich is that right it is so he shared a picture uh this kind of i think it went a little bit viral you shared it in your book the newest book which i highly recommend like all of your books which is called the practice shipping creative work but he shared a a a no pile and a yes pile he's a cartoonist right cartoonist right and so he he he showed this to i guess to to kind of give give us an inside look of what it looks like to be a cartoonist and his process and the no pile is super high for those listening not watching on video it's really high and the yes pile is tiny and you you said drew's not a genius he just has more paper than we do and so i think that's this is very useful for for leaders and creators and creatives to hear when it comes to producing great work that a lot of times it's about quantity not necessarily quad quality because the quantity helps us get to the quality right so drew isn't just a cartoonist drew is one of the top cartoonists at the new yorker which is one of the only places you can actually get paid to draw a cartoon okay and um drew really nice guy i didn't know him before i put that in the book i contacted him and we talked um it's like 80 to one maybe more and lots of people think they're funny and after the third cartoon they give up so the problem with the word quality is the word quality means something very specific it does not mean perfect and perfectionism is the enemy perfectionism is designed to never be able to be reached quality means meeting spec that is it meeting spec and it is not that hard to meet spec if you have an accurate machine tool and you are grinding pieces of metal into an oval shape because the tool will do it for you it is almost impossible to meet spec for a new yorker cartoon because it needs to be a cartoon they've never run before but it can't be too different from all the other cartoons they've already run and so you will not know if you have met spec until after you draw the cartoon maybe even after you show it to the editor at the new yorker that's the only way to know if you've met spec it's the only way to know if your jazz riff sounds good is to play your jazz riff that creative work by definition does not have an easily understood level of quality to it so people in the music business in the book business are always surprised every new best seller is a surprise bestseller because nobody knows anything and if somebody in the 70s who you know was making the carol burnett show or mash saw television of today they wouldn't say oh that's really good quality that's what we aspire to it's different it evolves so the only way to get there is to use a lot of paper you've talked about embracing your own temporary discomfort um meaning art doesn't seek to create comfort it creates change and change requires tension the same is true for learning true learning as opposed to education true learning is a voluntary experience that requires tension and discomfort the persistent feeling of incompetence as we get better at a skill can you share seth more about why leaders need to embrace their own temporary discomfort so let's talk about surfing for a little bit um nobody except for one inland surf ranch in california no one goes surfing hoping the waves will be the same every time because if they did they'd be disappointed and in fact that's not the point of surfing the point of surfing is the waves are different every time and a friend of mine who was a pretty good 10-foot wave surfer found himself in indonesia and there's a ferry that takes you to this island once a week so he's on this island for a week and he gets there the first day and the waves are 22 feet tall that is bigger than the second story of your house and that's an uncomfortable place to be as a surfer and now he knows how to surf 22 foot waves whereas if there was a machine that always made 8 foot 10 foot waves he'd never get better at surfing and the same thing's true with leaders the same thing's true with anybody who's trying to make a difference in the world we don't sign up to do what we did yesterday because then we'd just be a cog at home depot you know looking for screws on aisle seven what we do is we show up to make things different and we want things to be different so that we can explore but that exploring comes with the narrative of this might not work right that you you could be working on a project for a week or a month or a year and then have to say nah and throw it out because you don't know this this makes me think so much of navy seal jay hennessey who i spoke with who now works with the cleveland indians jay said as a seal and even with the indians now as as one of their uh senior leaders we have to always be pushing our edges and i love that phrase seth i'm curious how do you as a guy who's so accomplished so bright how do you push your edges um i don't spend a lot of time feeling accomplished i think that there's a lot of work to be done and not a lot of time to do it and i can tell when i'm phoning something in and i'd rather not do that and i can tell when i feel that feeling of pushing the edges and when i was younger that's all there was because i didn't have any momentum and so it's work on a regular basis to go find some more edges because if i just stuck with what i was good at there wouldn't be any edges uh i've heard you do random things like make exquisite coffee even though you don't drink coffee and do other things like that is that part of it or why do you do things like that a lot of the weird affectations i have are about control because i live a life out of control in so many ways um the the idea of understanding coffee culture understanding the inputs and the outputs understanding why people are attracted to it what's fascinating to me it's it's a it's a geeky thing to do i really wish i could drink coffee my body doesn't agree with me but um i like doing things that put a smile on people's face it surprised them that reset expectations and in the case of coffee i have this situation where nothing horrible is going to happen when i make a cup of espresso from the fact that i roasted the beans myself grind them myself put them into the single lever action olympia crimini oh stock from 1979 uh like all of those steps there's no risk there for me but there's a practice in that too which is the craft of saying can i get one percent better and when i compare that to the kinds of things that i do in public where like if you get on stage in front of a thousand people with a riff you've never given before you know i gave the tedx talk stop stealing dreams which has been seen almost a million times now i didn't practice it and i've never given it again i worked on it for two months but i didn't like stand in front of the mirror the way you're supposed to do all that stuff because i wanted to feel what it felt like to be without a net in that moment uh you also are notorious for your your keynotes to have hundreds and hundreds of slides rapid fire keep you on the edge of your seat what is it about that style and that method a corporate person listening may think oh my god seth would have 400 slides for a 25 minute speech and it's and for for someone who somehow hasn't seen one of your keynotes i would say it's not what you think it's it's it's so engaging and entertaining while also informative and educational how have you crafted that style and what what is the work that goes into it to creating one of those those keynote experiences both for yourself as well as for the audience well thank you for that um i don't think i get enough credit for inventing it but when i invented that style 20 years ago people laughed at it i wrote a book about it called really bad powerpoint it's only 10 pages it's online somewhere i don't believe that powerpoint was invented by people who think like you and me and it is mostly used internally for deniability so powerpoint was built by engineers for engineers to basically give them a way to talk through a spec it was adopted by corporations who are looking for deniability so they can put together quote a deck and bore you with it and then three months later when you say why didn't you tell me they can say it's in the deck when we put words in a powerpoint presentation we are asking the human being to read the words in their head at the very same time we are talking words to them our brains don't work that way the second problem is that we can't help it we sort of use the bullet points as cue cards and we read them so now we want the person to read them and listen to us reading them at the same time but no one reads at the rate we're talking so they're bored and confused what i realized is that human beings are really good at absorbing visual data and that my job is to implant some visual data in your brain and then tell you a story about it and the visual hook lasts a long time so there are people who saw a slide i used to use of a seagull sitting on top of a sign that says no seagulls and they saw that 15 years ago and they still remember it and because they remember the picture they remember my story and so what i'm doing up there with the pictures first of all it's about 200 slides in 45 minutes what i'm doing here is saying here's one two three four slides in row to plant one image and now i'm gonna tell you a story and so i'm dancing with the slides i'm not reading them and the slides are there for me i'm not there for them and this weaving and dodging and layering is what it's a keynote is actually good at it is not good at the other thing and i think the other way is with bullet points is malpractice right bullets are for the nra they are not for presentations how did you feel 20 years ago when you were doing this for the first few times yeah it was i've seen my old presentations if you look at my first ted talk in those days ted talks were not in public and they didn't tell us they were recording it and they didn't tell us before they put it on ted.com and i'm not crazy about that first presentation because it's too slow and i didn't quite have it yet but it's been seen a lot because people don't know i was just getting warmed up but what was clear is my peers were aghast because i was doing something at a different layer level than they were ready for and the audience really liked it but um and so and then to answer your last part of the question because almost no one has ever asked me about this um i haven't been able to do them during covid because zoom does not lend itself well to powerpoint presentations so i'm just talking in the real life now but uh i will spend my day looking for a picture in the real world or online and i will build part of my presentation because i found a good picture not the other way around the what type of preparation and care and love i mean you'd have to put so much into every bit every story every sentence i think that's the part that is not fully appreciated my friend joey coleman is an amazing speaker and he models his style after yours when it comes to his he it was like 20 minutes 300 slides it was incredible i don't know if you know joey but but just blew me away went to notre dame debate team but then brought some seth goad into his game and it's like wow um but i i just i love hearing the process of getting ready for things seth i don't know i think that's exciting to people i think it's important to think about that what about like your prep process to get ready for big moments like that i think the biggest part is they're not big moments by the time that i am on stage every once in a while there's one you know i did a talk for 6 000 people at the association for training and development that felt big to me because these were my people oprah was on just before me i didn't want to let anybody down but generally if you've got your craft the number of people in the audience isn't the point so the process the practice for me is something like this uh i saw a picture of the 1929 1927 solvay conference and it's got albert einstein and marie curie niels bohr and i said i'm going to use this picture for something so first i had to research what it was a picture of and then i was looking as i'm being the wikipedia article to understand who was solve why was there a survey conference what does what what's going on here and why is this important then i found it i found the germ i was looking for and it became the penultimate story in my presentation for five or seven years because you know so that it was five hours of work which i didn't know if it was going to work it could have very well gotten the way a lot of things go which is oh that's a good idea i own the domain but nothing after that but this one i found like that insight the the insight is uh 17 people in the picture there's 29 people in the picture 17 of them won the nobel prize in physics and almost all of them won it after the photo which means you didn't get invited to the conference because you won the nobel prize you won the nobel prize because you were with the people who got invited to the conference and like that's six chapters of a book right there right that's akimbo right there why bother learning in community well because of survey because it turns out that when they connected all of these people their work advanced so much they won the nobel prize your who was everything right you surround yourself with those people it's critical some might look at you and say he was born with it and you've written about the difference between talent and skill talent is something we're born with it's in our dna a magical alignment of guess skill on the other hand is earned it's learned and practiced and hard won it's insulting to call a professional talented she's skillful first and foremost like in the words of steve martin i had no talent none somebody's looking at you and saying seth was born with his stuff obviously he's just talented he's developed some skill too but he's born with it what do you think about that yeah i mean all the evidence shows that that's completely untrue and um you know let's start with the fact that my high school english teacher wrote in my yearbook that i would never amount to anything and that i was the bane of her existence why would somebody write that well she was sort of kidding but because i was terrible terrible at what school yeah i i mean i got good grades because i could fake my way through things but i wasn't a fine student in in an english classroom i was easily bored i didn't understand why faulkner mattered and i wasn't curious enough to discover why faulkner mattered and i majored in computer science in college when it was the early days and i was terrible at it and i mean it was like all of these moments when if talent was present it would have won out and i know people who have had billboard top 10 songs and have won pulitzer prizes and i know people who can juggle and all of these people in all these different ranges you can't point out that they're talented they have identical twins who aren't doing what they're doing i mean it's not it's not based on dna van gogh would not have been a famous painter if he had lived 50 years earlier or 50 years later there's no way because it wasn't the moment to pick up painting and we've built this castle on top of the word talent when talent is should be reserved for a very small number of things so for the person listening who may be having a bit of imposter syndrome or they're not really sure but they desire to lead or desire to impact others what message do you give to that person well two parts first of all it's good that you feel like an imposter because you can't make it go away but it's a symptom that you're on to something and you should welcome it oh you know like oh i was running i got tired oh i must have been running hard oh i was leading i feel like an imposter i must have been leading well i mean it's that simple and the way forward is to find a smaller group of people to make your art for a smaller group of people to lead a smaller group of people even if it's one person and suddenly it doesn't feel so scary suddenly it's like walking on a tightrope one foot off the ground if you fall you fall don't start on the in the big top that doesn't make any sense jack butcher was on the show seth and he has this mission that he wants to help people make one dollar online one dollar building an online business because once they make that first dollar magic happens yeah and there's he has countless stories of his students now i'm one of his students by the way of his students who have made their first dollar they share a screenshot and a year later or longer they have a thriving growing business because they had the guts to make one one dollar i think that is an inspiring message for all leaders creators to think about try to make just just one person just one person you impact or make that first dollar yeah any but we have to put one asterisk next to it which is no one wants to be hustled no one wakes up in the morning saying i wish someone would hustle me today so a lot of people who are filled with fear will make that dollar by hustling somebody yeah great and that does that doesn't count you have to make it in a way the person afterwards says thank you thank you i can't wait to tell my friends yeah seth you went to wyoming for an event run by a couple of your friends allen and bill and one morning they woke you up at five o'clock in the morning for a fly fishing lesson and you go out to do this and you asked the instructor to set your rod up without a hook what made you do that right it's not easy to get a fly without a hook i discovered but they figured it out um so it was fly fishing like in the movies you know yeah and i a i didn't want to catch a fish and b they were throwing the fish back anyway so i certainly didn't want to torture a fish but the biggest part was this i knew that i am externally motivated enough that if we were trying to catch fish i was going to try to catch fish and if i was going to try to catch fish it was going to get in the way of fishing and as soon as they got rid of the hook i was casting like a maniac i was so good i was so present i was so in the moment and enjoying all of it because i wasn't willing with all of my effort for a fish to bite the hook i didn't care because all i was trying to do was be present and to feel what it felt like to cast disconnecting from the outcome let me focus on the real outcome which was casting not whether if i got lucky and a fish bit my hook or not and i had the best day of anybody that day because they were all type a performers who didn't catch as many fish as they hoped and i catched exactly as many fish as i hoped so yeah i caught i caught so you you you focus on the process you focused on the moment um you focus on the lead measures which is good at getting good at casting i would imagine however there is somebody listening who is the svp of sales at a multi-billion dollar company that says seth we got to make sales bud we got to get results what do you say to that person who who is who is arguing right driving in their car right now or on the elliptical in their home home gym saying sounds great man but for me like we got to get the sales we got to get the deals we we can't just focus on the process we have to have the result as well so let me tell you about the story of thornton may okay who uh built uh cambridge technology partners to be a 300 400 million dollar a year company as their head of uh sales and biz dev thornton may uh never once had a quota and never once tried to make a sale thornton may would go to a city he flew a lot and he'd find eight or ten chief technology officers in that city who were competitors or nearly competitors and he would invite them to breakfast and i know the story because he would bring someone like me along his bait he'd send a note saying do you want breakfast with me and seth godin uh we're just gonna have some other ctos there so it'd be like the cto of exxon sitting next to the cto of mobile or whoever blah blah blah and that was the one in houston and he would just go around the country and organize these breakfasts that's all i did he was good at that that was the casting he was good at that well if you're good at it one of the things that happens during breakfast is these people who had never had anyone to talk to before couldn't talk to their boss couldn't talk to their employees they didn't have any co-workers couldn't talk to their spouse suddenly here were people with the same problems they had and he would just sit there quietly and for 45 minutes they would all talk to each other about their problems and then inevitably someone would say hey thornton can you help us with this and he'd take notes and he'd get back to the office and someone would call these ctos and solve their problem and that's the right way to build a multi-hundred million dollar company uh focus on the process but bring a little seth godin bait it might be helpful uh i i love it speaking of selling uh you've said selling is simply a dance with possibility and empathy it requires you to see the audience you've chosen to serve then to bring them what they need sales is about intentionally creating tension the tension of maybe the tension of this might not work the tension of what will i tell my boss that's precisely the tension that we dance with as creators there are i get a lot i feel like a lot of emails from people who work in sales because there's a lot of jobs where people work in sales which is kind of what we're talking about here with as a creator as someone who who publishes regularly and ships work when you are working with people who work in sales at companies what type of questions do you get from them and how do you help them um well a disclaimer i don't do any consulting or coaching so right i mean like maybe you speak at an event or a conference or for a company you know yeah yeah so um it used to be that you knew more than your customers and so you could put a shroud of deniability and ignorance around them and they with no one else to turn to would buy something inferior from you that's not true anymore your customers are now smarter than you and so i begin with this if you are not eagerly and regularly sending potential customers to your competitors then you're selfish because you know that your competitor has a better left-handed widget than you do right and so if someone comes to you and says i really just need a left-handed widget you should send them to someone else because someone else does that better than you it's really unlikely you make everything better and so don't start by saying that you're a generous leader and then acting like you have to hoard all the sales i don't buy it i don't trust you and hoarding is the opposite of possibility and abundance so you're going to do one or the other and if you're in the hoarding business then what you're trying to do is manipulate people into buying from you and then somehow when they find out they made a mistake getting them to not be angry whereas if you're in the abundance and connection end of the thing you're simply educating people and connecting people and finding out what they really want if it turns out that what you have is what they need you don't have to sell them anything they're going to buy it right and so if you call up uh singapore airlines after the covid and say i i'd like to fly to tucson they shouldn't try to persuade you to fly to singapore they should say the number for air arizona is so-and-so because you're not interested in flying to singapore you really want to go to arizona right yeah but the next time you need to go to singapore who are you going to trust and there's almost no industry that i've bottled millions and millions and millions of dollars of stuff in my life and i can't think of an industry where i'm eager to be a customer where they treat me like i'm stupid i would much rather show up as a customer where they treat me like i'm smart what what is it about consulting or working with teams i would imagine you get inquiries constantly so why what is it about that that makes you not want to do that work so i give free advice to friends all the time if they're willing to listen to me but paid consultants get paid probably to solve the other person's problem and you can't solve their problem they have to solve their problem and most of the work of a successful paid consultant is the persistent gentle showing up to get them to do what they've always known they should do and i'm just much happier with the mic drop thing like here it is show your work you can figure this out and i get that people probably need more consultants than they than they need me but this is my thing speaking of being generous you said generosity is the most direct way to find the practice it subverts resistance by focusing the work on someone else generosity means that we don't have to seek reassurance for the self but can instead concentrate on serving other seth the reason i bring this up is because i know in my writing practice when i'm trying to get a book done by a deadline um this helps me the most of thinking about that person who's reading and often i'll bring a friend or colleague into the room with me to create prompts that helps me be more generous i'd love for you to talk about generosity and how that helps you get through the resistance yeah so generous doesn't mean free right generous means somebody needs a light turned on somebody needs a boost someone needs to find a path and you care about that person and you can make a big difference in their life by helping them get to where they want to go so if you're put on a rock concert it is generous to bring more energy to the show than you might feel like and if you're selfish you're like i just don't have it in me today but you're not there for you you're there for them and if you're imagining writing something and you're on page 80 well is there a reader who needs to get the page 90 or you simply writing to page 90 because that's the only way you'll get paid if there's a reader who needs the next 10 pages writing for them gets you out of your own head and it gives you a chance to say here i made this but it's not about you it's about them there are three kinds of quality and you've written about the difference between hamilton and west side story but i saw hamilton in chicago and i i i i i'm literally at a loss for words at the feeling it evoked from me i'm sitting with my wife miranda and it just we looked at each other saying is this real like how do they do this and i think you would call that the creative magic and that that's that's one of the kinds of quality can you talk about the difference between hamilton and west side story and creative magic and maybe how that applies to us as leaders so which is a better quality car a toyota corolla or a rolls royce i would assume a rolls-royce i haven't had either yeah most people would say rolls-royce right that's the quality of luxury that's the quality of we spent a lot of money and you can tell yup but if you had to drive a car across europe or even across the united states i'd much rather drive to toyota because it's not going to break down that is the quality of meeting spec that is the quality of the fart that is the quality of the parts fit together properly right and so those are two of the kinds of quality that we confuse all the time a taco stand can be of extraordinarily high quality because it is the taco as the taco is supposed to be not because they have lobster and caviar tacos right but then there's this third kind of quality which is the quality of hamilton it is not the quality of this is expensive which is what west side story is what size story on broadway had the single best projection screen i've ever seen in my life it had 400 seat tickets it was on in the theater district it met all the luxury good check boxes it was a rolls royce of plays but nothing i got nothing from it because it didn't have that third kind of quality and that third kind of quality punches you in the gut it tears you up it's something you remember a month or a year later it is the quality of this touched me at a level i needed to be touched and changed me in a way i did not expect and that is what lin-manuel did with hamilton interesting if you're a fan he didn't do it with mary poppins possibly because he wasn't in charge possibly because that wasn't the quality he was seeking right in mary poppins the movie no one forgets their lines the lighting is fine it is quality by the toyota definition it was just missing the other quality of this changed me so i know you do this a lot but i want to bring it up because it's personal to me and it's worth saying because i think there are people i want you want you to know uh and there are people listening who have the ability to do this as well and that is you know i sent you a cold email at the very beginning of my show uh i had a few episodes out and you said follow up after you've had 75 episodes and you have a big hit and so on november 26 2015 the day my 75th episode came out i emailed you back responded to that email and said seth i have 75 episodes and a big show it's a hit i'd like to have you on and you you agreed within like five minutes and now episode 86 is is with you um the impact that you had i'm not gonna say you're the only reason you're not i'm not gonna lie but it was a significant impact on me to to give me a nudge and a push to keep going even through some of those episodes that if you listen are not very good but that's part of the deal that's part of being an artist that's part of being a creator is pushing through that to get to 75 i i've heard stories you've done this with others i'm sure you do with a lot of people what what is it that says hey get back to me after you've you've you've put in some reps after 75 or so of these things what what is it that makes you respond in that manner because you could have just clicked delete ignored me and and forced me to be persistent and keep emailing you which i would have but this way actually put like a a mark on the calendar for me to say i am going to email seth when this comes out and i'm going to have him on and i can't wait what is it about you that makes you want to do that for people well it's a very thoughtful question um first an aside for people who are listening i do not have a policy of showing up on episode 75 or episode 100. don't send me a note saying i met episode 100 you have to say yes number two i hate being hustled i just i and i'm getting more and more strict about it if you start hustling me you're just going to get deleted so don't send me email period that's just my request but beyond that i'm a teacher i've been a teacher since 1977 i believe in the practice i believe the only way to make things better is for people to do the work to make things better and if somebody who cares as much as you do shows up in the right way with the right intent and i can make a small difference in their life it's not cement it's not uh scalable but that's okay uh it mattered to you and to see how you were able to grow into it mattered to me and i probably got more out of that story than you did uh well i want to acknowledge it and say thank you because it not only has it impacted me in a small weird way when i get notes like that uh i think of how you responded and i try to respond the same way or or even better if i can since i have probably have more time than you do uh given all the things you have going on and so it that's a ripple effect that that impacts people well beyond just me um and probably even well beyond the people i send it to because i'll even tell them well this is what seth did and uh and i think that's pretty cool because i know you're you do that for a lot of people and it's worth us talking about because for the people out there that get requests and get things like that none of us want to be hustled we don't want people who are who are doing things nefarious or for the wrong reasons but when you find those good people man it is so cool to see the impact you can have on them long term and the ripple effect it has on others and their sphere well said well said i'm afraid i got it i'm afraid i got it i got you that's a beautiful way for us to wrap this up yeah man thank you so much seth excited for the book thank you there's a a page with samples at trustyourself.com which is not the name of the book but it used to be and i still own the domain so i'm getting the most out of it awesome thanks so much seth talk soon man all right bye bye

Channel: Ryan Hawk

Views: 8,823

Rating: 4.9137931 out of 5

Keywords: Leadership, Learning, The Learning Leader Show, Learning Leader, Business, Entrepreneur

Id: fJO1pBLRkTk

Length: 48min 20sec (2900 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 01 2020