Seth Godin | If You're Self Employed, You Probably Have the World's Worst Boss

I was curious when we started talking about entrepreneurship so are you building your company are you building it to sell it someday I know I heard that you are not part of the alt NBA you're not teaching per se other people who are talented or as talented or more talent or whatever are teaching are you preparing or treating at least is that the mindset to eventually at least have the option to sell it absolutely not you got to decide if you're a freelancer or an entrepreneur at any given moment yeah so Mondays between 2 o'clock and 4 o'clock I'm an entrepreneur I made that part up but and the rest of the time I'm a freelancer I'm on stage no one wrote my content if you read a blog post that I wrote or listened to a podcast I did it's me there's nobody behind the scenes I have zero staff when I do my freelance work zero I make every slide I do that's my craft when I thought about the alt NBA I said what would happen if I acted like an entrepreneur in the sense of I'm not allowed to say I'll do that part of the work I just have to find extraordinarily talented people give them the freedom gain enrollment and help them get to where they're going so the discipline of the authenticated and entity that I could sell it's that I'm trying to build an entity that scales in a really juicy personal way that I as a human could never scale and that just every time something shows up for the NBA that I could do and I alone could do we take it out because that's not allowed well so it sounds like maybe you're saying it's a personal decision but like I guess what I was getting to the next follow-up question was should we be running our businesses you know thinking about processes there's a guy on MSNBC Marcus lemonis who's famous he has a billboard on my commute to New York City and I've never seen him speak but it's just seen his bill billboard yeah I love this show it's it's fun but he talked about you know people and process and and product is that what we should be doing is we should be building our businesses as if after Tony Robbins say it - you should if you're not building a business that you can't eventually sell you're doing it wrong well wrong is such a loaded term right so the e-myth revisited is the classic of this work on the business not in the business that there is a model of entrepreneurship that says every job should be done by the least skilled available person so you can pay them the least amount then you can just build a business with all of those building blocks we were never over paying for a different test at some point you will extract maximum value but my overarching belief is culture doesn't exist to make capitalism better capitalism exists to make our culture better use it when you need it but we're not here for capitalism so maximizing your profit isn't the goal maximizing your life and your impact is the goal right so what's missing from Tony's sentence which he probably meant to say is you're doing it wrong if your goal is to maximize your profit I agree with that I just don't understand why maximizing your profit is the goal you guys liking this so far I forgot you were here great thank you you asked me about working for free do you want me to rip on that for two please should I be working for free so freelancers face a dilemma all the time which is that some people some organizations tell themselves the story that they should acquire certain kinds of work for free they deserve it for free or they're offering an opportunity for free and that the only way to work with that sort of person is to do it for free yeah RFP is a popular acronym right you you send in this proposal requests for proposals well that's it okay let me address that too I'm talking about the zoo needs an ad campaign and so the zoo says get famous mr. creative mr. creative do our ad campaign for free that's one kind of thing the other thing you're saying is there's a purchasing agent who's figured out that by having a carat of money they can get you to do a whole bunch of preliminary work first bidding against all the other freelancers that one's way more interesting too so answer that one first an if you're answering RFPs and you do not have a significant technical competitive advantage or an asset that others don't have you're in a race to the bottom and therefore if you want to be a productive freelancer you must do work that is inspecting an RFP you just say I don't answer our piece I wait til someone wants what I do I am a category of one if you need my kind of work you know Jill Greenberg the wonderful photographer doesn't answer RFPs if you want teal Greenberg there's only one Joe Greenberg that meant she had to develop a photographic style that was hers and the only person you can get it from is her so it's harder but it's also better in terms of the other one about the zoo the question is really simple which is will doing this work for free either give me karma so even if no one knows I did it for free I'm glad I did because free world just do it sure or from a capitalist point of view does it give me a credential and a piece of my portfolio that becomes part of my story that I can tell to somebody else who will pay me for it but the chances that the person who hired you for free is now going to pay you money or very very low yeah I guess that's what I was getting at to is how should we be measuring that success right it's not just all about the money right sometimes there are other valuable things whether it's reputation management or the first hundred and fifty speeches I gave I paid to give them I had a PR firm that would reach out to organizations when I was running Yoyodyne it was our only marketing was me being on stage and it was like do you need an Internet speaker and it was 1994 everyone needed an Internet speaker did get paid to give these speeches but if I hadn't given those 150 speeches I wouldn't be me yeah and you I think you wrote recently about the comparison of you know if you're a guest on Krista Tippett show for example or Oprah yeah yes should you be paid for that right and I guess the answer is it depends which you what you value or you see the value in it well but back to my point about the zoo if you show up on Oprah if you're an author or if you show up on Christmas thing in your spiritual leader there's an idea piracy occurred your idea went into the world for free yeah but your obscurity problem was just solved yeah and we most of us have an obscurity problem not a privacy piracy problem yeah right so once everyone knows your idea you do better not worse I agree and this is a conversation or a wrestle that I have with clients and partners and clevers all the time sir including this hotel for example like hey you have an empty hotel ballroom I can actually feel that ballroom for you and yet they they see me as an ATM if you want to come and take money out well it's what they do for a living sure but at the same time I'm saying I bring some to the table that you know my people have people you know they have conferences of their own they have business meetings and off-site meetings and hey don't you think that if I bring a few hundred people here they'll this will get on their map and so sometimes I think people are very short-sighted just looking for that quick return on the investment so it'd be to be selling it's really important to understand that the person you're selling to isn't spending their own money and the person you're paying isn't getting to keep the money you're giving them so the only question that happens it b2b is what will I tell my boss and if you can't answer that question in a way that makes them happy you can't do business with them so what's probably happening in an institution with hundreds or thousands of people someone you will never meet made a rule and the person you're dealing with isn't being unreasonable they are doing what they believe to be their job so the challenge of engaging as a generous hustle is to find someone who is in a flexible enough institution that they can receive your gift yeah so maybe what you're saying is you might be talking to the wrong person yeah almost certainly yeah good I like it we've all been stucked before yeah all the time talk to us about how to get unstuck you know sometimes we're stuck in a bad relationship or we're stuck in a job that we hate or I can think of a thousand different ways that we're stuck but talk about getting unstuck well I I guess I could share two bits of advice one is we get stuck when we are more afraid of change than we are of staying still so we say this is better than that alternative there are two fears battling with each other well the problem with that is the the being uncomfortable or the bad part has to get so bad exactly so what you end up with if you accept it is a life of always whatever the next thing you're stuck on always being unhappy because you're you're just stuck until finally the unhappiness tilts over it's sort of like why do they wait till the union is on strike before they settle the contract why do they wait until the government to shut down why don't they just have the negotiation three days earlier and skip the pain yeah well it's because the same story's going on in our head so the discipline here is to realize this isn't a one-time thing this is a lifetime thing how do I experience the pain in advance so I don't have to lift through it how do i do scenario planning sufficient to cause me to make majeure interesting decisions before I have to actually live through all the pain that sparked a difficult part of human nature yeah but most of the time we're stuck as professionals and as creatives we're stuck because we've raised the stakes too much on the thing we're you know I I want to write this book this book will change my life I can't write chapter one I'm completely stuck and we want chapter one to be perfect well the way around it is to find other tasks to do that don't have so much import so instead of writing chapter one write twenty blog posts but when you're done with 20 blog posts you could then reveal to yourself that that's chapter one yeah it's small incremental steps except it's not looking at a thousand mile journey one simpler time okay here you know the short version of this is if you're self-employed you almost certainly have the world's worst boss I'm gonna let that sink in for just a minute yeah because we are our own worst critic we're hard on ourselves and we don't set up systems to enable ourselves to succeed because we're paralyzed because we're afraid well that's a good transition into shame oh yeah so let's talk about what Bernie Brown has written a lot about guilt versus shame and let's talk about this sabotage that we do when we are our own worst critic and how if we fall onto the wrong side of the fence you know guilt Bernie writes is about feeling bad about what I've done and she says shame is about saying I am bad right she and I are using different terminology she's certainly been in this far deeper than I have but I've been talking about it a long time too but what I want to get here is is this is the sabotage right we do honor ourselves right well but let's agree that shame is one of the basic human emotions it's one of the earliest emotions we experience it has been around forever it goes straight to a key part of our brain and it's super effective our culture all cultures have a significant element of shamed force other people to comply with the culture so the culture becomes the culture people like us do things like this and I believe we're naive to say there will be no shame there's the shame of the three-year-old who wets his pants just on his way to nursery school right that there's shame in lots of places for me there's a huge distinction between shaming behavior and shaming people and society can only exist when we say to people how dare you when we say to people that behavior is shameful people like us don't do things like this what gives you the right right but we say those things to people to get them to to keep them from destroying our society if they're you know have selfish goals but shaming people you will never amount to anything you are a loser you are a bad person that crosses every line because what it does is it it's the dream killer it's the thing that prevents a human from seeing possibility and working their way out of it so if you think about Kat and her work on prison reform too often we say to people you're a bad person and we're locking you up and we'd like to lock you up forever because you don't deserve anything as opposed to saying that behavior is not allowed in our world we need to correct for that behavior and once we've made our point you should be welcomed back with our encouragement so you don't behave that way anymore and I think the same narrative is in our head that when we commit a faux pas when we engage with something in the world that doesn't work because it was shameful behavior I sure hope we learn from that because otherwise we're sociopaths but we shouldn't take away from that therefore I am a bad person therefore I will never amount to anything and that story we tell ourselves that narrative is so corrosive and the problem and the thing that shames me the most about being a market are using the word shame is that marketers use this to make a profit and politicians use it to win a point and that's unacceptable to me yeah I think we've all felt this imposter syndrome all right like I don't deserve to be up here what am I doing here you know and and when I think about the self limiting beliefs or the the self-sabotage because we are our own worst critics I feel like personally that's what gets me stuck a lot of the time so how do we overcome that maybe there's just one more I want to go one more step with this how do I don't know if you're going to like my tickle step but here you go you don't have to do this for a living you decided to do it for a living if you're gonna enroll in that journey it's worth accepting that you are playing a role no one thinks you are really like this in real life I hope not no one thinks I am really like this quote in real life authenticity is this made-up idea there's no such thing as authenticity there might be consistency consistency meaning do you act that way when no one's looking that's really important to trust but often to see this is who you were born to be that's ridiculous you're playing a role you wore a certain clothes today you shaved or didn't shave you did things because you wanted people to see a thing and get a result so the good news is we're not coal miners the good news is we don't have to do some horrible task involving life and limb we get to do this the cost is we're playing a role and we're putting on a performance and I get that you or I feel like an impostor boy I feel terrible for you but dance with it because it's your job and that's what it is to be a professional not an amateur the amateur says I can only do it if I feel like it the professional says this is my work and I'm going to do it despite the fact that I don't feel like pushing through do there's no pushy because there's no other side it's chopping wood carrying water doing the work that's your job so can we end this talk do we have to I'm afraid so we're gonna run out of film probably so can we end this by me telling you a little story please and sharing with you the best advice I've ever gotten okay and it happened to come from you oh boy and a fair warning I'm reluctant to share this a little bit because it's personal but I think it has enough value that it's worth sharing fun fact about me I'm adopted and my entire life I had a great childhood but I always had this desire to find my birth parents and I wanted to know who I was my roots you know where I come from and did you see that movie with Nicole Kidman and the guy from Slumdog Millionaire was called lion it was on the seat next to me on a plane so I know it without the word it's a really good movie if you've seen that movie maybe you can understand a little bit how I felt I felt a lot like him in in that there was just I could can't describe it someone who's not in the situation but I had this burning desire to find out my roots so hard yeah and as a teenager I would petition the courts for my birth records yeah and I got denied over and over and over again and that only just fueled my fire I felt sure I felt it was unfair I felt kind of violated like how dare you hold withhold for me what's my my right to have yeah and it was very difficult flash forward a number of years round well when the internet became more pervasive and public documents became more available I I found my birth mother and it was the most amazing thing and I sent her this letter and I wrote and included a picture by the way of our family so we have four amazing kids very happily married I've got a great family and I sent this great family photo with you know wearing our best and I wrote a note that said something like you know this may come to a shock but I found you and I just wanted to say thank you I want to say thank you for doing probably the most selfless thing anyone could ever do which is you know a shot at a better life for me that's so generous yeah and and so I sent that letter and it also said if you want contact you know I would be more than happy to have a phone call or come meet you I'm thrilled that I found you after this you know 25-year 30-year search and I got a letter back I just give you a little context you know when you're adopted your mind goes to the edges of the extreme of course right you you think you know is my dad Steve Jobs like is there is there some inheritance waiting for me someplace that I should know about or do my mom or dad some famous you know rock musician or our athletes and so it goes that way and it also goes to the other side spectra which is a my the product of a violent crime right and then everything between and so I would say the not knowing is the most difficult part anyway so I did get a letter back and it was from this a very proper look like proper organization it was a it was a some sort of firm and I thought oh I Steve Jobs probably is my dad like it was like a Dumbledore is bequeathing you know the resurrection stone this whole thing sounds so wrenching so I opened it and it's it said you know dear mr. Elliott we're in receipt of your letter and our client that does admit that she is your biological mother but wants no contact and this is our official putting you on notice that if you have any further correspondence we will not hesitate to file it okay yeah oh I'm sorry restraining order against you and it was a sucker punch yeah I was devastated I was crushed I mean I was pissed too I was crushed and it was very difficult and and I probably kind of felt sorry for myself for a little bit and this was right around the time that I quit a perfectly good job and left the studios I was at Universal Pictures for a while and I decided to start this production company and it was a time reading around 2008-2009 where you you wrote tribes it was the first time that I reached out to you it was a very difficult time you know the recession we were in the in the heart of the recession we were knee-deep I was struggling to keep my family afloat you were very nice I reached out to you but you you know you rejected me to a couple times like you know I don't know who you are you know I'm not a student coming I'm sorry no that's okay I'm getting to the point of this this lesson of this year straightway well so I persisted I was I was tenacious I didn't give up and I kept chipping away and and tried to communicate and you were very receptive and very nice and gracious and finally about a year and half later you agreed to come to one of these meetings for the first times like 2009 heading in 2010 and and so you came and you sat down with me and you talked and you were a human being and and you took the time and you remember what you told me you remember that and advice that you gave me it's out of context yeah really sorry I I don't expect you to remember unless okay but I told you about how I was struggling and how I had this great idea to to start this new webseries this show called behind the brand where you know I was I was making it very selfishly because actually desperately needed to know how to be successful like right away because before you know I was struggling to keep my business afloat everything it was happening and and you said to me I'll never forget it you said Brian there's no prince charming in this story there's no rescue boats no one's coming you stop waiting to get picked the Today Show's not calling CNN is not going to call you you're not going to get scooped up waiting to get picked waiting to get rescued and that just pierced my heart like no other and and I in that moment my whole my whole point of view changed I realized that I was playing the victim I felt like one I mean rightfully so in some regards but what you told me that no one's coming no one's gonna arrest me I need to save myself change that point of view into being like a survivor right to continue to push forward to not give up I changed my life well I want to thank you for that well don't thank me this is you [Music] so there is a bit of a happy ending there's more than a bit of a happy ending you have a happy family you're doing incredibly generous productive work seen by millions of people around the world well there's that but there's so I also persisted and and I didn't assume that because I failed once I would fail again I decided maybe there's an another outcome I kept looking for my dad and I found him and last year me and my whole family got to meet my dad who was much more receptive and figured that one day I would call and I found out that I have two younger sisters and we all got to meet in this big happy family reunion turns out we're Jewish my dad said Mazel Tov [Applause] yeah so I guess that's maybe a good place to end Plateau boom [Applause] [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Behind the Brand

Views: 24,822

Rating: 4.9384613 out of 5

Keywords: Bryan Elliott, Behind the Brand, entrepreneur, Seth Godin, adoption story, my roots, Lion movie, Find your family, reunite birth parents, Brian Elliott, Bryan Elliot, tenacity, persistance, never give up, soft skills, Best Advice Ever, Seth Godin best advice, Seth Godin Best Advice Ever, The Lost Interview

Id: lcpjuALJ94o

Length: 26min 34sec (1594 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 14 2019