Seth Godin: Imposter Syndrome, Getting Unstuck and The Practice

hey everybody what's up it's chase welcome to another episode of the chase travis live show here on creative live you know this show this is where i sit down with the world's top creators entrepreneurs and thought leaders and i do everything i can in my power to unpack their brains with the goal of helping you live your dreams and career and hobby and in life my guest today is a very special man he has been on the show before we are lucky to call him a close friend of the family and of course he's in his 19 best-selling books he's written about everything from the internet to marketing he's in the marketing hall of fame the direct marketing hall of fame the guerrilla marketing hall of fame i don't know there's so many marketing hall of fames he is a legend to say the least 19 best-selling books and been on the show before but we're here today to talk about mr talk with rather mr seth godin and about his newest book called the practice which to me is long overdue specifically because i feel like this is the book that seth was meant to write it's a book about finding your voice it's a book about taking a chance on yourself about making the thing that you either do as a hobby or want to do as a living and making it a reality and the book helps you figure out how to do it and it turns out that creativity is the core of this thing which is a huge hallmark of this show one of the reasons we wanted to have seth back on to celebrate this new book learn a little bit more about him and it and without further ado please join us join me and the crew who's producing this uh for amazing conversation here with the one and only mr seth godin seth thank you so much for showing up great to have you on the show my friend well i am definitely in your neighborhood with this project and i have been thinking you of you a lot i hope that you're doing okay um well everyone who is listening to this show if you uh for some reason missed the creative calling book long week which i don't think many folks on this podcast missed it but in case you're new here since september um the last time seth and i were together was in a room in new york city when he was kind enough to show up at the book uh my creative calling release and we had an amazing conversation that went longer than we anticipated and to a sold-out show in uh what was the name of that theater cool little theater you point fabulous helen mills the helen mills theater in uh in manhattan uh connection that you uh introduced me to the helen mills theater folks uh i think so fondly of that and that evening um and i want to thank you very publicly here for contributing as so much as you did to um you gave probably the first and earliest uh and probably the deepest set of feedback that i got from anyone who read that book in advance and it had a material impact on on the book and i want to say thank you first of all and well part of part of the lesson that both of us know is i got more out of giving you that feedback than you did and i have been carrying it with me ever since so the thanks come from me well i couldn't uh just to confess you know here looking at your next project your new book called the practice and i am it is such it brings this fire up inside of me because it seems not only you know relevant and it is just a beautiful venn diagram between what the people who are i think already in this audience and the times right now in the middle of a pandemic when you know people are reassessing priorities and this idea that you have a voice i i look at your project and i i am wickedly inspired so i'm hoping you can start off our conversation uh with a little bit of what made you write this book i'm always fascinated by the motivation and inspiration behind anyone's new project but especially when you've got so many things going on and to be able to put all your marshall all your resources into one thing means it's very important a very good reason for writing it so let's start there why did you write this book well the subtitle is called shipping creative work and i am super lucky that i spent most of my time engaging with people who realize that what they do for a living is ship creative work shipping because if you don't ship it it doesn't count work because it doesn't come easy and creative because it's something that might not work and some of the people who are listening to this think that they are creatives but they're not they're simply doing a job over and over again under the guise of touching something that used to be a creative outlet but they're cogs in the system that's a choice it doesn't have to be that way and the reason we don't always make the choice gets to the original title for the book which my great editor nikki papadopoulos persuaded me to change but i still have the eight hats i made and the original title of the book is trust yourself and when we think about trust yourself particularly in this moment of so much economic and social dislocation long overdue focus on racial injustice people dealing with illness all these disruptions when all that's going on we are being challenged to decide what's important and we are being challenged to decide who we can help and where possibility lies and the loudest voice in our head that's causing us to hold back is the voice that says it's not our turn i'm an imposter i don't know enough it won't work i'm not supposed to do this all of those things so here's the question that i begin with as i started down this path when you are talking to yourself who is talking and who is listening because we're really clear everyone i've ever met that there are two there's the talker and the listener but there's only you so i want to argue that we have an industrial brain that's about compliance and conformance and fill in the blanks and color by number and then we have the other brain that's not very good at language that brain has some instincts and it wants us to make things better and if we can learn to trust that part of ourselves to commit to a practice i think it unlocks a whole bunch of opportunity why i god it's just such a beautiful framing of a problem that has plagued so many and again so timely but it makes me want to ask a slightly different question it's like this idea of trusting ourselves when did we forget when did we stop trusting ourselves because as a little toddler right we realize that we're standing on our own two legs that when we move our right foot that it goes you know forward or we learn that if we articulate our point that's the best way to you know change the world around us so when do we you know i guess maybe when we first trust her and then when do we lose it and clearly this is about reclaiming it so if we're reclaiming it we must mean we lost it at some place where do we lose that why i don't think most species evolve to have game-changing innovators among their adults that uh there's a difference between a puppy and a dog right and if you watch a four-year-old who's never been in a swimming pool hesitate to jump in the water that fear is there for a really good reason because if we didn't have that fear we wouldn't make it to five that as soon as we start becoming a sentient being there's a trigger of self-preservation but and there's a huge butt then we built 12 to 16 to 20 years of schooling to amplify that that what we did was we built a system on purpose organized by the factory capitalist mindset to get people to do what they're told because it's a way more productive path to hiring people if you have people who want to do what they're told we're not you know if you've ever spent any time with a four-year-old they're not organized around doing what they're told they do what they want and so we all went through school so we would do what we were told and that makes sense until the institutions that are telling us what to do are telling us the wrong thing until we lose our job until we miss opportunity until the best job the best work the best opportunities belong to people who don't do what they're told and so it's up to people like you and sometimes like me to say to them wait a minute you have this inside of you let's let's reclaim it this i understand the connection of fear and of like the right kind of fear as you said if you're a four-year-old jump in the pool you should be scared because that keeps keeps us alive biologically i want to do a little bit more retrace you you chalked a lot of it up to school but part of as i reflect on my own experience a lot of this was not school related and it was i would call it cultural and our parents our career counselors our friends our peers our spouses our partners there's this um it's almost a conditioning to not trust ourselves from and this is probably i can throw a rock at the school but it's really hard to throw a rock at someone you love who like they are scared for you and by extension we become scared and i'm wondering is it just school or am i unique in that experience or how would you think about the problem that that i had trying to you know free myself whatever yeah of course you are completely right i mean school is a six-letter shortcut for the cultural standard that i think if you grew up in sparta you probably would have been surrounded by people who are encouraging you to be a warrior and this idea of what it meant to be in sparta was throughout the culture well in our case we codified it in school parents want that sticker on the back of their car because it's built into the status driven culture that career counselors and people who have jobs in a bureaucracy have it built in because they mean well because the bureaucracy has made a promise and mostly kept it and so the people you know one of the things i talk about in the book is all criticism is not the same and we gotta be really clear about this people who care about you who say why don't you just go get a real job are evoking that they care about you not that they understand that deep down you might be better off not getting a real job you need to ignore that because that's not useful criticism useful criticism comes from someone who says i see who you are and i see where you're going what if you did it this way instead because you might get where you're going even better and that criticism is gold and that criticism is hard to find but when you find it the only response is thank you and it was interesting um you mentioned a piece of software before we went on aaron the person who started the company cajoled his way into 30-minute virtual coffee with me and i didn't know him and he had a new idea for a product and i was happy to give free advice because he was a friend of a friend and for 30 minutes i explained how i saw where he was trying to go and for 30 minutes he argued with me as if me liking the software was the purpose of the call and you know i have a lot of esteem for my awareness of how software gets marketed in the world but he didn't have to like my suggestions but he needed to hear them because that's why he set up the meeting but he was viewing my feedback as a judgment of him and if you do that if you assume you are your work you have a real problem because if you are your work that means you can't change your work without changing you and it means if your work doesn't resonate with the person you seek to serve you now have to dislike the person you seek to serve and not liking your customers is a really hard way to make a living i think to put it mildly right and be in service is something you don't respect or appreciate or admire or connect with um all criticism is not the same is [Music] like that is a very important lesson and that's why i'm saying it again uh i think you were one of the first people that i learned that from in a blog post that you wrote and probably i'm thinking 2007 or eight and maybe a little bit later and right on the heels of that i can't remember the title of the blog post but i remember you know it was talking about like who who matters you know what voice matters and who's a little bit about intern i'm gonna try and find this blog post of the how many thousands of blog posts do you have ten thousand writing every day for twenty five percent change but keep up and keep at it and maybe i'll hit eight shows well i remember that and very shortly that uh i sat down with a friend uh brene brown and she she shared the roosevelt quote it's not the coup counts it's the man in the arena quote and it started i i recognized that doing the thing that trusting yourself and that the criticism that we receive whether it's how we spend our time or what we focus on or who we run around with that deciding who you're going to listen to in advance of actually getting that information is so powerful because otherwise you have to evaluate it every time a new piece of criticism comes to you which is this exhausting list of people right it's never ending how many people do you know you know let's say 500 5 000 i don't know how many people you know but if you if you don't have a framework for whether or not you should pay attention to them right then you're always caught in this sort of this huge cognitive load of does this person matter or not so i'm wondering and this is this kind of uh references the book in like the concepts of choosing yourself of leaders are leaders are imposters there's all these sort of false um false icons that we've got so i'm wondering if you can give us some guidance on how to set up a plan for who to trust and when because when i'm talking about writing who do i trust i trust seth godin i trust seth godin to give me feedback on the book now if i'm gonna you know i'm stepping up on the ninth t and it's a 320 yard par four with the wind to the right i'm not sure i'm going to trust seth godin's advice i don't know if you're a big golfer but don't talk about okay but give us a framework seth do you see where i'm going okay so first of all i think i'm having a flashback of that post i didn't look it up while you were talking but i think what i said was i'm walking by a playground in new york city on the upper left side yes and because i it was traumatic right and yeah this four-year-old or seven-year-old starts making fun of me as i'm walking by and what it triggered for me is that when i was seven that would have been devastating that a kid on a playground who i didn't know my age who said something nasty about me i would take me i'm still not over it right but in that moment i was fine because in that moment as a 50 year old i'm like you know what you're seven you were wetting your bed until a week ago i had no issue with you not liking me have at it i you have you can't lay a glove on me right now man i am so over you and it was the post moment for me because i realized i can do that anytime i want to and if the feedback isn't helping i shouldn't open myself to it so the first thing i did after that was i stopped reading my amazon reviews and i haven't read one amazon review of my book since then and the reason is i've never met an author who said i read all my one-star reviews and now i'm better at writing because it doesn't make you better at writing it just says this person didn't isn't the kind of person who's going to like your book so as a creative we are surrounded by people who their opinion doesn't matter and so you can get stuck and this is we see this in rock and roll all the time where some diva crashes and burns because they've trained themselves to ignore everyone and that's not helpful so when i'm sitting with someone like nikki at portfolio i have to stop myself from ignoring her because i've so trained myself to ignore so many other people and in that moment it's not oh here's the list of people i don't listen to in that moment i'm like i have a very small list of people i eagerly do listen to and if someone earns their spot on that list then like i said earlier it's gold and when it comes to for example writing there are good days for me giving people feedback on writing but i also know because i've had it happen to me firsthand there are plenty of people who have succeeded who are terrible at giving feedback on writing and the fact that they've succeeded at writing is irrelevant and this is a story probably never said in public before oh but juicy you remember the book uh positioning by trout and reese it's one of the most it's one of the most important marketing books ever written that reveals my ignorance i've been living under a rock i apologize what are they called positioning okay and it was written in the 1970s it wasn't an original idea but they definitely owned it in the way they wrote about it and the short example is seven up seven up is the un cola well once you know what cola is just calling it the uncola positions it in a different spot in your brain whereas if 7up is light and refreshing they'd have to fight against all the light so they said here's the grid we're on the other side of the grid it's that profound it changes the way you show up if you're a photographer and all your competitors bring in 3 000 pounds of gear and you run and gun with one little thing that's your position you don't have to talk about many other things you're just the opposite of that so when i wrote permission marketing my agent sent one of the co-authors of that book a galley and asked him to blurb it and if you get a galley and you're too busy or you don't want to blur but you're just right back i'm too busy he wrote back a five paragraph note explaining that i was never going to be successful as a writer that my idea was terrible and i should just go back to what i was doing and that's not helpful feedback and he yet he co-wrote a really important book so uh i can teach some people how to juggle but i'm not that good a juggler and i'm bad at golf and a teaching golf so you got to pick carefully about what you're looking for but what i'm trying to get at is if you sit down and say i'm going to do creative work that will please everyone and i'm leading with my chin and the first person who doesn't like it i'm going back to my hole you're just hiding you've got to be super specific because trust yourself doesn't mean whatever is on your mind is going to work what it means is until you start shipping the work you don't know what's going to work you've got to go through this iterative process of knowing who it's for and what it's for bringing it to those people and not just listening to what they say but watching what they do because if you bring it to those people and they embrace it regardless of what they say to you you're on to something and that is the that is the opportunity of shipping creative work you had one word in there that i want to hang on which is so critical in case you missed it we're gonna go back process you said the word process it was the it was buried right in the middle but i think it was one of the most important words that you just said and i'm guessing that's one of the reasons you chose the title instead of trust yourself the concept of practice because practice even even implies that it's not at rest right it's it's an active process it's changing it is uh you can wake up one morning and do it well and the next morning and not do it well this is why things like yoga this is why meditation is a practice because i don't get linearly better with my meditation if you're anything like me i had a terrible meditation this morning why did you choose the concept practice and can you orient that around uh process for us right so what it means to have a practice is that you do it you simply do it you merely do it you do it without commentary you do it without drama and you do it in service of whoever you're seeking to make a difference for if it doesn't work today you do it again tomorrow this is the practice so very few people have as their practice going out for ice cream you need to be in the mood to go out for ice cream you need to want whatever you don't go out for ice cream every hour but my blog is a practice and i would write it even if no one read it because i don't have my blog come out tomorrow because i wrote the best possible post it comes out tomorrow because it's tomorrow that's the practice and once you know that there's going to be a blog post coming out tomorrow your subconscious freaks out as well if you're going to publish something i might as well come up with something good because it realizes that it can't sabotage the practice by coming up with something bad by pretending to be blocked there's no such thing as writer's block there's just sloppy practice keep going on that no such thing as i know that's a uh a key piece of the book what to talk to me about it so i made these on my glowforge these are handmade writer's blocks they're maple one and a half inch cubes and they have little things on each side but everyone they're all different but everyone says on one side no such thing as writer's block and what do i mean by that what i mean is no one gets plumber's block nobody uh gets check out at the supermarket block right that if your job is to go to the supermarket and be a checkout person you do it you don't get blocked the writer's block actually means i'm afraid of bad writing i don't want to write because i am afraid that the writing i do will be bad and if you can let go of your fear of bad writing and are willing to do bad writing if you do enough bad writing and you can insert photography makeup architecture whatever it is your craft is you can do enough bad work sooner or later some good work is going to slip through it can't help it and my friend isaac asimov who i worked with on a project a long time ago published 400 books back when it was hard to publish a book he did 400. and i said isaac how do you do that and he took me over to this little rickety typewriter in his apartment and he said every morning i sit in front of this typewriter at 6 30 and i type until noon and then i'm done for the day and he doesn't have to type a book he doesn't have to type anything brilliant he doesn't have to invent the next robot which he invented he just has to type and if he types long enough a book is going to come out that's the practice simply type right now there's like 10 000 brains that are melting that's just it's so you speak like a laser beam um isn't it natural to to want to type something good isn't it like doesn't it make us feel good about ourselves and isn't that part of what we're doing by writing or putting creative work out into the world how do we reconcile those things about you know our work and our worth and um just yeah but keep keep keep because there's there's 10 000 brains right now that are going oh my god this is this is hard for me to grapple with so give us a little bit of sugar with the medicine if you will well let's think about your arc as a rider of bicycles because most people who are physically able can ride a bicycle you were bad at riding a bike for weeks or months like the first time you ordered a bike you definitely fell off that's a good reason to stop riding a bike and yet you got back on the bike you didn't go to bike riding school you didn't get an a in bike riding you didn't read the bike writing textbook you didn't watch bike riding videos you rode a bike but now here's the other half of it all of us may know how to ride a bike but none of us have won the tour de france because we didn't ride a bike enough at some point we said this is good enough bike riding i'm going to go do something else there's a movie on netflix i'm not going to train to be even better at bike riding well the same thing is true with your photography and the same thing is true with your writing and every everybody knows how to take a picture with their phone but there are very few people who can take a picture like chase why what's the difference please do not tell me it's talent there's no such thing as photography talent it's skill and skill is different than talent because talent is something that you were born with and it's immutable and skill is something you choose to put the effort in to learn and what i'm arguing in almost every field if we care enough we can get better because you already got better proof it works but then you stop caring enough to get better still so what story do we tell ourselves and the thing is i've written 7000 blog posts half of them are below average by any measure right they're below average in yield per word in traffic in whatever compared to the others below average if i knew which 12 blog posts i could have written over this period of time i would have written just those but i am always surprised always surprised because i'll write a blog posting event ever and then it becomes one of my best blog posts so for me the measure is did i maintain my streak did i push myself to a place where i felt nervous did i do it not to be selfish but to be generous and did one person 12 years later remind me of a blog post about walking past the playground on amsterdam avenue right because then it was worth it but what i am not doing and this is super important i have never once had a blog post one with the internet i've never had a blog post that everyone looked at and talked about the same day great that's the goal because as soon as you try to win at mass you start doing seo you start doing listicles you start acting like buzzfeed and then you disappear because you become a wandering generality and a mediocrity instead of saying i didn't make this for everyone i made it for you and there if you're wrong at least you can make it for that person tomorrow at the core of all of this though the person who's just listened to you give that sugar medicine combo is saying this yes seth but i'm scared and if they're not saying it out loud they're saying it in their head yeah to what do you respond um so you can call these rants because i'm proud that i'm rich i'm just giving you like 10 i'm going to give you one liner after one last own material and just letting you hit it with a hammer it's amazing i love it like what i'm trying to do in this book because i have the luxury of doing so is to tell my version of the truth and not sugarcoat it because plenty of people can help you say there's a muse bob dylan says the ghost writes his songs he just has to sit by and wait i think that's all nonsense and i think that we have evidence that persistent successful creatives don't actually get touched by the muse they're actually really hard working and resilient people ask me about imposter syndrome and impostor syndrome is felt by a lot of people regardless of the way you appear to the outside world imposter syndrome is that feeling that you're fake that you're fraud that you have no right to be doing what you're doing and that soon you will be found out and they say how do i get rid of imposter syndrome and my answer is you can't because you're an imposter and so am i because what it means to be an imposter is you can't be sure you're announcing this is my new book my new blog post my new this my new this my new this and you can't be sure if it's going to work you can't be sure if it's certified guaranteed etc you're acting as if and so if you want to fight the fear and fight the feeling of being an imposter you're going to exhaust yourself the fighting is what's making you stuck if we stop fighting and say oh yeah i'm an imposter in service of other people and i'm afraid in service of other people that's like saying i'm running the marathon and it's mile 20 and i'm tired well yeah because you signed up to run the marathon if you weren't tired you're not trying hard enough and so the message of the book is not everyone gets to be a creative and if you want to have a hobby i think having a hobby is great but if you want to be a professional at any level for money or not for money for other people you got to acknowledge the fact that you're afraid and you have to embrace the fact that you're an imposter both those things are true and both of those things are fine talk about leadership because i think there are a lot of people who pay attention to the show who uh martial creators out of their job and they think of that i think wisely so as creative in their own way but the relationship between creativity and leadership and you know i i'm drafting off of what you just said with this imposter like when we actually can all call ourselves imposters we're just doing the best we can and we probably are you know our our time is limited and if we don't show up today then we certainly weren't we weren't qualified enough to be here today and someone else showed up but how does this relate to leadership and uh i don't know tie these things together the triangle of imposters leaders and creativity okay so first i want to say i don't think we're doing the best we can i know i'm not doing the best i can i don't think anybody does the best they can all the time that if somebody is picking up a car that ran over a little kid and using superhuman strength and gives themselves a hernia and saves the kid's life i'll grant you that in that 60 seconds they were doing the best they can but the rest of us are in a long haul and in the long haul we're conserving energy we're protecting ourselves we're saving it up for another day and if you can let yourself off the hook and say this might not be me at 11 but i can persistently train and contribute at eight that might be a lot better than hiding out at two because you can't be eleven right because we need to be realistic about that but going back to leadership leadership is not the same as management management is a very specific job that industry needs where you tell other people what to do and get them to do it faster and cheaper than they did it yesterday and management is important but you don't have to be a manager and most people listening to this are not leadership on the other hand is totally optional and leadership is exploring the unknown voluntarily volunteering to lead or volunteering to follow someone who is leading and if it's not voluntary then there's no leadership then you want to be a manager and some managers lead but not all of them and some leaders manage but not all of them so what i'm saying to leaders is it's a creative act it's a form of art because you don't know if it's going to work because if you knew it was going to work it would be management no it's leadership i'm going over there i'm not sure how to get there who wants to come and that leadership has to make us feel like an imposter because we just agreed we don't know exactly how to get there and therefore who are we to do it and as a result in our society a lot of people say not for me someone else i'll wait for i'll follow them instead and when we look you know i've been on the internet since 1976 i've been doing it professionally since 1980 something and we believed at the beginning that lots and lots of good caring people would take advantage of the fact that the gatekeepers were gone and show up with their songs and show up with their leadership and show up with their writing and it would be a huge net positive and what we saw are two things that happened in addition to some people showing up that way one trolls showed up people who want to manipulate the system to make things worse and two a lot of really capable good people didn't show up that most of the people used twitter for its first 10 years only followed people they didn't tweet more than half the people who used twitter did not tweet they were receiving it and here we have this medium and you were such a pioneer back at the beginning and you've consistently done this to say wait a second you mean i have a camera and a microphone let's go and too many other people said who can i follow and we're now in this moment of 2020 where so many things went sideways and my argument is the only way to make things better is by making better things and the only way to make better things is by leading and you can lead in any way you want but you got to find a group of people who you can earn their trust and you can point somewhere and as an imposter who means well lead because that i think is the only hope we've got i think this is a natural segue um kick me in the shins if you feel otherwise but this connection you it's you've already made it three or four times in our conversation this uh this idea of uncertainty and leadership what you just gave you said i'm going over there i don't know how it's going to be i'm going to put this on the internet i don't know how it's going to be received i'm going to write 7 000 blog posts if i knew which 50 of them were the right ones to write i would have only wrote 3 500 but in all of those things is is uncertainty and in the book further then things will be uncertain you've actually actively said avoid certainty but aren't we certainty seeking machines isn't that part of like our dna is like routine and simplicity and risk avoidance and and so i how do you counsel someone whose dna is that we should make as many certain decisions to make our lives as long as possible so let me begin by saying i only wrote this for one percent of the people in the united states not by income but because they are not eager to do whatever they're told all day every day and you know it was really interesting uh dan ariely did a study in which uh you know of course college students get studied in uh cheap psychology experiments more than any other group so your mileage may vary but there are these toy there are these toys called bionicles they're like legos but they're action figures and he hired a bunch of students and he said all right i'm going to pay you a dollar a bionicle to sit here and put them together and after someone ordered you know earned 10 bucks he said all right you undo 10 more so he could judge what the exhaustion rate was for getting paid a dollar or bionicle the exact numbers might be off here but it doesn't matter then he did the experiment again but this time while they were putting the bionicles together the experimenter was taking the bionicles they just put together apart in front of them and putting them back in the box so now we got two jobs one job where you're actually doing something that feels like a craft and the other job where it is obvious that what you're doing is stupid because as soon as you do it they take it apart in front of you what he found is in the second experiment really statistically well done way more people quit early because even though it's your job you're getting paid to do it this sucks i don't want this job i want to do a job where i feel connected where i feel like i'm doing something that matters and so if that's only one percent of the people in the world fine with me that group of people is saying you know what this uncertainty is not just a hassle it's a huge part of the deal it helps me become a human so one of my slogans is that reassurance is futile and it's the most controversial one i think in the whole book because i know lots of people who would like more reassurance everything's gonna be okay and someone like me shows up and says everything's unlikely to be okay it's really unlikely that you're gonna hit a home run with this it's really unlikely that every person who sees it's gonna love it it's really unlikely it's gonna turn out exactly the way you hoped right because here's the problem with reassurance there's never enough as soon you know oprah just called how much she loves the last thing you did she hangs up and like five minutes later you're saying what about brene brene i didn't like it she didn't call me and then you need bernay to call it never ends right and if we can just acknowledge that whatever happens is okay just another data point on the journey of shipping creative work then we can get back to the practice i did that it didn't work my first year as a book packager i got 800 rejection letters in a row i was going to have to quit i was window shopping at restaurants and eating macaroni and cheese for dinner i was failing and fail every time i open the mailbox that's two three four letters a day with a stamp that someone had written to me saying we don't like you every single day right and the only way i got through it was by saying that's a no for now that's another data point this isn't about they don't like me they don't like that thing i just tried and for free for the cost of two stamps i found out they don't like that thing i just tried what a gift now what and that is where the practice lives that's how you develop the practice is don't look for reassurance look for signposts that let you know which way to turn next if for some reason you just fast forwarded to this part of our conversation uh i'm obviously sitting here with seth godin talking about his new book the practice and what is this felt to me this you know when you first shared that you were doing a new book with me some time ago and through the course's conversation like uh this got a super pellet it's like a pill of all the best stuff from because there's some of this is marketing some of this is mindset some of this is is creativity some of it's heart and soul and passion and trust and like it if you're a creator and you have not yet bought this book well a do seth solid and uh pre-order it because prayer is really really mad with authors having just come out of this and been coached by seth and some of our mutual friends that this is just it's essential reading i'll leave it at that essential reading now it's important for me to try and uh find a hole in your armor as your friend so how how but how how do we reconcile for example another theme of the book is uh it's probably two too strong a word it's another uh topic of the book is being paranoid about mediocrity so how can we simultaneously put work out and not you know be the man or woman in the arena the he she are they just throw it at us let's go i'm willing it's a process it is a um i'm it's a habit it's a practice it's all these things and yet back in in not necessarily the maybe it's the reptile part of our brain we also are judging we need to have taste we need to be able to sniff out mediocrity you know how how can you reconcile this stuff for me such a juicy such a juicy question exactly what i was expecting from chase thank you first let's talk about what is good taste because i started talking about this in the creators workshop that we run and i re i did a lot of research on the definition no one had a good one good taste is predicting in advance what your customers are going to like that's good taste so if you show up at a party and you are dressed in a way that people admire you have good taste if you worn those clothes to a different party you look like an outlier but here you have good taste you predict it in advance but the people you serve want we develop good taste through practice we develop it by seeing and noticing and learning to understand what fits together and what doesn't right next to that is the idea that perfectionism is different than perfect perfectionism is the idea of holding back because you don't want to ship and using as an excuse a defect that no one else could see that is different than saying is it good enough because the words good enough mean what they say it is good enough it doesn't have to be better because if it needed to be better then it wouldn't be good enough and so the rules are number one we don't ship junk if you believe it's junk you don't ship it number two develop a better taste meaning figure out what's junk more accurately before you ship it the way to develop good taste is by putting things into the world and seeing what resonates and what doesn't and then we get to the nike problem which is the ridiculous slogan just do it because just do it can be read as what the hell ship junk just just do it the answer is actually merely do it which would not have sold any sneakers but it's correct merely do it without commentary merely do it without drama because you can because it's important and so what i'm arguing is you have a reputation don't wreck it you do not need to ship your work to everyone to find out it's no good you can ship it to a few people don't make promises you can't keep if you're a surgeon don't do an experimental surgery on someone and say yeah i just did it no not okay because you made a promise to that person you would do the best surgery not something you just thought up on your way to the operating room and so when we think about people you know if i if i make a list of you know people like you people like jill greenberg people um like annie leibovitz people who have developed a look and a feel to their photography just to pick an example their work when it first appeared was daring offended a lot of people and was distinctive and it was over time that a you all changed the culture and b your taste got ever better but none of it would have happened if any of you had been perfectionists right so for those of you who haven't seen joe greenberg's work once you see it you say i recognize this the very first photo that jill greenberg ever took was of me in 1976 when she was i think 14 or something like that and that picture pretty much sucks even if though i'm in it it's not a good picture but if she hadn't taken that picture she wouldn't have taken the picture after that one and then the one after that one and on and on and on and so you gotta start and then you gotta say not i made it inside the boundary i am done exploring because now you're back to shipping mediocrity you gotta say i found the boundary and now i'm going to go outside the boundary because it's there that the juice lies it's there the juice lies that's a that was a very good answer because i to me that's like i can understand now the concept of merely ship it and over time what you ship be can be refined as refined by your taste by your skill level your skill level only increases through practice and through shipping and this is it becomes a virtuous cycle rather than be paranoid about sucking and then just shipping work it this is a it's almost a uh yeah a virtuous cycle it it it seems like at the base of all this stuff it comes back to trusting yourself though because if you're if you're worrying your you know your trust or your skills or your you know and is is developing trust a process is that a practice as well yeah and you already figured out the answer i mean the people in your life that you trust who you do not who are not your parents everyone else in your life you trust you trust because you trusted them a little and they didn't let you down and then you trusted them a little bit more and they didn't let you down and that's how you learn to trust yourself is you discover and you know julia cameron's morning pages which i mentioned in the book uh are really useful when they're used the way they're supposed to be used it's not here's where you practice your real writing it's just dump everything that's in your head this morning as soon as you wake up and then do it again tomorrow by writing down your inanities by writing down all the dead ends you learn to trust yourself because you discover that rather than having to keep it off the page because it's so humiliating it's not that bad right you're not going to show it to anybody else but like that's the worst i got okay i could build from this and realizing it's not fatal is so important because the four-year-old jumping in the pool that could be fatal this work not fatal mistakes are fixable problems are solvable the reason that problems are solvable is that's why we call them problems if they're not solvable then they're situations then they're laws of physics so find a problem and start a cycle of solving it and then you will trust yourself a little bit more and you get to do it again and repeat so much of this stuff the simple answer but what you don't know about our recording is like i had my skype was not working and i had to restart and this idea of restarting of just repeating i'm just like okay i'm going to do it again and it worked the second time so again this is this connection between process and practice and repetition and i want to go all the way back to the beginning and why this work is so timely is because what i have heard over and over in talking to friends and peers and mentors and students and about this crazy time that we're in is it's just made me understand in sometimes subtle and sometimes very profound ways what is meaningful to me how we spend our time what we're doing with whom and you know part of maybe the lesson that we need to learn is we needed to have a lot of these pins stripped away but this concept of finding your voice is so like and if you haven't found it yet this is this should be your message mission can you just like can you riff on finding your voice to me because i do i do think that this is i mean tribes linchpin those are all ahead of their time in their own way this to me because of the launching it in a pandemic when people are trying to it's meaningful for them when they realize that creativity is such a huge force and that they can make some choices they can see the world as it is they can make change learn new things manage their fear talk to me about the voice again and this is something that i just the more we talk finding your voice if you can be parodied then you are peculiar peculiar has a very specific meaning it means private property it means yours and if you sound like something when you are on the screen on the canvas or on the page that can be your voice and i know when someone sends me a blog post i wrote 15 years ago that i don't remember writing i can tell if i wrote it because it sounds like me you can change that over time you can go from being a playwright to a political activist and you can find a different voice but you can make it your voice when you decide you care enough about trusting that voice to share it with other people consistently and generously and persistently so that it stands for something so that it stands for you that idiosyncrasy is essential because everyone else is taken the only person who's left is you there isn't just one version of you if i had been born in the ukraine i wouldn't be talking to you right now and i wouldn't be talking in english this is not dictated by my dna this is dictated by where did you grow up what did you think was important what have you been rewarded for what have you been punished for what do you think is worth doing next and we add that all up and when we feel like we found our footing and we had a day well spent it's because we found our voice because we spoke up for someone who was facing injustice because we reached out to somebody who needed us because we put something into the world that made someone cry whatever it is you choose when you do that and are in sync we can announce you have found your voice and when you feel like you are losing your voice which has happened to me which has happened to others don't act like it got put on you by an external force because external forces happen but then we make choices and what we have is the choice to realize there are still people who are counting on us and it doesn't have to be a million people it can be two two people waiting for us to show up as us as only we can unsubstitute and that option is such a privilege to be the kind of person who is trusted enough that people are hoping you will show up with your voice you said it was a choice and i think this is a very very important uh thing i want to underscore because this has always been present in your writing if and for those that do not have the distinct privilege of like hanging out with seth and getting a meal or a drink or you just feel this like this it's just so in like indelibly you at the base of all this stuff is mindset you said that was a choice just a second ago you've also said that passions are choices like you choose to be passionate about something that the attitude that you walk in any room with is a choice and it's a choice you can develop you can get better at walking in with a better attitude how help us understand the role that mindset plays in all i'm a huge mindset freak and i i put at the base of my creative pyramid if you don't start from a good foundation and to me this is mindset then at some point you know it's going to be hard for you to show up because life gets hard and there's a million things external forces that you just talked about but the the best defense that i've i am aware of and what is so pervasive in your writing and when you spend 10 minutes with you is for your mindset and how you decide to talk to me about mindset okay so to be clear i've had privilege my whole life and so many lucky breaks and lots of people have been misjudged and hurt and grew up in families that weren't as supportive as mine and didn't have resources but there are also people in the world who grew up with way more than i grew up with all of those humans maybe you're dealing with a disability maybe you're trying to overcome poverty maybe you've been sick all of those people had something happen in their life that happened the question is now what should we do does that mean you have as many choices as everybody else no everyone has a different set of choices okay that happened now what should we do and there are only two paths one path is to say i have no choices i have to do what i'm doing that feels really empty to me it feels like that's not going to get you the life you want nor is it going to get you the day you want and the alternative is to say my choices are limited everyone's are but given the choices i've got and the mindset i could adopt today which one do i want because i'm entitled to whine about x y or z will it help right i'm entitled to be nervous or anxious about x y or z will it help i'm entitled to be depressed and sad about x y or z will it help because if it won't help don't choose to do it and the world will keep dumping stuff on us the media will keep dumping stuff on us everything around us that happened now what should we do and what i have found is that the most useful path is to say now i can make a choice what a privilege to be able to make a choice and you know i've worked with um with my friend kat and she's worked in pelican bay and high security prisons that's the biggest place where healing starts okay that happened now what do i do there's still a choice even after things have been stripped away even after unlucky breaks even after tragedy there's still a choice and the flip side is also true after i joined yahoo a long time ago i worked with a whole bunch of people who had unlimited options they were in the equivalent of florence during the renaissance they had as many resources as they wanted they could walk into any place and raise money they could hire anybody they could build anything and most of them just faded away because they didn't want to make the choice and it's the same deal on the up on the down on the sideways if you choose to make a choice you get to own what happens next and that feels to me like an opportunity an obligation and it's thrilling too two final topics before we wrap up go for one this is okay i um the concept of shipping is it's thoroughly on the book right shipping creative work why don't we just get credit for doing creative work in our parents basement for a hobby i love hobbies i love them i have i i can carve a canoe paddle in a way by hand out of a piece of cherry wood that makes me very happy and i will not sell it to you because the minute i sell you a canoe paddle i've elevated my hobby to a profession and they're separate so you know hilma off klimt who had that big show at the guggenheim i think you and i may have seen each other right around that time i'm controversial in thinking that she sort of blew it because she painted 10 000 really important paintings no one ever saw them and she wouldn't let her nephew show them to the public until 20 years after she was dead like what would have happened if it was one year after she was dead i'm not sure 20 years after she was dead because she had a hobby and so the art ends up being important but the art isn't brave and her taste didn't develop and her taste didn't develop because she didn't ship the work and i could only imagine how the world would be different today if everyone from duchamp to victor vasurelli had seen her work as she was making it and how her work would have changed if she could have seen how people saw what she made so yeah go have a hobby i will not dismiss that at all but it's also not going to make the world better until you shift to work is it all about making the world better or is there any medicine or does that still then qualify under good free up oxygen mass come before other people but it's not professional and that's the distinction i you know i wrote something the other day that i was surprised to write which is um and this is why we share the planet with you and we don't usually think about it that way that we have this party going on for billions of people and we're sharing the punch and we're sharing the carbon and we're sharing the air and i think it's really important that we're looking out for everyone except number one because we're sharing the planet and so if you're not here to make things better why exactly are you here because i'm not sure anyone has the right to just take whatever they can get away with i think what we do is have the right to choose to make things better um you just have this way of putting a bone you you speak like finished written prose it's i'm sorry i'm randy no it's beautiful like i wish it was safe and encouraged so i move into rant mode i'm sorry no i mean this is why people around the world are going crazy right now as they listen to this in the best way why they're motivated and inspired and you can clearly tell that you are a writer because you speak in these profound narrative arcs with a very strong period at the end of it and then you set your pencil down so cool all right last topic seth um i'm not gonna let you off with a one sentence tight precise little answer here and it's the concept of joy that pervades through the book this like this just there's like a levity and and again this is the the another thing that is so great about spending time with you and that you see in your writing or here and you know the videos that you've made is just there's just a joy of playfulness and you're all you're very clear in this book about this is it's your job to seek it because it's not necessarily going to smash you on the head or i mean there's an awareness maybe component to it but what role does that play in maybe in your life and and how would you prescribe it to uh anyone who's listening or watching so i recently did a podcast about gpt3 which is an artificial intelligence install that's going to change the world or the things that come after and if you are engaging in a back and forth or reading some writing that this ai has done you can't tell that a person didn't write it and like i've been studying ai since 1976 so i'm pretty good at telling it was very hard to tell and the argument i made in the podcast is maybe it doesn't matter that if you are reading something or being amused by something or watching something and it turns out it was made by a machine not a person maybe it doesn't matter because you got the benefit of it and the authenticity and the pain and the turmoil of the creator is secondary to what did it do for you and i got to tell you there are definitely days when i am not filled with joy and optimism but every time i fake it i feel better i do better work and i have a better day so if you can't tell the difference between a day when i'm really filled with joy and optimism and one when i'm not then i'm probably doing my professional work and the same thing is true if you have a lawyer or surgeon or a veterinarian or anybody else if you go to see a concert back when in the future when there's concerts you don't want the musician to come on and talk about what a lousy day they have and not play very well you want them to come on and give the best show they ever did and i guarantee you that when a musician comes on and does the best show they ever did after a lousy day their day just got better and so don't put me down for the authenticity camp put me down for the camp of people who care enough about their work to show up there's something also so about the like presence you have to be present in order to really feel that joy and that's what i've i loved and it does i just i think about that when i read your writing that it feels so present as you said you get up this is part of the practice right we're full circle here you get up and i'm writing because it's tomorrow not because this is my best work and there's some again triangle that is this joy presence doing like fulfillment is this me reading into your work something that wasn't intended or is this part of what a what a creative practice gives us yeah i think that um you know i've talked to some really extraordinary creators and the ones who are in the most turmoil are the ones who don't want to own their creative magic they're the ones who are sure that if they look it in the eye it will disappear they're the ones who are obsessed about this agent or that editor or that gatekeeper that didn't get that thing they're the ones who are bitter because they their gift doesn't feel like it will continue to be present and as i was working my way through writing this book which was you know 15 years in the making and several weeks in the writing was what do they have in common or different from the people who are joyful professionals who just keep showing up so glad that they get to work indoors make a difference for other people and even get paid for it and it keeps coming down to where's the source and if the source is unknown unnamed and somehow we've involved building a shrine and you know taking mushrooms then you're always going to feel like a double fraud because it's not even your work and the alternative is to say no this is as much work as digging a hole i give me a shovel and let's go and it seems to me that that story we get to tell ourselves is the most productive way i know to do this i work to read three quotes to you that you said about joy okay the most successful givers aren't doing it because they're being told to they do it because it is fun it gives them joy this is this is what i want people to think about like this thing that you do of course it it it has all of the properties that are sadly some of the properties that bring you joy but this idea of shipping it of putting it out there in the world of creating more joy that's part of the thing that we're doing even if you create a a dark piece or a melancholic piece people who weed or watch or connect with that art it ultimately can bring them joy to know that they're not alone in their suffering or that they're connected with other people on the planet that's like the part of again this this book really does feel like the culmination of like the 17 books that you've written i'm going to give you two more joy quotes the joy of art is particularly sweet though because it carries with it threaten of missed connections it's the precisely the high wire act of quote this might not work that makes original art worth doing and then the last one and then i'm going to ask for your comments your final comments about joy here corporations particularly large-scale service and manufacturing businesses are organized for efficiency or consistency but they're not organized for joy joy comes from surprise and connection and humanity and transparency and anew it's am i reading into this again or is joyce that you're seeking personally and this is you're pouring it on the page to create more of it more connection more awareness or is this joy is this joy a foreground thing is it are you actively cooking on this or is it simmering in the background for seth godin i really like to solve interesting problems and the problems i like to solve are almost always about helping someone get to where they've always wanted to go and maybe they didn't even realize that's where they wanted to go and when i see that happen in the workshops i'm running i get to see it up close or later after someone's read something i wrote that is what i do and that is what i remember and that is what i want to do again tomorrow i remember the first time it happened when i was 17 years old and i want to have it happen again to be able to unlock potential for people to get to where they wanted to go so they can feel that joy of also solving an interesting problem for someone else because people don't like to be alone we've learned that the hard way in the last nine months people want to be connected connection is at the heart of who we are but connection creates problems and create connection creates opportunities and art part real art is simply connection how did i make something that helped the connection happen and so i think i'm hardwired for that part but i might be seeing it a little different than some other people and i'll just add one more thought about joy which is uh back when i was getting on planes i gave the keynote speech at the national funeral directors association and i got to tell you the top 10 of the people in that industry get joy at a funeral because they didn't make someone die that person was gonna die anyway but they got a chance to put on a service to put on an interaction that gave that family solace and memories and possibility and can you imagine being a funeral director who didn't get joy out of it and you're going to do it every day for 50 years just for the money please give me the other guys instead i'd much rather work with them thank you so much for your time seth and for anyone who uh if you if you've missed at all this is largely i think the culmination i think seth's best uh and it it is in his new book it's a tidy little package that's easy to pick up all you have to do is press a button on the internet it's called practice shipping creative work um i'm not quite sure when we're going to be able to drop this i think we're going to try and time it us in a sophisticated and timely way with the launch on november 3rd so whenever you're listening to this i would encourage you go pick up a copy it's truly extraordinary um helping us create people identify as creators or entrepreneurs risk takers or want to be more of any of those things to help you find a voice to do your best work and to realize that everything is there for us if we apply ourselves and if we take appropriate action seth thank you so much for being on the show i'm i long for our us to be able to be in the same room again soon and i just wanted to say thank you oh you're such a match thank you chase it was really a privilege really truly keep making a ruckus all right signing off until next week or in a couple of days or maybe even tomorrow i bid you you

Channel: Chase Jarvis

Views: 82,832

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Keywords: chase jarvis, chasejarvis, creativity, business, entrepreneur, artist, creative, freelance, photography, career, advice, seth godin, creative practice, habits, mindset, writers block, getting unstuck, building taste, inspirational talk, motivational talk, interview, podcast, chase jarvis live

Id: fbUbH_Kepys

Length: 73min 20sec (4400 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 04 2020